Jo sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underwear. She’d turned the air-conditioning up to full blast and thrown an extra blanket over her sleeping husband. Her half of the bed was a swamp, and the sheets would need to be washed again in the morning. Her pillow, like so many before it, would likely end up stuffed in the trash.
Jo could feel the icy air swirling around her, but it offered little relief from the waves of heat. Before waking up drenched in sweat, she’d dreamed she was tied to a stake with flames lapping at her bare shins. She’d watched the hem of her white dress catch fire. Within seconds, her entire body was ablaze. Jo knew the dream well. For years, she’d lived in fear of it. Only in recent months had she begun to understand it. Now when the dream came, she let herself burn. Heat was energy, and energy, power. She wondered if she could learn to control it—to channel the fury and indignation that fueled it. She wanted to find out exactly what she could do.
With her eyes closed, Jo envisioned a brilliant blue orb of energy hovering above the palms she held cupped in her lap. She’d just set it spinning when a sound from another room broke her concentration—the faint whoosh of a window rising. Her eyes opened and the orb vanished. She was on her feet in an instant.
“Art.” Jo shook her husband. He answered with a snore. “Art!”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Shhh! There’s someone in the house. Call 911.”
“Where are you going?” he asked, struggling to sit up.
Jo padded toward the door in her bare feet. “To get Lucy.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Art was fully awake. “Let me do it! Get back here!”
But Jo was already out the door and halfway down the hall. She peeked into the bathroom as she passed. It was empty, as was the guest bedroom. There was only one other room on the second floor—the one near the stairs at the end of the hall. The one with a poster of a K-pop boy band. The one where her eleven-year-old daughter was sleeping.
The door appeared closed, which told her she’d found the intruder. Lucy always slept with it open. But a sliver of space between the door and its jamb told Jo the latch hadn’t caught. She readied her arm—elbow bent, palm facing out. Then she slammed her hand into one of the wooden panels. The door flew backward into the wall, where it stuck, its knob embedded in the house’s thirty-year-old Sheetrock. Jo hurled herself over the threshold, expecting the element of surprise to work in her favor. In the split second in which the room was revealed, she saw her daughter on the bed, hands zip-tied, eyes bulging, the small stuffed pig she’d slept with since she was an infant crammed into her mouth. Jo’s brain registered Lucy’s hands frantically gesturing toward the left side of the door. Then Jo’s world went dark.
She woke with the right side of her face pressed into carpet, her head throbbing, and her hands bound. A large body lay blocking her view of the room. She recognized the familiar hole in the back of Art’s favorite Columbia T-shirt and wondered what the hell he was doing. Then the sound of duct tape being ripped from a roll brought her back to the bedroom, and Jo knew she didn’t have long to act. A self-defense instructor who’d offered weekly classes at the gym always showed new students how to break out of zip ties. Jo thought of it as a parlor trick with little practical use, but the three simple steps had lodged in her brain: Tighten the zip tie with your teeth. Raise your arms over your head. Swing your arms down and apart with as much force as possible. Rage, fear, and frustration swirled inside her as she began to bring her hands to her mouth. Her body was burning and her arms were slick with sweat. She smelled hot plastic as she bent her neck toward her wrists. Before she could clench the loose end of the strap between her teeth, the band holding her wrists stretched like a piece of chewed gum and fell away.
The man was busy wrapping Lucy’s ankles with a second strip of duct tape as Jo rose from the floor. She grabbed her daughter’s new tennis racket and positioned herself behind him. “Get your fucking hands off my kid,” she growled.
When he spun around, she caught him in the face with the edge of the racket. It wasn’t enough to take him down, and he came back at her with a fist to her temple. Jo’s knee rammed into his groin, and a kick to the abdomen sent him sailing into the bedroom wall. She was on him the second he hit the ground, with the handle of the tennis racket pressed against his throat. He was a large man, well over six feet, with a chest so broad she could barely straddle it. She took a good look at him, attempting to commit his appearance to memory. His most distinguishing feature seemed to be a lack of one. Even if she’d seen his face a thousand times, it wouldn’t have left an impression.
“Who are you?” she demanded as his entire head turned purple. When he couldn’t answer, she reluctantly lessened the pressure.
