After Nessa dropped her off at home, Jo walked through the door to find Lucy playing Zelda on the giant television her father had purchased for video games. Whenever Jo popped home from work during the day, that was usually where she found Art.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Jo kissed Lucy on the crown of her head. “You must be starving, poor thing. I brought you a sandwich from the deli on Main Street.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said, without looking up. “I’ll take it to school for lunch tomorrow. Dad and I made beef ravioli from scratch.”
“You did?” Jo marveled. “Was it edible? How’s your belly feeling?”
“It feels fine. The pasta was yummy. Hey—can you take me to visit Harriett sometime?” she asked.
“We’ll see. Where is Dad?” Jo asked.
“Bedroom,” Lucy told her, still without looking away from the screen.
Upstairs, Jo made as much noise as possible as she walked down the hall. She’d learned it was best to give her husband fair warning. Still, she found Art on the bed with the computer on his lap. He closed the top as she entered.
“Maybe wait until the kid’s in bed?” Jo didn’t give a shit if Art watched a dirty video now and then, but she couldn’t disguise her disgust at what she’d come to see as a massive waste of time. Video games and porn consumed so many hours of her husband’s day, it was a minor miracle he managed to feed himself or their daughter.
“For your information, I was working.” Art sounded indignant. Who knew, maybe this time it was true. “Where have you been? Lucy said you were hanging around with Harriett Osborne. So what’s the story? She really a witch?”
“Yes.” Jo glanced down at the clock on her phone. She’d timed the trip home perfectly. “Turn on the local news.”
“You mean on the television?” It was as though she’d asked him to tune the wireless to News of the World.
Harriett snatched the remote off the bedside table and switched the TV to channel 4. The news had started, and they were playing footage taped earlier that day. Two burly EMTs emerged from a thicket at the edge of Danskammer Beach Road, lugging a blue plastic body bag. Several yards away, Nessa was talking to her detective friend while Harriett listened in. Jo saw herself standing apart from her friends, her eyes fixed on the body bag. A car drove between the crime scene and the cameras. By the time it had passed, the EMTs were loading the dead girl onto a stretcher, but Jo hadn’t moved an inch.
“Oh my God, Jo. Did you murder someone?”
“What the hell?” When she saw Art’s face, she could have sworn he was serious. “No! We found a dead body.”
When the news hit him, his eyes went wide. “You did?”
“You really thought I might have killed someone?”
“One has to consider all possibilities.” It was clearly a half-hearted attempt at humor. “You do have a nasty temper. But yes, of course I was kidding. What the hell happened? Where did you and your friends find a body?”
Jo wanted to tell him everything. It didn’t feel right to hide important details from Art. But she, Nessa, and Harriett had agreed to stick to the official story. “We were walking down to Danskammer Beach, and Nessa stepped off the trail to pee and found a black trash bag with a body inside.”
“Jesus Christ. Who was it?”
It was such a simple question, and one Jo had anticipated. Yet she stood there, unable to answer. The day had been such a blur that she hadn’t had time to absorb the horrible truth. “It was a girl.” It wasn’t until she heard her own cracked voice that she realized she was crying.
“Come here.” Art set the computer aside, took Jo’s arm, and pulled her down beside him on the bed.
“It was a girl,” Jo wailed into his shoulder. “Seventeen, maybe. Just a little girl, a few years older than Lucy. Naked and used up and thrown away by the side of the road.”
He held her tighter. “Oh, Jo, I’m so sorry.”
“Who would do something like that?” She’d listened to hundreds of crime podcasts. She knew there were people who hunted women, but she’d always imagined them as comic book villains or bogeymen, whose victims had only been nameless bodies.
“I can’t even imagine,” Art replied, and she knew it was true. Art Levison, for all his flaws, had never willfully harmed another human being in his life.
She rested her head on her husband’s chest. When they were younger, they had spent hours lying with their limbs entwined. Jo tried to count the years that had passed since she’d last sought comfort from Art. The warmth of his body and weight of his arms were so calming. The scent that had once driven her mad now soothed her. Her eyes felt heavy, and she might have fallen asleep if she hadn’t spotted Lucy peeking into the room.
“Do you need something?” Jo asked.
“Nope,” Lucy said. “Just making sure you haven’t killed each other.”
“Then your work here is done,” Art said. “Please resume whatever you were doing before you felt the urge to play detective.”
When Jo began to sit up, he resisted. After a two-second struggle, he set her free. “Where are you going?”
