After Nessa dropped her off at home, Jo walked through the door to find Lucy playing Zelda on the giant television her father had purchased for video games. Whenever Jo popped home from work during the day, that was usually where she found Art.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Jo kissed Lucy on the crown of her head. “You must be starving, poor thing. I brought you a sandwich from the deli on Main Street.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said, without looking up. “I’ll take it to school for lunch tomorrow. Dad and I made beef ravioli from scratch.”
“You did?” Jo marveled. “Was it edible? How’s your belly feeling?”
“It feels fine. The pasta was yummy. Hey—can you take me to visit Harriett sometime?” she asked.
“We’ll see. Where is Dad?” Jo asked.
“Bedroom,” Lucy told her, still without looking away from the screen.
Upstairs, Jo made as much noise as possible as she walked down the hall. She’d learned it was best to give her husband fair warning. Still, she found Art on the bed with the computer on his lap. He closed the top as she entered.
“Maybe wait until the kid’s in bed?” Jo didn’t give a shit if Art watched a dirty video now and then, but she couldn’t disguise her disgust at what she’d come to see as a massive waste of time. Video games and porn consumed so many hours of her husband’s day, it was a minor miracle he managed to feed himself or their daughter.
“For your information, I was working.” Art sounded indignant. Who knew, maybe this time it was true. “Where have you been? Lucy said you were hanging around with Harriett Osborne. So what’s the story? She really a witch?”
“Yes.” Jo glanced down at the clock on her phone. She’d timed the trip home perfectly. “Turn on the local news.”
“You mean on the television?” It was as though she’d asked him to tune the wireless to News of the World.
Harriett snatched the remote off the bedside table and switched the TV to channel 4. The news had started, and they were playing footage taped earlier that day. Two burly EMTs emerged from a thicket at the edge of Danskammer Beach Road, lugging a blue plastic body bag. Several yards away, Nessa was talking to her detective friend while Harriett listened in. Jo saw herself standing apart from her friends, her eyes fixed on the body bag. A car drove between the crime scene and the cameras. By the time it had passed, the EMTs were loading the dead girl onto a stretcher, but Jo hadn’t moved an inch.
“Oh my God, Jo. Did you murder someone?”
“What the hell?” When she saw Art’s face, she could have sworn he was serious. “No! We found a dead body.”
When the news hit him, his eyes went wide. “You did?”
“You really thought I might have killed someone?”
“One has to consider all possibilities.” It was clearly a half-hearted attempt at humor. “You do have a nasty temper. But yes, of course I was kidding. What the hell happened? Where did you and your friends find a body?”
Jo wanted to tell him everything. It didn’t feel right to hide important details from Art. But she, Nessa, and Harriett had agreed to stick to the official story. “We were walking down to Danskammer Beach, and Nessa stepped off the trail to pee and found a black trash bag with a body inside.”
“Jesus Christ. Who was it?”
It was such a simple question, and one Jo had anticipated. Yet she stood there, unable to answer. The day had been such a blur that she hadn’t had time to absorb the horrible truth. “It was a girl.” It wasn’t until she heard her own cracked voice that she realized she was crying.
“Come here.” Art set the computer aside, took Jo’s arm, and pulled her down beside him on the bed.
“It was a girl,” Jo wailed into his shoulder. “Seventeen, maybe. Just a little girl, a few years older than Lucy. Naked and used up and thrown away by the side of the road.”
He held her tighter. “Oh, Jo, I’m so sorry.”
“Who would do something like that?” She’d listened to hundreds of crime podcasts. She knew there were people who hunted women, but she’d always imagined them as comic book villains or bogeymen, whose victims had only been nameless bodies.
“I can’t even imagine,” Art replied, and she knew it was true. Art Levison, for all his flaws, had never willfully harmed another human being in his life.
She rested her head on her husband’s chest. When they were younger, they had spent hours lying with their limbs entwined. Jo tried to count the years that had passed since she’d last sought comfort from Art. The warmth of his body and weight of his arms were so calming. The scent that had once driven her mad now soothed her. Her eyes felt heavy, and she might have fallen asleep if she hadn’t spotted Lucy peeking into the room.
“Do you need something?” Jo asked.
“Nope,” Lucy said. “Just making sure you haven’t killed each other.”
“Then your work here is done,” Art said. “Please resume whatever you were doing before you felt the urge to play detective.”
When Jo began to sit up, he resisted. After a two-second struggle, he set her free. “Where are you going?”
Jo wiped her eyes. “I should pop by the gym for a few minutes,” she told her husband as Lucy bounded back down to the living room.
“Can’t it wait? You’ve had a rough day. Are you sure you have to go now?”
“Yeah.” She rose from the bed and looked down at her husband. “I need to check in with Heather. She’s only been assistant manager for three weeks, and this is the first time I’ve left her on her own.”
“If that’s what you need.” Art gave in and reached for the computer beside him. When he opened it, Jo caught a glimpse of a Word document on the screen.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Just something I’ve been working on. Be careful, will you? Sounds like there could be a killer out there.”
It was seven thirty when Jo slipped behind the wheel of her car, and Furious Fitness closed at nine. Heather had texted her throughout the day, assuring Jo that everything was running smoothly. But Jo had never missed a full day of work before, and she wasn’t about to start.
She was idling at a traffic light on Main Street, across from the Mattauk police station, when someone lurched across the road in front of her car. The woman’s bottle-blond hair was slipping out of a loose bun on the top of her head, and she looked ready for bed in a spaghetti-strap top and a pair of men’s boxer shorts. There was little doubt she was drunk.
Jo watched with growing concern as the woman stomped into the center of one of the police station’s flower beds, pulled up a plant, roots and all, and hurled it at the building’s windows. Jo rolled down her window in time to hear the plant hit with a loud thud and a satisfying spray of dirt.
“You fucking motherfucker!” the woman screamed as she uprooted a small bush. “I told you! I told you someone killed my baby!”