“This is a joke, right?” Jo asked, a half smile on her face as she wiped the sweat from her hairline and fanned her belly with the bottom of her tank top. She’d just come back from her morning run, and as usual, she was sopping wet.
Nessa gestured toward her car in Jo’s driveway. Sitting on the passenger side was a woman with wild hair.
Jo gasped. “Holy shit. Is that who I think it is?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Nessa replied.
“I figured she’d gone to seed. She looks amazing.” Jo stepped back and lowered her voice even further. “So lemme see if I have this straight. You hear dead people?”
“Yes,” Nessa confirmed. She didn’t know if it was the right moment to confess that she could often see them, too.
“And you, me, and Harriett goddamn Osborne are going to go look for a corpse that’s been calling to you from beyond the grave?”
“That’s right.” Nessa was getting a bit nervous.
Jo nodded thoughtfully. “Well,” she finally said, “beats the hell out of everything else I had planned for the day. If I can get someone to teach my Spin class, I’m good. Gotta take a shower and drop the kid off at school first, though. That okay with you?”
Nessa was so relieved, she would have agreed to anything. “Take your shower. We’ll give Lucy a ride when you’re done.”
Jo peeked around the corner at Harriett and laughed. “Oh man. My kid’s gonna love this.”
“Who’s the lady sitting in Nessa’s car?” Lucy asked as they walked down the path to the driveway.
“A very special guest,” Jo whispered. “I’d hate to ruin the surprise.”
She opened a door to the back seat and let Lucy scramble in first before her.
“Hi there. I’m Jo Levison.” She thrust a hand between the front seats. “And this is my daughter, Lucy.”
“Harriett Osborne.” The woman took Jo’s hand, but didn’t let go. Instead, she turned it over, examined both sides, and traced Jo’s life line with her index finger. “Fascinating,” she said. “How long have you been like this?”
“Been like what?” Lucy asked, craning her neck for a look at her mother’s hand.
“A few years,” Jo said.
“It will get stronger,” Harriett predicted. “You’ll have great power, but it won’t last forever. Don’t wait to make use of it.”
“How do you know all of that?” Jo asked.
Harriett shrugged. “Does it matter? We both know it’s true.”
“Hold on a sec,” Lucy interrupted. As an only child, she’d spent too much time in the company of adults to be properly intimidated by them. “Did you just say your name is Harriett Osborne?”
“I did,” Harriett confirmed. Then she turned back to Jo. “Someday she’ll be one of us, too.”
“The Harriett Osborne?” Lucy asked skeptically. Kids at school whispered about her at recess. One of the boys who lived across the street from Harriett claimed to have seen her dead body, half eaten by cats.
“Will you believe me if I pull up my pant legs and show you all the cat bites on my shins?”
Lucy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“She’s pulling your leg, baby,” Jo assured her. “I think.”
“I am,” Harriett confirmed with a wide, toothy smile that managed to be both attractive and unsettling. “When animals eat a person, they don’t go for the legs first. They generally eat the nose, lips, and anus. Apparently, those are the tastiest bits.”
Nessa grimaced as she checked the rearview mirror to see the child’s reaction. Her own daughters would have been horrified at that age. Jordan and Breanna were wonderful girls, and tough as nails in their own right, but they avoided death like regular humans. Nessa had known early on that neither of them had inherited the gift. Sure enough, they’d found out a couple of years back that it had passed to her niece, Sage, instead. On the morning of her twelfth birthday party, the girl had discovered a woman’s body floating facedown in a pool in suburban Atlanta. The woman’s husband was arrested for murder before Sage had taken her first bite of birthday cake.
Lucy was peering up at her mother. She didn’t appear bothered at all. “Do you think the anus thing would make a good science fair experiment?”
“Where would we get a corpse?” her mom asked.
“Maybe Nessa knows,” Harriett quipped.
In the driver’s seat, Nessa cleared her throat, uncomfortable.
“Do you really know where to get a dead body?” the girl asked.
“Lucy,” Jo laughed nervously, “Harriett was kidding again.”
The woman in the passenger seat smiled slyly and left it at that.