Jo wiped her eyes. “I should pop by the gym for a few minutes,” she told her husband as Lucy bounded back down to the living room.
“Can’t it wait? You’ve had a rough day. Are you sure you have to go now?”
“Yeah.” She rose from the bed and looked down at her husband. “I need to check in with Heather. She’s only been assistant manager for three weeks, and this is the first time I’ve left her on her own.”
“If that’s what you need.” Art gave in and reached for the computer beside him. When he opened it, Jo caught a glimpse of a Word document on the screen.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Just something I’ve been working on. Be careful, will you? Sounds like there could be a killer out there.”
It was seven thirty when Jo slipped behind the wheel of her car, and Furious Fitness closed at nine. Heather had texted her throughout the day, assuring Jo that everything was running smoothly. But Jo had never missed a full day of work before, and she wasn’t about to start.
She was idling at a traffic light on Main Street, across from the Mattauk police station, when someone lurched across the road in front of her car. The woman’s bottle-blond hair was slipping out of a loose bun on the top of her head, and she looked ready for bed in a spaghetti-strap top and a pair of men’s boxer shorts. There was little doubt she was drunk.
Jo watched with growing concern as the woman stomped into the center of one of the police station’s flower beds, pulled up a plant, roots and all, and hurled it at the building’s windows. Jo rolled down her window in time to hear the plant hit with a loud thud and a satisfying spray of dirt.
“You fucking motherfucker!” the woman screamed as she uprooted a small bush. “I told you! I told you someone killed my baby!”
Jo gasped when the door opened and an officer appeared, his service revolver drawn. He lowered the firearm when he recognized the attacker. “Mrs. Welsh? Put the begonia down!”
The woman lobbed the plant at his head. Her aim was surprisingly good, but he ducked just in time. “I fucking told Rocca someone killed her and you fuckers did nothing. Now some other girl is dead. You fucking useless pieces of shit! This is on you!”
Jo steered her car into the station’s parking lot and hopped out. Her gut was telling her the woman was the mother of one of the girls Nessa had seen on the beach.
“Mrs. Welsh!” A second policeman with a gun ran outside. Someone was going to get shot.
“Fuck you! Go ahead and shoot me, you spineless piece of shit. What the fuck do I have to live for, anyway?”
The woman reached down for a large rock, and Jo knew the time had come to intervene. She sprinted toward the flower bed and grabbed the woman by the wrist.
“Don’t,” she heard herself tell the drunk woman. “Not now.”
Jo’s iron grip seemed to convince the woman that a struggle wasn’t worth it. She dropped the rock, and Jo released her. The woman teetered for a moment, then fell backward onto her butt. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.
“My name is Jo Levison.” She held out a hand and pulled the woman up to her feet. Mulch from the flower beds remained stuck to the woman’s boxer shorts.
“I’ve seen you before,” the woman said. “You were on the news.”
“I was,” Jo said. “I was one of the people who found the girl today.”
“My girl is out there, too.” The woman’s jaw was clenched tightly enough to break all her teeth. The stench of alcohol wafted from her skin. “And these worthless motherfuckers won’t even look!”
“I’ll help you find her,” Jo told the woman.
The woman’s face went slack with surprise. She didn’t know what to make of Jo’s offer. “You will?”
One of the police officers was inching toward them as though they were terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests rather than two civilians armed with nothing more than begonias. “Mrs. Welsh,” he said. “You need to come with me. I’m going to have to book you for destruction of government property.”
“Oh, come on,” Jo said. “She threw a couple of plants. What property did she destroy?”
“There’s a crack in one of the windows.”
“I’ll have it fixed,” Jo said. “I own Furious Fitness. I’ll send my repairperson over to take a look tomorrow. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay the bill. Now save yourself some paperwork and let me take this lady home. As soon as we’re gone, you can go back to looking at naked ladies on your phone.”
It had just been a shot in the dark, but the look on his face told her she hadn’t missed the mark.
“Why are you helping me, rich lady?” the woman whispered as Jo led her away.
“What makes you think I’m rich?” Jo asked.
The woman responded with a drunken titter. “If you weren’t rich, that cop would have shot your ass. Where you from, anyways?”
“Here,” Jo said.
“Me too! How’d you end up looking like one of those bitches who show up every summer?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just got lucky.” It was the only explanation Jo could offer.
