“Mother,” Beth said, louder.
Mariana turned and snapped at her, her good mood from their outing gone. “Beth, you’re being rude.”
“No, please,” Lily said. She put her hand on Mariana’s arm, and Mariana stared at the contact, stunned. “I want to hear what she has to say. What is it you’d like to tell us, Beth?”
Beth stared at them. At Lily, so thin and waifish under her poncho after years on the road. At Mariana, beaming at this one small touch from her daughter, her firstborn. The bitter girl, not the sweet.
She killed Julian. Beth was supposed to say the words. She broke into the house and shot him in the face. She shot your husband and left him dead on the kitchen floor. Don’t you care? Doesn’t anyone care?
No one would believe her. And if she could ever prove it was true, it would kill Mariana. It would crush her forever.
It was over. This nice day, her mother’s attention, the possibility that anything good could start to happen. Beth had been a fool to enjoy herself, even for a few hours, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it. She could still feel the warming sun in her hair, still hear Neil Diamond on the radio, still hear Mariana say “honey.” She could still feel that echo of the moment when she looked like she could conquer anything.
She still liked the illusion, even though she knew the truth. She couldn’t conquer anything at all.
“Welcome back, Lily,” she said. “How long will you stay?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
December 1977
BETH
Jail wasn’t as bad as Beth had thought it would be.
She didn’t have to talk to people, for one. She didn’t have to argue or justify herself or make good impressions on people. She didn’t even have to make decisions anymore—Ransom, out there somewhere in the freedom of the real world, made most of her decisions for her. She didn’t have to plan a schedule or decide what to wear or what to eat. She didn’t have to wake up every day in the Greer mansion, breathing its stuffy air and looking at the reminders of her parents in every room. She didn’t have to see the kitchen floor, picture the way the blood had looked pooled on it. She didn’t have to see Mariana’s beautiful clothes in her closet, never to be worn again. She didn’t have to think about anything at all.
Not that Beth wasn’t thinking—she was. Her memories were sharp and detailed, tormenting in their precision. It should have been an overwhelming blur, too much to take in, but for once Beth’s brain wouldn’t shut down, wouldn’t disappear into panic or numbness. She was awake now, maybe for the first time in her life.
Ransom told her the arrest had happened because of the gun. The ballistics had matched the gun from Julian’s murder to the two Lady Killer murders. They didn’t have the gun itself, but they had someone who had seen Beth at the second murder scene. So they’d taken their gamble.
Beth was angry—she knew that. Buried deep down, somewhere beneath the endless buzzing and thinking in her brain, were the hot coals of fury, powering everything. It was sobriety that made things clearer—the forced sobriety of being incarcerated with no access to alcohol. It wasn’t until a few days had passed in her cell that Beth realized her hangover had completely cleared up, that for once she wasn’t a little bit drunk or a lot drunk or living the aftereffects of being drunk. She slept deeply despite her surroundings, and she ate every bite of jail food. She could think for the first time in years. It wasn’t pleasant—if someone had handed her a bottle of wine, she would have upended it and drunk the whole thing, no questions asked—but it was unavoidable. If Beth was going to be forced to think clearly, she may as well try to come up with a plan.
Besides, while she was in the depths of this jail cell, she was safe from Lily.
Beth knew she wasn’t acting the way a terrified, wrongly accused woman was supposed to act—eating, sleeping, not weeping or falling apart. She knew that every guard who saw into her cell, every person she spoke to, was making and spreading a scathing impression of her. She’s cold. She doesn’t talk, doesn’t cry. She doesn’t even look worried. She isn’t sorry those men are dead.
Detective Washington hated Beth, especially after the circus of the arrest. He was furious, as if the whole thing were Beth’s fault. Ransom was high on a wave of outrage, working at his most expansive decibel level. The uniformed cops treated her with a mix of salaciousness and callousness, like she wasn’t a person at all but a pinup photo in a magazine. And Detective Black was miserable, painfully unhappy about the indignities Beth was subjected to, uncomfortable around his partner and the other cops, unable to do anything about it. He was so twisted up Beth almost felt bad for him. Almost.
She couldn’t afford to feel bad for anyone right now. Not even herself.
Her refusal to talk galled Detective Black, she knew. He thought that now that the worst had happened—now that Beth was sitting in a jail cell wearing an oversized jumpsuit—she should finally be a proper woman and fold under pressure. Beth sat in her cell and knew that Detective Black was bound to be disappointed in her. Being behind bars, eating crappy food, being called a murdering cunt—these weren’t the worst things that could happen. The worst things had already happened years ago.
She looked up one day to see Black being let through the door of her cell, the uniformed female guard closing the door behind him. Beth had been given no notice he was coming.
He was wearing a dark blue suit. She wondered if his kindergarten-teacher girlfriend had helped him pick it out. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly combed, though he wore it a little long for a cop. Beth had caught the faintest whiff of aftershave when he’d walked next to her during the arrest, and she knew that if she could lean in and smell his neck, the scent would be pungent and male. Aftershave, Beth thought, was one of the most important scents in any girl’s world. It was the smell of fathers, or uncles, or teachers, or priests, or husbands. Beth’s own father had worn aftershave, but the smell would be different on Detective Black, because sometimes aftershave was the smell of a man who wasn’t, and would never be, yours.
He looked at her for a long moment as she sat on the edge of the cot in her cell, wearing her denim blue jail jumpsuit. It was cold in here, but Beth didn’t cross her arms. She kept her hands at the edge of the bed, beside her hips, holding on as she looked him in the eye.
“Where’s the gun?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” Beth said. The truth, for once.
“Why were you at the second murder scene?”
“I wasn’t.” So much for the truth, then.
Ransom would have a panic attack if he could hear her right now.
Detective Black scrubbed a hand over his face. “You’re covering for someone,” he said. “You know I know it. You know it’s the only answer that makes sense. The question is who. And why.”
Beth said nothing.
“I’ll find the answer, you know. I’ll find who you’re covering for.”
She’ll kill you if you do. “You won’t.”
“You don’t have much faith in me. I’m very good at my job.”
“If I’m convicted, you won’t have to bother.”
Was she going to be convicted? Ransom was her only hope. She had told him to get her out of this, and she knew he was going to use every trick in his book. He did it because she paid him, so she had no sentimental attachment to Ransom. But still, right now he was all she had.