“Be careful what you let others have,” Nessa’s mother had advised her the day she graduated from nursing school. “Everyone you help’s gonna want a piece of you. Give what you can, but you’ll be worthless to all of them unless you stay whole.” It wasn’t until Nessa took her first hospital job that she truly understood what her mother had meant. By the end of the first week, she’d vomited six times and shed buckets of tears. She could feel the work chipping away at her soul.
In order to save it, Nessa built a wall around her world. Her private life was her refuge from the demands of the doctors, the suffering of her patients, and the needs of their relatives—a place she could leave them all behind. For years, the only people allowed inside were Nessa’s family. She thought of her world as a house filled with memories. Some were always kept on display. Others, like her gift, were stored safely away until she had use for them.
Now her world had welcomed two new inhabitants, and a third was knocking. Nessa knew Jo was right—she had to open the door and let Franklin in. He was there for a reason, and he needed to know how her gift really worked. But she’d never expected to invite another man inside her private world. As crazy as it sounded, it felt like cheating.
When she got home from the police station shortly after ten, Nessa showered and headed for bed. She lay there for an hour until she knew for a fact that sleep wouldn’t be coming. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t done all she could for the dead. Dressed in her silky pink nightgown and robe, she went out to her car and sat in the front seat with the keys in her hand. The street was empty and all the houses were dark. The world should have been silent—but it wasn’t. The waves were still crashing in the distance, and now a chorus of female voices had joined them. Nessa couldn’t say how many were calling, but she knew it had to be more than three.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she slipped the key into the ignition. “I’ll try to do better.”
The car’s engine drowned out the voices, but Nessa knew they were still there. She drove slowly through the empty streets of Mattauk, looking at the town through the eyes of a stranger. It wasn’t hard. She’d never truly belonged. The storefronts were all charming, the restaurants homey, and the businesses cleverly named. If asked, she could have drawn every building from memory. But Nessa was overcome by the uncanny sense that there was so much she’d never seen. She remembered when her parents had first decided to move out of the city. Nessa had warned them things had changed on the island. She and Jonathan had driven out one summer with the twins. All that was left of the community she remembered were a few little cabins down by the shore.
But her parents hadn’t been dissuaded from following their dream. The home they’d bought hadn’t come with a white picket fence, so they’d promptly built one of their own. They’d come to the island to find what they’d been promised—and to claim their reward for lives of good deeds and hard work. But while they hadn’t been snubbed in Mattauk, they’d never felt entirely welcome, either. They knew their neighbors referred to them not by their address or the landscaping or the color of their house. They were the Black family. Nessa had sensed her parents’ relief when she’d moved to the island with her kids after Jonathan’s death. It let them ignore what had become increasingly clear—Mattauk was no longer the place they remembered. So they’d doted on their grandchildren and tried their best not to look too hard.
Nessa wondered what they would have said if they’d known there was a monster lurking in the shadows of their storybook town. Someone was murdering girls. Not the girls who lived in the big, tasteful houses. Not the girls whose parents were lawyers or doctors or investment bankers. He was taking poor girls—the kind who lived in trailers that could be hitched to a truck and carted off. He was stealing them, using them, and throwing them away because the world considered them trash. Would that have come as a surprise to her parents? Or had they known, deep inside, that that’s how things worked—even in pretty little places like Mattauk.
Nessa passed the courthouse and the police department, where Franklin’s car still sat outside. She was headed for the far edge of town, beyond the hospital and medical offices, to a seventies-era building she’d never set foot in and had always done her best to avoid.
The county morgue’s front desk was empty, but just as Nessa had expected, there was someone standing in the parking lot outside. The outline of a figure was all Nessa could make out in the dark, but she knew who it was. She threw on her turn signal and pulled the car into the lot. The girl in the blue dress focused her unblinking stare straight at Nessa’s headlights, as though she’d been waiting for her ride to arrive. Inside the morgue, her cold, naked body had been lying on a sliding steel drawer inside a refrigerated cabinet for two days. Nessa stopped beside the girl and got out of the car. She walked over to the passenger side and opened the door. The girl in the blue dress climbed in.
