Jo pulled out her knife and sliced open a small section of the plastic. A lock of long red hair floated up from the opening and undulated in the water like a flame. The skull to which it was still attached peeked out, as if the girl to whom it belonged was too shy to emerge. Her eyes were gone, as was her flesh. Jo hovered there, the GoPro held out in front of her. The girl remained perfectly still, looking back at Jo from two empty eye sockets as though patiently waiting for her picture to be taken.
Jo felt a hard yank on the rope attached to her belt, a signal for her to come up. But she kept on going. Now that she knew what to look for, it would be easier to locate the second girl. And it only took a few kicks of her flippers to find another trap, this one seemingly newer than the last, with a black plastic bag stuffed inside. Jo made an incision between two of the wires, revealing the bones of a hand with patches of flaking flesh still attached to it. Jo made sure the camera lingered for a moment on the long, pale fingers. Then she began her slow, careful ascent to the surface.
When she climbed up the swim ladder onto the boat, she was met with grim faces. She didn’t need to tell the others what she’d found; they’d seen it all, too. She took off her mask and waited silently as her friends removed her flippers. As she turned to let them take off her air tanks, she spotted a slab of gray in the water nearby.
“It’s the whale,” she marveled. It was hard to believe she’d been so close to such a magnificent beast. “I didn’t see her when I was coming up.”
“She was right there the whole time,” Nessa told Jo. “It’s almost like she was sent here to watch out for you.”
Jo glanced at Harriett, who claimed her innocence with a casual shrug.
That evening, they turned Nessa’s dining room into a podcasting studio, with three chairs around the circular table and a microphone carefully placed in front of each seat. Harriett watched them set up the equipment but turned down the chance to be interviewed on the podcast. Her part would come soon enough, she informed them. In the meantime, she had gardening to do, and her compost heap needed tending.
Before she left, she approached Josh. He was an average-size man with an average-size paunch. But standing before Harriett, he resembled a small, furry animal. When she reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder, he glanced down at it in awe. “In this war, there isn’t a Switzerland,” she told him. “There is no such thing as neutrality. You have to choose sides. You are very lucky, Mr. Gibbon. You have a chance to decide how you’ll be remembered, and I’m now certain you will make the right choice.”
As Harriett walked down the street on bare feet, her silver strands of hair sparkling in the moonlight, Josh watched from Nessa’s front window. When she vanished around a curve in Woodland Drive, he drew in a deep breath as though a heavy weight had been lifted off his chest. He turned back to Jo and Nessa, who were waiting by their chairs at the table. His skin appeared waxy and white.
“She says shit like that all the time. You’ll get used to it,” Jo said.
“Shall we start?” Nessa asked politely.
They all took their seats at the table. Nessa and Jo waited while Josh, head bowed and brow furrowed, fiddled with the controls on his computer. When he looked up again, he’d become a different person. While the podcast was recording, he was in his element, and his cocky confidence returned.
“Hello, justice seekers. This is Josh Gibbon, and tonight we have a very special edition of They Walk Among Us. I’m recording the show live this evening, and for reasons that will soon become clear, it will be posted in its entirety, unedited, immediately after recording.
“I’m in Mattauk, New York—a place many of you will recognize as the beach town where a young woman’s body was recently discovered wrapped in a black plastic trash bag. I’m joined by Nessa James and Jo Levison, two of the women who made that discovery, and tonight they have explosive new information to share with us. Not only do they have proof that a serial killer has been at work here in this picturesque place, they believe they now know the killer’s identity.” He paused and shifted into earnest mode. “Honestly, folks, I thought by this point I’d seen and heard everything. I never imagined I could be shocked anymore. But these women’s story, and the evidence they’ve provided, has shaken me to my very core.
“We’ll start with you, Nessa. On the morning of May sixth, you made a gruesome discovery on Danskammer Beach.”
“Yes.” Nessa’s voice came out as a whisper, and Josh gestured for her to speak louder. She cleared her throat nervously. “Yes,” she repeated.
“What was it?”
“It was the body of a young girl wrapped up in a garbage bag. She looked to be around seventeen years old, and she was nude.”
“How did you happen to come across the body?” Josh asked.
“My friends and I were walking down a trail from the road to the beach, and I spotted the bag in the scrub. I’m a nurse practitioner, and I used to work in a hospital. I’m familiar with the smell of death. I knew there was something terrible in that bag. And there was.”
“The police claim the young woman was a prostitute who died of an overdose.”
“They still can’t tell us who she is, but they know she was a sex worker?” Her indignation came through clearly, though Nessa kept her tone polite. “What difference would it make if she was? Is it suddenly okay to kill sex workers?”
“Of course not.” Josh looked taken aback. “I didn’t mean to suggest that.”
“If the police said she was a cashier at CVS, would you have brought that up, too?
“No. Probably not,” Josh conceded.
“The police claim the girl died of an overdose while with a client, who panicked and got rid of the body. But that doesn’t fit with what I saw. The bag hadn’t been tossed out of a car. Someone had taken the time to wrap the girl up like a present and carry her down the trail. The bag’s drawstrings were tied in a neat bow.”
Josh lifted a finger to have Nessa pause for a moment.
“The pictures Nessa took of the bow are up on our website and will remain there until we’re forced to take them down. Nessa, you and your friends called the police. But when they arrived, there was something you didn’t share with them. Is that right?”
“Yes. I had a feeling there were other bodies nearby.”
“Are you talking about ESP?”
They’d discussed how to handle the subject of Nessa’s gift. Josh felt it was best to keep it vague.
“You can call it whatever you like. I’ll call it women’s intuition. Every lady listening right now knows exactly what I’m talking about. I had a feeling that I just couldn’t shake. I mentioned it to my daughters that night when I got home, and they reminded me that a girl their age had disappeared along Danskammer Beach two years ago.”
“A girl named Mandy Welsh.”
“My friends Jo and Harriett met Mrs. Welsh. She told them she was convinced her daughter had been murdered. But two years later, police were still writing Mandy off as a runaway.”
Josh turned to face the microphone. “We tried to reach Mandy Welsh’s mother for this podcast, but we were unable to locate her.”
“A few weeks back, Amber Welsh and her kids disappeared overnight,” Nessa said.