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?”