“Girlfriends, friends, colleagues. I don’t mean to sound rude, but you probably think that wife of yours hung the moon.”
There’s something in her tone, something I don’t like. Anyway, I don’t think that’s accurate. I admire Alice, because there is much to admire in her. I love her, because she is easy to love. I think she’s beautiful because—well, because she is.
“JoAnne,” I say, trying to reel her back. “Tell me about the widows.”
“There’s probably a lot of reasons.” Her words spill out in a rush. “Pact members travel more, do more, than most people.” Her gaze skitters around the room. “We probably all lead riskier lives. I mean, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have joined The Pact, right? The Pact attracts a certain kind of person?”
I think of Alice being forced into a straitjacket and carried off to Fernley with strangers in a black SUV. I think of the pilot in his flimsy Cessna. “There could be a hundred different reasons,” JoAnne says, as if trying to convince herself.
“Reasons for what? What risks?”
“Freak accidents. Drownings. Food poisoning. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but an unusual number of Pact members seem to die at a young age. And as soon as someone loses a spouse, there’s almost always a new relationship, fostered by The Pact, that leads pretty quickly to marriage.”
“Who?” I’m desperate to know if there are real facts and names behind what she’s saying.
“You know Dave and his wife, Kerri?”
“Of course. Alice has been meeting with Dave once a week.”
“I know.”
“How?” I ask, but she just waves her hand in the air as if this is an irrelevant detail.
“Dave and Kerri were both married before,” she says.
“You’re saying their spouses died?”
“Yes. Years ago, around the time that Neil and I joined The Pact.”
“They seem so young.”
“They are. They actually met through The Pact. Maybe it was just a coincidence, their spouses dying within three months of each other. Kerri’s husband, Tony, had a boating accident on Lake Tahoe.” She shudders. “Dave’s wife, Mary, fell off a ladder at her house while cleaning the second-floor windows and hit her head on the stone pavers of their driveway.”
“It’s horrible,” I say, “but these things happen.”
“Mary didn’t die right away. She was in a coma. Dave decided two months in to take her off life support.” That vein in JoAnne’s forehead, throbbing.
“Do you have proof?”
“Look, both Dave’s wife and Kerri’s husband had made multiple visits to Fernley. Both of them had ‘wrong thinking,’ Neil told me. According to rumors, their crimes ranged from obfuscation to misrepresentation of Pact doctrine to adultery. I went to Dave and Kerri’s wedding—it took place so soon after the deaths of their spouses. At the time, I was happy for both of them. They’d both been through so much. I thought they deserved something good in their lives. Neil and I were new, and I was still pretty gung ho. I didn’t think twice about the timing and the coincidence. But I do remember one strange thing about the wedding.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, normally you’d think that this happy occasion would be tinged with sadness, right, because of all they’d lost? And you’d think that the spouses’ names would come up in the toast, or in conversation, that somebody would fondly mention the dead wife and the dead husband. After all, everyone at the wedding knew both of the former spouses. But it was as if Mary and Tony had been entirely forgotten. No—not forgotten—erased.”
“But what you’re accusing The Pact of goes way beyond threats and slander. You’re talking about murder.”
JoAnne looks away. “Right before I saw you at the Villa Carina party, something else happened,” she says softly. “A couple joined just a few months before you and Alice. Eli and Elaine, hipsters from Marin. Nine days before the Villa Carina party, their car was found out near Stinson Beach. I tried to press the issue with Neil, but he refused to talk about it. I scoured the newspapers and couldn’t find anything. They vanished. Jake, when Eli and Elaine joined, Neil made some comments. It was strange—people in The Pact just didn’t like them. I don’t know why. They seemed nice. Elaine was a little overly affectionate with the husbands, maybe, but nothing serious. They dressed a little different, and they were into Transcendental Meditation, but so what? Anyway, when they disappeared, I started thinking about Dave’s and Kerri’s spouses, and all the inter-organization weddings that have happened over the years. I’ve even heard of cases in which The Pact deems a nonmember to be a threat and takes steps against that individual in order to prevent damage to the marriage.”
JoAnne leans back in her seat and sips the green lemonade. She’s staring at me, but I have absolutely no idea what she’s thinking. A mother and her two kids are next to us, eating Panda Express. The kids are giggling over their fortune cookies. I look at JoAnne’s phone. It has been on the table between us this whole time.
JoAnne sets her cup down. One by one, she touches the tip of each nail underneath the nail on her thumb. Then she repeats. It’s subtle but a little manic. “They just disappear without a trace, Jake.”
Whenever I meet with new patients, the first thing I do is try to figure out their normal states. We all live within a range of emotions; we all go up and down. With teenagers, the range can swing wildly. I always want to know where each person’s “normal” lies, because it allows me to more quickly recognize when someone is especially up or, more important, especially down. With JoAnne, I’m still trying to find her normal. She’s clearly riddled with anxiety. I want to know how to interpret this fear, I want to understand the context for the stories she’s telling me. Are they the product of an unbalanced mind? Should I trust her perception? Looking down at her phone, I’m worried. What if Neil finds out we’ve met?
JoAnne is rubbing her nails slowly along her palm.
“You used to wear them short.” I reach over and touch one of the long, slick nails.
“Neil wants them this way, so I do it.” She holds them up in front of me, in a faux-glamorous sort of way. I notice that her ring fingers are longer than her index fingers. There’s actually a correlation between finger length and the likelihood of infidelity. According to a fairly convincing study, when the ring finger is longer than the index finger, the person is more likely to be unfaithful. The explanation has to do with testosterone levels. After reading the research, I found myself staring at Alice’s hands, inordinately relieved to discover that her ring fingers are shorter than her index fingers.
“Should I be worried for our safety?” I ask.
JoAnne thinks for a moment. “Yes. They don’t know what to make of you. You make them nervous. Alice is different. They either really like her, or they really don’t. Either way is probably bad for you.”