“Get the fuck off me.” Blood sprayed from the man’s mouth as he snarled, leaving a scarlet splatter pattern on Jo’s white T-shirt.
Jo added a knee to his groin and crouched over him like an animal. “If you don’t start talking now, I’m going to rip your head off.” She was going to. She could feel it. She imagined the tendons popping one by one as she separated his head from his neck. She was going to make him suffer.
“Jo.” It was Art’s voice. He’d regained consciousness. “Don’t kill him. Lucy needs you.”
She could hear the wail of sirens in the distance.
Jo didn’t need answers from the man. She knew everything. She could see it all, and felt it as keenly as though it had all come to pass. She knew who had sent him, and she knew why he was there. She lowered her face down toward the man’s. “Do you feel this?” The heat flowed through her arms like molten lava. She put her hand on his face and heard his skin sizzle. “I’m marking you. Because when they let you out—and I know they will—I’m going to find you and kill you,” Jo said. “And I want you to give Spencer Harding a message. I’m going to rip that motherfucker’s intestines out and shove them into his eye sockets and out through his mouth. Make sure you tell him. And remind him that I know where he lives, too.”
Then the police were inside. It took three of them to pull her off the man, whose face had been branded with a perfect print of her palm. Blisters would later form on the officers’ hands where they’d made contact with Jo’s skin.
Jo sat on the front steps with her bare arms wrapped tightly around Lucy. Inside, the house was a whirlwind of activity, with cops, technicians, and photographers studying the scene. The neighbors had come out to gawk from their lawns. But all Jo could see was her eleven-year-old daughter lying bound and gagged on the rainbow sheets she’d loved since kindergarten.
“Nothing like this will ever happen again. Do you hear me?” Jo said, putting the universe on notice.
“I know, Mama,” Lucy whispered. “I’ll be okay.”
Jo held her even closer. Though her child’s life was no longer in immediate danger, lasting damage had been done. The three of them would live with the memory of that night for the rest of their lives. With luck, Lucy’s recollections would grow hazier in time. But Jo knew she and Art would always be stalked by that image of their daughter—and the thought of what might have happened next. The men responsible would be punished. But Jo would never be able to forgive herself for leading Spencer Harding straight to her family.
Art appeared on the stairs with his old army surplus duffel in one hand and Lucy’s suitcase in the other. His eyes were bleary with exhaustion.
“Where are we going?” Lucy asked.
“Dad’s taking you somewhere safe,” Jo said.
Lucy’s eyes went wide and wild. “No, Mama! We can’t leave you here by yourself! Dad, she has to come, too!”
Art looked off into the darkness. “Your mother says she has to stay.”
For the first time in years, Lucy broke down sobbing, and Jo felt her heart breaking. It made no difference how strong Jo grew—Lucy would always be her kryptonite. That’s why they’d gone for her. They knew Jo’s child was her weak spot. If something happened to Lucy, it would destroy her. That had to be why superheroes never had children.
“Listen to me, sweetheart.” Jo kept her voice calm. She’d cry when they were gone. “You and Dad are just going on a quick trip. As soon as everything’s settled here, you’ll come right back, I swear.”
“But where are we going?”
“Somewhere fun,” Jo promised. She and Art had decided to keep the destination a secret from everyone until he and Lucy were settled. They were heading to his brother’s lake house in Vermont. It had always been Lucy’s favorite place.
“Why won’t you come with us?” Lucy cried.
Jo caught Art’s eye. He didn’t understand, either. “Because I need to stay here and make sure nothing like this will ever happen again.”
“But how are you going to do that?”
“With the help of your aunts Nessa and Harriett,” Jo said.
“Harriett’s going to help you?” Lucy wiped her eyes. Suddenly anything seemed possible. Her daughter’s fondness for Harriett had always struck Jo as unusual. Now she understood: they saw the world the same way. Harriett was feral, while eleven-year-old Lucy still lived by nature’s laws.
“Yes, does that make you feel better?” Jo asked.
Lucy sniffled and nodded. Then she let her arms slip from her mother’s waist and took her father’s hand. Jo gave them both kisses and went inside.