On the way home, Nessa stole peeks at her passenger, but the girl never looked back. Her eyes remained focused on the road in front of them. Nessa wondered what it was like to be trapped between this world and the next. Whatever discomfort the girl felt, she seemed determined to endure it. She wasn’t going to disappear until she knew her people would find her. Her connection to them was the source of great power.
Nessa’s phone pinged as she pulled into her driveway and parked the car. A text had arrived from Jo, with her first good news in days: Harriett had finagled invitations to a party on Culling Pointe. They would have a chance to speak to the rich people Mattauk’s cops refused to bother. At least it was something, Nessa thought, as she walked around to the other side of the car.
She opened the passenger-side door and motioned for the dead girl to get out. Then Nessa guided her guest through her house to the couch in the living room. When the girl took a seat, Nessa saw that she’d been taught to sit with her back straight, her knees together, and her ankles crossed. She kept her little black bag in her lap with her hands folded over it. For the first time, Nessa noticed a gold chain, so thin it was almost invisible, hanging around the girl’s neck. A pendant was hidden beneath the dress’s demure neckline. Nessa assumed that a cross lay near the girl’s heart.
The girl’s eyes followed Nessa as though she were waiting for something to happen.
Nessa sat down across from her guest and flipped open her sketch pad. “I’m trying,” she said, hoping that counted for something. “I’m new to all this, and it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
The girl sat there, polite but persistent. She reminded Nessa of the girl she’d once been.
“Your mama must be losing her mind,” Nessa said. “Until we find her, you should stay here with me.”
The ghost’s brown eyes stayed locked on Nessa as Nessa began to sketch the contours of her face. She seemed curious.
“Don’t get your hopes up about the portrait,” Nessa warned her. “I’m not the world’s best artist, but let’s see if I can do you some justice.”
When she was finished, she showed the girl what she’d drawn. It was an excellent likeness, Nessa thought—better than the ones she’d sketched from memory. It would make it much easier for the girl’s family to be found. The ghost said nothing, but by the way her gaze lingered on the page, Nessa knew she recognized herself. When Nessa showed the girl sketches she’d made of the other two victims, her eyes went blank. It was clear she’d never seen them before.
At five o’clock in the morning, Nessa arranged her drawings on the dining-room table and closed her sketch pad. Just as dawn broke, she finally fell asleep.
She woke at noon knowing exactly what she needed to do. As soon as she’d showered and her makeup was on, she grabbed her phone and dialed Franklin’s number. When he picked up, she heard noises in the background and knew without asking that he was at lunch. “I’m sorry to bother you, but would you mind stopping by when you have a chance?” she said. “I have something to show you.”
He didn’t ask what it was. He didn’t put her off or tell her he’d come when he could. “I’ll be there in five,” he said.
She waited at the window for him to arrive. When Franklin pulled into the drive, she felt glad to see him—and that felt wrong. Her pulse quickened when the car door opened and his form rose to full height. Since the day she’d met Jonathan, other men’s charms had always bounced right off her. Now there was a chink in her armor. Nessa didn’t know where it was, but she knew she was vulnerable. That didn’t keep her from rushing to greet him.
“You okay?” Franklin asked as he walked up the flagstone path to her door.
She wasn’t sure she should answer that question. “Come in,” she said instead.
Nessa ushered Franklin through the house to the dining room, where she’d spread out the portraits of the three dead girls on the table.
“What are these?” he asked.
Nessa placed a finger on the portrait of the girl in the blue dress. “This is the girl I found in the trash bag by Danskammer Beach.” She slid her finger over to the next two drawings. “I saw these girls there, too. They were standing in the water. I went back to sketch them yesterday.”
“So there were three girls, not two?” Franklin asked.
Nessa nodded.
“That certainly changes things. This Mandy Welsh?” Franklin asked, tapping the portrait of a pale girl with light hair and freckles.
“Yes,” Nessa said. “I don’t know who the third girl is. But her body is right next to Mandy’s in the water off Danskammer Beach.”
“And you saw them all in your dream?”
“It wasn’t a dream. They were there the day we found the first girl. What I saw—what I drew—were the three girls’ ghosts.”
“Ghosts,” Franklin repeated, and she nodded. It didn’t seem to be going as well as she’d hoped.