Traffic slowed as they approached Lucy’s elementary school. The sidewalks were filled with parents and children who lived close enough to walk. One of the moms caught sight of Harriett first and stopped dead in her tracks. Several kids plowed into her. Soon an entire line of pedestrians had turned to face the road. When Harriett greeted the crowd with a royal wave, most of the adults seemed embarrassed. The kids went wild and waved back.
Nessa giggled. “You’re famous, Harriett.”
“So it seems,” Harriett replied.
“OMG, I’m going to be the most popular girl in school today.” Lucy was beaming as Nessa pulled up to the drop-off point.
Harriett turned around and gave her a wink. “Tell your classmates they’re welcome to visit me anytime. I’ve always adored children. They’re absolutely delicious.”
For as long as anyone could remember, there had never been anything along Danskammer Beach but sand and scrub. A thin barrier island just off the main island’s south shore, it disappeared beneath waves during any strong storm. The stretch of ocean it faced was no good for swimming, and the lonely five-mile road that ran beside the beach was often closed for repairs.
At the far end of the island, just outside Mattauk city limits, the road passed over a bridge before swerving inland away from the sea. On the far side of the bridge, a tall steel gate blocked the sole entrance to a long, narrow stretch of land that jutted out into the water. The only people allowed access were the owners of the mansions in a community known as Culling Pointe. Before Memorial Day, the Pointe was a ghost town. Even during the summer, it was easy to forget anyone was out there. Occasionally one would spot a perfectly groomed woman browsing the shops in Mattauk. But for the most part, the millionaires and billionaires kept to themselves—and kept Mattauk’s full-time residents out of Culling Pointe.
They were halfway along Danskammer Beach Road when Nessa suddenly steered the car onto the shoulder. “The voice just got a lot louder. We should stop and look.”
“I jog down here all the time,” Jo said. “Kind of creepy to think I might have been running right past someone’s dead body.”
Nessa parked and the three women climbed out. A hundred yards of impenetrable scrub separated the highway from the beach. Stunted by salt water and gnarled by wind, the trees hunched closely together, their leaves whispering to each other in the breeze. Nessa hurried along the side of the road, listening for the girl’s voice over the crashing of the waves. Harriett and Jo trailed behind.
“You really think Nessa can hear the dead?” Jo asked Harriett. She’d come along for the adventure. She was still on the fence when it came to Nessa’s psychic powers.
“No reason not to believe her,” Harriett replied. “She seems perfectly sane, and I don’t think she’s capable of lying.” She didn’t seem to have anything more to say about the matter, and they walked in silence for a minute or more.
“You probably don’t remember, but you and I met once,” Jo said. “Years ago. At the grocery store.”
“Yes, I remember. You backed into my car.”
Jo felt herself blush. “It was right after Lucy was born, and I was a total disaster. I remember I was still bleeding like a stuck pig and I had baby vomit down the front of my shirt, and you got out in this amazing dress, looking like someone in a magazine, and you told me you’d take care of everything. I was so relieved my insurance premiums weren’t going to skyrocket. I had no idea you were actually going to send someone out to my house to repair the taillight I’d broken.”
“Don’t make it out like I gave you a kidney,” Harriett said. “I only made a call.”
“Harriett—I was the one who backed into your car, and you sent someone out to my house to fix my taillight. He didn’t even take any money when he was done. He said you’d already paid him. Why did you do that?”
“Who knows,” Harriett said with a shrug, as though her motives were a mystery even to her. “Why wouldn’t I? You seemed like you had other things to worry about.” As far as Jo could tell, Harriett wasn’t being modest. She truly didn’t think her behavior had been remarkable. It had, however, made a huge difference to Jo. She’d thought about it several times a week for the past ten years.
“I like what you’ve done with your garden,” Jo said.
“Thank you,” Harriett replied happily. “I’d be glad to give you a tour sometime.”
“I like what you did to Brendon Baker’s lawn, too. The motherfucker deserved it.”
“Yes,” Harriett readily agreed, “the motherfucker certainly did.”
“When did you discover your . . .” Jo hesitated. “. . . ability?”