Once she’d been loaded into the car, Mrs. Welsh promptly passed out. Jo tried calling Nessa. The phone went straight to voice mail, and when she drove past Nessa’s house, the lights were all off. She couldn’t haul the woman back to her own home, so she continued down Woodland Drive and pulled up in front of the town’s most infamous residence.
Harriett answered the door in a sheer linen muumuu that did nothing to conceal the naked body underneath. “Long time no see,” she said.
Jo tried not to stare. “Hey, yeah, I’m sorry to bother you. I was on my way to my gym and I ran into a woman throwing plants at the police station.” She knew how crazy it sounded, but she kept on going. “I think she’s the mother of one of the girls Nessa saw. She’s drunk off her ass and looks seriously ill. She needs our help.”
“Of course. Darling?” Harriett called back to someone. “Would you mind pulling on some pants and giving me a hand for a moment?”
Jo watched in astonishment as the sexiest man who’d ever worked at a Mattauk grocery store appeared buck naked in Harriett’s living room with a pair of old jeans in his hand. Jo averted her eyes until he’d managed to put them on.
“What can I do for you?” he asked Harriett.
“There’s a drunk woman in my friend’s car. Will you please bring her into the house?”
“Sure thing,” he said, flashing the ladies his movie-star smile.
They both watched him walk out to the drive, bare-chested and shoeless. “You’re my hero, Harriett,” Jo said. “But for the record, I could have brought her inside.”
“I know,” said Harriett. “It’s just that Eric likes feeling useful. And it was about time he got dressed and went home, anyway. Come in and make yourself comfortable.”
When Jo looked around, she could hardly believe she was indoors. The walls of the house had been transformed into vertical gardens, and trees bearing unusual fruit grew out of containers. Jo examined the herbs sprouting from the hanging planter affixed to the nearest wall, but couldn’t identify a single one of them. Books bristling with scraps of paper marking important pages were stacked high on the Eames coffee table and rose like columns from the floor beside the Knoll sofa. On top of the piles closest to her were Working Conjure: A Guide to Hoodoo Folk Magic, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo, and Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing. Squirrels were building a massive nest in the living room fireplace, and a flock of little green parakeets chased each other around the high ceilings.
Harriett’s gentleman caller reappeared with a limp Ms. Welsh cradled in his arms.
“Just put her on the sofa, please,” Harriett told him.
When the woman was laid out like Sleeping Beauty, Harriett handed the man his shirt and shoes, then leaned down to examine the new arrival. She pried open one of Ms. Welsh’s eyes, examined her fingernails, and sniffed at the breath leaking out of her lungs.
“Jo, would you mind popping into the hall linen closet and grabbing a spare blanket for our guest?”
Jo did as she was asked. On her way back to the living room, she stopped to wait while Harriett finished saying a very warm goodbye to her gentleman friend.
As soon as she heard the door close, Jo headed for the sofa and spread the blanket over the sleeping woman. Harriett had slipped on a pair of glasses and taken a place behind a wooden counter that had once served as a bar but appeared to have been transformed into a workbench. There were still liquor-filled bottles lining the shelf behind her, but stuffed inside them were leaves, roots, and various other ingredients Jo wasn’t certain she wanted to identify. Glass jars with cork stoppers held dried mushrooms, a rainbow of berries, and something that upon closer inspection appeared to be shriveled caterpillars.
“I hope it’s not rude to say so, but your boyfriend is smoking hot,” Jo remarked casually.
Harriett smirked as she plucked dried buds from a branch and dropped them into a marble mortar, followed by a handful of fresh green leaves. “I’m long past the boyfriend stage,” she said. “I don’t need to own anyone. And I certainly don’t want anyone to think they own me. Eric and I just enjoy one another’s company. At least twice a week.”
“Twice a week? Damn, Harriett. I can’t even remember what it’s like to have sex twice a week.”
“I have sex with Eric twice a week. He’s not the only one.” Harriett seemed to relish the shock on Jo’s face. “I’m making up for lost time. I didn’t have enough sex before I got married,” she explained. “My family was conservative, and everyone made it seem like such a big deal. My grandmother had me convinced I’d catch AIDS, get knocked up, and be branded the town whore if I dropped my trousers. For years I was too worried about going to hell to realize how much I liked fucking. I’m not worried about anything anymore.”
Harriett added a handful of seedpods to the mortar and ground its contents into a mush, which she spooned into a glass. Then she added a splash of pale green liquid from one of the liquor bottles, poured some Evian on top, and stirred.
“What are you making?” Jo asked.
