The Book of Cold Cases, page 16
“No.” The word was automatic. The letter from the parole board was still buried in a pile of mail. I hadn’t touched it.
I also hadn’t thrown it out.
“Think about it,” Detective Black said. “Because the truth is, you don’t have to sit home, afraid. And you can hate Beth—God knows, I have. But even if you hate her, you have to keep going. Because the truth is going to come out.”
I thanked him and hung up a few moments later. I was calmer now. I woke up my laptop and checked my email.
The first email that came up was a Google alert. I had a few alerts set up for various true-crime cases I’d written about, in case there were any updates. This one was my alert for crimes in Claire Lake. I would read that one later.
The second email that came in was from Michael—the property records on Linwood Street. All I had to do was open the email and start the work of filling in the missing parts.
Instead of being angry or afraid, I could get to work.
I looked again at Michael’s text on my phone: Are you all right?
I let out a breath and texted back: I am now.
* * *
—
The next day, I left work an hour early. Still wearing my scrub top and jeans, my purse over my shoulder, I hurried four blocks from the office to the city courthouse, getting to the records office half an hour before it closed. The records office sent me to the archives office—apparently a different thing entirely—so I lost an extra five minutes wandering the basement hallways, looking for the right sign.
I finally found the archives office and stepped inside. Except for the clerk, I was the only one there.
“I’m looking for the records for these two addresses,” I said, sliding a piece of paper with the Linwood Street addresses on it. “I need the pre-1960 records, and they aren’t online.”
The clerk behind the counter, a fortyish woman with bobbed hair, slid on her reading glasses and scanned it. “That’s over forty years ago. Anything over forty years is kept in a different room. That takes longer.”
That would be my third room in a row. “You can’t get them now?”
She glanced at the clock, not bothering to hide it. “Submit a request form, and someone will contact you in the next few days.”
She was trying to be firm, but I sensed an opening. “We can do this in the next ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll go with you, read the files, and you’ll still go home on time. I promise.”
“Ten minutes?” She looked at the clock again, then looked at me, this time curiously. “Why do you need this so urgently, anyway?”
“I’m a writer.” When she looked at my scrub top, I added, “In the evenings. I’m writing a book.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh. A mystery?”
“Yes, a mystery.”
“I love Lee Child.”
“So do I,” I said, which was actually true. “I’m writing something a little like that, and I have a great story idea. I just want to have a quick look at the file to settle a research point.” To juice the story up, I added, “I think one of these buildings might have been a private psychiatric hospital.”
“An old psychiatric hospital, huh? That’s a pretty good setting.” Her expression softened. There was no one in line behind me, no one else in the room. “Okay, put the ‘Closed’ sign on the door behind you and we’ll go quick. I want to be out of here at five minutes to five.”
Thank you, Lee Child, I thought as she let me behind the counter and admitted me to the file room.
It was a dim, dry place, windowless and claustrophobic, lit with fluorescent light and lined with file boxes. The clerk, who now told me her name was Carole, pulled two boxes and opened them. “There won’t be much,” she warned, “for buildings that old.”
I flipped through the file for the first address, scanning as fast as I could. Normally I would have taken Carole’s advice, filled out the form, and taken my time researching what I needed, but my gut told me I was running low on time. Either there was something here, or there wasn’t. I needed to know.
I didn’t find anything interesting in the first building’s history, and with five minutes to go, I went to the second box. While Carole gave me an impatient sigh in warning, I flipped back in time for the building at 120 Linwood.
And there it was: The original building was built in 1940, and ownership was transferred to something called the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women in 1949. I had never heard of the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women, but I sensed that it could be a lead. I pulled out my phone and took a photo of the records page, then another of a property tax report. There was a record of sale back to a private family in 1956, and I photographed that, too.
“Hey,” Carole said. “No photos allowed.”
“Just one more minute.” I tried to text the photos to Michael, but there was no signal inside the records room. I tried pulling up my phone’s browser to search the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women, but nothing would load.
“Okay, I have to go home,” Carole said. She was exasperated with me. I didn’t blame her. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t know.” I looked for anything else in the file that would give me a clue; there was nothing. I put the file back in the box and helped Carole put the boxes back, feeling foolish. I’d barged in and derailed the last fifteen minutes of her day like I was doing something important, but it was probably a dead end. I bet this never happened to Lee Child.
“So it wasn’t a psychiatric hospital?” Carole asked as we walked back out of the archives room and she locked the door with a key from the ring in her hand. I tried my phone again, but there was still no signal. We were too deep in the basement.
“I don’t know. It was something called the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women. There’s no signal down here, so I can’t tell you what that was.”
Carole had paused and was looking at me with a bemused look on her face. “The Elizabeth Trevor House? I’ve never heard of it, but that wouldn’t have been a psychiatric institution. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“What do you mean?”