She stood at her bedroom window and watched two police officers help Art pack the back of his SUV. Lucy looked up at the house before she crawled into the back seat, and Jo quickly stepped out of sight. She didn’t want her daughter to see her bawling, and she was terrified of the fury brewing inside her. She didn’t want to punish Spencer Harding—she wanted to destroy him. She planned to rip his bones apart at the joints, pound his skull into mush, and set fire to his flesh. She knew any reasonable psychiatrist given a glimpse of her daydreams would have had her committed.
“Mrs. Levison?”
Jo wiped her eyes before she turned around. “Yes?”
An officer who looked like he was fresh out of high school was standing there in the doorway. “Just wanted you to know that I drove by and checked on your friends. They’re fine.”
“You’re sure? You saw Nessa James with your own eyes? You made sure she’s okay?” Jo asked.
“Oh yeah,” the kid said with an inappropriate grin. “She’s more than okay, as a matter of fact. Mrs. James asked if you could please phone her when you have a chance.”
“Thank you.” Jo searched for her phone and found it right on the nightstand where she’d left it. She’d missed ten calls from Nessa in the past thirty minutes. She cleared her throat before she lifted the phone and dialed.
“Jo?” Nessa answered immediately, her voice breathless with worry. “What’s going on?”
“A man broke into my house around three this morning. He was going to kidnap Lucy.”
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Nessa gasped. “Is she okay? Are you okay? And Art?”
“We’re shaken but fine. The police are here and the guy is in custody. But I need you to call Franklin and have him meet us at your house. I’ll pick up Harriett on the way.”
“What’s going on?”
“I can’t say anything over the phone. I’ll tell you when I see you. And be careful—I’m sure they know where you live, too.”
“They?” Nessa asked.
“Spencer Harding’s men,” Jo said. “They’re coming for us. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
After Jo hung up, Nessa stood by the side of the bed in her robe, staring at the phone. A warm hand slid from her shoulder blades to the small of her back, sending a tingle down her spine.
“I had another look around,” Franklin said. “Everything should be locked up tight. But this evening I’m going to install a security system. You reach Jo? She doing okay?”
Nessa nodded. “I think so. She says the three of us need to talk to you. She’s going to pick up Harriett and come over.”
Franklin grabbed his button-down shirt off the floor and slid his arms into the sleeves. “Glad she gave us fair warning. I plan to be dressed the next time company comes calling.”
Nessa winced. “You think that kid who came by is going to keep his mouth shut?”
“No,” Franklin said bluntly. “I’m sure everyone in the department knows by now.”
“Is that going to cause trouble for you?” she asked.
Franklin finished buttoning his shirt and leaned down to look her in the eye. “I couldn’t care less,” he said, and planted a kiss on her lips.
Nessa had sent her girls back to school the morning after the girl in blue’s funeral. As grateful as she’d been to have them there by her side, Mattauk was not a safe place for young women. She didn’t put her worries into words. Breanna and Jordan were technically adults, but Nessa still did her best to shield them from the ugliness of the world.
When she dropped them off at the train, she’d made them promise to stay safe. Stick together, she told them. Trust your gut and don’t take any chances. It was the same warning she always gave the twins, and given the grim ceremony they’d attended the day before, they seemed to take it a bit more seriously. But nowhere near as seriously as Nessa would have liked.
“We know why you’re sending us away so quickly,” Jordan said. “You want to spend some alone time with Franklin Rees.”
“Excuse me?” Nessa feigned outrage and both her girls cracked up.
“Yeah, we saw him looking at you. Like a big dog drooling over a thick, juicy steak,” Breanna teased.
Nessa felt her cheeks catch fire, and she fanned herself with her hand.
“He’s smoking hot for an old man,” Jordan said. “Good work, Mama.”
“I don’t know where y’all get your ideas,” Nessa tutted. “Did you two ever stop to consider that I might be the dog and he might be the piece of meat?”
It was such a relief to hear her girls laughing. She’d worried about how Breanna and Jordan might feel when they learned there was a new man in her life. But the thought hadn’t seemed to cause either daughter a moment’s unease.
“I like him,” Breanna told her mother. “I’m happy for you.”
“Me too,” Jordan said. “It’s about time you got some action.”
