In order to save it, Nessa built a wall around her world. Her private life was her refuge from the demands of the doctors, the suffering of her patients, and the needs of their relatives—a place she could leave them all behind. For years, the only people allowed inside were Nessa’s family. She thought of her world as a house filled with memories. Some were always kept on display. Others, like her gift, were stored safely away until she had use for them.
Now her world had welcomed two new inhabitants, and a third was knocking. Nessa knew Jo was right—she had to open the door and let Franklin in. He was there for a reason, and he needed to know how her gift really worked. But she’d never expected to invite another man inside her private world. As crazy as it sounded, it felt like cheating.
When she got home from the police station shortly after ten, Nessa showered and headed for bed. She lay there for an hour until she knew for a fact that sleep wouldn’t be coming. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t done all she could for the dead. Dressed in her silky pink nightgown and robe, she went out to her car and sat in the front seat with the keys in her hand. The street was empty and all the houses were dark. The world should have been silent—but it wasn’t. The waves were still crashing in the distance, and now a chorus of female voices had joined them. Nessa couldn’t say how many were calling, but she knew it had to be more than three.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she slipped the key into the ignition. “I’ll try to do better.”
The car’s engine drowned out the voices, but Nessa knew they were still there. She drove slowly through the empty streets of Mattauk, looking at the town through the eyes of a stranger. It wasn’t hard. She’d never truly belonged. The storefronts were all charming, the restaurants homey, and the businesses cleverly named. If asked, she could have drawn every building from memory. But Nessa was overcome by the uncanny sense that there was so much she’d never seen. She remembered when her parents had first decided to move out of the city. Nessa had warned them things had changed on the island. She and Jonathan had driven out one summer with the twins. All that was left of the community she remembered were a few little cabins down by the shore.
But her parents hadn’t been dissuaded from following their dream. The home they’d bought hadn’t come with a white picket fence, so they’d promptly built one of their own. They’d come to the island to find what they’d been promised—and to claim their reward for lives of good deeds and hard work. But while they hadn’t been snubbed in Mattauk, they’d never felt entirely welcome, either. They knew their neighbors referred to them not by their address or the landscaping or the color of their house. They were the Black family. Nessa had sensed her parents’ relief when she’d moved to the island with her kids after Jonathan’s death. It let them ignore what had become increasingly clear—Mattauk was no longer the place they remembered. So they’d doted on their grandchildren and tried their best not to look too hard.
Nessa wondered what they would have said if they’d known there was a monster lurking in the shadows of their storybook town. Someone was murdering girls. Not the girls who lived in the big, tasteful houses. Not the girls whose parents were lawyers or doctors or investment bankers. He was taking poor girls—the kind who lived in trailers that could be hitched to a truck and carted off. He was stealing them, using them, and throwing them away because the world considered them trash. Would that have come as a surprise to her parents? Or had they known, deep inside, that that’s how things worked—even in pretty little places like Mattauk.
Nessa passed the courthouse and the police department, where Franklin’s car still sat outside. She was headed for the far edge of town, beyond the hospital and medical offices, to a seventies-era building she’d never set foot in and had always done her best to avoid.
The county morgue’s front desk was empty, but just as Nessa had expected, there was someone standing in the parking lot outside. The outline of a figure was all Nessa could make out in the dark, but she knew who it was. She threw on her turn signal and pulled the car into the lot. The girl in the blue dress focused her unblinking stare straight at Nessa’s headlights, as though she’d been waiting for her ride to arrive. Inside the morgue, her cold, naked body had been lying on a sliding steel drawer inside a refrigerated cabinet for two days. Nessa stopped beside the girl and got out of the car. She walked over to the passenger side and opened the door. The girl in the blue dress climbed in.