“So you want to go to the media with our story?” Nessa couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. “I suppose we could call the Times, or one of the local channels. Do you really think they’ll listen?”
“Of course not.” Harriett sighed, her first contribution to the conversation since proposing they execute Spencer Harding. “A story like ours would never make it past the fact-checkers. We’d be putting anyone who ran the story at the risk of a massive lawsuit.”
“But maybe we could convince the media to start their own investigations,” Jo said.
“The men who run the networks and newspapers all know Spencer Harding,” Harriett said. “They sit next to him at fund-raisers. They trade witty banter at cocktail parties. They clink scotch glasses with him at Jackson Dunn’s parties. And they buy their artwork from Harding’s galleries. Even if we could convince a reporter to investigate, the story would never run. Their bosses would kill it. You two are still depending on a system that you both know doesn’t work. Plan all you like; you’re just delaying the inevitable.”
Nessa bit her lip.
Then Jo perked up. “I know someone with a big audience and no corporate bosses. Someone who already wants to talk to us.”
“You do?” Nessa asked hopefully. Harriett just smiled.
Jo pulled out her phone and brought up the page for the podcast They Walk Among Us.
“He’ll listen,” Jo said.
Where Do All the Girls Go?
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.