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.”