During her summer with her grandmother in South Carolina, Nessa had befriended a neighbor girl named Jeannie. Every morning before it got too hot to do much of anything, they’d walk two miles down the dusty dirt road into town. Nessa’s parents sent her ten dollars a week for spending money, which amounted to a fortune back in those days. The girls would buy two bottles of Cheerwine and packets of BBQ Fritos, which they’d eat at a leisurely, ladylike pace while sitting outside the library on the town’s best bench.
They were there late one morning when they spotted Miss Ella walking toward them, a stack of library books under her arm. She must have been around seventy-five years old and just under six feet in height. To twelve-year-old Nessa, she’d seemed impossibly old and improbably tall. She wore her silvery hair in a topknot, and her skirts swept the ground. A treasure chest’s worth of necklaces dangled from her neck, none of them fashioned from gold. Instead, they were shells and berries and roots that grasped at her flesh as though they might be alive. They were jewels of nature rather than trinkets made by man.
Just as she reached the girls’ bench, Miss Ella came to a stop. “You!” Her voice, sharp and clear, cut straight through the swampy air. The gnarled finger she’d raised was pointed at a car parked on the opposite side of the road. A man sat hunched down in the driver’s seat, watching them, his hat positioned so it cast a shadow on his face. “I catch you with your pecker out again, and that nasty little worm’s gonna shrivel up and fall off. You hear me?”
He must have. The ignition instantly turned over and the man peeled out of the parking space.
“You know that pervert?” Miss Ella asked the girls.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said almost proudly. She seemed to relish the role of informant. “That’s Earl Frady. He works down at the feed shop.”
“Either of you see him again outside that feed shop, you come and tell me straightaway. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said with a wide grin on her face. As the woman walked away, Jeannie leaned over to Nessa. “She’s gonna feed him to the gators like she did Mr. Cogdill.”
“Who’s Mr. Cogdill?” Nessa asked.
“Another old man who liked little girls,” Jeannie told her.
Nessa was dying to ask about Mr. Cogdill, but she’d been warned not to talk outside the family about three things, if she could help it: the gift, dead girls, or Miss Ella.
“Did Miss Ella feed Mr. Cogdill to an alligator?” Nessa asked her grandmother as soon as she got home. She expected to be informed it was nothing but idle gossip.
“Jeannie tell you that?” her grandmother asked.
“Is it true?” Nessa asked.
“Yes,” said her grandmother. “Though they’ll never prove it.”
It seemed that one day the previous summer, Carroll Cogdill, mortician, equestrian, and all-around pillar of the Low Country community, had gone missing while fishing in the swamp. The next morning, a giant gator had emerged from a water trap on the country club golf course and waddled across the green, pausing by the tenth hole to cough up a toupee. Everyone there that day knew it could only have belonged to the missing man. And when they cut open the gator, they found the rest of him. He’d been chopped into pieces, which the gator had subsequently swallowed.
Officially, Miss Ella had been cleared as a suspect. No one could offer any evidence that she’d ever met Carroll Cogdill, and she didn’t appear to have a motive for killing him. Plus, as a woman in her seventies, it was assumed she lacked the upper-body strength that would have been necessary for the butchering. Unofficially, everyone in town was convinced it was her, but aside from Miss Ella, the only people who knew what had really happened were Nessa’s grandmother and the mother of the two little girls Carroll Cogdill had raped.
“So she killed him.” Nessa wanted to make sure.
“She did,” her grandmother told her. “I’m not gonna lie to you.”
“But the Bible says ‘do not kill,’” Nessa reminded her grandmother.
“The Commandments only apply to humans,” said the older woman. “Nobody goes to hell for killing a monster.”
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Jo noted. She and Nessa were driving into town for an appointment with the host of They Walk Among Us. Josh Gibbon had responded to Jo’s email immediately and proposed meeting at a café in town. “Something on your mind?”
Nessa wondered what Jo would say if she knew about Miss Ella. But in the thirty-five years that had passed since that conversation in her grandmother’s kitchen, Nessa had never shared the story with a single soul. And that wasn’t going to change. She figured she owed it to Miss Ella—a penniless old woman in South Carolina who’d risked everything to avenge the young and helpless. Miss Ella deserved discretion, even if she’d been dead for twenty long years. “Just thinking about all the bad men out there and what we should do with them.”
Jo glanced over at her friend. “I’m sure Harriett was kidding about killing Spencer Harding.” It was a lie. Harriett hadn’t been joking—and the idea had been growing on Jo as well. She’d been fantasizing about it all morning.
Nessa responded with a smile. Jo was protecting her. It was sweet, in a way—and condescending in another. Somehow, Jo had discovered the truth about Harriett, and she was worried it would scare Nessa. But Nessa had been aware of Harriett’s true nature all along. Women like Harriett and Miss Ella wouldn’t exist if the world functioned as it was meant to. The way Nessa saw it, in these situations, you followed the rules first. You toed the line. You made sure to cross every t and dot every i. And when that didn’t work, it was time to bring out the goddamned gators.
“You think Harriett was kidding?” Nessa asked pointedly.
“No,” Jo admitted. “Not really.”
“Me either,” Nessa replied.
Just as the conversation was taking an interesting turn, Jo pulled into a parking space in front of the café, where a youngish man was sitting at a table by the front window.
“That’s him.” Jo turned the engine off.
“That hairy little frat boy?” Nessa scoffed. “Are you sure he’s who we need to be talking to? He looks like he spent all night watching dirty movies and playing video games.”
“That hairy little frat boy has thirty million listeners,” Jo told her.
“Well then.” Nessa was duly impressed. “Let’s go spill some beans.”
Though he’d been eager to meet, Josh clearly wasn’t letting bygones be bygones. He was going to make Jo pay for her rudeness. While she and Nessa tag-teamed the tale of finding the murdered girl and every strange thing that had happened since then, he sat back and listened, his face expressionless and his arms crossed over his chest.
“Wow. That’s quite a story,” he said when they finished. “Too bad no one’s going to believe it.”
“We have evidence,” Jo argued. “There’s a DNA test that proves the girl who died wasn’t related to the woman who claimed to be her mother. We have pictures of the photo we found in the locker at my gym. And there’s a man in jail right now for breaking into my house.”