At the time, the phrase had annoyed her. Nessa had been on her own for almost ten years. She’d guided her children to adulthood and helped her parents pass on to the afterlife. She’d done it all by herself, and she’d done a damn good job of it. She didn’t need anyone to take care of her. And yet that afternoon, when Franklin drove her home from Furious Fitness, she’d looked up at her house and realized she didn’t want to be alone anymore.
There was plenty of food left over from the funeral, so after Nessa saw her girls off, she invited him in. It was almost midnight by the time they finally shared a dish of warmed-up mac and cheese.
Now Nessa watched Franklin as he sat on the bed and tied his shoes. His movements were measured, always perfectly precise. His shirt showed no sign of spending the night on the floor. The bows on his shoes could have set a new standard. It wasn’t until he looked back and winked at her that she was able to believe this was the same man who’d been on top of her, or under her, or behind her all night. In the dark, she’d had nothing to distract her. The subject of babies never passed through her brain. She didn’t once wonder if it might lead to marriage. What they’d done had felt natural, animal, elemental. Harriett was right: sex did get better with age.
In time, she’d confess everything to her friends. But after what had happened to Jo’s little girl, today definitely wasn’t the day.
Jo pulled her car up behind a black SUV parked across the street from Harriett’s house. On the weekends, it wasn’t uncommon to see cars parked along Woodland Drive, but they were almost always gone by Monday morning. Jo got out and looked through the windows. There was no one inside. Her senses tingling, she turned her eyes to Harriett’s house, which sat still and silent on the opposite side of the road. A burst of panic sent her sprinting to the front door, which opened with a single twist of the knob.
“Morning.” Harriett was at her workbench, scraping a plate full of bright red chunks into her blender.
“You’re okay.” Jo doubled over in relief.
“You sound surprised,” Harriett said. “Smoothie?”
Jo shook her head over the sound of the blender. When the contents of the pitcher were a brilliant red, Harriett punched the off button.
“What’s in that?” Jo asked.
“Beet juice,” Harriett said, pouring herself a glass of the mixture. “Good and good for you.”
“There’s a strange SUV parked across the street,” Jo informed her.
Harriett took a sip of her concoction. “Is there?” she asked without bothering to look. Her teeth were red when she smiled. “If it stays there too long, my nosy neighbors will have it towed. By the way, a baby police officer stopped by early this morning. He said you’d sent him. He wouldn’t tell me why, but he said you were fine.”
“No one bothered you last night?”
“Define bother,” Harriett replied with an arched brow.
“Never mind.” Jo wasn’t in the mood for Harriett’s sense of humor. “Someone broke into my house around three in the morning. He was there for Lucy. He tied her up and—” Her voice cracked. She stopped, pressed a finger to her lips, and willed herself not to cry. Then she finished the story.
“Lucy will be fine, Jo. You have my word.” Harriett’s voice had softened and her face appeared younger, as though she were channeling some long-ago version of herself. “When I was her age, I lived through something terrible, too. I survived, and so will she. Lucy has three things I didn’t: good parents, a loving home, and me. You didn’t kill the intruder, did you?”
“No,” Jo replied. She’d wanted to. The urge had been almost impossible to resist. But she hadn’t.
Harriett nodded. “That’s okay. It’s my job to make him suffer,” she said. “But I assume you got a few good licks in?”
“Yeah. I hurt him.”
“Badly?” Harriett sounded hopeful.
“Very,” Jo said. “I don’t think he’ll be using his face for a while.”
“How did it feel?”
Jo hesitated. “Better than sex.”
“Excellent.” Harriett flashed the gap between her teeth. “It’s important that Harding gets the message.”
“The message?” Jo asked.
“That we’re not going to take his bullshit,” Harriett said. “He knows we’re onto him. There’s a mole in the police department. Someone must have told him we found the photo.”
“You figured that out quickly.” Jo was impressed. It had taken her all morning to reach the same conclusion.
Harriett grinned. She’d extracted the information from Chertov in less than five minutes, but Jo didn’t need to know that.
“But why send a guy to my house? Why not to yours—or to Nessa’s?”
“I would imagine the detective’s car parked in front of Nessa’s house might have deterred them.”
Jo’s brow furrowed. “I’m talking about last night.”
“So am I,” said Harriett.
“Oh,” said Jo, her eyes widening as she realized what that meant. “How do you—” She stopped. “Did you have something to do with that?”
Harriett shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You two seem to think I’m responsible for everything. All I do is stand back and let nature take its course.”
They knew. The second she opened the door, Nessa could see there would be no need for a confession. Whether by gossip or witchcraft, Jo and Harriett already knew she’d slept with Franklin. Jo had too much on her mind to make any wisecracks, and didn’t catch the wink Harriett gave Nessa as she breezed by.
“Can I get you guys some coffee?” Nessa offered awkwardly.
“No, thank you,” Jo said before rounding on Franklin. They’d all known something bad would happen. She didn’t know if he could have stopped it. What she did know for sure was that he hadn’t tried. “Someone in your department tipped off Spencer Harding. He sent one of his thugs to my home last night. The man went straight to my daughter’s room.”
“What?” Nessa felt ill. She turned to Franklin. “You didn’t tell me everything.”
“We don’t know for certain that Spencer Harding was behind the breakin,” Franklin offered stoically.
“The man who broke into my house zip-tied Lucy’s wrists and crammed a stuffed pig into her mouth. What do you think would have happened to her, Franklin? Rape? Torture? Would we have found her months from now in a trash bag by the side of the road?”
“Oh my dear Lord.” Nessa’s eyes filled with tears as Franklin shuffled uncomfortably.
“You don’t want to think about it, do you? Well, that’s too fucking bad, Franklin, because it’s all I’m going to think about for the next thirty years.”
“Now, Jo—”
Jo took a step toward him, and Franklin retreated slightly. She may have been the smaller of the two, but she had fury on her side.
“Don’t,” she warned him. Nessa could see her friend’s body vibrating like a pressure cooker that was fixing to blow. “And don’t tell me I don’t know it was Spencer Harding, because I do. So does Nessa, so does Harriett, and so do you.”