During her summer with her grandmother in South Carolina, Nessa had befriended a neighbor girl named Jeannie. Every morning before it got too hot to do much of anything, they’d walk two miles down the dusty dirt road into town. Nessa’s parents sent her ten dollars a week for spending money, which amounted to a fortune back in those days. The girls would buy two bottles of Cheerwine and packets of BBQ Fritos, which they’d eat at a leisurely, ladylike pace while sitting outside the library on the town’s best bench.
They were there late one morning when they spotted Miss Ella walking toward them, a stack of library books under her arm. She must have been around seventy-five years old and just under six feet in height. To twelve-year-old Nessa, she’d seemed impossibly old and improbably tall. She wore her silvery hair in a topknot, and her skirts swept the ground. A treasure chest’s worth of necklaces dangled from her neck, none of them fashioned from gold. Instead, they were shells and berries and roots that grasped at her flesh as though they might be alive. They were jewels of nature rather than trinkets made by man.
Just as she reached the girls’ bench, Miss Ella came to a stop. “You!” Her voice, sharp and clear, cut straight through the swampy air. The gnarled finger she’d raised was pointed at a car parked on the opposite side of the road. A man sat hunched down in the driver’s seat, watching them, his hat positioned so it cast a shadow on his face. “I catch you with your pecker out again, and that nasty little worm’s gonna shrivel up and fall off. You hear me?”
He must have. The ignition instantly turned over and the man peeled out of the parking space.
“You know that pervert?” Miss Ella asked the girls.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said almost proudly. She seemed to relish the role of informant. “That’s Earl Frady. He works down at the feed shop.”
“Either of you see him again outside that feed shop, you come and tell me straightaway. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said with a wide grin on her face. As the woman walked away, Jeannie leaned over to Nessa. “She’s gonna feed him to the gators like she did Mr. Cogdill.”
“Who’s Mr. Cogdill?” Nessa asked.
“Another old man who liked little girls,” Jeannie told her.
Nessa was dying to ask about Mr. Cogdill, but she’d been warned not to talk outside the family about three things, if she could help it: the gift, dead girls, or Miss Ella.
“Did Miss Ella feed Mr. Cogdill to an alligator?” Nessa asked her grandmother as soon as she got home. She expected to be informed it was nothing but idle gossip.
“Jeannie tell you that?” her grandmother asked.
“Is it true?” Nessa asked.
“Yes,” said her grandmother. “Though they’ll never prove it.”
It seemed that one day the previous summer, Carroll Cogdill, mortician, equestrian, and all-around pillar of the Low Country community, had gone missing while fishing in the swamp. The next morning, a giant gator had emerged from a water trap on the country club golf course and waddled across the green, pausing by the tenth hole to cough up a toupee. Everyone there that day knew it could only have belonged to the missing man. And when they cut open the gator, they found the rest of him. He’d been chopped into pieces, which the gator had subsequently swallowed.
Officially, Miss Ella had been cleared as a suspect. No one could offer any evidence that she’d ever met Carroll Cogdill, and she didn’t appear to have a motive for killing him. Plus, as a woman in her seventies, it was assumed she lacked the upper-body strength that would have been necessary for the butchering. Unofficially, everyone in town was convinced it was her, but aside from Miss Ella, the only people who knew what had really happened were Nessa’s grandmother and the mother of the two little girls Carroll Cogdill had raped.
“So she killed him.” Nessa wanted to make sure.
“She did,” her grandmother told her. “I’m not gonna lie to you.”
“But the Bible says ‘do not kill,’” Nessa reminded her grandmother.
“The Commandments only apply to humans,” said the older woman. “Nobody goes to hell for killing a monster.”
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Jo noted. She and Nessa were driving into town for an appointment with the host of They Walk Among Us. Josh Gibbon had responded to Jo’s email immediately and proposed meeting at a café in town. “Something on your mind?”
