1
Mrs. Smith
Cold Harbor, Long Island, New York
June 1982
Mrs. Smith read the final sentence of theCosmoarticle titled “How to Eat Like a Thin Person” and flung the magazine aside in disgust. It struck the water hard, creating several tiny tsunamis that rose over the lip of the hot tub and splashed down onto the bathroom floor.
The cover model, a brunette with feathered hair and a hesitant smile, began to sink. The water added shadows to her pearl-smooth skin and twisted her smile. As she sank, she seemed to be staring up at Mrs. Smith, silently begging to be rescued.
Mrs. Smith stared back. She didn’t think the brunette looked like a supermodel. She looked like a frightened child wearing an ill-fitting dress and too much makeup.
Mrs. Smith had seen plenty of frightened children over the course of her very long life and hadn’t felt an ounce of pity for any of them. She’d never shown them mercy or sympathized with their plights.
She expected them to be scared when she was close by. After all, even simple creatures knew when they were about to die.
For a brief moment, Mrs. Smith wondered what it was like to be afraid. But she was unable to comprehend the emotion. She had never cowered in terror. Never scrabbled backward, searching for a place to hide. Fear was for the weak. For prey.
Mrs. Smith was a predator.
The heavy magazine slowly dragged the cover model deeper under the water’s surface, but Mrs. Smith grew tired of the girl’s insipid face, so she pushed it to the bottom of the hot tub with a curved nail, thick and black as an old fishhook.
The magazine’s pages fanned outward like the wings of a manta ray. The sight stirred a familiar longing in Mrs. Smith’s bones, so she sank lower into the tub, submerging as much of her body as she could. There, in the saltwater tank that kept her scaly skin hydrated through the interminable hours of daylight, allowing her to rest in safety and seclusion, she closed her eyes and thought of her children.
She would be with them again when darkness fell.
Tonight, after her neighbors were asleep, she would leave her cage of a house, where she was confined to tanks and tubs like a minnow in a bucket. Without the sun shining its spotlight on her, arousing the curiosity of the neighbors and the boats in the harbor, she could walk down to the beach. She would cast off her robe and leave it crumpled on the boathouse floor, her naked body electrified by the salt-kissed air. Her feet, too large to fit in women’s shoes, would ache to sever contact with the dry land. Her long arms would stretch forward to meet the embrace of the incoming tide.
Soon, she would swim.
Soon, she would hunt.
Until then, she would wait in her hot tub. She would wait and consider the message of the magazine article. She wouldhear the words of the woman who wrote to the editor echo inside her mind like whale song.
“Help!” the woman had written. “I can’t lose any weight because I’m always hungry!”
Mrs. Smith suffered from the same affliction. She, too, was always hungry.
She ran her tongue along her teeth, which hung like icicles from the roof of her mouth, and considered the words of the woman who’d written the editor, searching for answers. The woman wanted to shed twenty pounds before her wedding but couldn’t seem to control her appetite.
Mrs. Smith couldn’t control hers, either. For her own protection, she ate many things she didn’t want to eat. She ate food that sustained her. Food that kept her alive but failed to satisfy her cravings. No matter how much she bit and chewed and swallowed, the hunger remained. It burned in her belly, refusing to let her sleep for more than a few hours. It called to her, even from her fragmented dreams.
The hunger would not be satisfied until she’d consumed the sweetest of all flesh.
Soon, she would have her fill of it.
Soon, she would feast.
2
Natalie
Natalie Scott checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror one last time before climbing out of her station wagon.
As she moved through the employee parking area behind the Gold Coast Realty offices, she wished she had a more stylish car. Like Beth Pulaski’s Jag.
But a sporty little two-seater wouldn’t work for Natalie. Not with three kids and two dogs. And where would she put groceries for a family of five? Or plants? Or suitcases?
