Page 140 of The Change
“Oh, you did it forme?” Leonard sneered through the pain. “So the money had nothing to do with it? Anything happens to me, and you won’t see a cent. Everything I have will go to the whales.”
“I loved you,” Claude said just before the nine iron made contact with the side of his head. A spray of blood painted her outfit.
“Me?” Leonard sputtered. “Or Daddy?”
She swung again and caught him in the stomach. He barely had time to double over before Claude nailed him in the crotch. He fell to his knees, and she struck him in the back of the neck. And when he was flat on the ground, she kept swinging, bringing the nine iron up over her head and smashing it down against his motionless corpse.
She finally stopped when her legs wore a candy-apple coating of Leonard’s blood. Then she looked down at the club and hurled it into the sound.
Nessa clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my sweet Lord,” she whispered.
“That asshole helped kill all those girls,” Jo said. “He deserved what he got.”
But it wasn’t the gore that had gotten to Nessa. As Claude walked back down the dock and up the stairs from the beach, she wasn’t alone. Nessa could see the ghost of a pretty girl in a blue dress following closely behind her.
When Faith Reid’s Serpent Held Its Tongue
Her mother gave her the necklace for her thirteenth birthday. A coiled snake that dangled from a thin gold chain, it had nestled against her mother’s sternum for twenty-five years. From the time she was little, Faith had been told that the pendant had been passed down through her family, and that the necklace came with a story. One day, both of them would be hers. This was that day.
“You know the story of the Garden of Eden,” her mother said.
“Of course.” Faith and her mother went to church every Sunday.
“The version you’ve heard is all wrong.” Her mother reached out and lifted the serpent pendant from her daughter’s skin. “They say the serpent came and tempted Eve to eat an apple from the tree of knowledge, and because of Eve’s sin, mankind was banished from Eden. But that’s not what happened at all.”
“It’s in the Bible,” Faith argued. “It’s God’s word.”
“God may have dictated the Bible, but it was put down on paper by men. And over the years, men have changed things that don’t make them look good. In the original story, Eve was the hero, and this snake was her friend.”
She let the serpent fall back to its new home on Faith’s chest.
“You want to know what really happened?”
“Yes,” Faith said. She did. More than anything.
“Well, they say God made man before woman. That part is true. But when he was done making Adam, he figured he could do a lotbetter, so he gave it another go. The second creation was superior to the first in every way but strength. She wasn’t much of a match for all the lions and bears. So God decided to keep them both.”
“I thought all the animals in Eden were tame,” Faith argued.
Her mother lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t kid yourself, girl. No animal is ever totally tame,” she said. “They’re either too lazy to eat you or waiting for just the right moment.”
“Yeah? What about the snake?”
Her mother waved away the suggestion. “The snake lived in the tree of knowledge,” her mother said. “It had all the juicy red apples it wanted.”
Faith laughed. She loved her mother’s strange stories.
“So one day, when Eve was taking a nap under that very same tree, the snake slithered down to her. It had waited till Adam wandered off so it could have a word with her alone.”
“Where did Adam go?” Faith asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” her mother replied. “Eve’s the hero of this story. And that’s the first thing the snake told her. ‘You are the best of God’s creations,’ he said. ‘First came the animals, then Adam, then you. God kept getting better as he went along. He would have made you stronger, too. But he ran out of material. So you’re just gonna have to stay on your toes.’”
“To fight off all those hungry animals?” Faith asked. What other dangers could a garden hold?
“No,” her mother said. “The most dangerous beast in Eden was Adam.”
“Adam?”