Nessa wondered what Jo would say if she knew about Miss Ella. But in the thirty-five years that had passed since that conversation in her grandmother’s kitchen, Nessa had never shared the story with a single soul. And that wasn’t going to change. She figured she owed it to Miss Ella—a penniless old woman in South Carolina who’d risked everything to avenge the young and helpless. Miss Ella deserved discretion, even if she’d been dead for twenty long years. “Just thinking about all the bad men out there and what we should do with them.”
Jo glanced over at her friend. “I’m sure Harriett was kidding about killing Spencer Harding.” It was a lie. Harriett hadn’t been joking—and the idea had been growing on Jo as well. She’d been fantasizing about it all morning.
Nessa responded with a smile. Jo was protecting her. It was sweet, in a way—and condescending in another. Somehow, Jo had discovered the truth about Harriett, and she was worried it would scare Nessa. But Nessa had been aware of Harriett’s true nature all along. Women like Harriett and Miss Ella wouldn’t exist if the world functioned as it was meant to. The way Nessa saw it, in these situations, you followed the rules first. You toed the line. You made sure to cross every t and dot every i. And when that didn’t work, it was time to bring out the goddamned gators.
“You think Harriett was kidding?” Nessa asked pointedly.
“No,” Jo admitted. “Not really.”
“Me either,” Nessa replied.
Just as the conversation was taking an interesting turn, Jo pulled into a parking space in front of the café, where a youngish man was sitting at a table by the front window.
“That’s him.” Jo turned the engine off.
“That hairy little frat boy?” Nessa scoffed. “Are you sure he’s who we need to be talking to? He looks like he spent all night watching dirty movies and playing video games.”
“That hairy little frat boy has thirty million listeners,” Jo told her.
“Well then.” Nessa was duly impressed. “Let’s go spill some beans.”
Though he’d been eager to meet, Josh clearly wasn’t letting bygones be bygones. He was going to make Jo pay for her rudeness. While she and Nessa tag-teamed the tale of finding the murdered girl and every strange thing that had happened since then, he sat back and listened, his face expressionless and his arms crossed over his chest.
“Wow. That’s quite a story,” he said when they finished. “Too bad no one’s going to believe it.”
“We have evidence,” Jo argued. “There’s a DNA test that proves the girl who died wasn’t related to the woman who claimed to be her mother. We have pictures of the photo we found in the locker at my gym. And there’s a man in jail right now for breaking into my house.”
Josh Gibbon leaned forward. “Yes, and according to the story you just told me, you also have a friend who claims to be a psychic and another friend who seems to be the town witch, and the three of you are accusing one of the richest men in New York of being a serial killer.”
“Sounds to me like a story millions of people would want to hear.” Nessa tried to lure him with honey. “One that could turn a popular podcast into a cultural phenomenon.”
“Really?” Josh turned to her. “’Cause to me, it sounds like a story that will get me sued straight into bankruptcy.”
“Then let me ask you a question,” Jo said. “Do you believe it?”
She simmered as Josh sat back, his fingers woven together pompously and resting on his ample paunch. In what screwed-up universe did this twentysomething Comic Book Guy get to cast judgment on her story? Jo wanted to pick up the table and hurl it across the room.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “It’s crazy as hell, but I believe it. Doesn’t mean I’m going to put it on my show, though.”
Jo closed her eyes. It was the only way she could resist leaping over the table and strangling him. Three girls were dead. Her daughter had almost been kidnapped. And this little shit wasn’t interested. Fortunately, Nessa kept her cool.
“How many murdered women and girls have you featured on your podcast? How many who’ve been mangled and tortured and chopped into bits?” Nessa asked. “Hundreds?”
“At least,” Josh admitted.
“A thousand or more?”
He nodded. “Probably.”
“All those dead girls made you famous,” Nessa said. “Don’t you feel like you owe them? We just told you there’s a monster on the loose. You going to help us stop him—or are you just out here looking to make a buck off those bodies?”