“Elizabeth Trevor wasn’t crazy, at least that I know of, so they wouldn’t have put her name on a mental hospital.”
“What?” I blinked at her. “Who was Elizabeth Trevor?”
Carole tutted at me with the pleasure of someone who knows an obscure piece of trivia that has finally become useful. “You should brush up on your Claire Lake history,” she said, “especially your feminist history. Elizabeth Trevor was a factory worker who got fired because she got pregnant when she wasn’t married. She campaigned for rights for unwed mothers. In those days, single mothers were discriminated against by employers, landlords, doctors, everyone. Elizabeth Trevor tried to change all that. She was a badass.” Carole nodded. “You’re not looking for a psychiatric hospital; you’re looking for a home for unwed mothers. Are we done here? I’m going home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
October 2017
SHEA
“Jesus, Shea, what is it? I got here as fast as I could.” Michael slid into the booth opposite me, brushing his hair back from his forehead. “I’ve never heard you sound like that.”
Panicked—that was how I must have sounded. Excited. Alive.
I cupped my hands around my hot coffee cup. We were in a diner around the corner from the courthouse. People were coming to grab takeout on their way home from work. I was still in my scrub top under my jacket and was finding it hard to keep warm. The shock was starting to get to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Michael. “I know you were probably busy.”
He shrugged and motioned to the waitress for a coffee. He was wearing a gray T-shirt under a dark brown blazer, a look that was just formal enough that I knew he had been working when I called. “It sounded important. I wanted to hear what it is.”
I let out a breath. “This is going to sound insane,” I said. “Completely insane.”
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“I may have just cracked the Lady Killer case.”
The waitress brought Michael’s coffee, and I watched her give him a once-over before she walked away. Michael didn’t notice. He also didn’t touch the cup. “What did you find?” he asked, his gaze fixed on me.
“Beth’s mother wasn’t mentally ill,” I said. “Sylvia got it wrong. The place Mariana went before she was married, the papers Julian had—she wasn’t admitted to a mental hospital. She was in a home for unwed mothers.”
I watched it hit him, the way it had hit me. The way it was still hitting me, almost an hour later.
“I found it in the file for 120 Linwood,” I said, pulling out my phone and calling up the photos I’d taken of the file. I turned the phone so he could see the photos on my cracked screen. “From 1949 to 1956, it was the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women. There are no records of the place online, but there are articles about Elizabeth herself. She was an activist for the rights of unwed mothers.”
“You’re kidding.” Michael peered closer at my photo, trying to read. “I’m going to send myself this,” he said.
“Go ahead.” I watched as he texted himself the photos. “The timeline adds up,” I said. “Mariana is at the Elizabeth Trevor House before her wedding to Julian. It’s kept a secret. After they’re married, Julian and Mariana have Beth. Then, a few years later, Mariana’s mother dies, and her will leaves everything to Julian instead of Mariana. Including her secret papers.”
“Julian would learn of the secret for the first time,” Michael said. “We have to assume the premarital baby wasn’t Julian’s, then.”
“Probably not, but who knows?” I took my phone back. “Either way, he’d be angry, but especially if the baby wasn’t his.”
“So Beth Greer has a half sibling.” Michael picked up his forgotten coffee and sipped it, thinking.
“A half sister,” I said.
His eyebrows rose. “How do you know the baby was a girl?”
Because I saw her standing at the edge of the drop behind the Greer mansion, her blond hair blowing in the wind. I saw her go over. I’ve heard her voice on my phone, telling me she’s still here. “Think about it,” I said. “The woman’s handwriting on the murder notes. The woman seen at the crime scene who resembles Beth. The fact that no physical evidence ever tied Beth to the crimes. Because it wasn’t her, but it was the next best thing. It was her sister.”
“We need documents.” Michael rubbed his temple. “A birth certificate. Patient records from the unwed mothers’ home. Some type of ID so we can track this woman and find out where she is, what her life has been, if she’s still alive.”
“She isn’t still alive,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
I did. There were some things I knew better than Michael did. The woman who had pounded on the door of Julian’s study had definitely not been alive.
“I’ve been working on the handwriting samples you sent me,” Michael was saying, making rapid notes on his phone. “The Claire Lake PD never released a photo of the original notes, but I’m sure I can find something. A photo we can compare to the handwriting you saw in Julian Greer’s study.” He continued typing, his coffee forgotten again. “It’s possible that Mariana’s first baby died and we’re completely off track, which is why we need records. But to track down this lead—Jesus, Shea, we have so much work to do.”
He was right. We had a lot of work to do, and all of it was important. And it was possible I was wrong.
But I wasn’t wrong. I had heard Mariana’s voice. Is she bitter, or is she sweet?
Sometimes she was so sweet, but other times . . . Well, I don’t like to think about it.
