Page 17 of The Change
At the far end of the island, just outside Mattauk city limits, the road passed over a bridge before swerving inland away from the sea. On the far side of the bridge, a tall steel gate blocked the sole entrance to a long, narrow stretch of land that jutted out into the water. The only people allowed access were the owners of the mansions in a community known as Culling Pointe. Before Memorial Day, the Pointe was a ghost town. Even during the summer, it was easy to forget anyone was out there. Occasionally one would spot a perfectly groomed woman browsing the shops in Mattauk. But for the most part, the millionaires and billionaires kept to themselves—and kept Mattauk’s full-time residents out of Culling Pointe.
They were halfway along Danskammer Beach Road when Nessa suddenly steered the car onto the shoulder. “The voice just got a lot louder. We should stop and look.”
“I jog down here all the time,” Jo said. “Kind of creepy to think I might have been running right past someone’s dead body.”
Nessa parked and the three women climbed out. A hundred yards of impenetrable scrub separated the highway from the beach. Stunted by salt water and gnarled by wind, the trees hunched closely together, their leaves whispering to each other in the breeze. Nessa hurried along the side of the road, listening for the girl’s voice over the crashing of the waves. Harriett and Jo trailed behind.
“You really think Nessa can hear the dead?” Jo asked Harriett. She’d come along for the adventure. She was still on the fence when it came to Nessa’s psychic powers.
“No reason not to believe her,” Harriett replied. “She seems perfectly sane, and I don’t think she’s capable of lying.” She didn’t seem to have anything more to say about the matter, and they walked in silence for a minute or more.
“You probably don’t remember, but you and I met once,” Jo said. “Years ago. At the grocery store.”
“Yes, I remember. You backed into my car.”
Jo felt herself blush. “It was right after Lucy was born, and I was a total disaster. I remember I was still bleeding like a stuck pig and I had baby vomit down the front of my shirt, and you got out in this amazing dress, looking like someone in a magazine, and you told me you’d take care of everything. I was so relieved my insurance premiums weren’t going to skyrocket. I had no idea you were actually going to send someone out to my house to repair the taillight I’d broken.”
“Don’t make it out like I gave you a kidney,” Harriett said. “I only made a call.”
“Harriett—I was the one who backed intoyourcar, and you sent someone out to my house to fixmytaillight. He didn’t even take any money when he was done. He said you’d already paid him. Why did you do that?”
“Who knows,” Harriett said with a shrug, as though her motiveswere a mystery even to her. “Why wouldn’t I? You seemed like you had other things to worry about.” As far as Jo could tell, Harriett wasn’t being modest. She truly didn’t think her behavior had been remarkable. It had, however, made a huge difference to Jo. She’d thought about it several times a week for the past ten years.
“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 theNew 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.
