moment to register the fake blue light casting shadows on my bed—my laptop, which I’d left open and blank, was lit up now. An automatic update or something, I figured; I crept over, prepared to snap it shut.
My email was open—probably the last thing I’d looked at before bed. I almost closed the screen without reading it, fighting off that ache of curiosity.
Mostly stupid stuff, newsletters and promotions.
And one at the top, from fourteen minutes before.
From: Edith Iredale
To: Lindsay Bach
Wednesday, August 14, 2019 at 4:06 AM
Don’t.
Chapter 13
I thought about calling Tessa on the spot, even though it was four thirty in the morning and there was nothing in particular she could do. But I’d stopped updating her on the investigation, her and Damien. I battered around the apartment turning on lights and checking locks. Finally I forwarded the email to Tessa with a plea to call me. I felt anger building like a panic that no one was up to help me, that I was alone in this lunacy, getting emails from the dead.
Tessa called a little after seven, her voice scratchy, and I put her on speakerphone.
“So somebody hacked into Edie’s account and sent you that?” she said.
“Apparently! Unless we’re now of the belief that the dead can fucking send emails.” I looked around again, grateful for the buttery light that pressed in from the windows, washing away the shadows.
“So…we think this means what?”
“This means someone knows I’ve been poking around and wants me to stop. Right? Probably whoever else was in the room, whom I just missed with my camera. I mean, what else could it mean?”
“Is it a threat?” She sounded a little more awake now. “Should we call the police?”
I took a long sip of coffee. “Is that a stupid idea?”
“It just might be hard to explain. Or to get them to do anything for you. I mean, since there wasn’t an actual verbal threat. Hang on, let me ask Will.”
I picked at my cuticle as they discussed it in muffled voices. “Okay, I’m right,” she announced, suddenly loud. “Since there wasn’t an actual threat, let alone a quote-unquote credible one, there’s not much they’d do. Do you want me to look into the header info?”
“Header? Is that like metadata?”
“Sort of. It’s the data involved in getting an email from Point A to Point B. Maybe it’ll show who actually sent it.”
A sprig of hope. “Yes! That’s a great idea. Thank you.” We were quiet for a moment.
“Lindsay, this is fucking weird. This is scary.”
“I know.”
“Are you still talking to people about this? I worry about you. I was already worried about your emotional well-being—”
“You mean my mental health.”
“—but now I’m actually worried for your safety,” she finished. She didn’t correct me.
“I’ll stop,” I told her, wishing it were true, wishing I could. “Let me know about the header, though, okay? But I’ll delete all my files and everything. ’Cause you’re right. This is getting weird.”
“Do you want to stay here tonight?”
“No,” I said, because my next move was to keep searching.
* * *
Lying in bed that evening, I finally found a photo on the website of Nicky Digital, a then-ubiquitous party photographer: Lloyd onstage, adjusting his lens, a few feet behind Man Man’s bespectacled drummer. So his alibi did check out. Lloyd really was handsome, with his striking bone structure and tousled blond hair. We’d had sex in April, a month before he and Edie had begun hooking up. Of course he didn’t want to keep fucking me. Nobody ever does.
I set the computer on my nightstand and flicked off the light, exhausted but unable to sleep. For hours I lay in a fugue state, my body mostly asleep but my mind still meandering, curling like a mist over a landscape of thoughts of Michael or Alex or Josh, somewhere else, probably real but possibly my own invention. I feel lonely, my brain quietly announced, and hearing it so baldly, my eyes welled up. I fell asleep in a fuzzy sleeping bag of self-pity.
Rain pinged against my air conditioner. Morning. I padded across the room and pulled the curtain aside: a downpour, splattering against the window and turning Fulton Street into a smear of green and gray. A perfect day to feel sorry for myself, to believe and not-believe that Edie was murdered, that the world was stiff and cruel and somebody out there wanted me dead, too. A taxi almost hit a jaywalker, the driver leaning on the horn