* * *
—
When my phone rang hours later, at one o’clock in the morning, I wasn’t sleeping. I knew who was calling. I picked up the receiver and said, “Beth?”
“I can never sleep,” Beth said. “Can you?”
I sat up, wide awake. “I won the game,” I said.
“Did you?” Her voice didn’t have its usual fight. She sounded tired, so tired.
Still, I pushed on. “Your mother had a child before she married your father. You have a sister. I’m going to find her.”
Beth sighed. “You’re going to regret that. But, then, it’s too late. You’ve already met Lily.”
Lily. “Is that her real name?”
“What a curious question,” Beth said. “It’s the only name I’ve ever known her by. And I’ve known her a long, long time.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“If you already know the answer, why are you asking the question?”
My spine tensed. Next to me on the bed, Winston Purrchill gave me a look of displeasure as I disturbed his sleep. “I saw her,” I said. “Standing behind the house. She was blond. Pretty, I think. She went over the edge. Is that what happened, Beth? Did she jump?”
There was a short, bitter laugh on the other end of the line. “Lily would never have killed herself. That would have been too easy. She was showing off, trying to scare you. You’re lucky. You should see what she does to the people she doesn’t like.”
And there it was—the crux of everything. When you looked beneath the files and the records and the search for proof, this meant that the pretty girl I’d seen with her blond hair blowing in the wind had been the deadliest serial killer in Claire Lake history. She had shot two men point-blank in the face. She had killed Julian Greer and left him to bleed on the floor.
“Who was she?” I asked Beth.
“There are so many answers to that question.” Beth’s voice was slurring a little. She sounded drunk, but she didn’t drink. She must have taken a pill. “She was the shame of my mother’s life. She was the person who ruined mine.”
“And yet you covered for her crimes. You went to trial for her. You nearly went to death row.”
“I had my reasons,” Beth said. “If you knew Lily, you’d understand.” She paused, and then her voice lowered to a slurred hush. “I think I hear her now.”
“Beth?”
There was quiet on the line, rustling. Then Beth said, “Come tomorrow, and I’ll tell you. It’s time. This is all going to be over soon, and I’m so damned tired.”
I felt a bolt of alarm at the idea. “Beth, I don’t want to come to that house.”
“No, but you will.” Despite the drugged tone of her voice, she still had that imperious way of talking. “You will. Here she comes.”
She hung up. I stared into the darkness, thinking about Beth spending the night alone in that house, with whatever lived there. About spending every night there for forty years.
Tomorrow—today, technically—was Saturday. I could get up in a few hours, get on the bus, and go to the Greer mansion to hear everything.
Or I could stay home, and avoid whatever waited in that house for me.
I lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and wondered which one I would do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
November 1960
BETH
At age six, they told Beth she was lucky. She was living in a big house high above the ocean, with a backyard that looked over the water. She had a room all to herself and no siblings to argue with. She had all of her parents’ attention and never had to share it. She went to private school, where she wore a uniform of a navy blue skirt and a dark green sweater that was very becoming against her red hair. Beth is pretty and extremely bright, her teachers told her parents, though it puzzles us why she doesn’t talk much in school.
Oh, don’t worry about that, her mother told the teachers. Beth is just lonely. It’s how she’s always been.
In the evenings after school, Beth would sit in her room and study a little—everything was so easy—but mostly she’d look out the window. Her parents didn’t want her company; children were to be seen, not heard or really spoken to. Her parents didn’t want each other’s company, either, and most nights one or the other of them was out. That didn’t bother Beth, because she believed that was the way everyone’s parents were.
So Beth would sit alone in her window seat, looking over the darkened back lawn, which sloped down to the ocean. The lawn was vast and green and empty. It did not have a swing set or even a patio. The house ended, and there was just green and then endless water, as if the world were waiting to swallow the house whole.
Beth did not play on the lawn. She didn’t practice cartwheels on the grass or go down to the ocean and put her toes in the cold water, balancing in her bare feet on the wet rocks. She didn’t take her dolls out there to have tea or pretend she was an explorer with her stuffed animals as her assistants. She wasn’t expressly forbidden to do those things—her parents paid little attention to what she did, even when they were home—but the fact was, she didn’t want to. The lawn wasn’t a good place.
There was no part of this house that was a good place, really.
But still, people said she was lucky. She was. The house so beautiful, so big. The fact that it wasn’t good didn’t seem to matter to the people who told her she was lucky. Those people didn’t have to live here.
If someone had asked her—which no one did—what exactly was wrong about the house, she couldn’t have said. There weren’t creaks or cobwebs or groaning ghosts. It was something about the high ceilings, the elaborate moldings, the slightly off angles of the rooms when you walked down the corridors. There was an older house that had been partly torn down and remodeled into a newer one, and the old house didn’t like it. It was still in pain. It was a silly, childish thing to believe, and yet when she lay in bed at night, she imagined it was true.
