Nessa parked her car in her drive and sat staring straight ahead at her white colonial. It took a minute to find the strength to get out. Then she unlocked her front door, closed it behind her, and stood quietly in the foyer of the house she’d inherited.
She’d had plenty of bad days in recent years, but it had been a while since one had felt quite so unrelenting. First the dead girls at Danskammer Beach, then Franklin’s appearance, and finally Harriett’s bizarre insistence that she sleep with a man she hadn’t seen in ages. If this was how things were going to be, Nessa wasn’t sure she wanted to stick around for thirty more years.
Her gaze swept the foyer as she listened to the crash of waves on a distant beach. In the grief-filled months following her parents’ funerals, her daughters had begged her to see a therapist. Nessa had turned first to interior decorating instead. She’d spent weeks shopping for the room’s antique table and porcelain lamp. She’d splurged on the wallpaper with its hand-painted cherry blossoms so visitors would see something beautiful when they entered her home. It had never occurred to her that the loveliest corner of her house would one day be the best spot to hear the dead.
After her parents died and her daughters left for school, there were times when the silence had almost driven her mad. Now the once quiet house was filled by the sound of the ocean, and Nessa was terrified of what she might hear next. She turned on the television as she passed through the living room and into the kitchen. Rooting through the fridge, she found a bottle of white wine that a friend had brought months earlier. She uncorked it and poured herself a glass. Sitting at the kitchen table, she put her phone faceup in front of her. Then she dialed the last number she’d called.
“Hey, Mama.” Breanna sounded worried. “Everything all right?” She was the elder of Nessa’s twins, the first daughter of a first daughter, and she’d always had a touch of the sight. Even as an infant, she’d been so in tune with her mother’s moods that Nessa hadn’t been sure whether the child was reading, causing, or predicting them.
“Yes, baby.” Nessa kept her voice even while the tears trickled down her face. They weren’t tears of sadness, but rather of gratitude. Her children were safe. For years, the twins had been Nessa’s sole source of solace. They’d stayed close by her side after their father died. Neither one of them would leave her for more than a few minutes at a time. “Where’s your sister? She okay?”
“Jordan’s fine, Mama. She’s at the library.”
“Good, good.” Nessa paused to blow her nose. “So tell me what’s been going on. How’s life?”
She wanted to hear her daughter talk about normal things. Boys and books and the Korean soap operas both girls loved.
“‘How’s life?’ You’re really worrying me now, Mama.”
There was no point in pretending nothing was up. Breanna could see straight through her. “Okay, fine. I was calling to let you both know not to get upset if you spot me on the news this evening.”
“Oh my God, Mom!”
“No, no, no. Don’t jump to conclusions. Nothing happened to me. I just—” Nessa took in a breath. “I found a dead girl today.”
Breanna went quiet. Her next words were a whisper. “Who was it?”
Nessa had never hidden anything from her daughters. They knew all about the family legacy. She’d sat them both down at the age of ten and told them every story she could recall about their great-grandmother Dolores and Miss Ella. When Nessa confessed that she, too, had the gift, Breanna had sobbed for hours.
“I don’t know who it was yet,” Nessa admitted. “Just someone who needed to be found.”
“So it’s started?”
“I suppose so.” Nessa suddenly felt exhausted.
“Was it horrible? You can tell me.”
Nessa could imagine her daughter cringing on the other end of the line. Breanna didn’t want to hear the details. Like other normal people, she preferred to avoid the subject of death. But Nessa knew her daughter would listen if she needed her to.
“Yes, it was horrible,” Nessa confirmed. “She was just a young girl. They killed her and dumped her by the highway like a piece of trash.”
They. The word had slipped right out of her mouth. She’d always assumed there was a single killer. But the truth was, she didn’t know that for sure.
“Oh my God, Mama, that’s awful,” Breanna moaned. “Do you need us to come home to be with you?”
“No!” Nessa wasn’t going to say so, but the last thing she wanted was her two girls in town with people going around killing women their age.
