So there we have it—an alibi, she thought, when she noted the date.

Crystal opens the laptop and it instantly buzzes to life, already bookmarked on Landry’s most recent blog post—written several days ago, presumably before she found out about Meredith.

She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”

“You mean blogging?”

“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.

“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”

“Have you read it?”

Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.

Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.

Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.

It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational Breast Cancer Diaries, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid I’m A-Okay.

The shocker was that the saucy Boobless Wonder blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.

Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.

“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”

Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”

Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.

Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.

In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.

“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”

“Because . . .”

“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”

Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.

“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”

Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.

Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”

“Roll Tide.”

Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”

“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”

The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.

She forgot, for a moment there, Crystal realizes. Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.

Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”

“You’re the writer. You tell me.”

“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”

“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.

“We talked a lot, privately, about stuff like that. She said she’d always dreamed of writing a book, and she recently told me she’d been toying with the idea of compiling some of her blogs into a collection and trying to get it published.”

“You talked on the phone?”

“No, usually e-mail.”

“Is that how you all communicate privately?”

“That, or instant-messaging.”

“No phone.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the others—maybe some of them call each other—but we don’t. At least, we didn’t, until this week, after Meredith . . .”

Crystal nods. “And by ‘we,’ you mean . . .”

“The bloggers I’m closest to. There’s a little group of us—Meredith was a part of it.”

“And the other two women who came with you to the funeral?”

“Elena and Kay—yes, them, too.”

“Who else?”

“The others aren’t here. I’ve never met them. And one is—Nellie passed away.”

Crystal raises an eyebrow. Another one? “When? What happened?”

“Oh, it wasn’t . . . she wasn’t . . . killed. It was cancer.”

Right. Of course it was. Crystal even vaguely remembers reading about the death in past entries on several of the blogs, including Meredith’s.

But for a moment there her mind jumped to the possibility of an opportunistic serial killer preying on this vulnerable group of women, perhaps even posing as one of them . . .

Again she thinks of Jenna Coeur.

But she wasn’t a serial killer, she reminds herself. She just killed one other person . . .

Just?

Crystal wants to ask Landry if Meredith ever mentioned her, but she’s getting ahead of herself. First things first.

“So there was . . . Nellie, did you say?”

Landry nods. “She was from England. Whoa Nellie was her screen name.”

“Hang on a second.” Crystal turns to the laptop, searches, and finds herself looking at Whoa Nellie’s blog. The photo shows a thin middle-aged woman sporting a crew cut—no postchemo head scarves for Whoa Nellie—and the top entry was written by her husband, reporting her death and linking to her obituary.

Crystal clicks it, reads it silently, then turns back to Landry.

“Okay. So there’s Nellie, Meredith,” she counts off on her fingers, “and then there’s you, and Elena, and Kay . . . Who are the others in your clique?” The word slips out, and Landry reacts with a wrinkled nose.

“Clique? We’re not a clique. That makes it sound like we’re being exclusive.”

“And you’re not?”

“No. We’re just a group of women who gravitated together, like any other friends, except . . .”

Except they all have cancer, and most of them have never met.

Crystal nods. She gets it. “So are there any others in the group, besides the five of you?”

“Just one more.”

Pen poised, Crystal asks, “Who is it?”

“Jaycee. She writes PC BC. She lives in New York.”

“Is that with a G or a J?” Crystal asks, once again trying to translate the drawl.

“With a J. You spell it J-A-Y-C-E-E.”