Josh stiffened. Nessa had clearly hit a sore spot. He didn’t like having his motives questioned or his heroism called into doubt. “I started my podcast to shine a spotlight on killers who had gone undetected. I wanted to save lives, and I have.”
“And I bet you’ve made a lot of money doing it,” Jo said. “Now you’re going to sit back and let a serial killer murder more girls because you’re afraid of getting sued.”
“I’m not afraid,” Josh snapped. “But I can’t go around making accusations if I don’t have real evidence to back them up. Right now, there’s only one body. One body is not proof that there’s a serial killer at work in Mattauk.” He looked at Nessa. “You say there are two other bodies in the water off Danskammer Beach. It’s doubtful they would have lasted this long, but it could be worth having a look. Do you know where they’d be?”
Jo felt a flash of hope. He was starting to come around. He couldn’t bear to have anyone question his white-knight credentials. Nessa was a genius.
“Yes, but the ocean floor is littered with lobster traps,” Nessa said. “It’s like a giant dump down there. That’s probably why the killer chose the spot.”
“Maybe the bodies are inside lobster traps.”
Nessa had considered that, too. But it didn’t make the situation any less hopeless. “There could be thousands of traps. We don’t have the resources to pull them all up.”
Josh’s brow furrowed. “Why bring them up to the surface? Why can’t someone go down and take a look?”
“You mean police divers?” Jo asked. “We can’t go to the cops. We think someone on the force is tipping off Spencer Harding. And even if there isn’t a mole, the police wouldn’t send divers down just because Nessa says she sees dead people.”
“Why does it have to be the police?” Josh had clearly experienced an epiphany. “We just need to find someone who’s certified to scuba dive.”
Jo fell back in her chair as a thought slammed into her. “I’m scuba certified.” That’s what she’d gotten from an employer one year in lieu of a promotion—scuba classes and gear. Refusing to acknowledge the insult, she’d learned how to dive. The skill came in handy every spring when her family visited Art’s mother and stepfather in South Florida, allowing Jo to escape for few peaceful hours every day.
“Then I suppose all we need is the equipment,” Josh said.
Jo hesitated for a moment before she added, “I have that, too. It’s in my garage. I’d just need to clean it off and get tanks from the dive shop.”
“You’re really willing to go looking for dead bodies at the bottom of the ocean?” Josh suddenly seemed to be taking the whole enterprise more seriously. “Who the hell knows what else might be down there.”
“If you’re worried, you can come along and keep me company,” Jo offered.
“Yeah, no thanks,” Josh said. “But I’ll happily throw in a GoPro.”
When they got back to Harriett’s, they found her stoned on the sofa, wearing headphones plugged into an iPhone.
“Did you know—” Harriett pulled off her headphones and took a toke. “That three hundred thousand women and girls were reported missing last year? Two hundred and forty thousand were girls under twenty-one. Half were women of color. Let’s say ninety-nine percent made it back home safe and sound. That still leaves twenty-four hundred girls. Where are they? The FBI claims there are fifty serial killers active in the U.S. at any one time. So how many of those girls are everyone’s favorite bogeymen taking? Five hundred? A thousand? What’s happening to the others?”
“Where are you getting all these statistics?” Nessa asked.
“They Walk Among Us,” Harriett said. “Figured I ought to check it out. Josh Gibbon’s a bit of a serial killer fanboy, isn’t he?”
“What the hell, Harriett,” Jo said, staring at the device in Harriett’s lap. “We came all the way back here to tell you the news and you’re lying there listening to a podcast? Since when do you have a phone?”
“Since always,” Harriett said. “I own a leaf blower, too, but I seldom use that, either. How did your meeting go?”
“He’s interested, but he wants proof. Do you think Celeste might be willing to take us out on her boat tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. Her husband took the kids to his parents’ house, so she and I are going to spend the night on the boat. We’ll meet you at the dock at eight.”