“An antidote for the alcohol sloshing around in our guest’s system, along with a few other things that will help her feel better. What she really needs is a month of good meals and a lot of rest. Her system is on the verge of collapse,” Harriett said. “There are clear signs of heavy drinking, and the color of her tongue indicates she’s severely malnourished. Her troubles must have started long before her daughter’s disappearance. This woman’s life has not been easy. She’s too young to be so ill.”
“Young? How old do you think she is?” Jo asked quietly.
Harriett glanced up and took another look at the woman laid out on the sofa. “Late thirties,” she replied.
“No.” Jo couldn’t believe it. That would make her much younger than both of them.
“Nothing ages a person like poverty and misery,” Harriett said. “Despite what all the ads claim, it’s not skin cream that helps some women keep their glow. The only true youth serum has two ingredients—luck and money.”
Harriett finished mixing the strange herbal cocktail and held it up to the light for inspection. Seemingly satisfied with the result, she came out from behind the bar and took a seat on the edge of the sofa. Ms. Welsh’s eyes fluttered open as Harriett gently lifted her head.
“Drink,” Harriett ordered as she poured a thin trickle into the woman’s mouth. The patient swallowed and grimaced at the taste. A few seconds later, she sat upright, took the glass from Harriett’s hands, and guzzled the rest of its contents, twin streams of green liquid running down either side of her chin.
She sat back and wiped her mouth with the palm of her hand. “That was disgusting. What the hell did you just give me?”
“Just a little something I made. I assume it worked?”
“You could get rich selling that stuff.”
“Why would I trade a creation as pure as this for something as filthy as money?” Harriett laughed.
The woman looked at Harriett as if she might be insane. Then her eyes widened. “Fucking hell! You’re the witch, aren’t you?” She cringed and recoiled when she realized what she’d said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off. That’s just what people at work call you.”
Harriett’s smile broadened, exposing the gap between her teeth. “That doesn’t offend me. ‘Witch’ is the label society slaps on women it can’t understand or control. But feel free to call me Harriett. And you are?”
“Amber Welsh.”
Jo stepped forward. “I’m Jo Levison. I found you outside the police station. I brought you here.”
The memory appeared to make Amber wince. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure I’d be sleeping on the floor of a cell right now if it wasn’t for you. Wouldn’t be the first time. But I swear to God, I’m not like that anymore. I’ve been mostly sober for three whole months. Been talking to my sponsor every day. Then someone texted me a video about the body they found, and I lost it.”
“I think you have a good reason to be angry at the cops,” Jo said. “It sounded like something happened to your daughter.”
Amber pulled in a long, shaky breath as she nodded. “Mandy disappeared two years ago around this time of year. When I went to the Mattauk police, they said girls like her run away all the time. I told them they didn’t know my daughter. She was responsible. Always had dinner ready when I got home from work. Helped with the little ones. After their dad got sent away, I don’t know what I would’ve done without her. To be honest, I don’t know how I manage now.” Amber bowed her head. “Maybe she wasn’t an honor student or prom queen, but Mandy was a good kid. I told them that. The night she didn’t come home, I went straight to the cops and told them that something had happened to my girl. But they didn’t listen. They’ve had it in for my family for years now. They know I’ve been in trouble and they know her dad went to jail for meth, and they figured that was all they needed to know about Mandy. They said it would be a waste of resources to send someone out to look for her.”
“Those bastards.” Jo’s fists were clenched and throbbing. “Why do they get to decide who’s worthwhile and who’s not?”
“What do you think happened to Mandy?” Harriett asked.
Amber wiped her tears away with the edge of the blanket. “Somebody killed her, of course. Just like that girl they found down by the beach today. That’s where Mandy was last seen. Walking down the road that runs next to Danskammer Beach.”
“She was walking by herself? Where do you think she was going?”
“Well, there’s only one place she could have been going, isn’t there? The Pointe. She was wearing a dress we bought for her grandmother’s funeral. I think she might have been going to see someone about a job. But you know what? The cops never bothered to ask a single fucking person out there if they’d seen her.”
“The Pointe is a long way for a girl her age to walk. What kind of job would she have been interviewing for?” Jo asked.
