“What are you talking about?” Leonard let the binoculars drop to his side. His face still wore the remains of a smile, as though there was still a chance it was all just a joke.
“How many girls did you let these rich assholes kill?” Claude demanded. “Tell me the truth.”
Leonard took in a breath. Jo and Nessa waited to hear the denial he appeared to be concocting.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Rocca took care of it all. Don’t worry. There won’t be any more surprises. Spencer was a sick fuck. He wanted to put his where he was able to see them. But the other bodies are gone. They won’t be found.”
“Neither will yours.” Claude brought the nine iron down from her shoulder.
“Oh, c’mon, Claude,” Leonard cooed, reaching out an arm.
The nine iron caught the morning sun as it swung through the air. A thwack and a scream followed. The binoculars fell to the dock as Leonard stumbled backward with his injured arm pressed to his chest.
“Oh shit,” Nessa gasped.
“Whoa,” Jo said with an amused snort. “She did it.” The violence hadn’t disturbed her at all. She could feel the cells of her body tingling.
“After everything I did for you.” Claude stepped toward him.
“Oh, you did it for me?” Leonard sneered through the pain. “So the money had nothing to do with it? Anything happens to me, and you won’t see a cent. Everything I have will go to the whales.”
“I loved you,” Claude said just before the nine iron made contact with the side of his head. A spray of blood painted her outfit.
“Me?” Leonard sputtered. “Or Daddy?”
She swung again and caught him in the stomach. He barely had time to double over before Claude nailed him in the crotch. He fell to his knees, and she struck him in the back of the neck. And when he was flat on the ground, she kept swinging, bringing the nine iron up over her head and smashing it down against his motionless corpse.
She finally stopped when her legs wore a candy-apple coating of Leonard’s blood. Then she looked down at the club and hurled it into the sound.
Nessa clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my sweet Lord,” she whispered.
“That asshole helped kill all those girls,” Jo said. “He deserved what he got.”
But it wasn’t the gore that had gotten to Nessa. As Claude walked back down the dock and up the stairs from the beach, she wasn’t alone. Nessa could see the ghost of a pretty girl in a blue dress following closely behind her.
When Faith Reid’s Serpent Held Its Tongue
Her mother gave her the necklace for her thirteenth birthday. A coiled snake that dangled from a thin gold chain, it had nestled against her mother’s sternum for twenty-five years. From the time she was little, Faith had been told that the pendant had been passed down through her family, and that the necklace came with a story. One day, both of them would be hers. This was that day.
“You know the story of the Garden of Eden,” her mother said.
“Of course.” Faith and her mother went to church every Sunday.
“The version you’ve heard is all wrong.” Her mother reached out and lifted the serpent pendant from her daughter’s skin. “They say the serpent came and tempted Eve to eat an apple from the tree of knowledge, and because of Eve’s sin, mankind was banished from Eden. But that’s not what happened at all.”
“It’s in the Bible,” Faith argued. “It’s God’s word.”
“God may have dictated the Bible, but it was put down on paper by men. And over the years, men have changed things that don’t make them look good. In the original story, Eve was the hero, and this snake was her friend.”