Franklin was speeding down Danskammer Beach Road when he saw Nessa and Jo walking toward town, the fire on Culling Pointe raging behind them. He threw the car into park and left it idling with the driver’s-side door standing open as he ran to Nessa and threw his arms around her.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Nessa told him. Better than fine, she thought.
“The girls told me you were out here. Why didn’t you call me?” he asked.
“It was just supposed to be me and Jo out there today,” Nessa said. Like Jo, she now knew it to be true. Harriett had planned it all. “Your part’s going to come soon enough. There are a dozen girls out there who need their names back.”
“Look!” Jo pointed across the water. Someone was swimming toward them.
They walked through the scrub to the beach, where a woman was emerging from the surf, naked but for a backpack. Her body shone like bronze under the sun.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Harriett asked.
Epilogue
Jo watched her twelve-year-old daughter bound toward the car, dressed in the chic black uniform she’d worn to self-defense class. Thanks to generous funding from the Leonard Shaw estate, every girl in Jo’s ever-expanding program had received one.
“There were only three papers left!” Lucy climbed into the SUV. “Everyone in Mattauk is reading the review of Dad’s play!”
Jo glanced over at the stack of New York Times on her daughter’s lap. “JOHN WILLIS, BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPIST, DEAD AT 59.” The photo beneath the headline showed the famously bespectacled titan of industry standing on the terrace, forty-nine floors above the streets of Manhattan, where his body had been discovered. Security footage had captured the middle-aged mogul’s bizarre death. Ornithologists could only cite one other example of a human being mobbed and killed by a flock of seagulls. From what Jo had gleaned from the gossip going around, it was true that animals did indeed go first for the lips, nose, and anus.
“It’s a good day to have a review in the Times, that’s for sure,” Jo said. And an even better day to have the theater critic refer to your first Off-Broadway production as a “triumph.” “Text Dad and tell him to pick up seven more copies before he drives home from the city.”
She turned off Mattauk’s Main Street and onto a road that would bypass town and take them straight to the beach. Lucy’s head was still bent toward her phone when Jo brought the car to a sudden stop. “Holy shit,” Jo said. “It’s true.” One of her clients had told her, but she hadn’t quite believed it.
“What?” Lucy lifted her head and let out a cackle. The monstrous weeds around Brendon Baker’s old house had vanished—and the For Sale sign in the front yard now exclaimed Sold! “It’s like it never even happened. Where did he move?”
“Back to the city,” Jo said. “I heard he told the agent he wanted to be surrounded by asphalt.”
Lucy tittered. “Dumbass,” she said. “Doesn’t he know that won’t stop Harriett?”
“I think Harriett’s too busy for a man like Brendon Baker these days.”
“But she’ll be at lunch, right?” Lucy looked worried. She was bringing a tart she’d learned how to make at Mattauk’s popular new cooking academy for kids. The dewberries had come from Harriett’s own garden.
“She promised, didn’t she?” Jo asked. “Harriett always keeps her promises.”
Nessa and Franklin sat side by side on the sand at Danskammer Beach. Though they’d both retired, a lifetime of discipline had left them both early risers. Every morning, as soon as there was enough sunlight to see, they’d set off on a stroll. It wasn’t unusual for them to return home in the afternoon. This morning, they’d walked east from the cottage, following the shoreline past the public beaches, Grass Beach, and the Mattauk marina. When they were halfway along Danskammer Beach, Nessa had stopped.
“You want to head back?” Franklin asked. The girls were coming out for the weekend, and Nessa had invited Jo and Harriett for lunch.
“Why don’t we rest here for a second,” Nessa said. She often drove out to sit in the same spot. The dead girls were gone now, their spirits at rest. Faith’s and Mandy’s families knew what had happened. But the third girl had no one else to mourn her, so Nessa did.
Her name, they’d discovered, was Mei Jones. A fifteen-year-old girl who’d lost her parents in a car accident, she’d come to Mattauk to live with the chief of police and his wife as a foster child. According to Juliet Rocca, the girl had disappeared the night after she arrived. It wasn’t uncommon, she was told, for foster children to run away before settling into a new home. Juliet had insisted her husband open a missing persons file, but no leads ever came in. After Mei’s disappearance, Juliet spent months trying to hunt down any family members. She later learned no report had ever been filed.
The medical examiner couldn’t say for sure how they’d murdered her. But there was no doubt Mei had died on Culling Pointe. Nessa raked her eyes down the charred peninsula. Nothing had survived the fire. And nothing would ever be built there again. Leonard had left the land to a whale conservation group. They had already confirmed that Culling Pointe would forever remain undeveloped and barren.
“You good?” Franklin took Nessa’s hand. The wedding ring she’d worn for so long now hung from a chain around her neck.
Nessa looked over at him and smiled. “Yeah, I’m good,” she told him.
Harriett glanced up at the sun. Every minute she had to spend with Lucy was precious, and she didn’t want to be late for lunch. If they got to the boat soon, she and Celeste could be back to Mattauk by noon.
The garden they’d come to visit was lovely—perhaps the prettiest in all of East Hampton. In late spring, it opened to the public for two days. Harriett could see it was tired of putting on a show. It wanted to be free of shears and mowers. And the man who spent his summers in the nearby mansion didn’t deserve to enjoy its blooms or its fragrances.
She’d met the man once, years before. He was the CEO of the holding company that owned a third of the ad agencies in Manhattan, including the company that had just dumped Max—and the one that still employed Chase and his second wife, who’d soon give birth to the couple’s first child. The CEO’s name had leaped out to Harriett when she’d gone through Claude’s files. She’d assumed always he was just a garden-variety dick like her old boss and her ex-husband. Instead, she learned he’d been a frequent guest at Culling Pointe.
“Beautiful,” Harriett said. They’d arrived at a rustic wooden arbor with a bench half hidden by wisteria vines.
“The article in Gardens Illustrated said he comes here to think,” Celeste told her.
“Perfect,” Harriett said. “Let’s give him something to think about.”
She pulled a glass tube from her pocket. Celeste took a step back as Harriett kneeled on the grass and unscrewed the metal cap, in which she’d drilled several small holes. “Here you go, ladies.” She placed the tube on the ground and watched with pleasure as its three eight-legged occupants scuttled straight for the bench.