“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.”