“I wish the gift had gone to someone else. You sure you don’t need our help?”
“I’ve got help,” Nessa told her.
Breanna knew what that meant. “You’re saying you found a witch like Miss Ella?”
“I found two. A protector and a punisher.”
“In Mattauk? Hold up. Jordan just came in.” Breanna put the phone down, but Nessa could hear her talking to her sister in the background. “Mama found a dead girl today.” Then she heard a thump and a thud as the phone changed hands.
“Where’d you find her?” That was Jordan—just like her father the cop. Loving and warm, but always straight to business.
“In some scrubland between the beach and the road.”
“Which beach? Which road?”
“Danskammer.”
Jordan’s next question followed so quickly, it took Nessa by surprise. “Was she redheaded?”
“No,” Nessa said, thinking only of the girl in blue. “Why?”
“Hey, Breanna.” Nessa heard her daughter put the phone down. “Mama found the girl out by Danskammer Beach,” Jordan told her sister.
“You’re kidding!” Breanna responded in the background.
“You remember Mandy Welsh?” Jordan asked her mom.
“No,” Nessa said. “Don’t think so. Should I?” There were vast stretches of time when Nessa had been oblivious to everything but her daughters, her parents, and her patients.
“She was the girl who went missing when Breanna and I were juniors in high school.”
That rang an unpleasant bell. “Remind me?” Nessa said, sitting up a bit straighter.
“They say she left her house one evening and never came back. The last place she was seen was Danskammer Beach. The cops claimed she ran away. But no one at school believed them. Mandy wasn’t the type.”
Nessa shivered. “You said someone saw her? Who was it?”
“Someone out fishing on the beach. They said they saw Mandy walking past all alone, wearing a fancy outfit. She didn’t even have a suitcase. And no one gets dressed up to run away.”
“Why do you think she was out by Danskammer Beach?” Nessa asked.
“No clue,” Jordan said. “But it was sometime in April, so she definitely wasn’t out for a swim.”
“What did Mandy Welsh look like?” Nessa felt dread rising inside her.
“White girl with red hair and freckles. When we were little, she looked just like that girl from the books.”
“Anne of Green Gables!” Breanna called out in the background.
“Hold on a minute, baby—” Nessa got up and cracked open the laptop she’d left sitting on the kitchen counter. She typed in the girl’s name. The first image that popped up was a missing person poster. Nessa’s heart sank. “I saw her ghost today, too,” she said. “She was standing on the beach not far from where we found the other girl.”
For a moment, all Nessa could hear was Jordan’s breathing. “Oh my God. Does that mean Mandy’s dead?” Jordan finally asked.
“I think so,” Nessa said. “I didn’t find her body. It must be somewhere out in the ocean.”
“Mom.” Jordan was using her no-nonsense voice. “This isn’t what Great-grandma used to do—finding women whose husbands beat them to death. There’s more than one dead girl this time. This sounds like a serial killer. You’re out of your league. Did you tell the police you saw a redhead, too?”
“What was I supposed to say without a body to back me up? What do you think they’d do if I told them I see dead people?”
“Mom. Someone killed two girls.”
Nessa didn’t have the heart to tell her there had been a third girl on the beach.
“Franklin Rees is the detective on the case,” she said. “I’ll give him a call.”
“Franklin Rees?” Jordan repeated cautiously. “The guy who found Daddy? He’s the detective on the case?”
“Yeah,” Nessa said with a sigh. “He works out here now.”
“You’re joking.” Jordan sounded frightened. “Mama, this is getting way too weird.” She put the phone down. “Remember Franklin Rees?” she asked her sister. “Mama says he works for Mattauk PD.”
Breanna grabbed the phone away. “Is he still handsome?” she wanted to know.
“Oh, Lord, Breanna, you too?” Her mother sighed.
“Sounds like he’s still handsome,” Breanna informed her sister as she handed the phone back.
