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His eyes drifted to Emmy-Lee’s skeleton, affection softening his features. “They’ve got the best stories. All kinds of crimes. Murders, disappearances…the ones that make you wonder what really happened behind closed doors.”
He let the silence stretch.
“Then one morning I’m reading the Boston Tribune over my eggs and coffee, and there she is.” His gaze slid back to me. “A picture of a pretty little thing with big eyes and a smile that could stop traffic. The headline called her a murderer. Said she’d killed her husband in cold blood…that she’d tortured him. It said she was claiming self-defense.”
He chuckled under his breath.
My heart slammed hard enough to hurt, echoing through a body that refused to listen to me.
“Imagine my surprise when I heard a crash outside The Hollow one night. I step out onto the porch, and there she is, staggering out of a Prius that’s tangled against Big Hank.”
He’d been there from the beginning. Watching me before I even knew I had to be afraid.
“And I knew right then…the universe had delivered her to me. I knew it wanted me to make her into a good girl, just like I’d done with all the others.”
His gaze flicked toward the deep freezers, and I made another choked sound that was supposed to be a scream.
“They all came to me bad, and I helped them. I taught them how to behave. How to be the good girls they were intended to be.” He patted my cheek like a proud father. “You’re the latest gift, sweetheart. And I’m going to be so gentle with you at first. So patient. And then you’ll understand.”
Oh god…what did that even mean?
Harvey’s boots scuffed softly across the warped floorboards as he crossed to the far corner of the room toward a tall, narrow cabinet that looked like it belonged in a museum of forgotten horrors. The wood was dark and scarred.
He was singing something under his breath, a low tune that might’ve been a lullaby once, back when someone still sang it with love instead of madness. The sound made my skin crawl.
The cabinet door creaked open. I couldn’t see what he was doing at first, but I heard the soft clink of metal, the scrape of something heavy being lifted, and then a low, terrified whimper that wasn’t mine.
When he turned back toward me, dragging someone behind him, my heart stopped.
For a second, I didn’t recognize her. My brain caught on details instead—the swing of dark hair, the bare shoulder, the way her body hung too loose in his grip—before something clicked into place hard enough to make my stomach drop.
I’d seen her at the Hollow that first time Hattie had brought me in. She’d been laughing, dancing under the ridiculous moose head in the middle of the day with the rest of the bachelorette party, completely unbothered by anything in the world.
And now her eyes were wide with that same frozen terror clawing through me, but her body was slack and unresponsive. She wasn’t fighting the ropes around her wrists. Her legs dragged uselessly across the concrete as Harvey hauled her into the center of the room and forced her down into a metal chair bolted to the floor.
She’d obviously been drugged and paralyzed just like me, trapped inside her own skin while her eyes did all the screaming. Harvey straightened her head so she was facing me, like he was arranging a doll for tea time.
“Bad girls need examples,” he said calmly. “They need to see what happens when they don’t listen. When they fight. When they try to leave.”
He pulled a thin needle and thick black thread from his pocket, and the girl’s eyes widened in horror as he threaded the needle with careful movements. “You always laughed too loud when you came into the bar,” he murmured to her in a soft voice as if he were scolding a child. “Good girls don’t laugh like that. Good girls stay quiet.”
The girl’s eyes rolled, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She whimpered.
Harvey pressed a finger against her lips. “Shh,” he said. “No more noise. No more loud laughing.”
He pinched her lips together and began to sew, the needle piercing her skin as the thread pulled tight, stitch after stitch sealing her mouth shut. Her body jerked in tiny, helpless spasms, her muffled whimpers turning to wet, choking sounds as blood welled around each puncture.
I watched, paralyzed, bile rising in my throat as he finished the last stitch, tying it off with a neat knot.
“There,” he said, patting her cheek. “Now you’ll learn to be quiet.”
Her eyes met mine—wide and pleading—as Harvey stepped back to admire his work.
“But you also danced too provocatively,” he continued, his voice still gentle and patient. “Good girls don’t dance like whores. Good girls don’t try and tempt the men around them.”
Harvey picked up a heavy cleaver from a table, the blade dull but thick, and knelt in front of her. Her eyes widened in terror, a choked, desperate sound escaping the sewn mouth as he lifted her foot, resting it on a small wooden block.
He brought the cleaver down hard. The first cut took off her foot at the ankle with a sickening crunch, blood spraying across the concrete. Her body convulsed and her eyes rolled back as she tried to scream through the stitches.
