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I bent down and snatched my phone, wishing I could talk back to him, yell across the distance.Whyareyou, Jamie? Clem committed suicide, and it was so clearly, so irrevocably our fault. And now Laurel. What does it mean? What are you saying?
“One detail in the police report caught my attention,” Jamie said, answering me. “And yes, I’m going to get in trouble for telling you this. But Laurel was discovered with lacerations all over her hands and arms, made roughly around the time of her death. None of them life-threatening, but cuts everywhere, fourteen in all. There aren’t any pictures of her included in the police record—which is strange, by the way. But what the responding officer did note is that the cuts were thin, like from a razor blade. And they appeared in places you would expect if someone was defending herself. There’s actually a question in the police report, written in the officer’s notes, which he or somebody else later tried to scratch out. He wrote: ‘Defensive wounds? But why, if suicide?’ Why, indeed.”
Thin cuts, like from a razor blade. This was too much. I rushed across the grass, blades bright and stiff under my feet despite the August swelter. Clutching the phone to my chest, I caught my reflection in the glass of the back door—wild-eyed, shoulders hunched—before I flung it open and slipped inside.
The frigid air-conditioning sucked the summer heat from my skin. I’d come inside to feel safe, contained. But one glance at the sweeping white ceilings, the gleaming kitchen, the sharp, modern furniture—all of it, my choices—and I felt suddenly wrong. Like I’d entered not a home but a museum, a mausoleum. A cold, beautiful place where things were laid to rest.
“One more thing,” said Jamie, from the center of my chest. “I told you Laurel Hargrove’s death hits close to home. Here’s why. Years ago, I met her.”
I jerked the phone away, studying the screen as if it were Jamie himself standing in front of me.
“When I was younger, I was friends with a girl who went to Whitney at the same time that I went to Columbia. The schools are an hour apart, so we’d see each other from time to time, usually after I’d begged her enough times to come visit. She and I had a…complicated relationship, to say the least. And she was friends with Laurel.”
Me. Jamie Knight was talking about me.
Chapter Two
“This is the part I can’t shake.” Jamie paused. “The same day I met Laurel Hargrove, I met another girl who would end up committing suicide—only she died much sooner, by the end of our senior year.” His voice caught again. “Clementine Jones was her name.”
Of course he remembered Clem. There was no way he’d forget, given the circumstances.
“The truth is,” Jamie continued, “meeting them went poorly. Have you ever had an encounter that went so wrong you lay awake at night reliving it? Months later, when I heard Clementine committed suicide, I couldn’t get in touch with my friend or get any details from the news. It was hushed up quickly, which at the time seemed reasonable. It’s tragic, right? Someone that young, on the cusp of graduating and starting her life. About to get free.”
Get free.It was like Jamie was speaking to me in code. I thought of how he’d met Clem and Laurel—what he’d witnessed—and pressed a hand over my eyes, as if not looking could block the memories.
How much about us had Jamie guessed?
“Now, this was years ago,” he said, “but I still remember Clementine Jones hung herself. That stuck with me. Left an impression. So when I realized I’d met Laurel—that she’d been there the same day I’d met Clementine—I thought: what are the odds two of the three girls I’ve ever met from Whitney both hung themselves? I went digging into Clementine’s death, looking for details. I couldn’t find much—just one old, flimsy police record that said her body was found on campus. But—and here’s where it gets stranger—not in her dorm. She was found in the Cargill Sports Center, which is Whitney’s big athletic center. In other words, this girl was found, just like Laurel, in an eerily public place.”
They’d found Clem hanging in the women’s showers, actually. Fully clothed, her chin bent to her chest, fragile and limp as a broken dandelion. A delicateness in death she would have hated in life. Clem had once been the star of the Whitney women’s soccer team, and Cargill had been a home to her as much as the Performing Arts Center had been to Laurel. I’d always thought she’d done it there because it was the last place left where she felt safe.