“I’ll have you know I have not gotten any action.” At that point, it was the truth. Even in Nessa’s prim and proper world, two stolen kisses did not count as action.
“Yet,” said Jordan, and the two girls burst out laughing again.
“Look at her face!” Breanna cackled.
“You two been hanging out with Harriett?” Nessa demanded.
They put on their sweetest, most innocent expressions. “What makes you think that?” Breanna asked.
“But seriously, Mama, we’re glad,” Jordan said. “This is some scary business you’ve gotten yourself into. We’re happy you’ve got someone to take care of you.”
At the time, the phrase had annoyed her. Nessa had been on her own for almost ten years. She’d guided her children to adulthood and helped her parents pass on to the afterlife. She’d done it all by herself, and she’d done a damn good job of it. She didn’t need anyone to take care of her. And yet that afternoon, when Franklin drove her home from Furious Fitness, she’d looked up at her house and realized she didn’t want to be alone anymore.
There was plenty of food left over from the funeral, so after Nessa saw her girls off, she invited him in. It was almost midnight by the time they finally shared a dish of warmed-up mac and cheese.
Now Nessa watched Franklin as he sat on the bed and tied his shoes. His movements were measured, always perfectly precise. His shirt showed no sign of spending the night on the floor. The bows on his shoes could have set a new standard. It wasn’t until he looked back and winked at her that she was able to believe this was the same man who’d been on top of her, or under her, or behind her all night. In the dark, she’d had nothing to distract her. The subject of babies never passed through her brain. She didn’t once wonder if it might lead to marriage. What they’d done had felt natural, animal, elemental. Harriett was right: sex did get better with age.
In time, she’d confess everything to her friends. But after what had happened to Jo’s little girl, today definitely wasn’t the day.
Jo pulled her car up behind a black SUV parked across the street from Harriett’s house. On the weekends, it wasn’t uncommon to see cars parked along Woodland Drive, but they were almost always gone by Monday morning. Jo got out and looked through the windows. There was no one inside. Her senses tingling, she turned her eyes to Harriett’s house, which sat still and silent on the opposite side of the road. A burst of panic sent her sprinting to the front door, which opened with a single twist of the knob.
“Morning.” Harriett was at her workbench, scraping a plate full of bright red chunks into her blender.
“You’re okay.” Jo doubled over in relief.
“You sound surprised,” Harriett said. “Smoothie?”
Jo shook her head over the sound of the blender. When the contents of the pitcher were a brilliant red, Harriett punched the off button.
“What’s in that?” Jo asked.
“Beet juice,” Harriett said, pouring herself a glass of the mixture. “Good and good for you.”
“There’s a strange SUV parked across the street,” Jo informed her.
Harriett took a sip of her concoction. “Is there?” she asked without bothering to look. Her teeth were red when she smiled. “If it stays there too long, my nosy neighbors will have it towed. By the way, a baby police officer stopped by early this morning. He said you’d sent him. He wouldn’t tell me why, but he said you were fine.”
“No one bothered you last night?”
“Define bother,” Harriett replied with an arched brow.
“Never mind.” Jo wasn’t in the mood for Harriett’s sense of humor. “Someone broke into my house around three in the morning. He was there for Lucy. He tied her up and—” Her voice cracked. She stopped, pressed a finger to her lips, and willed herself not to cry. Then she finished the story.
“Lucy will be fine, Jo. You have my word.” Harriett’s voice had softened and her face appeared younger, as though she were channeling some long-ago version of herself. “When I was her age, I lived through something terrible, too. I survived, and so will she. Lucy has three things I didn’t: good parents, a loving home, and me. You didn’t kill the intruder, did you?”
“No,” Jo replied. She’d wanted to. The urge had been almost impossible to resist. But she hadn’t.
Harriett nodded. “That’s okay. It’s my job to make him suffer,” she said. “But I assume you got a few good licks in?”
“Yeah. I hurt him.”
“Badly?” Harriett sounded hopeful.
“Very,” Jo said. “I don’t think he’ll be using his face for a while.”
“How did it feel?”
Jo hesitated. “Better than sex.”