“My divorce attorney helped me see it. But I suspect I had it long before that,” Harriett mused, as though it were something she’d often pondered. “I wish it hadn’t taken so long for me to realize it was there. I feel like I spent the first twenty years of my life trying to figure shit out. The second twenty, I wasted on the wrong people—my husband, the assholes I worked with. Then I reached this stage of my life, and all of that fell away. For the first time in my life, I was alone. And for the first time in my life, I knew what the hell I was doing. And you?” She turned to Jo and picked up one of her hands. “When did you discover you could generate this kind of energy?”
“I punched a hole through a wall,” Jo said. “I was managing a hotel in Manhattan and a woman on one of my cleaning teams was assaulted. So I went up to confront the guy, and he’s sitting there in a robe with his dick hanging out. I swear to God, it felt like I exploded. Before I knew it, I had the asshole up against the wall with my right hand and I’d put my left hand straight through the Sheetrock next to his face.”
“I hope he was more respectful to women after that,” Harriett replied.
“Doubt it. But I did make him piss himself, which was fun,” Jo said. “The hotel tried to cover up the incident. So I turned over a bunch of documents to the New York Times.”
“So that was you? How wonderful!” Harriett lit up with glee. “I remember reading that story in the paper. It was very impressive how you shut the place down—so neat and professional, like one of those building demolitions they used to show on the evening news.”
“Yes, and just like those implosions, the cockroaches all made it out alive,” Jo said.
“For now,” Harriett said. “Look.” She pointed ahead of them, and both women immediately broke into a jog. Up ahead, Nessa had come to a stop.
“I think the girl’s down there,” Nessa said once they caught up with her. She was fixated on a nondescript section of scrubland. The voice had grown louder and more insistent, as though its owner knew they’d come for her at last.
Jo looked for a way into the thicket, where brambles and branches were woven together as tight as a net. “Anyone bring a machete?”
“Now, now. There’s no need for violence.” Harriett took the lead, slipping effortlessly into the foliage. Jo and Nessa followed, certain at first that she’d tamed nature with her magical powers. Instead, Harriett had spotted a slim trail that hadn’t been in regular use for some time. Inside the scrubland, the vegetation closed in all around them. Nessa glanced back and realized she could no longer see the road. The sound of waves slamming into the beach told her the ocean lay straight ahead. When she turned her eyes upward, she saw swatches of sky. Otherwise, there was nothing to guide them. They’d entered alien territory. It felt like the kind of secret world you might’ve stumbled upon when you were little. But this one was bad. At least one person had entered the thicket and never left.
Jo paused on the trail and wrinkled her nose with disgust. “Do you smell that?” she asked. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes,” Harriett confirmed without stopping. “It’s death.”
Nessa pulled the collar of her T-shirt up over her face, but the sickly sweet smell stayed in her nose. She’d been preparing herself for the sight of a body, but the stench took her by surprise. The girl down south hadn’t been dead long enough to reek. This poor thing had been waiting for quite some time. That morning, Nessa had woken up at the crack of dawn and prayed on her knees that the voice she’d heard was a hallucination—the product of a malfunctioning, middle-aged brain. The putrid odor of death had just stripped that last hope away.
While the other women forged ahead, something held Nessa back.
“Here.” It felt as if someone was whispering in her ear. Nessa turned her head and saw the girl standing just off the path, a few feet away.
Nessa let go of her T-shirt and the collar slipped down. The dead girl was a baby. Seventeen, maybe, eighteen at most. Her own daughters’ age. She was dressed for a party in a pale blue dress that clung to her thin body. A tiny quilted leather purse dangled from her shoulder. The girl’s black curls were styled in twists. Someone had spent nine long months making this beautiful creature. Whoever her parents were, she must have brought them great joy. And then some demon had killed her and dumped her here, wearing her prettiest dress, on the side of a desolate highway.
“Where are you, baby?” Nessa did her best not to cry. Her grandmother had warned her that her heart was too soft and she would have to work hard to stay strong. Nessa’s job was to find the girls so their families could mourn.
“Here,” the girl said without moving her lips. She pointed at a black plastic mass that lay slumped against a tree twenty feet off the trail. Nessa forged her way through the dense foliage. Poison ivy brushed her exposed ankles and branches snared her hair. The stench grew overpowering as Nessa got closer to the garbage bag.
