PAULA: Does Beth Greer ever call you? Do you guys, like, hang out? Be honest. What’s she like?
SHEA: We don’t hang out. We have talked—I’ll say that she knows my number, and I know hers. We don’t shoot the shit or anything. As for what she’s like, I don’t really know how to describe it. I think the Beth you see in the media, in the photos, a lot of that is the real Beth. It isn’t like she’s at home baking cookies or something. She’s hard to figure out, and she likes it that way.
PAULA: If you guys have wine parties or start a book club or something, call me. I’ll move to Oregon for that.
SHEA: If we do that, I’ll definitely call.
* * *
—
The doctor’s office fired me.
I couldn’t blame them. I’d left work one day a nobody, and then I’d been in the hospital for a month and I’d come back famous—or maybe I was infamous. I never really knew which it was.
It didn’t matter. I was busy. Traffic and memberships on the Book of Cold Cases skyrocketed. I got a lot of interview requests, though I didn’t accept many of them. I started work on an article about my interviews with Beth, the amazing story she’d spun. The article was long, and it was by far the best thing I’d ever written, and, to my amazement, Rolling Stone bought it. After that came more requests—for more articles about the Lady Killer case, and for articles about the other cases I’d researched. I was a guest on a few podcasts, and then, with Michael’s help, I tried the unthinkable: I started a podcast myself. The numbers started out good, and then they got better.
I’d never planned to be this person, talking all the time in the spotlight. I’d never chased fame, and I wouldn’t have chased it now except for the fact that my fame served one important purpose: It kept the spotlight on Beth.
Michael’s private detective business started to climb, too, and he took on better and better cases. Our relationship was serious, and it was the best thing in my life—I was crazy about him, and I thought he felt the same about me. We worked together on a lot of projects, both mine and his, and we spent a lot of nights at either his place or mine. But we mutually agreed that we weren’t living together yet, and we made no mention of marriage. We were both too burned. It was one of the things we understood instinctively about each other without having to talk it to death. There were a lot of things like that with me and Michael.
“I like him,” Esther said when we had lunch together one Saturday in a diner in downtown Claire Lake. “He’s ultraserious, like you are. He’s smart. He likes you. And as the girls say today, he’s a snack.”
I flinched. “Please don’t say things like that. You’re an embarrassing mom already, and the baby isn’t even here yet.”
My sister smiled and sipped her sparkling water with a twist of lime. She and Will had been scheduled for their first round of IVF when they found out she was already pregnant. Now she was quietly happy in a way I’d never seen her, though of course she was still Esther the overachiever. Everything about this baby was being organized to the smallest detail. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a 401(k) already. “You can be the cool aunt,” Esther said. “I’ll be the awkward mom. It works for me. How is the physio going?”
I shrugged and speared a piece of roasted potato—using my right hand, because my left elbow ached almost constantly. “I go as often as I can.”
“Shea. You’re working too much. You had a terrible trauma. You have to take care of yourself.”
“I am,” I argued. “I will. Just as soon as all of this is over.”
Esther frowned. “I know that Beth is over sixty, but she looks pretty healthy to me. You’re exposing her as a murderer. Maybe you should be careful in dark parking lots.”
“I never go into dark parking lots,” I said. “And Beth talks a big game about suing me, but that’s bluster. She doesn’t actually care about murder charges. If she did, she would never have agreed to talk to me at all.”
“I don’t get this,” Esther said. “There’s no such thing as someone who doesn’t care about murder charges.”
“That’s because you haven’t met Beth.”
I didn’t tell her about Beth’s aneurysm. Beth thought her time was limited, and she didn’t care about how the last part—whether weeks or months or possibly years—played out. She’d been tied to that house, to Lily and Mariana and Julian, for forty years. She was done.
At one in the morning that night, my cell phone rang. I was alone in bed—Michael had an early flight to San Francisco in the morning—and I was halfway between waking and sleeping. Winston was curled against my chest, kneading imaginary biscuits on my T-shirt, and he flattened his ears in annoyance when I reached over him and answered the phone.
“Hi, Beth,” I said. She only ever called me at one in the morning.
“?‘An anonymous source’?” she said, not bothering with hello. “Did they actually buy that? I don’t know whether to be insulted or amused.”
“Try both,” I said, using one of Beth’s own lines. She was talking about an article that had just run on CNN’s website, in which I said that “an anonymous source” had tipped me off to the possibility of Beth murdering her half sister in 1978.
“Whatever,” Beth said, sounding more like the twenty-three-year-old she’d been in the seventies instead of a woman who was over sixty. “I also saw the 60 Minutes thing. Were you trying to pull at my heartstrings?”
The 60 Minutes piece was an interview with the wives and grown children of Thomas Armstrong and Paul Veerhoever about the devastation the murders had left in their lives. “No, that was all Michael,” I said to Beth. “I know better. You don’t have a heart.”
“Neither do you.”
I smiled, stroking Winston Purrchill’s grumpy head. “I have a heart, Beth. I just don’t let you see it. How’s Lily? I haven’t seen her since she pushed me off a cliff.”
“What a bitch you are,” Beth said mildly. “I knew it when I first saw you in that park, thinking you could follow me. I knew you’d be a pain in my elderly ass.”
I leaned back against my pillows. “If I’m such a pain in your ass, then why are you calling me?”
“Because Ransom is dead.”
I went quiet, staring into the darkness. I wondered what to feel. Sadness, anger, pity? Try all of them. “I’m sorry,” I said, the phrase we all use when we can’t think of what to say, one that provides no comfort at all.
Beth was quiet for a long moment, and I realized she was collecting herself. I’d never known her to have any kind of strong emotion, let alone one that made her speechless. I was witnessing it now. I waited.
“Well,” Beth said at last, her voice tight. “Don’t think this means anything. There are other lawyers. He left me in the hands of his successor, in fact. I’ve still got some fight in me. So what’s your next move?”
“Your DNA,” I said.
“You must have been so disappointed to find out they didn’t take samples in 1977,” Beth said. “It was blood type they looked at back then, not DNA. But they never even asked for my blood, because they had nothing to compare it to.”
“They’ll get it now,” I said.
“My lawyer is fighting that.”
“He’ll lose.”
The first time we’d had one of these middle-of-the night conversations, it had felt utterly strange. Beth and I were supposed to be enemies. I was trying to get her put away for murdering Lily. But she’d call me, and we’d spar like we had in her living room in the Greer mansion.
I didn’t know why we did this. I just knew it was instinctive for me. Beth understood my obsession with this case because she was the center of it and was as obsessed as I was. And, of course, there was Lily. No one knew Lily the way Beth and I did. No one had seen her, felt her presence, the way we had. It was impossible to explain, which made it so simple when I talked to someone I didn’t have to explain it to.
“Is Joshua talking to you?” I asked her.