Beth stopped talking, and silence fell. We were in the living room of the Greer mansion, surrounded by its musty vintage furniture. Outside the curtains, darkness had fallen. The dinner hour was long over, but neither of us had eaten. Beth had been talking for hours.
The house was still, as if the entire place was listening to Beth. There was no movement past the curtains on the lawn outside. The ceramic mermaid and shepherdess sat unseeing on the shelf behind the sofa, their glassy eyes blank. On the coffee table next to Beth’s elbow was a glass ashtray the size of a baby’s head. I hadn’t noticed it before. It likely hadn’t been used in decades, and yet it was still there, gleaming in the dim light.
“Yes, Shea?” Beth said. “Did you get all of that?”
I grabbed my phone, which was still recording, and jabbed it with my thumb. Then I picked up my papers, though I knew all of the dates by heart. “You’re talking about Christmas 1970,” I said. “Your father died in March 1973.”
Beth’s face was still, pale and beautiful. “Yes,” she said softly.
“What happened in those two years? Where was Lily?”
“Seattle for a while,” Beth said. “Salt Lake City. There were a few months in San Francisco, then Arizona. Those are the places I know of because those are the places I sent money when she eventually wrote me and asked.”
“You sent her money?”
Beth’s smile was bitter. “I didn’t have much money of my own at sixteen, but I sent her whatever I could beg, borrow, or steal. I thought I was helping my poor half sister who had been treated so badly. I was stupid in those days. All I can say for myself is that it was the last time she fooled me.”
“How did she fool you?”
“Because my father was sending her money, too. She’d blackmailed him with threats that she’d start telling the truth about whose daughter she was. My father hated Lily, but it was easier to shut her up than to fight her. At least at first. I think he figured if he just paid her, she’d stay away forever. But I didn’t know about that until after he died. I just stupidly thought the money I sent her was the only money she had.” Beth looked away from me, at the windows, seeing nothing as she spoke. “What you don’t understand, Shea, is that everything is my fault. All of it. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might as well have. Everything is on me.”
The air in the room was cold now, oppressive, hard to breathe. I felt beads of sweat start along my hairline. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I could have stopped her,” Beth said, still not looking at me. “I knew what she was, even then. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone, but I knew. I was the only one who suspected about David. But Lily left town, and I chose to believe it was over. I finished high school and stopped thinking about it, except when I sent her money. I made the same mistake Julian did, but the difference was that I knew better. I knew Lily, and he didn’t. So while I was worried about math tests and the fact that my parents wanted me to marry Gray, Lily was . . .”
I was leaning forward, entranced despite the cold sweat running down my skin. “Lily was what?”
“She never told me,” Beth said. “But I’ll bet there are deaths in those cities, when Lily was there, that no one could ever explain. Unsolved murders, even. They’d be buried under decades of other murders by now, forgotten. But they’re there, like David’s death. Like whatever happened to her foster family.”
The silence was a heavy weight in the room. This was the crux of it, then; this was what Beth wanted me to believe. She wanted me to believe that at eighteen, her sister had become a serial killer.
It wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, I’d been willing to believe that Beth was one herself.
“I should have looked for her,” Beth said. “I should have found a way. She’d given me addresses to send money to. She was using assumed names—Veronica Jenshak, one or two others. I should have taken my money, gotten in my car, and gone to find her. Tried to stop her. Done whatever it took. I think part of her wanted me to do it—to defy my parents, leave town, and go look for her, even if it was only to have her locked up. Part of her wanted me to care. She called me and begged me once. It was the only time in my life I ever heard her distressed.”
My mouth was dry. I was on the knife-edge, listening to her words. “What did she beg you for?”
But Beth shook her head. “That was later—years later. I’d stopped giving her money by then. But before my father died, I was young and scared and stupid. I thought maybe Lily would just behave, be nice, if I gave her the money she wanted. I stayed home, and people died because of it. I don’t have to know who they were to know they died. I just know.”
I wondered if it was possible to find any murders that might be Lily’s. Without an exact timeline, it was nearly impossible. “And then what?” I asked.
“And then two things happened.” Beth ran a hand through her hair and turned back to me. “The first is that I finished high school. It was understood by everyone that I would marry Gray, but I had to finish high school first. After that, it was simply a matter of waiting for him to propose. That was all I was good for—marrying rich. College was out of the question; my parents would never have sent me, I didn’t have my own money, and my grades weren’t good enough for even a small scholarship. So that was that. I was going to be a wife.”
It sounded terrible. “And the second thing?”
“The second thing that happened was that Julian decided that with Lily gone so long and my future all but settled, he was done paying Lily her blackmail money. And he stopped.”
My muscles were tense, aching, my mind racing. “March 1973,” I said.
Down the hall, there was the shush of a tap being turned on in the bathroom.
“I had written to Lily about Gray over the years,” Beth said. “I told her I didn’t want to marry him, to marry anyone. She never answered me about that. Her letters were always short and to the point: how much money she needed and where I should send it. She never even signed her real name. She’d only sign her letters with ‘See you soon.’?” She glanced at me. “Before you ask, I burned every letter after I got it, so, no, you can’t see them.”
I sagged in my seat. She knew me so well.
Beth swallowed, her jaw tight. “Even though Lily never said anything, I knew she was reading my letters. I was selfish. I wouldn’t go find her, but in a way I wanted her to come back and find me. Then one Saturday, I went shopping and my mother went to her bridge club and my father got shot in the face, right in the kitchen over there.” She motioned toward the hall, toward the sound of the taps. I felt queasy, wondering if there was blood running in that sink right now. What I would see if I went in there.
“Lily,” I said.
“I got what I wanted, didn’t I? Lily came back. It changed everything,” Beth said. “Everything. My mother fell apart. Gray’s family got cold feet, because my father was the prestigious one in our family, the CEO. Without him, we were just a silly girl with nice tits and her sad, broken mother. We were an embarrassment, as if murder was contagious. It was easy for Gray and me to break it off—Mariana was so drunk she didn’t even notice. And as an added benefit, all of Julian’s money came to Mariana. And to me.”
“Beth, you don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it wasn’t Lily. Maybe—”
“It was Lily,” Beth said. “I knew she had killed my father, and I never said anything, because I was nineteen and no one would have believed me. I never said anything because I was afraid of her. I never said anything because it was my fault. I’d told Lily about the way the inheritance worked, about Gray. I’d set everything in motion.”
“This is insane,” I said. “All of this is insane.”
“But it’s true,” Beth said. “I caused everything. I knew what my sister was and I didn’t stop it. And six weeks after Julian died, Lily came home.”
* * *
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