The second most important part of the job was to bear witness to the wounds. You have to look at the truth, Nessa’s grandmother had told her, no matter how awful. The ghosts need someone to know what happened before they can move on. Nessa stared down at the black trash bag. She wasn’t supposed to cry, but she couldn’t help it. Some other mother’s baby was wrapped up in that plastic. It was only by the grace of God that it wasn’t one of Nessa’s own girls.
“Dear Lord, give me strength,” she whispered. She knew she’d have to open the bag, but there was nothing on earth she wanted to do less.
“You found her,” Harriett said. She and Jo had appeared at Nessa’s side.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” It hadn’t seemed real to Jo until that moment. “We have to call the police.”
“Not yet,” Nessa told them. “I need to see what was done to her.”
“Oh my God, why?” Jo cried. “So you can be completely fucked up for the rest of your life?” She had no idea what Nessa had seen during her years working at the hospital. She didn’t know yet what Nessa knew—that God needed some people to look at things the rest of the world couldn’t face.
“I need to see her so she can go and be at peace knowing there’s someone who will never forget.”
Nessa squatted down beside the trash bag. The red plastic cinch string had been tied in a fancy bow. She took several pictures before she used a twig to pull the bow loose and open the mouth of the bag. Nessa heard Jo vomiting behind her, but refused to turn away. Curled up inside was a rotting corpse. If not for the girl’s hair, Nessa wouldn’t have recognized her. Her smooth, lovely skin was now a mottled green, and there was no trace left of her pretty blue dress. Naked and broken, she’d been used up and thrown away.
Nessa rose and returned to the spot where she’d left the ghost standing on the side of the trail. She reached for the girl’s hand, and while she couldn’t quite grasp it, she could feel its presence. “You can go now,” she told the girl. “I promise you, I will find your family, and my friends and I will punish the person responsible.”
Back in South Carolina, the dead girl had vanished as soon as Nessa’s grandmother had spoken to her. This one remained. She wasn’t ready to leave.
“There,” she told Nessa. She lifted one of her long, bare arms and pointed down the trail toward the ocean.
“Baby, I told you, I found your body,” Nessa assured her. “You don’t need to be here anymore.”
“There,” the girl repeated, her arm still raised.
“Nessa? What’s going on?” Jo asked carefully. “Who are you speaking to?”
“I’m talking to the girl’s ghost,” Nessa told her.
“What?” Jo spun around. “Holy shit. You can see her? Where is she?”
Nessa gestured with her chin. It didn’t seem polite to point. “They’re supposed to leave when you find them, but this girl is hanging around. She wants us to go farther down the path. Should we?” She half hoped one of her friends would say no.
“Of course,” Harriett replied. “She brought us here. We have to find what she wants us to find.”
That was easy for Harriett to say, Nessa thought miserably as the three of them continued down the narrow path toward the ocean. When the branches drew back and daylight appeared, Nessa breathed a sigh of relief. There were no other girls in the thicket. Then she stepped out onto the beach and realized she, Harriett, and Jo were far from alone.
“Please tell me you see them,” Nessa begged her companions.
“Who?” Jo asked, then managed to grab hold of her before Nessa fell to her knees.
There were two more ghosts standing in the water. The waves crashed over and into them, but they stood unmoving, like pillars sunk deep into the sand. One girl was white and wore a black dress. The other girl, who appeared to have Asian ancestry, was clothed in a red hoodie. The only thing all three dead girls shared in common was their youth. None of them looked older than eighteen.
“Where are you?” Nessa called out to the girls. Their bodies had to be somewhere nearby. The girl standing closest had pale, freckled skin and long red hair. She pointed out across the ocean.
“How can I find you?”
To that, neither girl had an answer.
“Nessa? What do you see?” Harriett asked, but Nessa was too overwhelmed to answer.
They were dead, their bodies resting on the ocean floor. How could two young women have died without anyone knowing? Where were their mothers? Why had no one come looking?
“Nessa?” It was Jo. “Tell us.”
“Somebody’s been killing girls,” Nessa said, her knees giving out once again. This time, Jo couldn’t hold her, and Nessa collapsed onto the sand and cried.
“What were you ladies doing out here this morning, anyway?” the police officer demanded. He was new to the area, and Nessa didn’t care for his tone. She’d accomplished more than enough in life to deserve some respect.
