I looked down to see a stack of magazines on the credenza next to the door. The top one was an issue of Life from October 1977. The month of the Lady Killer murders.
There was the swish of curtains, light filled the room, and I caught my breath. The windows looked over a vista of flat lawn, slightly overgrown like out front. It was an empty square, framed on either side by dark trees, and past the end of the yard the land dropped away sharply, leaving only the dark, bruised sky and emptiness. It looked like a cliff over the edge of the world.
“I hate the view,” Beth said matter-of-factly, “but it’s better than the darkness with the curtains closed. If you want a drink, you can go find something in the kitchen.”
“I’m okay,” I managed, pulling my gaze away from the view. If you walked out onto that lawn, I guessed, you’d be able to see over the edge to the ocean, but you couldn’t see that far from here. Just lawn and sky. I watched Beth pick up a glass of something with clinking ice cubes and take a sip.
“You don’t have a car,” she said as she took a seat on the sofa.
She must have seen that I hadn’t parked in the driveway. “I don’t drive,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes a little—my tone was harsher than I’d intended—but she let it slide. “Let’s do this,” she said, picking up the glass again. “How do we start?”
I sat in one of the chairs, a little far from her. Neither of us was ready to get close yet. “Is that alcohol?” I asked, maybe because the car question had cut close to the bone. Most people assumed I didn’t drive because I had DUIs that had led to my license being revoked, which wasn’t true. It had happened so often it made me angry. I wanted Beth to be as unnerved as I was.
Beth’s smile had very little humor as she answered my question. “Not today. Not for eight years now. If you’d asked me in ’09, you would have a different answer. And in ’97 and ’84. That’s the first scoop for your article, I suppose: Beth Greer has been an on-and-off drunk since 1974 or so. She keeps kicking it, then backsliding, then kicking it again.”
“That’s tough,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Third time’s a charm. Before we start, I should tell you that I looked you up.”
I was opening my messenger bag, but I stopped. “Pardon?”
“I had to know that you’re who you say you are. Which, it seems, you are. The name you gave me is real, and you’ve worked for that doctor’s office for five years. I had to make sure you were legitimate before I let you into my house.”
It was almost funny. I was worried about being alone with Beth, but it had never occurred to me that she’d worry about being alone with me.
“What else did you find?” I asked, thinking about what had happened when I was nine. The Incident, I called it. My name hadn’t made the news, as far as I knew.
Beth put her drink down. “Not very much. I let you in. If I’m never seen again, then I guess I took my chances.” She looked at my face. “That’s what you were thinking about me, wasn’t it? That I might kill you?”
“You were acquitted,” I said.
To my surprise, she laughed. Her laugh had bitterness in it, but it also had real humor, and for a second I saw the young woman who had captivated the media for a few months in 1977. Whether she was a killer or not, Beth Greer had charisma that was hypnotic to experience in person.
“You don’t quite think I’m innocent, do you?” Beth said.
What was I supposed to say? I had to tell her the truth. Our entire interview was about the truth. “I have a lot of questions,” I said. “I’ve read so much about this case, and I keep feeling like I can only see a piece of it.”
“Then you’re as perceptive as I thought you were,” Beth said. “The first thing you need to remember is that if there was anything true spoken at that trial, I can’t think of what it is. That trial was all rumors and lies. Did you know they thought I was sleeping with Ransom?”
“I read that,” I said. Ransom Wells, Beth’s lawyer, was older than her and a married man, but that didn’t mean much. “I never believed it.”
Beth leaned back on the sofa. She was in control of her emotions, but her expression was hard. “There were rumors I was fucking everyone,” she said. “In 1977, if you had tits and an ass, you were a piece of meat. And if you got mad about it, everyone thought it was funny. I was a dirty joke—to the cops, to the media, to the judge. The only time they took me seriously was when they thought I might blow their brains out. That was the only time I had them scared.”
I stared at her. I couldn’t summon a single word. My blood hummed in my veins, and sweat prickled the back of my neck, harsh yet somehow pleasant. Beth Greer was telling me the truth. It was amazing, and it was terrifying. This—this was what I wanted. This was what made the rest of my life pale into nothingness. This was a high I didn’t think any drug could match.
“Tell me more,” I said.
Beth picked up her drink, the ice cubes clinking some more. “Why don’t you drive?” she asked instead of answering. “You’re not a drunk like me, so that’s not the reason. Tell me the real one.”
I wasn’t going to tell her. It was my automatic reaction to never tell anyone. Esther knew; so did my parents. My therapists, of course. My ex-husband had only heard the story once after we’d dated six months, and then never again. No one else had heard it, at least from me. So when the words came, I surprised myself.
“I was nine,” I said. “I was walking home from school. A man pulled up in his car and asked if I was cold. He said I needed to get in. He said my parents were waiting for me.” I kept my eyes on Beth, watching me. “I got in. After a few minutes, I realized something was wrong. I asked to get out, and when he said no, I begged. He hit me. I started struggling, screaming. He tried to pin me down and make me be quiet, but he was driving at the same time. When he was distracted and the car slowed, I opened the door and jumped out and ran. I told my parents, and eventually the police found him and arrested him. He went to prison.” I took a breath. “He’s been put away, but it doesn’t matter. He gets out in a few months, and I don’t drive. I don’t feel safe in cars since that day. I hate them.”
There was a roaring inside my skull, like someone had opened the hatch of a spaceship. A presence and an absence at the same time. Everything and nothing at once.
It was my biggest secret, the thing I never talked about. Ever. I had just told my biggest secret to Beth Greer.
I couldn’t read her expression. It didn’t crumple into pity, which was what I’d dreaded. If anything, she looked thoughtful, with no emotion at all. In that moment, she had the face of a woman who just minded her own business, and I had the crazy thought that sometimes it was a relief to be friends with someone who didn’t have any emotions.
“Is that the end of the story?” she asked.
Cold sweat broke out on my hands, and my stomach turned. For a second, I thought I might throw up. “Yes,” I said. “That’s the end of the story.”
I wondered if she knew I was lying.
Who was I kidding? Of course she knew.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
September 2017
SHEA
“Okay,” I said, pulling out my cell phone and turning on the recorder. “Let’s talk about the Lady Killer murders.”
“Let’s,” Beth said, her tone dry.
I looked at her. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in me asking you if you committed them or not?”
She didn’t blink. In the merciless light from the windows, her high cheekbones and large eyes were especially striking. “You’ll form your own conclusions,” she said. “Everyone does.”
I looked around at the old-fashioned figurines, the expensive dark wood paneling, the now-vintage print of a racing horse on the wall. “You were living in this house when it happened,” I said. “Alone.”
Beth waited. She had a talent for stillness.
“Your parents had died, and you’d been on your own for two years,” I said.