I got that. There was a lot of talk about the psychological effects of divorce, about the emotions and the heartbreak, but no one ever talked about the things. How you had to go through every item you owned, even in your head, and figure out whether it was really something that was yours or not. How you had to pack your things, move your things, haul your things. Throw out your things. Van and I had sold our house, which meant we’d had to empty every closet, every room, one by one, decide what was going to happen to every potted plant and picture frame. It had been excruciating, so exquisitely painful and drawn-out that I never wanted to do it again.
I was living with Winston Purrchill, and that was enough for me.
Still, I was very aware that I was alone with Michael. He was wearing dark jeans, a T-shirt that had a faded Rolling Stones logo on it, and a long leather jacket in a style that at one time had been referred to as a car coat. I’d always pictured him in my mind with a retro look, and it turned out he really had it. And—I had to admit it—I liked it.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked, oblivious to how tongue-tied I was. He put his laptop on the coffee table and took his coat off.
“No, thanks.” I sat on the sofa, next to him but with a few feet of space between us. I was still wearing my scrub top and my sweater, though I slid my coat off. “Let’s start with the birth certificate,” I said.
That was the first gift Ransom Wells had given us: Lily’s birth certificate. According to the certificate, Lily’s name was Lillian Knowles, and she was born in January of 1952. Her mother was Mariana Pattinson, age nineteen. Her father was unknown.
“Knowles,” Michael said, waking up his laptop and beginning to work. “That’s the name they gave Mariana’s baby. They didn’t give Lily Mariana’s maiden name, likely because they didn’t want her publicly connected to the family. But where did Knowles come from?”
We found the name further back in the family tree; it was Mariana’s grandmother’s maiden name. So Lily started life without being given her mother’s name, or her father’s, either.
Lily had spent her life in foster care. The records were sealed—even to Ransom Wells—but there was a one-page summary from a report made in 1969, when Lily was moved from one family to another. Hostile behavior, the report listed laconically under the heading “Notes.” The reason for the transfer was only listed as suicide of family member.
I wanted to shake the truth out of whoever had written those four words and nothing else. Suicide of family member? Lily would have been seventeen in 1969—the year after she’d come to visit Beth with bruises on her face. The next year, when Beth had asked what happened to her foster family, Lily had said, Bad things.
Maybe those bad things had really been suicide. Maybe they had been murder. If murder, was this unnamed family member Lily’s first victim? Or was the first victim David, the groundskeeper?
“I have more questions than answers,” I said to Michael as I handed him the paper. “This is going to drive me crazy.”
“Tell me about it,” Michael said. “Read this.”
It was a newspaper clipping from 1975. A man named Lawrence Gage had been shot in his bedroom in Phoenix, Arizona, in an apparent home invasion. Gage was divorced, and he was in bed alone. The intruder came through a screen door, killed Gage, and took some cash and valuables. No one could think of any enemies Gage, a retiree, could have had. The crime was especially distressing because Gage was shot in the face.
“Another victim,” I said.
“Read the last part,” Michael said.
The final paragraph stated that Gage had lived in Phoenix for four years, ever since he retired. He had moved from Claire Lake, Oregon, where he had spent all of his career running a department store.
If Gage was from Claire Lake, and Lily had killed him in Phoenix—if she was his killer, which Ransom seemed to think—then it wasn’t random. Lily had tracked Gage to a different city. She had targeted him. Why?
Ransom Wells had kept this article in his file all these years. Why?
I looked up. My eyes locked with Michael’s, and we asked each other the question silently before I said it aloud. “Lily’s father?”
“I checked the dates,” Michael said. “Mariana was nineteen when Lily was born. Lawrence Gage lived in Arlen Heights then. He would have been forty-three.”
I thought of Ransom saying, Mariana was taken advantage of, pure and simple. She was practically a child. And then she was ashamed.
“He could have known Mariana’s family,” Michael said. “He was wealthy and ran a department store. They would have moved in the same circles.”
He could have been a friend of the family, which meant he could have met teenage Mariana. Perhaps he had assaulted her; perhaps he had only fooled her. The result was the same either way. Lawrence Gage went on with his life as if nothing had happened, and Mariana was sent to the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women to have her baby in secret. A little girl.
And then, years later, had he woken to see that little girl grown into a woman, standing over him in bed with a gun to his face?
What had driven Lily to the extremes she’d gone to? It was convenient, and so modern, to simply say that mental illness had been the reason. When mental illness was combined with a neglectful and possibly abusive childhood, you had a recipe for a serial killer, or so the research said. You had someone you could put in a box, someone you could point to and say: See? Look at that person. That person isn’t me.
But there was nothing in these papers that said Lily had ever been diagnosed by a professional. There was nothing to say she’d seen a psychiatrist at all. For all her love for Lily, Mariana had never taken her to a doctor or a social worker. There was nothing to show that either Mariana or Beth had ever tried to help her. There was nothing that spoke to how much Lily might have suffered. There was nothing to show that, after being born in secret to the wrong woman at the wrong time, Lily had had any chance at all.
“Lily’s father isn’t named on the birth certificate,” I said. “If Lily found out who he was, it must have been from Mariana.”
Michael looked at the date in the newspaper clipping. “Lawrence Gage was murdered three months after Mariana Greer died. If Mariana had told Lily that Gage was her father, Lily had known it for three months by then. I wonder what took her so long?”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to process everything. I was tired. There were too many gaps in the timeline—too many months and years when Lily had just dropped off the map in a way you could still do in the midseventies, when there was no internet and there were no cell phones. In 1975, a simple fake ID and a crossing of state lines would allow you to start a new, anonymous life.
Michael, who was following my train of thought without realizing it, kept talking as he shuffled through the papers. “Between Gage’s murder in 1975 and Thomas Armstrong’s murder in 1977 is a complete blank. Where was Lily? What set her off to start the Lady Killer murders? And where is she now?”
“I told you, she’s dead,” I said.
Michael narrowed his eyes at me. If he suspected it was Lily I’d seen at the Greer mansion, the presence I had felt, he decided not to ask. Instead he said, “I’d like to see some proof of that.”
“I’d like to see a lot of things,” I replied. “Let’s add it to the list.”
* * *
—
The last pages Ransom Wells had given me were records of charitable trusts. One was a charity for orphaned girls; another was to support single mothers in poverty. Another was a charity to provide mental health services “for teenage girls at risk.” Another was for victims of violence. All of the charities were run by numbered companies. And, according to Ransom’s paperwork, all of the numbered companies were owned by Beth Greer.
I had wondered more than once what Beth had done with her time over the past forty years, since she’d never married or had children and she had no need to work. This was the answer.
“Why did he give us this, do you think?” Michael asked, reading over the papers. His laptop was sitting on the coffee table, and outside it had long ago gone dark.