“Enjoying the public land that our federal tax dollars maintain,” Harriett said.
“We were heading down to the beach,” Nessa added. “I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped off the trail. That’s when I found her.”
“Was the trash bag closed when you found it?” the officer asked.
“Yes,” Nessa confirmed.
“And you took it upon yourself to open it up?”
“I didn’t know what was inside of it.” Nessa’s hackles were up. “Someone could have cleaned out their freezer and tossed the bag into the thicket. I didn’t want to call 911 to have y’all clean up a bunch of rancid garbage.”
“You contaminated the crime scene.”
“No I did not!” Nessa shot back.
“If she says she didn’t, she didn’t,” said a voice from behind her. “Nessa James is a nurse practitioner with a Ph.D. Her husband was a detective for the NYPD. She knows what she’s talking about.”
Nessa spun around to see a fiftysomething man in a navy suit. He stood just under six feet, though his perfect posture made him appear much taller. He’d thickened a bit since she’d seen him last, but in a way that made him seem sturdy, and the gray in his close-cropped hair added to the gravitas he’d always possessed. He wore glasses now, but the dark eyes dancing behind them were the same.
“My apologies, ma’am,” Nessa heard the younger cop say. He did a poor impression of sorry, but at least the words had been said.
“You can go now,” the older man dismissed him.
“Hello, Franklin,” Nessa said as the other cop slunk away.
“Nessa.” He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her in such surroundings. “I was wondering if you were still here after all these years. I always figured we might meet again someday.”
She’d known it, too. “What are you doing all the way out on the island?”
“Moved here about six months ago. Couldn’t bear to stay in the city after Aiesha died.”
Nessa reached out and laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry to hear that she’s gone.” Nessa had met his wife once, long ago, at her own husband’s funeral. Aiesha had kept Nessa’s girls entertained that day with stories about her childhood in Kenya. If Nessa had stayed in the city, they might have been friends.
“Death comes for all of us. Aiesha was sick for a year. She had time to get ready. The poor girl you found this morning—” He looked past Nessa to where Jo and Harriett were watching the crime scene team assemble by the side of the road. “Those the two ladies who were with you?”
“Jo! Harriett!” Nessa called out and waved them both over. “Franklin Rees, this is Jo Levison and Harriett Osborne.”
“Ms. Levison, Ms. Osborne,” he said, shaking their hands. “I’m a detective with the Mattauk PD. I used to work with Nessa’s husband back in the day. I’ll be covering this case going forward.”
Nessa noticed Harriett giving Franklin an appreciative once-over. Given the circumstances, it couldn’t have been less appropriate. But Nessa wasn’t blind, either. Franklin looked good.
“What can you tell us about the girl we found, Detective Rees?” Jo wasted no time.
“Not much at the moment,” Franklin said. “She appears to have been out here for quite a while.”
“Given the weather, I’d say no more than two weeks, give or take a day,” Harriett said.
“How did you reach that conclusion?” Franklin asked. There was no challenge in the question. He sounded genuinely curious.
“I noticed the blowfly larvae had stopped feeding and the houseflies had arrived.”
“Oh my God.” Jo looked queasy.
Franklin nodded respectfully. “Well, we’ll find out if your hypothesis is correct when we get the lab results back.”
“It’s correct,” Harriett assured him.
“Has anyone reported a girl missing in the past two weeks?” Jo asked.
“No one locally,” Franklin said. “But we’ll certainly check all the databases.”
“When you locate her family, I’d like to speak with her mother,” Nessa told him. On that night back in South Carolina, she’d waited in the hall of the dead girl’s house while her grandmother spoke with the family. When her grandmother emerged, she’d looked much older and frailer than she had going in. That was the part of the job that would kill her, she told Nessa. But it was also the most important.
“If we locate the mother, I’ll pass along your request.” Franklin was trying to let her down easy, as though she were innocent of the ways of this world. “But don’t get your hopes up. We find Jane Does like this from time to time. Most are sex workers with drug problems and many have fled abusive homes. Even when we manage to ID the victims, their families often don’t want to be involved.”
