I glanced up through the Plexiglas and watched her absently scratch her temple. She was still beautiful, there was no doubt of that. Still fascinating, at least to me.
No one else in the room noticed her. For most people, the Lady Killer murders were ancient history, a curious footnote, if they had heard of them at all. The frightened fall of 1977 was a long-ago memory or a rumor of a time before you were born. After the trial and the sensational acquittal, Beth had dropped out of the public eye. Information about her over the past forty years was thin, though I knew she hadn’t married or had kids, that she still lived in the mansion, presumably all alone. Whether she was innocent or guilty, there were no more Lady Killer murders. The story seemed to be over.
Beth crossed one leg over the other, turning the pages of her novel.
I wondered if the book was about murder.
“Miss Greer?” One of the nurses poked her head out the door from the exam rooms. Beth put her book away and stood. I looked at her and saw the young woman who had been photographed being led to and from the courthouse, the acquitted prisoner standing next to her attorney, wearing a red shawl and red lipstick. I saw a woman, and I also saw the biggest mystery in the history of Claire Lake.
No one watched as she crossed the waiting room. No one except me.
CHAPTER FIVE
September 2017
SHEA
“I’m taking my lunch break,” I said.
It was early for lunch, but Karen shrugged. I was entitled, and the sooner I went, the sooner I could come back and relieve her. I pulled my purse from under the desk and grabbed my coat.
Beth Greer had taken forty-five minutes for her appointment. Then she’d walked through the waiting room, disappearing into the elevator without a backward glance. I couldn’t have said what possessed me to follow her, but I had the impulse not to let her out of my sight.
The rain had let up today, the sky a chalky gray-blue, the wind carrying the scent of ocean. On the street, people sat at the outdoor cafés or window-shopped, taking pictures of the houseboats on the water. Claire Lake had a neighborhood of citizens who lived on their boats, docked in the marina. They had walkways and window planters, garden gnomes and pinwheel birds, like any other home. In some past decade, the city had made the houseboats legal residences, and subsequent attempts to change the zoning had failed. Now it was one of Claire Lake’s tourist attractions, a pretty spot for people to stroll and enjoy their fancy take-out coffee. People came here to stay in the B&Bs, stroll the tidy, cobblestoned streets, and get away from the bigger, more crowded cities.
Beth didn’t head toward the marina. Instead she turned a corner down a side street. I followed at a safe distance, under cover of the downtown crowd. Beth turned another corner, then another. Then I lost her.
I stood next to a small, shaded park and turned in a circle, wondering which way she’d gone. Then a voice came from the park: “Why are you following me?”
It was Beth. She was sitting on a park bench under the canopy of trees, watching me. She wore sunglasses, the big kind that covered half her face, even though it was a cloudy day. Behind her was a statue of a man getting out of a boat—some Oregon explorer. Beth’s purse was on the bench next to her, and she had one knee crossed over the other. She watched me, waiting politely for an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know who you are.” That sounded vaguely threatening, so I hurried to add, “I’m a crime writer.”
Beth looked me up and down, taking in my scrub top. “You don’t look like a crime writer.”
“I do it in my off-hours. I run a website.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. My name is Shea Collins.”
Beth Greer tilted her head, watching me.
When I was researching my article on the Lady Killer case, I’d found a video on YouTube of Beth right before her arrest. She was getting out of her car and walking up the lane to the Greer mansion. The reporter—a man in a belted trench coat and plaid wide-legged pants, straight from 1977 central casting—had caught Beth as she pulled up and opened the car door. The reporter must have gotten a scoop, because there were no other reporters there. It was raining, and Beth was wearing a trench coat, too. It was an uncanny image, that of a woman in red hair and a trench coat, just like the witness to the second murder had reported seeing.
Beth Greer looked like she could have been walking the Paris runway any time in the twenty-first century.
“Miss Greer!” the reporter had shouted as he followed her, waving his wired microphone. “Miss Greer! Do you have anything to say about the murder accusations against you? Are you the Lady Killer?”
Beth slammed her car door and put her hands in her pockets. She looked at the reporter and leaned toward the microphone. “I’m just a girl who minds her own business,” she said. Her tone was cold and without inflection, almost robotic.
In 1977, everyone thought that Beth Greer’s lack of emotion about being put on trial for murder made her unfeeling, almost unnatural, like a witch. Watching the clip in 2017, I heard in her voice a woman who was sick to death of everything, a woman who had lived through the trauma of her parents’ deaths and was living through a media frenzy, a woman who knew that nothing she said or did would ever matter. It wasn’t that she was unfeeling. It was that she’d stopped caring, stopped being afraid.
I’m just a girl who minds her own business. That woman was looking at me now. The same woman who had possibly shot two men in cold blood and left taunting notes for the police.
“So you want to write about me. Is that it?” Now that I heard her voice, it was unmistakable. It was the same voice from the video. “You’re not the first person to ask.”
“I already wrote about you.” People were passing me on the sidewalk, so I stepped forward, toward Beth, hoping I wasn’t spooking her. Or spooking her more than I already had.
“Then what do you want?” Beth asked me. Not a hostile question. A curious one.
What did I want? I knew the answer to that. I could feel the blood pulsing in my veins, and my thoughts were mercury-quick, as if I were high. “I want to interview you,” I said. I had one shot at Beth Greer—maybe the only shot in my life. “I want to hear what really happened. I want to hear it from you.” I paused. “I want to know what it was like to be you. Back then. And what it’s like to be you now.”
“You’re asking a lot,” Beth said.
“I know.” I supposed I wasn’t a girl who minded her own business. I dug in my purse, looking for a business card—I’d had some printed once, when I had felt the urge to be more official. Now I couldn’t find any.
I found a flyer instead—one I had found shoved in my condo mailbox, that I’d put in my purse and forgotten. It advertised a local Thai place. I found a pen and wrote the URL of my website on it. Beneath that, I wrote my phone number.
I handed Beth the Thai menu, my cheeks heating. “I swear I’m a professional,” I said.
Beth didn’t look convinced, but she took the menu. She didn’t throw it in my face or tell me to mind my own business. She read what I had written, then folded the flyer and tucked it in her own purse. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She waited a second, then waved a hand. “Go back to work, Shea.”
I stood rooted. I couldn’t move until I knew. “Are you going to think about it, or are you going to throw it away?” I asked her. “Just tell me, so I’m not jumping every time the phone rings. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s hard to explain.”
She took her sunglasses off. She had aged forty years, but she still had the eyes of the woman in the YouTube video. “You’re really serious, aren’t you? Are you writing a book or something?”