He traced the handwriting with his fingertips. The amount of belladonna-derived atropine present in Hillary Whitney’s body—built up for so long that she’d stopped producing antibodies for it—had been enough to give her recurrent hallucinations, the coroner had said when Hutton showed him the note, enough to make her deeply paranoid. Maybe the note really didn’t mean anything, he told himself.
Hutton opened his computer and connected to the airplane’s Wi-Fi to begin sorting through the emails he’d received in the past few days. Most were work-related, but after a few minutes, a new message appeared at the top of his in-box from an anonymous remailer, the subject line reading “urgent re: callie court.” He opened the email to find an attached PDF. As the document downloaded, it was Callie’s face that appeared inch by inch, her gray irises glowing with a violet tinge, her face smeared with mud, flames licking behind her head.
The text below her face read THE FINAL DAYS OF CALLIE COURT—apparently he was looking at the cover of the November issue of RAGE. Next, a series of photographs of Callie from all over New York—the most beautiful pictures of her that he’d ever seen—loaded, followed by an accompanying text that was four solid pages long. The byline read “Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas.”
As his eyes adjusted to the small print, he saw the same three words right there in black-and-white—written over and over and over: “Detective Mark Hutton.”
His heart stopped for a moment. Thinking the plane had suddenly nose-dived, he looked up, expecting to hear screaming, to see smoke and flames, but the plane was quiet and calm, trucking along at 38,000 feet, level and pressurized.
Hutton scrolled to the beginning of the article and started reading. It was a lurid tale of a small-town girl in love with an indifferent city boy, using details from their relationship that even he barely remembered. In the story, the girl turned to drugs to forget him and then modeling to attract him. The climax began with a blow-by-blow account of the shoot responsible for the photos throughout the article, the author praising Callie’s fearlessness and bravery—“As she scaled the walls of Belvedere Castle, a passing runner remarked that she must have a death wish”—and heavily implying that she’d committed suicide.
The final paragraphs were so ludicrous that Hutton laughed out loud before remembering that it was his own name on the screen.
Callie didn’t think anyone at the party would notice her stuffing gum into her mouth and heroin into her nose. She grabbed the couture-clad arm of RAGE editor Catherine Ono and dragged her into a private room as she choked.
Ono tried desperately to save Callie’s life, even breaking a nail on the wad of gum in her throat as she tried in vain to dislodge it. Before she knew it, Callie was dead and she was being interviewed by an aggressive pack of NYPD officers. And now? The world would have already forgotten Callie Court—if it wasn’t for RAGE’s bravery in publishing this story.
Feminism cannot be about lifting yourself up while your sisters are trampled behind you. It is a movement for all of us. We must be united. We must be one. Women of the world: we must stop throwing ourselves upon the altar of male indifference. Like the logoless clothing worn by Court in the accompanying photo shoot, we must stop branding ourselves with the names of people who don’t deserve us—a lesson she learned too late.
If Callie Court—fashion’s most beguiling muse of the last twenty years—couldn’t love herself enough to survive loving someone else, how will we ever survive? How will the rest of us ever love ourselves if we don’t love each other?
I offer a simple solution: Be the matriarch. Find your feminism. Live in sisterhood.
Hutton actually snorted when he read the last line. He felt blood rushing to his face, and he pulled at his collar, peeling off his sweater and unbuttoning his shirt. The feeling in his stomach—a combination of shame, surprise, fear, and adrenaline—was quite possibly the most unpleasant thing he had ever experienced. He wanted to smash the file into pieces, though he knew there were millions more, probably being stacked on newsstands at this very moment; he wanted to burn down the world. Hutton recalled a phone conversation from September, when Cat found her name in the newspaper while they were talking and cried because the article was so mean. He’d told her to get over it and changed the subject. How stupid was I? he thought. I had no fucking idea what I was talking about.
He scanned back through the article, this time highlighting details only Callie would have known—the day he went to her apartment in Carroll Gardens and spent three hours working up the courage to tell her he’d met someone. Or two years later, their six-hour dinner. Her scarf had burned on the candle. He only vaguely recalled laughing in shock, the waitstaff laughing, too, as he simultaneously put out the fire with a damp napkin and ordered another round of drinks. They’d talked until the restaurant closed.
She’d worn that scarf every winter for the rest of her life, the article said.
Who would she have told all of this to? Callie didn’t have friends like this, not people she poured her heart out to like they were her…diary.
It was, he suddenly realized, taken straight from her diary, the one he hadn’t been able to find. That she “crashed against his indifference and broke every bone in her body”—that was true, he realized, recognition bubbling up so fast he nearly choked on it. “Your indifference is tearing me apart,” she’d told him once.
As he read the article for a third time, he became certain that it was a mixture of her diary and the extrapolations of a salacious narrator, their heavy prose stitched onto hers with the drool of a tabloid screenplay.
Hutton read the lines that were meant to describe him over and over. Was he really a “self-involved playboy whose handsome face and bottomless wallet kept him safely insulated from consequences of any kind”? No. She wouldn’t have said that.