Nessa looked past Franklin. The girl had come to stand behind him. She was listening to everything he said. She wasn’t going to go away. Not this one.
“This girl was loved,” Nessa informed him. “And not that it makes a difference where these things are concerned, but she wasn’t an addict. When she died, she was strong and healthy.”
Franklin studied Nessa’s face. “What makes you so sure?” he asked quietly, as if he knew he was entering dangerous territory.
The night Jonathan died, Franklin was the officer who’d answered Nessa’s frantic phone call. Few other cops would have given a wife’s intuition a second thought. But Franklin had listened—and he’d taken her seriously enough to check on Jonathan. He’d been just a few minutes too late. When someone had to call Nessa back with the news, Franklin had stepped forward. The connection they’d forged during those calls would last the rest of their lives.
Later, at her husband’s funeral, Franklin had come to stand beside Nessa at the coffin.
“You knew something was going to happen,” he’d said.
“Yes,” she told him, never taking her eyes off her husband’s face. “And it made no fucking difference.” It was one of the few times that she’d ever said the word fuck.
“It will make a difference someday,” he told her. He wasn’t repelled by her grief or intimidated by her rage. “God doesn’t give gifts like yours for no reason.”
For a few years following the funeral, they’d stayed in touch. Then one day an email went unanswered, and the next was never sent. As fond as she was of Franklin, his voice always reminded her of the worst day of her life. But now, standing on the side of the road with a dead girl’s body fifty feet away, she no longer felt the urge to flee.
“Nessa, what more can you tell me?” Franklin pressed her.
She turned her eyes away from him and watched as a photographer and a forensics technician were swallowed up by the scrubland along Danskammer Beach. “I’m still not sure what I know.” It wasn’t a lie, she tried to tell herself, but it certainly wasn’t the truth.
By the time the three women were free to go, the sun was well on its journey toward the ocean on the opposite side of the continent. They’d spent almost an entire day at the beach. Back in the car, the three of them were lost in their thoughts—or so Nessa assumed. Then, just as the car’s wheels rolled over the town line, Harriett broke the silence.
“That man Franklin wants to sleep with you, Nessa,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Nessa couldn’t believe what she’d heard. “I thought you were contemplating the meaning of life back there, and instead you’re thinking about sex? Have you forgotten where we spent the afternoon?”
“It’s perfectly normal to think of life in the presence of death,” Harriett replied. “I don’t know if you were paying attention, but your friend’s not bad-looking.”
“If you say so,” Nessa replied. “I hadn’t thought much about it.” Not really. Not until that very moment.
“You should have sex with him,” Harriett encouraged her. “You may find the experience much more pleasurable now than when you were younger. There’s certainly a lot less to worry about. I try to have sex whenever possible.”
Jo, who’d felt hopelessly shell-shocked by the morning’s discovery, burst out laughing in the passenger seat.
“What?” Nessa nearly swerved off the road. “Harriett, I’m married!”
Jo’s laughter trailed off, and a pall fell over the car. Whether Nessa could see him or not, it was clear that Jonathan’s ghost never stopped haunting her. Suddenly, they could all feel his presence. He was there with them now.
“Do you think having sex with a living man will make you love your dead husband any less?” Harriett wasn’t afraid to tackle the subject head-on.
“No,” Nessa pouted. “It just wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not?” Harriett probed. “Sex is natural. It’s a bodily function.”
“I’m too old for that bodily function,” Nessa said.
“Oh really?” Harriett snickered like a dirty-minded schoolgirl. “Who told you that?”
“No one had to tell me.” Nessa was getting annoyed. “Some things you just know.”
“You know because that’s what women our age have been trained to think,” Harriett said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Nessa demanded. “No one’s been training me.”
“Then you’ll do whatever you want,” Harriett said. “And you won’t give a shit what anyone says.”
“Damn straight I won’t,” Nessa told her.
“You’ll have sex with Franklin Rees if you feel like it,” Harriett said.
“Hell yes I will!” Nessa told her.
“Good,” Harriett said with a lighthearted shrug. “’Cause that’s all I’m asking.”
“Good,” Nessa repeated, suddenly aware of the one-eighty the conversation had taken. “Can we talk about something else now? Like blowfly larvae or serial killers?”