Page 84 of The Change
“We should go public,” Jo said. “Put some serious pressure on the authorities and tell people exactly what we know.”
“What do we know?” Nessa said. “Franklin was right—we don’t have much in the way of hard evidence.”
“We know Spencer Harding’s wife had a photo of a murdered girl in a locker at my gym. We know the photo was a Polaroid, just like the ones a woman who called herself Laverne Green showed you when she lied about being the girl’s mother. We know Rosamund Harding is dead and Laverne Green is missing. Amber Welsh, whose daughter disappeared along Danskammer Beach Road, has vanished as well. We know that after I told the police how Rosamund Harding gave me the combination to that lock at my gym, a man broke into my house with the intention of kidnapping my daughter. I think anyone with a drop of common sense will agree that Spencer Harding has to be behind all of this, and that someone on the police force has been helping him.”
“So you want to go to the media with our story?” Nessa couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. “I suppose we could call theTimes,or one of the local channels. Do you really think they’ll listen?”
“Of course not.” Harriett sighed, her first contribution to the conversation since proposing they execute Spencer Harding. “A story like ours would never make it past the fact-checkers. We’d be putting anyone who ran the story at the risk of a massive lawsuit.”
“But maybe we could convince the media to start their own investigations,” Jo said.
“The men who run the networks and newspapers all know Spencer Harding,” Harriett said. “They sit next to him at fund-raisers. They trade witty banter at cocktail parties. They clink scotch glasses with him at Jackson Dunn’s parties. And they buy their artwork from Harding’s galleries. Even if we could convince a reporter to investigate, the story would never run. Their bosses would kill it. You two are still depending on a system that you both know doesn’t work. Plan all you like; you’re just delaying the inevitable.”
Nessa bit her lip.
Then Jo perked up. “I know someone with a big audience and no corporate bosses. Someone who already wants to talk to us.”
“You do?” Nessa asked hopefully. Harriett just smiled.
Jo pulled out her phone and brought up the page for the podcastThey Walk Among Us.
“He’ll listen,” Jo said.
Where Do All the Girls Go?
During her summer with her grandmother in South Carolina, Nessa had befriended a neighbor girl named Jeannie. Every morning before it got too hot to do much of anything, they’d walk two miles down the dusty dirt road into town. Nessa’s parents sent her ten dollars a week for spending money, which amounted to a fortune back in those days. The girls would buy two bottles of Cheerwine and packets of BBQ Fritos, which they’d eat at a leisurely, ladylike pace while sitting outside the library on the town’s best bench.
They were there late one morning when they spotted Miss Ella walking toward them, a stack of library books under her arm. She must have been around seventy-five years old and just under six feet in height. To twelve-year-old Nessa, she’d seemed impossibly old and improbably tall. She wore her silvery hair in a topknot, and her skirts swept the ground. A treasure chest’s worth of necklaces dangled from her neck, none of them fashioned from gold. Instead, they were shells and berries and roots that grasped at her flesh as though they might be alive. They were jewels of nature rather than trinkets made by man.
Just as she reached the girls’ bench, Miss Ella came to a stop. “You!” Her voice, sharp and clear, cut straight through the swampy air. The gnarled finger she’d raised was pointed at a car parked on the opposite side of the road. A man sat hunched down in the driver’s seat, watching them, his hat positioned so it cast a shadow onhis face. “I catch you with your pecker out again, and that nasty little worm’s gonna shrivel up and fall off. You hear me?”
He must have. The ignition instantly turned over and the man peeled out of the parking space.
“You know that pervert?” Miss Ella asked the girls.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said almost proudly. She seemed to relish the role of informant. “That’s Earl Frady. He works down at the feed shop.”
“Either of you see him again outside that feed shop, you come and tell me straightaway. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie said with a wide grin on her face. As the woman walked away, Jeannie leaned over to Nessa. “She’s gonna feed him to the gators like she did Mr. Cogdill.”
“Who’s Mr. Cogdill?” Nessa asked.
“Another old man who liked little girls,” Jeannie told her.
Nessa was dying to ask about Mr. Cogdill, but she’d been warned not to talk outside the family about three things, if she could help it: the gift, dead girls, or Miss Ella.
“Did Miss Ella feed Mr. Cogdill to an alligator?” Nessa asked her grandmother as soon as she got home. She expected to be informed it was nothing but idle gossip.
“Jeannie tell you that?” her grandmother asked.
“Is it true?” Nessa asked.
“Yes,” said her grandmother. “Though they’ll never prove it.”
It seemed that one day the previous summer, Carroll Cogdill, mortician, equestrian, and all-around pillar of the Low Country community, had gone missing while fishing in the swamp. The next morning, a giant gator had emerged from a water trap on the country club golf course and waddled across the green, pausing by the tenth hole to cough up a toupee. Everyone there that day knew it could only have belonged to the missing man. And when theycut open the gator, they found the rest of him. He’d been chopped into pieces, which the gator had subsequently swallowed.
Officially, Miss Ella had been cleared as a suspect. No one could offer any evidence that she’d ever met Carroll Cogdill, and she didn’t appear to have a motive for killing him. Plus, as a woman in her seventies, it was assumed she lacked the upper-body strength that would have been necessary for the butchering.Unofficially,everyone in town was convinced it was her, but aside from Miss Ella, the only people who knew what had really happened were Nessa’s grandmother and the mother of the two little girls Carroll Cogdill had raped.