“Excellent.” Harriett flashed the gap between her teeth. “It’s important that Harding gets the message.”
“The message?” Jo asked.
“That we’re not going to take his bullshit,” Harriett said. “He knows we’re onto him. There’s a mole in the police department. Someone must have told him we found the photo.”
“You figured that out quickly.” Jo was impressed. It had taken her all morning to reach the same conclusion.
Harriett grinned. She’d extracted the information from Chertov in less than five minutes, but Jo didn’t need to know that.
“But why send a guy to my house? Why not to yours—or to Nessa’s?”
“I would imagine the detective’s car parked in front of Nessa’s house might have deterred them.”
Jo’s brow furrowed. “I’m talking about last night.”
“So am I,” said Harriett.
“Oh,” said Jo, her eyes widening as she realized what that meant. “How do you—” She stopped. “Did you have something to do with that?”
Harriett shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You two seem to think I’m responsible for everything. All I do is stand back and let nature take its course.”
They knew. The second she opened the door, Nessa could see there would be no need for a confession. Whether by gossip or witchcraft, Jo and Harriett already knew she’d slept with Franklin. Jo had too much on her mind to make any wisecracks, and didn’t catch the wink Harriett gave Nessa as she breezed by.
“Can I get you guys some coffee?” Nessa offered awkwardly.
“No, thank you,” Jo said before rounding on Franklin. They’d all known something bad would happen. She didn’t know if he could have stopped it. What she did know for sure was that he hadn’t tried. “Someone in your department tipped off Spencer Harding. He sent one of his thugs to my home last night. The man went straight to my daughter’s room.”
“What?” Nessa felt ill. She turned to Franklin. “You didn’t tell me everything.”
“We don’t know for certain that Spencer Harding was behind the break-in,” Franklin offered stoically.
“The man who broke into my house zip-tied Lucy’s wrists and crammed a stuffed pig into her mouth. What do you think would have happened to her, Franklin? Rape? Torture? Would we have found her months from now in a trash bag by the side of the road?”
“Oh my dear Lord.” Nessa’s eyes filled with tears as Franklin shuffled uncomfortably.
“You don’t want to think about it, do you? Well, that’s too fucking bad, Franklin, because it’s all I’m going to think about for the next thirty years.”
“Now, Jo—”
Jo took a step toward him, and Franklin retreated slightly. She may have been the smaller of the two, but she had fury on her side.
“Don’t,” she warned him. Nessa could see her friend’s body vibrating like a pressure cooker that was fixing to blow. “And don’t tell me I don’t know it was Spencer Harding, because I do. So does Nessa, so does Harriett, and so do you.”
“I spoke with Chief Rocca before you arrived.” Franklin’s voice remained cool and calm. “The man who broke into your home is refusing to talk. But he’ll crack eventually, and in the meantime, he’s safely behind bars.”
“Do you have any idea how many more men Spencer Harding can afford to hire? He’s got hundreds of millions of dollars, Franklin. That’s supervillain rich. He could pay people to come after each of us. He could send someone for Nessa’s girls, too. I fucking told you we were all sitting ducks here. My eleven-year-old daughter could have ended up like the girl on the beach. Now you’re asking me to wait for the system to work? The law won’t protect us. We have to protect ourselves.”
“You can’t take matters into your own hands,” Franklin said.
“Why not?” Jo demanded.
“Jo—” Nessa started.
Jo spun around to face her. “That’s my job, is it not? Taking matters into my own hands? If the system functioned the way it should, I wouldn’t be necessary. None of us would.”
Harriett had laid herself down on the sofa where the girl in blue had once sat. Nessa looked to her for help, but received nothing but a grin in return.
“What exactly do you have in mind?” Franklin asked Jo.
“I’m starting to think I shouldn’t tell you, Franklin. If you’re just going to keep toeing the line, it’s probably best that you leave. You don’t want to take part in this conversation. And to be honest, I don’t want what I’m about to say to be leaked back to Spencer Harding. Find the mole in your department, or my friends and I are going rogue.”
“Jo, there’s no need for that kind of talk,” Nessa said.
“Isn’t there? What would you say if a man had come after one of your daughters?” Jo stopped and shook her head. “No, you know what, it’s your house, Nessa. So you decide. Either Franklin goes, or I do.”