Jordan wasn’t amused. “I don’t care if he’s Idris damned Elba. Just promise me you’ll tell him about Mandy Welsh.”
“I promise,” Nessa said with a groan.
She downed a second glass of wine before she looked up Franklin’s number. She’d hoped the alcohol would relax her. Instead, her heart pounded faster.
“Nessa,” Franklin said when he answered. “We go years without talking, now I get to hear your voice twice in one day. Everything okay?”
“I’ve had two glasses of wine and I’m a little bit tipsy,” Nessa confessed. She wasn’t sure what was happening to her. First she’d taken up cursing, and now she’d started drinking alone. There was no telling what she’d end up doing next.
“I’ve found a few bodies in my day,” he responded. “Sometimes a drink or two is the only thing that helps.”
Nessa’s spine stiffened. She hadn’t meant to get personal. “What’s the latest on my girl?” she asked.
Franklin sighed. “Fentanyl overdose,” he said. “There were signs she’d had intercourse shortly before she died. Odds are, she was a sex worker who took one pill too many while she was out with a client. When she died, he didn’t know what to do, so he dumped her body on the side of the road. It happens around here—a lot more often than any of us like to think.”
“How often?” Nessa asked.
“A few times a year,” Franklin said.
“In Mattauk?”
“The general vicinity.”
The statistic was hard to swallow. “Then why haven’t I heard about it?” Nessa demanded.
“Because the deaths of drug-addicted sex workers rarely make the news,” Franklin said. “That’s not how I’d like it, but that’s how it is. You’re a nurse, Nessa. You know I’m right.”
She did. Nurses know better than anyone just how dark the world gets. “Okay, but that’s not what happened to my girl,” Nessa said. “She was clean.”
“The test showed high levels of fentanyl in her system.”
“Then someone drugged her,” Nessa shot back.
Franklin stayed quiet for a beat too long. “You want to tell me how you could know that, Nessa?”
She came right out with it. “I saw her.”
“You saw her?”
Nessa had planned to tell him everything, but at the last moment, she lost her nerve. She’d held on to her secrets for thirty-five years. She wasn’t ready to reveal them all at once. “I saw her in a dream,” Nessa lied. “That’s how I knew where to look for the body. She’s been calling to me. She’s been waiting for me to find her.”
This time, the pause that followed was so long, Nessa felt the need to fill in the silence.
“The girl I saw looked seventeen or eighteen but could have been younger. She died wearing a pale blue dress and black heels, and she had a little quilted black leather handbag. Her hair was in twists and it looked like it had just been done. She was dressed like she was on her way to a party.”
“There was a bag like the one you described underneath the body,” Franklin said. “It was empty but the label said ‘Ofelia.’ That mean anything to you?”
“Ofelia? Never heard of it.”
“Me neither. But according to Google, it’s a popular Caribbean retail chain. We’re checking the files for missing girls who might have family there. Right now, it’s our best lead, unless you can give me something else.”
She could. “The girl wasn’t alone in my dream. There was another young woman down there—a Mattauk girl who disappeared two years ago. Whoever killed her must have dumped her body in the ocean. She was my daughters’ age. They went to the same school. I believe her name was Mandy Welsh.”
“You’re telling me that in your dream, this girl Mandy Welsh was dead too? Are you sure, Nessa?”
“No, I’m not sure!” Nessa snipped. “I’m new to all of this. All I’m asking is that you go take a look. Will you do that or not?”
She expected pushback, but he offered none. “I will,” he said.
“Good,” Nessa huffed. The combination of wine and emotion was making her head swim. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to get off the phone and go to bed.”
“Thank you,” Franklin said. “Thank you for trusting me with your dream.”
She paused, taken aback by his words. “You’re welcome,” she said, though she didn’t feel like she deserved his thanks. She should have told him more. “Don’t make me regret it.”
An hour later, she passed out with her head on the dining-room table and the empty wine bottle in front of her.