Jo gasped when the door opened and an officer appeared, his service revolver drawn. He lowered the firearm when he recognized the attacker. “Mrs. Welsh? Put the begonia down!”
The woman lobbed the plant at his head. Her aim was surprisingly good, but he ducked just in time. “I fucking told Rocca someone killed her and you fuckers did nothing. Now some other girl is dead. You fucking useless pieces of shit! This is on you!”
Jo steered her car into the station’s parking lot and hopped out. Her gut was telling her the woman was the mother of one of the girls Nessa had seen on the beach.
“Mrs. Welsh!” A second policeman with a gun ran outside. Someone was going to get shot.
“Fuck you! Go ahead and shoot me, you spineless piece of shit. What the fuck do I have to live for, anyway?”
The woman reached down for a large rock, and Jo knew the time had come to intervene. She sprinted toward the flower bed and grabbed the woman by the wrist.
“Don’t,” she heard herself tell the drunk woman. “Not now.”
Jo’s iron grip seemed to convince the woman that a struggle wasn’t worth it. She dropped the rock, and Jo released her. The woman teetered for a moment, then fell backward onto her butt. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.
“My name is Jo Levison.” She held out a hand and pulled the woman up to her feet. Mulch from the flower beds remained stuck to the woman’s boxer shorts.
“I’ve seen you before,” the woman said. “You were on the news.”
“I was,” Jo said. “I was one of the people who found the girl today.”
“My girl is out there, too.” The woman’s jaw was clenched tightly enough to break all her teeth. The stench of alcohol wafted from her skin. “And these worthless motherfuckers won’t even look!”
“I’ll help you find her,” Jo told the woman.
The woman’s face went slack with surprise. She didn’t know what to make of Jo’s offer. “You will?”
One of the police officers was inching toward them as though they were terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests rather than two civilians armed with nothing more than begonias. “Mrs. Welsh,” he said. “You need to come with me. I’m going to have to book you for destruction of government property.”
“Oh, come on,” Jo said. “She threw a couple of plants. What property did she destroy?”
“There’s a crack in one of the windows.”
“I’ll have it fixed,” Jo said. “I own Furious Fitness. I’ll send my repairperson over to take a look tomorrow. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay the bill. Now save yourself some paperwork and let me take this lady home. As soon as we’re gone, you can go back to looking at naked ladies on your phone.”
It had just been a shot in the dark, but the look on his face told her she hadn’t missed the mark.
“Why are you helping me, rich lady?” the woman whispered as Jo led her away.
“What makes you think I’m rich?” Jo asked.
The woman responded with a drunken titter. “If you weren’t rich, that cop would have shot your ass. Where you from, anyways?”
“Here,” Jo said.
“Me too! How’d you end up looking like one of those bitches who show up every summer?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just got lucky.” It was the only explanation Jo could offer.
Once she’d been loaded into the car, Mrs. Welsh promptly passed out. Jo tried calling Nessa. The phone went straight to voice mail, and when she drove past Nessa’s house, the lights were all off. She couldn’t haul the woman back to her own home, so she continued down Woodland Drive and pulled up in front of the town’s most infamous residence.
Harriett answered the door in a sheer linen muumuu that did nothing to conceal the naked body underneath. “Long time no see,” she said.
Jo tried not to stare. “Hey, yeah, I’m sorry to bother you. I was on my way to my gym and I ran into a woman throwing plants at the police station.” She knew how crazy it sounded, but she kept on going. “I think she’s the mother of one of the girls Nessa saw. She’s drunk off her ass and looks seriously ill. She needs our help.”
“Of course. Darling?” Harriett called back to someone. “Would you mind pulling on some pants and giving me a hand for a moment?”
Jo watched in astonishment as the sexiest man who’d ever worked at a Mattauk grocery store appeared buck naked in Harriett’s living room with a pair of old jeans in his hand. Jo averted her eyes until he’d managed to put them on.
“What can I do for you?” he asked Harriett.
“There’s a drunk woman in my friend’s car. Will you please bring her into the house?”
“Sure thing,” he said, flashing the ladies his movie-star smile.
They both watched him walk out to the drive, bare-chested and shoeless. “You’re my hero, Harriett,” Jo said. “But for the record, I could have brought her inside.”
“I know,” said Harriett. “It’s just that Eric likes feeling useful. And it was about time he got dressed and went home, anyway. Come in and make yourself comfortable.”
When Jo looked around, she could hardly believe she was indoors. The walls of the house had been transformed into vertical gardens, and trees bearing unusual fruit grew out of containers. Jo examined the herbs sprouting from the hanging planter affixed to the nearest wall, but couldn’t identify a single one of them. Books bristling with scraps of paper marking important pages were stacked high on the Eames coffee table and rose like columns from the floor beside the Knoll sofa. On top of the piles closest to her were Working Conjure: A Guide to Hoodoo Folk Magic, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo, and Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing. Squirrels were building a massive nest in the living room fireplace, and a flock of little green parakeets chased each other around the high ceilings.
Harriett’s gentleman caller reappeared with a limp Ms. Welsh cradled in his arms.
“Just put her on the sofa, please,” Harriett told him.
When the woman was laid out like Sleeping Beauty, Harriett handed the man his shirt and shoes, then leaned down to examine the new arrival. She pried open one of Ms. Welsh’s eyes, examined her fingernails, and sniffed at the breath leaking out of her lungs.
“Jo, would you mind popping into the hall linen closet and grabbing a spare blanket for our guest?”
Jo did as she was asked. On her way back to the living room, she stopped to wait while Harriett finished saying a very warm goodbye to her gentleman friend.
As soon as she heard the door close, Jo headed for the sofa and spread the blanket over the sleeping woman. Harriett had slipped on a pair of glasses and taken a place behind a wooden counter that had once served as a bar but appeared to have been transformed into a workbench. There were still liquor-filled bottles lining the shelf behind her, but stuffed inside them were leaves, roots, and various other ingredients Jo wasn’t certain she wanted to identify. Glass jars with cork stoppers held dried mushrooms, a rainbow of berries, and something that upon closer inspection appeared to be shriveled caterpillars.