“I don’t know. House cleaner, maybe? She was good with kids, too. Maybe she was going to be somebody’s nanny.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“I was going through a rough patch back then.” Amber watched as her toes dug into the soft, spongey soles of her flip-flops. “Truth is, she might have told me, and I might just not remember. But when I realized she was missing, I went straight to the cops. If they’d gone out to look for her the same night, they could have found her.” Amber kept her gaze directed at the floor. There was such horror and grief on her face that Jo had to look away. She couldn’t bear to imagine what the woman might be seeing. If it had been her kid, Jo would have thrown more than plants at the police station’s windows. Amber had gone to the cops because she’d lost the most precious thing she had—and they couldn’t even be bothered to look for it. They’d assigned a price to Mandy Welsh’s life and decided a girl like her wasn’t worth their time.
“We’ll find Mandy,” Jo promised.
Amber shook her head hopelessly. “She’s dead.”
“We know,” Jo said. There was no point in pretending it might not be true. “But we’ll bring her back to you so she can rest in peace. Then we’ll take care of the person who killed her—and make sure he never hurts anyone ever again.”
Amber shook her head as though the thought were ridiculous and Jo was cruel to even suggest it. “How are you gonna do that?”
“We were the ones who found the girl by Danskammer Beach today,” Harriett told her. “Our friend heard her calling.”
Amber blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said flatly. “What?”
“Our friend Nessa has a gift,” Jo explained. “When the dead are lost, they call out to her so she can find them.”
Amber rose slowly from her seat as if she’d spotted a snake slithering toward her across the floor. “You ladies are sweet and I appreciate your help, but I know the cops here, and they aren’t going to listen to a witch and a lady ninja and some woman who talks to dead people.” When she was on her feet, she headed straight for the door. “Thanks for everything you’ve done tonight, but I really need to get home to my kids. My thirteen-year-old is not the babysitter his sister was.”
“Harriett gave you a drink that sobered you up in about ten seconds flat. Would you have believed that was possible?” Jo asked.
Amber paused at the door.
“I can do more than that,” Harriett added. “It will take a lot more than a single drink, but I can restore your health. All you have to do is pay me a few more visits. How long has it been since you haven’t felt broken?”
Long enough for her to take the offer seriously, apparently. “And what would I need to do in return?”
Jo hoped Harriett knew it wasn’t a good moment for a joke about selling her soul to Satan.
“You just have to talk to our friend tomorrow,” Harriett said. “Tell her what you told us about Mandy—and anything else you remember between now and then.”
“That’s it?” Amber asked.
“That, and you let me give you a ride back to your car,” Jo said. “It’s getting late, and someone in Mattauk’s been killing women.”
“Car?” Amber asked. “My car hasn’t been running. I walked into town. And in case you haven’t noticed, somebody’s always killing women.”
Amber’s house was a single-wide trailer parked on a bald patch of sandy dirt. Broken toys lay scattered around the building and a run-down Corolla with three wheels and no license plate sat parked in front. The trailer’s rusted screen door looked as though it had been kicked in multiple times, and a broken window was patched up with duct tape. Jo had always known there were people around Mattauk who weren’t well off. But she couldn’t have imagined this kind of poverty existing a few miles away from her middle-class subdivision or the mansions on Culling Pointe. Mattauk hid its poor people well. Or maybe, Jo realized to her chagrin, she’d never really bothered to look.
Jo had wondered what kind of job would have driven a sixteen-year-old girl to walk five miles down a deserted road in her best dress. Now she knew—and she could have kicked herself for being so dense. A girl who lived in a place like this would have walked five miles for any job that would pay her. Whatever the salary, the money was desperately needed.
A potbellied little boy wearing a pair of basketball shorts stood on the other side of the screen door. The light from a television flickered on the wall behind him. He watched, one hand digging into a bag of Cheetos, as the car pulled up. When the headlights went out and he saw his mom in the passenger seat, he darted out of sight.
“That’s Dustin,” Amber said.
“He’s cute,” Jo said. “How old is he?”
“Seven.” Amber sighed. “Damn it. He was in bed when I left. His brother shouldn’t have let him out. I bet all three of them have been up the whole time. Mandy would have—” She stopped and stared through the windshield, her eyes focused on nothing in particular.
“I’m sorry,” Jo said. “If there’s anything I can do . . .” She wished she knew how to offer help without offending Amber’s pride.
Amber turned to her. “You kept me out of jail tonight. That’s the best thing anyone’s done for me in a really long time. And if your friend can find Mandy’s body, that might just help more than anything else. I can’t go anywhere until I know there’s no chance at all that she’s coming home again.”
“What time do you get off work tomorrow?” Jo asked.
“My shift at the Stop & Shop ends at seven,” Amber said.
“Okay,” Jo said. “My friend Nessa and I will pick you up after work.”