“Does that always work for you?” I asked her as we got in the elevator, my purse tucked under my arm.
“Does what always work for me?”
“Ordering people around.”
One of Beth’s eyebrows rose. “Shea, is it lunchtime?”
“Yes.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I guess.”
“Then we’ll have lunch. I don’t see where the confusion is.”
The elevator doors slid open on the ground floor. “You don’t have very many friends, do you?” I asked her.
“I don’t have any friends,” Beth said, her tone blunt. “You know the reason.”
“It’s been forty years.”
“Not in this town, it hasn’t.”
I followed her out onto the street, then down toward the piers. Beth led me into one of the high-end cafés that the tourists frequented. “I’m wearing scrubs,” I said self-consciously as we stepped inside.
Beth swept her gaze down me and up again, assessing. “I don’t see a problem.”
There wasn’t. We were seated immediately in a corner booth and given glasses of water in seconds. I couldn’t tell whether we were favored because Beth was infamous or because she was obviously rich. It certainly wasn’t because of me.
“What?” she asked me, looking at me from above the rims of her reading glasses as she perused the menu.
“I can’t figure out whether to like you, to feel sorry for you, or be annoyed by you,” I replied.
“Try all three,” she said, as if the answer were simple. Then she looked at her menu again. “I think you’d like the lobster bisque.”
Of course she’d order for me. “Okay.” I closed my menu.
Beth closed her menu, too, and pushed back her reading glasses again. “You haven’t called me.”
No, I hadn’t called her. After the interview with the whisper was deleted from my phone, I’d plunged back into real-world research, the kind that was based on verifiable facts. And I had no desire to go back to that house. “I’ve been busy.”
“I thought you wanted to interview me.”
“I do.”
“Well, here I am.” She took a sip of her water. “I suppose Joshua told you a few things about me.”
She was fishing, I realized. Even though Beth was the one who had set up the interview, she wasn’t entirely sure what Detective Black had told me. I hadn’t called her to fill her in, and she wanted to know.
The idea was surprising. I hadn’t thought Beth had any weaknesses. I thought of Black’s bitter voice as he said, We aren’t friends, and I wondered if he was one of them. I also wondered why she called him Joshua.
“It was a good meeting, I guess,” I said lamely.
Beth’s gaze narrowed at me across the table. The waitress appeared, and Beth gave our order. I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t prepared to fence with Beth Greer in the middle of my workday. When I’d gone to the Greer mansion, I’d built up to it, gone in prepared. This time, she’d ambushed me. My instincts told me that if I thought that wasn’t deliberate, I was probably a fool.
But I’d lost our first interview without the chance to transcribe it, and now I had another opportunity. I wanted to know about Mariana. About Julian’s murder. About the Lady Killer murders. The source of all of those answers was sitting across from me. I figured I may as well not let it go to waste.
As the waitress walked away, I pulled my cell phone from my purse and put it on the table between us. “I’m going to record this,” I said. Beth said nothing as I tapped the screen.
When it was recording, I said, “Let’s talk about your childhood.”
She looked at the red light on my recording app for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure.”
“You were an only child, and your parents didn’t have a happy marriage. I think that must have been lonely.”
Beth’s voice was cool. “That’s like saying Mount Everest is tall, but yes.”
“I’m curious about your parents. Tell me about them.”
Beth looked down at my phone again, and when she looked up she had a coldness in her expression that was as blank as stone. “It’s dangerous to ask old people about their childhoods, Shea. Our buried things have been buried for a long time.”
I met her eyes, and then the waitress came back with two bowls of lobster bisque. When she had gone away again, Beth said to me, “I’ve never asked. Are you married? My background check didn’t cover your love life.”
I picked up my spoon, trying to shake off the cold feeling from a minute before. “Divorced.”
“Smart girl,” Beth said. “If my parents had had the guts to get divorced, everything would be different.”
“You said your mother was trapped.”
“She was, and so was my father. Men can get trapped in their own ways.”
“Did your mother have mental-illness issues?”
Beth frowned. “Excuse me?”
“It’s something I heard. That your mother may have spent time in a private hospital when she was a teenager.”
Beth blinked and put down her spoon. “Shea, please elaborate.”
They were simple words, polite even, but my stomach went cold. Beth’s inflection was lifeless, dead, her expression blank. She was waiting for an answer, and I had the feeling that if I didn’t provide it, I would be very, very sorry. Which was crazy, because she was an over-sixty woman having lunch in a trendy restaurant.
I cleared my throat. “I found a source who said—”
“Who? Who said that?”
For a second, I didn’t want to tell her. Then again, why was I protecting Sylvia Simpson and her forty years of judgment? “She was your father’s secretary,” I said.
“My father’s secretary told you that my mother was insane?” Now her tone was incredulous.
“Well, she said—”
“That’s bullshit. My mother wasn’t crazy. My mother was a victim. She lived her entire life in shame.”
“Who was she a victim of? Your father?”
“My parents fought, but my father was never abusive. He was good, in his way.” Beth leaned back in her chair and picked up her spoon, stirring her bisque as if she had just remembered it was there. “I would have loved my father more if he had noticed me. But we never had much to say to each other. I don’t think I’ve ever been very good with men.”
I gaped at her. She’d been accused of murdering two men in cold blood, so no, maybe she wasn’t very good with men. “Well,” I managed, “I guess I know the feeling.”
“You’re not the type that’s very good with men, either,” Beth said, letting her judgment drop without a second’s concern for my feelings. “You’re attractive enough, but I’m going to guess you don’t have a boyfriend.” She pondered me. “Does your family try to set you up with dates? I bet they do. And because of what happened when you were a child, you’re too messed-up to say yes.”
My blood pounded in my ears. How did she know everything? How did she see me so clearly when no one else did? “There’s only one man I’m actually interested in,” I said, “and I’ve never met him in person.”
She raised her eyebrows at that, the topic of her parents forgotten. “I’m intrigued. Tell me.”
And for some reason, I did. I told her about Michael, about our strange setup.
Beth listened carefully, as if this was of keen interest to her. God knew why. But she narrowed her eyes as I talked, paying close attention. Like the last time I’d confessed to Beth, it was intrusive and freeing at the same time. When I’d finished, she spoke.
“Your problem is a simple power imbalance,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means this man knows everything about you, and you know nothing about him. He knows where you live, where you work, the fact that you’re single. Has he told you if he’s married?”
“He says he’s divorced.”
“Which could be a lie.” She paused. “If he’s a former cop, he might know about what happened to you as a child. Or he can easily find out.”
The thought gave me chills. “I’ve never told him about that.”
Beth shrugged. “In return, all you know is what he’s told you over the phone. You have to believe what he says, because you don’t know anything else. That’s a power imbalance, and you know it.”
I shook my head. “Michael’s personal life is none of my business. We have a professional relationship.”