“Nope.” Nessa shook her head. “There’s no way she made a mistake. Remember—she had an envelope filled with pictures. They were Polaroids, too, like the photo in the locker. She had to know that the person in those pictures wasn’t her daughter.”
“Has Franklin heard about all of this?” Jo asked.
“He found out this afternoon and tried to get in touch with Laverne Green. She’s disappeared.”
“If she isn’t related to the girl, who is she?” Jo asked.
“I think she must be an actress, but Franklin isn’t convinced. He says it would be extremely expensive to hire a good actress and forge a birth certificate and medical records for a make-believe child.”
“The person responsible would have to be very connected and very rich,” Jo said. “Like Spencer Harding.”
“You think he’s capable of arranging something like that?”
“Leonard Shaw’s girlfriend, Claude, was in my gym today. Apparently, Spencer’s a pretty bad guy. She’s convinced he had Rosamund murdered, and she seems to think he knows people who can get just about anything done.”
“Leonard Shaw’s girlfriend was at Furious Fitness?” Nessa asked. “Why?”
Jo’s eyes were on Harriett as she delivered her answer. “She said she needed somewhere to run. Apparently, they’re having a problem with bees out on the Pointe.”
“Bees?” Nessa asked. “How strange.”
“Yes,” Jo agreed, still staring at Harriett. “Very.”
Later that night, after her groceries had been delivered, Harriett didn’t bother to dress. She left the house without a stitch on to walk among her plants in the moonlight. She pictured the confusion on Jo’s face earlier that day when she’d shown no regret for what had happened to Jackson. Harriett wondered how long Jo would think in terms of good and evil. Her friend was an intelligent woman, and such simplistic concepts were beneath her. But some people, even smart people, relied on those labels to make sense of the world. They slapped them on everything without ever realizing the placement was arbitrary.
When Harriett was a girl, she’d been taught to live in fear of evil. Her grandparents, who’d raised her, had warned her that men would whisper lies in her ear and steal her purity the moment she let down her guard. She was told the urges she felt were sinful. The boys who would have satisfied them were filthy. The girls, unspeakable. After high school, Harriett had fled from the Midwest to New York. But even there, a thousand miles from home, wherever she looked, everything had been labeled.
That changed the day she discovered her husband was fucking the head of his production department. She’d known plenty of women who’d suspected their husbands were unfaithful. She’d listened to their Nancy Drew tales of marital espionage. Harriett hadn’t spent months following Chase. She hadn’t installed spyware on his phone. She’d assumed their relationship was mutually beneficial, and trusted him not to fuck it up. It had never occurred to her to question his whereabouts. Then his lover grew tired of playing second fiddle and sent a video to Harriett’s phone.
She’d locked her office door and watched every second of it—from the moment the two had entered the frame, attached at the mouth and frantically fumbling to remove the clothing between them. She’d seen the woman get down on her hands and knees with Harriett’s husband behind her. She heard the woman gasp as his penis slid inside her and listened to her husband pant as he pumped faster and faster. Harriett watched fifteen minutes of furious lovemaking followed by an hour and twenty-one minutes of stillness as the two slept, wrapped in each other’s arms. It wasn’t their first encounter. It wasn’t even their tenth. They were comfortable with each other. Harriett knew they’d been doing what she was witnessing for a very long time.
When Harriett pressed play, her world had seemed solid, sturdy, dependable. By the time the video ended, she was surrounded by rubble. She wandered through the wreckage for months, distraught and disoriented. She no longer believed in anything.