Jo and Nessa turned their eyes to Harriett, who’d returned to her workbench, where she was filling a little glass bottle with a syrupy black liquid.
“What?” she asked when she looked up to find her friends staring at her. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading.”
“If I’m the light, what are you guys?” Nessa said with a sniffle.
“I’m the punishment that fits the crime.” Harriett returned to her work. “Jo is the rage that burns everything down. Nessa will have to talk to the dead girls’ mothers. But we’ll all have our parts to play.”
Silence followed. Then Jo giggled nervously. “Harriett is so fucking stoned,” she said.
Harriett grinned. “Nessa knows what I’m saying.”
She did. She’d heard something like it before—the day she’d asked her grandmother if she ever wished she hadn’t been born with the gift.
You don’t waste your time wishing when you got a job to do, the old woman had told her. Our work is important. We keep the scales balanced.
“Harriett’s right.” Nessa wiped her face and pulled herself together. “We need to get down to business. Anything else I need to know?”
“I jogged down to Danskammer Beach this morning,” Jo said. “There were cars parked along the highway and a crowd of people hanging around the crime scene snapping selfies.”
“Selfies?” Harriett looked up over her glasses.
“What in God’s name?” Nessa sounded mortified. “Why?”
“I guess word got out that there could be a new serial killer and all the ghouls are thrilled. Some kid actually stopped me and said he’d seen me on the news yesterday. Asked if he could interview me for his true crime podcast. I was standing a few feet from where we found that poor girl’s body, and this little asshole is looking to make a buck off the story.”
“Did you punch him?” Nessa said, making it clear she would have approved.
“No. Thing is, I know his show,” Jo admitted. “I’m embarrassed to say I used to listen to it all the time. Art made me stop after I slept with the lights on for a month.”
“Shows like that aren’t my thing, but I don’t blame you for listening,” Nessa said. “You gotta know what monsters are after you if you plan to avoid them.”
“It makes sense to listen if you’re a woman. But it doesn’t explain why serial killer stories are just as popular with men,” Harriett said. “Think about it—straight guys are almost never the victims. They don’t have to worry about anyone chopping them into bits. So what’s the appeal?”
“It’s pure entertainment for them,” Jo said. Dead women’s bodies fertilized a whole industry. Books, movies, shows, podcasts. “They all turn the murderers into supervillains with comic book names. It’s all about the killers—not the women they kill. There was one guy in Providence—they called him the Head Hunter because he cut off women’s heads. The podcast kid I met today could probably have rattled off every place in Rhode Island where the guy hid a head, but he couldn’t name a single one of the victims. The women are just props in the killer’s story.”
“You keep talking about a serial killer,” Harriett said. “Are we sure it was one person who murdered these girls?”
Nessa was curious to hear Jo’s answer. The same thought had occurred to her.
“What other explanation could there be?” Jo asked.
“It’s too early to draw any conclusions,” Nessa said. “I have to go back to Danskammer Beach. I didn’t get a good look at the third girl. I need to be able to sketch them all.”