Feeling exposed, she fought the urge to flee. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
Franklin responded with a snort. “You may be able to see ghosts, Nessa, but you’re terrible at reading minds.”
Nessa always remembered falling in love with her husband as a one-two punch. The first blow had come out of the blue the night she’d found the handsome young police officer praying over her dead patient’s body. That blow had knocked her over, but she’d gotten up and shaken herself off. If the Lord had seen fit to separate the two of them then, she could have gone on. The second punch arrived a few weeks later, when Nessa finally worked up the nerve to tell him about her gift. She’d agonized over the decision for days. Jonathan was a cop. He would want evidence, and she had none to provide. But she knew she couldn’t keep something hidden from the man she was coming to love. By the time she sat down to tell him, she’d worked out the answers to every question he might ask. She had photos of her grandmother and the scrapbook she’d inherited, which included her grandmother’s sketches pasted next to news clippings about the bodies she’d found. In the end, Nessa hadn’t needed them.
After she told him, Jonathan just sat there. “Okay,” he said.
“That’s it?” she asked. “‘Okay’? Don’t you have any questions?”
“I have lots, but we can get to them later,” he told her. “None of this changes anything. I knew you were special the day I met you.”
That was the moment Nessa knew she was down for the count.
“You believe me about the ghosts?” Nessa asked, and Franklin nodded.
He pulled in a long breath in a way that told her he had his own story to share, and took a seat on the edge of the table. “When I was a kid back in Brooklyn, I had to cross the Gowanus Canal every day to get to school. One morning I was walking over the Carroll Street Bridge, and I saw a woman standing in the middle, looking down at the water. I could tell from her face that something was wrong. I was about to pass by when she grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me over to the railing. She pointed down at the canal and asked me if I could see her. I looked and looked, and there was nobody there. But the woman on the bridge was insisting. She was almost hysterical. She kept saying, ‘There’s a dead girl down there in the water!’ I told her I couldn’t see a thing, and she started describing a girl like she was standing right there in front of her. Black hair. Yellow eyes. A birthmark shaped like Florida on her shoulder. I was thirteen years old, and the woman scared the hell out of me. So I ran. Later that day, as I was walking home from school, they were hauling a body out of the canal. It turned out to be a girl from my school. Her name was Linda Cavatelli, and she had black hair, yellow eyes, and a birthmark shaped like Florida on her shoulder.”
“You think the woman on the bridge could see the dead?”
“That’s what my mother said when I told her. She didn’t even seem surprised. She said she once had an auntie who was always seeing ghosts. Then she told me that if I’d been born female, I might have been able to see them, too. The ability usually runs in families, but boys never got it. I was annoyed as hell when I heard that. Wasn’t long afterward that I decided to become a cop. I figured if I couldn’t see dead people, the least I could do was help find out who killed them.”
“Seeing them isn’t as great as it sounds,” Nessa told him.
“Don’t I know it,” Franklin told her. “I haven’t come across any ghosts, but I have seen my share of the dead. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get used to it.”
Nessa turned back to the portraits lined up on the table. “It’s my job to find these girls’ families so their spirits can rest in peace. I need your help.”
Franklin picked up the sketch of the girl in the blue dress. “I’ll go back to the station now and post your drawing of our Jane Doe on the database. That’s all I can do for the moment.”
“What about the other girls?” Nessa asked.
“It’s unlikely their bodies would have lasted very long at the bottom of the sound,” Franklin said. “But I promised you I’d look, and I keep my promises. I found a fisherman with a sonar-equipped boat. He just updated to all the latest tech. If there are remains down there, we should be able to spot them.”
Nessa leaned forward and kissed him. When she pulled back, his eyes were wide with surprise.
“Sorry,” she said, horrified by her own behavior. “I shouldn’t have done that. I have a responsibility to these girls. I have to stay focused and I can’t—”
Franklin held up a hand. “It’s okay, Nessa,” he said. “But for the record, as soon as all this is over, you are more than welcome to do that again.”
Two weeks later, no bodies had been found. The girl in the blue dress was still sitting on Nessa’s couch, and the last thing on Nessa’s mind was kissing Franklin.