“I like what you’ve done with your garden,” Jo said.
“Thank you,” Harriett replied happily. “I’d be glad to give you a tour sometime.”
“I like what you did to Brendon Baker’s lawn, too. The motherfucker deserved it.”
“Yes,” Harriett readily agreed, “the motherfucker certainly did.”
“When did you discover your . . .” Jo hesitated. “。 . . ability?”
“My divorce attorney helped me see it. But I suspect I had it long before that,” Harriett mused, as though it were something she’d often pondered. “I wish it hadn’t taken so long for me to realize it was there. I feel like I spent the first twenty years of my life trying to figure shit out. The second twenty, I wasted on the wrong people—my husband, the assholes I worked with. Then I reached this stage of my life, and all of that fell away. For the first time in my life, I was alone. And for the first time in my life, I knew what the hell I was doing. And you?” She turned to Jo and picked up one of her hands. “When did you discover you could generate this kind of energy?”
“I punched a hole through a wall,” Jo said. “I was managing a hotel in Manhattan and a woman on one of my cleaning teams was assaulted. So I went up to confront the guy, and he’s sitting there in a robe with his dick hanging out. I swear to God, it felt like I exploded. Before I knew it, I had the asshole up against the wall with my right hand and I’d put my left hand straight through the Sheetrock next to his face.”
“I hope he was more respectful to women after that,” Harriett replied.
“Doubt it. But I did make him piss himself, which was fun,” Jo said. “The hotel tried to cover up the incident. So I turned over a bunch of documents to the New York Times.”
“So that was you? How wonderful!” Harriett lit up with glee. “I remember reading that story in the paper. It was very impressive how you shut the place down—so neat and professional, like one of those building demolitions they used to show on the evening news.”
“Yes, and just like those implosions, the cockroaches all made it out alive,” Jo said.
“For now,” Harriett said. “Look.” She pointed ahead of them, and both women immediately broke into a jog. Up ahead, Nessa had come to a stop.
“I think the girl’s down there,” Nessa said once they caught up with her. She was fixated on a nondescript section of scrubland. The voice had grown louder and more insistent, as though its owner knew they’d come for her at last.
Jo looked for a way into the thicket, where brambles and branches were woven together as tight as a net. “Anyone bring a machete?”
“Now, now. There’s no need for violence.” Harriett took the lead, slipping effortlessly into the foliage. Jo and Nessa followed, certain at first that she’d tamed nature with her magical powers. Instead, Harriett had spotted a slim trail that hadn’t been in regular use for some time. Inside the scrubland, the vegetation closed in all around them. Nessa glanced back and realized she could no longer see the road. The sound of waves slamming into the beach told her the ocean lay straight ahead. When she turned her eyes upward, she saw swatches of sky. Otherwise, there was nothing to guide them. They’d entered alien territory. It felt like the kind of secret world you might’ve stumbled upon when you were little. But this one was bad. At least one person had entered the thicket and never left.
Jo paused on the trail and wrinkled her nose with disgust. “Do you smell that?” she asked. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes,” Harriett confirmed without stopping. “It’s death.”
Nessa pulled the collar of her T-shirt up over her face, but the sickly sweet smell stayed in her nose. She’d been preparing herself for the sight of a body, but the stench took her by surprise. The girl down south hadn’t been dead long enough to reek. This poor thing had been waiting for quite some time. That morning, Nessa had woken up at the crack of dawn and prayed on her knees that the voice she’d heard was a hallucination—the product of a malfunctioning, middle-aged brain. The putrid odor of death had just stripped that last hope away.