Nessa didn’t like what she had to say, but she didn’t hesitate for long. What happened to Lucy and the girls at Danskammer Beach could not happen again. She had a job to do, and in order to do it, she needed Jo. “Franklin, I’m sorry, but you have to go,” she told him. “I promise I’ll call you later.”
“Nessa, tell me you’re not serious,” Franklin pleaded. “I’m supposed to help you, remember?”
“God sent Jo and Harriett to me first,” she told him.
Franklin just nodded, as though he didn’t trust himself with words, and headed straight out the front door. Nessa couldn’t believe she was letting him go.
The instant he was gone, Jo wrapped her arms around Nessa. She knew the extent of her friend’s sacrifice, and it broke her heart that she’d asked for it. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Nessa sniffled but refused to cry. “We gotta do what we’ve gotta do,” she said. “I can’t let my sex life get in the way.”
“Was I right?” Harriett piped up from the sofa. “Was it what you needed?”
“Oh my God,” Nessa said. “Looks like the best time might end up being the last time, but damn, was it worth it.”
“It wasn’t the last time,” Harriett told her. “Not even close.”
“You think Franklin’s going to forgive me for what just happened? I just kicked him out of my house so the three of us could break the law.”
“Franklin’s a good guy,” Jo said. “But we’ve wasted too much time letting the police take the lead. It’s time to kick ass.”
“Claude said we have an open invitation to the Pointe, is that right?” Harriett asked and Jo nodded. “Then why don’t we rip the problem out at the root.”
“What do you mean?” Nessa asked cautiously.
“You know what I mean. Let’s kill Spencer Harding. What’s the point in waiting any longer?”
Jo had expected those words to tumble out of Harriett’s mouth eventually. The only thing that surprised her was how appealing they sounded. She glanced over at Nessa, whose face couldn’t hide her own surprise. She didn’t know about the bees. As far as Jo knew, Nessa had never seen this side of Harriett before.
“Are you serious?” Nessa asked.
“Still too soon?” Harriett shrugged casually, as if they all knew it would come to murder eventually. “All right. Then what shall we do now?”
“We should go public,” Jo said. “Put some serious pressure on the authorities and tell people exactly what we know.”
“What do we know?” Nessa said. “Franklin was right—we don’t have much in the way of hard evidence.”
“We know Spencer Harding’s wife had a photo of a murdered girl in a locker at my gym. We know the photo was a Polaroid, just like the ones a woman who called herself Laverne Green showed you when she lied about being the girl’s mother. We know Rosamund Harding is dead and Laverne Green is missing. Amber Welsh, whose daughter disappeared along Danskammer Beach Road, has vanished as well. We know that after I told the police how Rosamund Harding gave me the combination to that lock at my gym, a man broke into my house with the intention of kidnapping my daughter. I think anyone with a drop of common sense will agree that Spencer Harding has to be behind all of this, and that someone on the police force has been helping him.”
“So you want to go to the media with our story?” Nessa couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. “I suppose we could call the Times, or one of the local channels. Do you really think they’ll listen?”
“Of course not.” Harriett sighed, her first contribution to the conversation since proposing they execute Spencer Harding. “A story like ours would never make it past the fact-checkers. We’d be putting anyone who ran the story at the risk of a massive lawsuit.”
“But maybe we could convince the media to start their own investigations,” Jo said.
“The men who run the networks and newspapers all know Spencer Harding,” Harriett said. “They sit next to him at fund-raisers. They trade witty banter at cocktail parties. They clink scotch glasses with him at Jackson Dunn’s parties. And they buy their artwork from Harding’s galleries. Even if we could convince a reporter to investigate, the story would never run. Their bosses would kill it. You two are still depending on a system that you both know doesn’t work. Plan all you like; you’re just delaying the inevitable.”
Nessa bit her lip.
Then Jo perked up. “I know someone with a big audience and no corporate bosses. Someone who already wants to talk to us.”
“You do?” Nessa asked hopefully. Harriett just smiled.
Jo pulled out her phone and brought up the page for the podcast They Walk Among Us.
“He’ll listen,” Jo said.