“Fuck him, then,” she said.
I nodded. What was the difference, I wondered, between a sociopath and someone who does everyday lying to make other people feel better? “Definitely,” I said. “And don’t come to your senses.”
She looked surprised. “You think?”
“I think.”
“He says he misses me, but when we were together I annoyed him like crazy. He never wanted me around. He practically packed my things. So why does he miss me now?”
Van had tried a let’s-try-again line two weeks after he left. I was surprised at first, but then I remembered how much he hated shopping and cooking, which he’d left to me. He had probably starved for those first two weeks. “Splitting up is hard,” I said to Alison, “but if it’s the right thing to do, then it’s worth it.”
She stared at the extinguished cigarette in her hand, as if wishing she could relight it. “He says he wants the cat. He barely noticed we had a cat, so I took it with me when I left, because he wouldn’t get fed otherwise. The cat, I mean.” She frowned. “Now he says he wants to discuss the cat. What does that mean? Who wants to talk to someone so badly that they discuss a cat they don’t care about? Still, I could just give him the cat and he might go away. What do you think I should do?”
I thought it over. I thought about what it would be like to be married to someone who sat in a parking lot, reading a book, waiting for you to come to your senses, and give him what he wanted, whether he’d ever said he wanted it or not. I’d rather be single until I died.
I shrugged. “Don’t go back,” I said, “and don’t give him the cat, either. That’s my advice. But then again, I haven’t seen my therapist in a long time.”
She looked shocked at that, and then she nodded. By the time I got in the elevator, I heard her door close without another word.
CHAPTER TEN
September 2017
SHEA
On Sunday, the sky was dark and lowering, the air damp. The salt smell blowing in from the ocean was getting stronger as I took the bus to Beth Greer’s neighborhood. Arlen Heights was built on a slope that rose above the marina downtown, ending on a bluff overlooking the water. The wind was sharper here, but the view was beautiful, a vista of the town below and the vast and empty Pacific.
My parents had never been rich; my father worked for an auto parts company, and my mother was a substitute teacher. During my childhood, we lived in one of the small houses in Claire Lake, away from the piers and the tourists. As a child, I walked every day through my quiet neighborhood to my school, past well-tended shrubbery and a park with a baseball diamond. Lots of people think that nothing bad ever happens in a place like that, but it isn’t true.
Arlen Heights was different. The houses were spread out, set far back from the winding streets, which were kept narrow and rough on purpose, as if that made the place more real. I saw one elderly man with a dog, a woman doing a brisk walk, and no one else as the bus pulled up to the stop. As it drove away, the silence descended.
I shifted my messenger bag and walked down the street toward the Greer mansion. I pulled my phone out and texted Michael.
I’m on my way to the interview. She isn’t going to kill me, right?
Unlikely, he replied. But I can track your phone if it makes you feel better.
I thought about it. I had a lot of rules about meeting strangers, but this was Beth Greer. It’s fine, I texted back. She isn’t Ted Bundy. I think. Besides, I have a confession. If Beth Greer murders me, I don’t think it’s the worst way to go.
His humor, as always, was equally grim. At least you’ll make the history books. I’ll make sure of it.
My fingers hovered over the screen. I had something else to say, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Did I want him to tell me I wasn’t crazy? I already knew there was plenty wrong with me. Maybe I wanted to tell him the truth about me. Maybe I just longed to hear someone say, You’re trying. You’re doing the best you can. Or maybe I really did want him to reassure me that Beth wasn’t going to kill me.
She’d been acquitted, after all. But her own lawyer had said of her: I know pure evil when I see it.
I was breaking every one of my careful rules. I was going to an accused murderer’s house alone. For someone who lived like I did, this was the height of insanity. And I was looking to Michael, a complete stranger, for reassurance. Statistically, it was Michael who was more likely to be Ted Bundy, not Beth.
This is why you don’t have any friends, I thought. Or any actual dates.
I had Xanax in my purse, but I didn’t take it. I wanted to be sharp. The Xanax was a gesture from my doctor when I had a series of anxiety attacks after the divorce. Sometimes just knowing you have it lowers the anxiety, she’d said. Just knowing I had pills did not, in fact, lower my anxiety, but I carried them with me anyway, in case the theory started working.
I turned up the drive to the Greer mansion, taking in the sight. Something about this house always fascinated me. It was half pseudo-Victorian, half midcentury, an unlikely mix of peaked gables with yellow brick, brown wood, and glass. It was ugly—very, very ugly—but it drew the eye, moving your gaze over one line and then another, as if every time you looked it created itself anew. Julian Greer, Beth’s father, had bought this house and remodeled it. He’d also died in the kitchen, shot by an unknown robber in his home.
The lawn was slightly unkempt, as if it hadn’t been tended in a while. Shading the house was a heavy overhang of mature trees, their branches brushing the rooftop and the windows. There was a single car in the driveway—an expensive Lexus—and no other sign of life. The silence seemed to envelop me as I knocked on the front door.
Beth answered immediately. She was wearing cream linen pants and a dark brown blouse that was tailored at her narrow waist. For a second, her slim figure and the seventies color combination threw me back in time, until I saw her gray hair with her reading glasses pushed back into it. She looked me up and down. “Come in,” she said.
I followed her inside. We walked through a tidy foyer to a living room, an open space that took up much of the lower level of the house. I paused, taking in the decor in surprise.
I felt like I’d stepped into an old photo album. The room was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows—now covered with curtains—lining the back wall. A sectional sofa in burnt orange and two matching chairs were arranged around a coffee table. The entire room was a throwback from forty years ago: an olive green knotted rug on the hardwood floor, the sectional low and flat with overstuffed arms, the coffee table made of heavy wood with angled legs. A bookshelf lined one wall, and I glimpsed vintage author names: Leon Uris, Sidney Sheldon, Alex Haley, Jacqueline Susann. There were ashtrays on the end tables, though they had no ashes in them and the room didn’t smell of smoke. The lamps had ceramic bases and triangular shades that were genteelly yellow with age. On a shelf behind the sofa was a ceramic mermaid with red lips and blue eyeshadow, her nipples coyly hidden by seashells. Next to her was a ceramic shepherdess with a crinolined dress and a crook in her hand, her bonnet flopping over her forehead.
There were people right this minute who would pay thousands of dollars to get a vintage look like this; the Greer mansion was the real thing. It was clean and tidy, but nothing here had been replaced since before I was born.
“I suppose we need some light,” Beth said, walking to the back wall. The curtains were cream with a dark brown diamond pattern, another vintage look that exactly matched Beth’s outfit. For a moment, it was a weird portrait of a midcentury Miss Havisham.