“What we have, dear listeners, is a pattern. Now, I tried to find my old friend, the one who knew Clementine and Laurel back then, to see what she could tell me. But this friend has dropped off the face of the planet.”
He’d tried to find me. Just for his show, but still. And it was true: I’d gotten new contact info after college, my articles were up onThe Sliceunder a pen name, and my work email was no longer active. I had no social media, and I was Shay Deroy now, not Shay Evans. I’d bet anything Jamie had reached out to my mother—which meant she must have shielded me, respected my wish for privacy. It was entirely unlike her.
I’d run after college. I hadn’t looked back. Andstillthis had found me. I’d pressed Play on Jamie’s episode like Cleopatra sliding the lid off the woven basket, unaware of the coiled asp inside.
“Two friends,” Jamie said, “who died in disturbingly similar ways. It could be a coincidence, I grant you. Suicides are more common than people think, especially among college students. And maybe the fact that Laurel and Clementine knew each other makes it even more likely Laurel’s death was a suicide. A kind of contagion effect, but in super slow motion. I don’t know… I just have a hunch the deaths are connected in a way I can’t see.”
He was putting pieces together, but there was still so much Jamie didn’t know. Case in point: a small, painful detail no one knew except the people who’d found Clem that day, and those of us close enough to her to hear the details of her death. Remembering made my skin flush, despite the air-conditioning, a sensation I recognized as the beginnings of panic.
Carved into Clem’s forearm, they’d found thin, bloody letters, spelling outIM SORRY. They’d never found the weapon, but there were small cuts on the fingers of her right hand, in the places where she would have held a razor or a knife. It was clear she’d carved the words herself.
Meaning it was obviously a suicide. Right? Eight years ago, when I saw what Clem had done, I’d accepted the truth immediately—recognized that it made a deep, awful kind of sense. It had been powerful enough to break through the fog of my mind, like a lifeline cast into the sea of my disordered thinking. It had shaken me, made me see sharp and clear again. In the worst irony, Clem’s death had given me back my life.
But now Laurel was dead the same way, in the same pattern. With razor-blade marks all over her arms and her hands, just no words.
Jamie’s voice returned to the kitchen, warm against the cold. “The last thing I’ll say before we take an ad break is that, in the absence of information about Laurel and Clementine—like I said, the police reports are thin, and neither death received much media attention—I decided to widen my search and look at other women’s deaths in the Hudson Valley area since Clementine died. You know I’m always searching for patterns, and I can be persistent. What I found was alarming. There has been a high—and I meanunusuallyhigh—number of missing persons reports for women aged eighteen to thirty-five in the last eight years.”
I gripped the phone so hard I thought, for a moment, I might shatter it.
“Why is there an eleven percent higher chance a woman will go missing in this region than in any other place in America? Eleven percent might not seem big, but it is. Statistically, the area’s an anomaly. Where are these women disappearing to, and why is no one paying attention? We’re talking about an unsolved mystery right in my own backyard, and I had no idea until now.
“Research shows the only high-profile person to reference the disappearances is Governor Alec Barry, who vowed to investigate two years ago in his State of the State address. But his investigation doesn’t seem to have amounted to much. When our producers talked to some of the women’s families, most said they’d given them up as runaways—or suicides.
“So here’s my transgression of the day, and it comes in the form of a question. Laurel and Clementine fall into the same age group, and their ‘suicides’—that’s in air quotes, by the way—essentially bookend the years we’ve seen these other women go missing. According to her file, Clementine’s parents called from their home in Wisconsin a few months before she died, trying to file a missing person’s report, but the police dismissed it after they confirmed she was attending classes. And Laurel’s mother told the police it had been years since she spoke to her daughter. Missing, then dead; missing, then dead. Could there be a connection between Laurel’s and Clementine’s deaths and these other women?”
It felt again like Jamie Knight was sending a private message to me, hidden in a podcast episode.