Jo shot Nessa a look. “You already arranged it?” she asked Harriett.
“Right after you left. I assumed your podcast friend would want to have a look for the bodies. A scoop like that would be too hard to resist.”
“What did you tell Celeste we’ll be doing?” Jo asked.
“I told her the truth,” Harriett said. “I know we agreed to keep everything between the three of us, but Celeste is important to me and secrets are such a bore. Besides, she’ll know soon enough as it is.”
“And she’s okay with it?” Nessa wasn’t so sure.
“Finding evidence that two girls were murdered?” Harriett seemed perfectly at ease. “Yes, she’s okay with it. She trusts me to know what I’m doing. And I trust her to tell me if I don’t.”
That night, Jo tossed and turned in Nessa’s guest room. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Harriett had said. At two in the morning, she texted Art and discovered he couldn’t sleep, either. He called from the lake house, and over the next three hours, Jo told him everything. She didn’t gloss over details or embellish ugly truths. Art stopped her here and there to ask questions, but when Jo was done, he sat quietly on the other end of the line. She could feel the pain in his silence, and she hated herself for hurting him.
“I’m so sorry, Art,” she said through tears. “It’s my fault that man broke into our house. I tried to do the right thing, but I put our family in danger. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to Lucy.”
“Listen to me. You did not send that man after our eleven-year-old daughter, and I refuse to let you take responsibility for the actions of a psychopath like Spencer Harding,” Art said, putting his foot down. “What I still don’t understand, Jo, is why you didn’t tell me any of this earlier. Were you worried I’d do something to mess things up?”
“No!” she cried, horrified by his interpretation. “I was just hell-bent on doing what I needed to do, and I was worried you’d try to stop me.”
He cleared his throat. “What exactly are you trying to do?” he asked.
“Make the world a better place for girls like Lucy,” she told him. “But my efforts backfired. Now I have to deal with Spencer Harding or our family will never be safe again.”
“Why would I stand in your way?” Art asked.
“To protect me,” Jo said.
“You don’t need protection. You think I don’t know that? This newfound strength of yours—it isn’t so new. You’ve always been strong, Jo. That’s one of the things I admire most about you. But you have an Achilles’ heel. You get frustrated and impatient when things don’t get done the way you would do them. Then you take on the burdens all by yourself. And you’ll just keep on taking them, one after another, until they finally crush you.”
As much as she would have loved to argue, she couldn’t ignore the truth in his words.
“What should I do?”
“Tell me everything from now on, and let me help you,” he told her. “And let me do it my way. As strong as you are, we’re stronger together. You may be the concrete, but I’m the rebar.”
He’d tossed out the last sentence as a joke, but it lingered in Jo’s mind until the sun came up. During the years she’d worked in Manhattan, Art had gotten up early each morning to make her coffee. And he’d greeted her with a drink every night when she got home. They may have been small things, but Jo could have listed a thousand such gestures. Maybe Art hadn’t found success the way she had. Maybe he hadn’t mastered the arts of housecleaning or lawn care. But throughout their marriage, he had given Jo the support she’d needed to grow. She knew that as strong as she was, she would have crumbled without him. If Jo was going to survive, she needed him back.
At seven in the morning, clutching steaming mugs of coffee, Jo and Nessa piled into the car. Before heading to the marina, they stopped by Jo’s house to pick up the scuba gear. As Nessa pulled into the drive, Jo looked up at the dark upstairs windows facing the street. Two belonged to the room Lucy had slept in since she was a baby. Jo bit her lip hard to hold back the tears.
“You sure you’re up for this?” Nessa asked. “We can find another diver.”
“And tell them what?” Jo responded.
“I don’t know. We’d come up with something.”
“No,” Jo said. “I finally know why I was chosen for all this. I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“What’s that?” Nessa asked.
“Whatever the fuck it takes.”