Of course Michael knew something was wrong. I stared at the words, wondering what the answer was. Based on what was going on in my head, I seemed to be going crazy. But to tell the truth, I wasn’t so sure.
I looked at the crack on my phone screen. I’d dropped my phone when something—maybe something dead—had banged on the door of Julian’s study. I’d thought about getting my phone fixed or replaced, but I hadn’t done it yet. Suddenly I wasn’t sure I was going to.
I opened a drawer in my desk, pulled out the number Detective Joshua Black had given me, and dialed it before I could lose my nerve. “It’s Shea Collins,” I said when he answered.
“Shea.” His voice sounded pleased. “What can I help you with?”
There were a hundred questions I could have asked him, but that wasn’t why I called. Instead I said, “Have you ever hated Beth?”
“On and off for forty years.” He said it without missing a beat, and I immediately knew I had called the right person. “Are you in that phase right now?”
“I’m so angry,” I admitted as I gripped my cracked phone. “I can’t stop. I don’t know what to do about it.”
Detective Black was quiet for a long minute, his breaths somehow soothing on the other end of the line. Then he said, “Shea, I’m going to say something, and you’re not going to like it. But it’s my job to tell the truth.”
I swallowed. “Go ahead.”
“Anton Anders has a parole hearing coming up.”
It was my turn to be silent, the emotions churning in my gut robbing me of words.
“You don’t want to go,” Black said. “I’ve seen it so many times with victims. And for some of them, it’s the wrong thing to go. But you need to go to that hearing.”
“No.” The word was automatic. The letter from the parole board was still buried in a pile of mail. I hadn’t touched it.
I also hadn’t thrown it out.
“Think about it,” Detective Black said. “Because the truth is, you don’t have to sit home, afraid. And you can hate Beth—God knows, I have. But even if you hate her, you have to keep going. Because the truth is going to come out.”
I thanked him and hung up a few moments later. I was calmer now. I woke up my laptop and checked my email.
The first email that came up was a Google alert. I had a few alerts set up for various true-crime cases I’d written about, in case there were any updates. This one was my alert for crimes in Claire Lake. I would read that one later.
The second email that came in was from Michael—the property records on Linwood Street. All I had to do was open the email and start the work of filling in the missing parts.
Instead of being angry or afraid, I could get to work.
I looked again at Michael’s text on my phone: Are you all right?
I let out a breath and texted back: I am now.
* * *
—
The next day, I left work an hour early. Still wearing my scrub top and jeans, my purse over my shoulder, I hurried four blocks from the office to the city courthouse, getting to the records office half an hour before it closed. The records office sent me to the archives office—apparently a different thing entirely—so I lost an extra five minutes wandering the basement hallways, looking for the right sign.
I finally found the archives office and stepped inside. Except for the clerk, I was the only one there.
“I’m looking for the records for these two addresses,” I said, sliding a piece of paper with the Linwood Street addresses on it. “I need the pre-1960 records, and they aren’t online.”
The clerk behind the counter, a fortyish woman with bobbed hair, slid on her reading glasses and scanned it. “That’s over forty years ago. Anything over forty years is kept in a different room. That takes longer.”
That would be my third room in a row. “You can’t get them now?”
She glanced at the clock, not bothering to hide it. “Submit a request form, and someone will contact you in the next few days.”
She was trying to be firm, but I sensed an opening. “We can do this in the next ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll go with you, read the files, and you’ll still go home on time. I promise.”
“Ten minutes?” She looked at the clock again, then looked at me, this time curiously. “Why do you need this so urgently, anyway?”
“I’m a writer.” When she looked at my scrub top, I added, “In the evenings. I’m writing a book.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh. A mystery?”
“Yes, a mystery.”
“I love Lee Child.”
“So do I,” I said, which was actually true. “I’m writing something a little like that, and I have a great story idea. I just want to have a quick look at the file to settle a research point.” To juice the story up, I added, “I think one of these buildings might have been a private psychiatric hospital.”
“An old psychiatric hospital, huh? That’s a pretty good setting.” Her expression softened. There was no one in line behind me, no one else in the room. “Okay, put the ‘Closed’ sign on the door behind you and we’ll go quick. I want to be out of here at five minutes to five.”
Thank you, Lee Child, I thought as she let me behind the counter and admitted me to the file room.
It was a dim, dry place, windowless and claustrophobic, lit with fluorescent light and lined with file boxes. The clerk, who now told me her name was Carole, pulled two boxes and opened them. “There won’t be much,” she warned, “for buildings that old.”
I flipped through the file for the first address, scanning as fast as I could. Normally I would have taken Carole’s advice, filled out the form, and taken my time researching what I needed, but my gut told me I was running low on time. Either there was something here, or there wasn’t. I needed to know.
I didn’t find anything interesting in the first building’s history, and with five minutes to go, I went to the second box. While Carole gave me an impatient sigh in warning, I flipped back in time for the building at 120 Linwood.
And there it was: The original building was built in 1940, and ownership was transferred to something called the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women in 1949. I had never heard of the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women, but I sensed that it could be a lead. I pulled out my phone and took a photo of the records page, then another of a property tax report. There was a record of sale back to a private family in 1956, and I photographed that, too.
“Hey,” Carole said. “No photos allowed.”
“Just one more minute.” I tried to text the photos to Michael, but there was no signal inside the records room. I tried pulling up my phone’s browser to search the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women, but nothing would load.
“Okay, I have to go home,” Carole said. She was exasperated with me. I didn’t blame her. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t know.” I looked for anything else in the file that would give me a clue; there was nothing. I put the file back in the box and helped Carole put the boxes back, feeling foolish. I’d barged in and derailed the last fifteen minutes of her day like I was doing something important, but it was probably a dead end. I bet this never happened to Lee Child.
“So it wasn’t a psychiatric hospital?” Carole asked as we walked back out of the archives room and she locked the door with a key from the ring in her hand. I tried my phone again, but there was still no signal. We were too deep in the basement.
“I don’t know. It was something called the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women. There’s no signal down here, so I can’t tell you what that was.”
Carole had paused and was looking at me with a bemused look on her face. “The Elizabeth Trevor House? I’ve never heard of it, but that wouldn’t have been a psychiatric institution. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“What do you mean?”
“Elizabeth Trevor wasn’t crazy, at least that I know of, so they wouldn’t have put her name on a mental hospital.”