The Book of Cold Cases, page 22
And then, as they pulled into the driveway, Mariana cried out in joy: “Lily!”
Beth looked, and the coldness came back, the darkness starting to lower again. Because Lily was sitting on the front steps of the Greer mansion, wearing jeans and a poncho, waiting for them to come home. And Mariana’s joy wasn’t forced or false anymore. It was genuine.
Lily stood as Mariana got out of the car, closing the door behind her, forgetting her packages, forgetting Beth. She nearly ran toward her first daughter, and her expression lit up. She stopped a few feet short of Lily, unwilling to hug her, though clearly wishing to. Hugs repulsed Lily, so Mariana touched her lightly instead, brushing her fingertips over Lily’s shoulders, her face.
“You’re so thin,” Mariana said as Beth slowly got out of the car. Lily had lost weight. Her face was thin, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. The poncho was worn and had holes at the seams, and Beth knew that part wasn’t a put-on; Lily must be broke. She herself hadn’t sent Lily any money in months.
“Where have you been?” Mariana was asking, too excited to wait for an answer. “You’ll have to tell me everything. Are you okay? I’ve been so worried about you. When did you get back?”
“This morning.” As Lily spoke, she looked past their mother at Beth, a smile in her eyes. We know a secret, that smile said.
She was ruining everything, everything. She was a monster. “Mother,” Beth said, holding Lily’s gaze.
“Beth, please.” Mariana barely glanced at her. To Lily she said, “Why don’t you come in? I’ll make you a lemonade.”
“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.
“You have to tell me,” Detective Black said, still a few moves behind. “Beth, you’re not stupid. You know how serious this is. Everyone, and I mean everyone, believes this was you. I’m the only one who sees what’s really happening. You’re going to be convicted, do you understand? You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison. I’m the only one who can help you.”
It was a good speech, but Lily had taught Beth well. Everyone wants what they want: That was one of Lily’s lessons. Detective Black wanted to help her, yes. But he also wanted to solve this case. He wanted to be the one to uncover the truth. He wanted justice. He wanted Lily.
No. No one got to have Lily. No one except Beth.
“The Hamlet act is getting old,” Beth told Detective Black. “You’re so torn, aren’t you? You think I didn’t do it, but you also think I’m a lying bitch.”
He looked like she’d suddenly spit on him. “I don’t think that.”
“Yes, you do. I didn’t kill those men, but I could have. I could have shot them while I looked in their faces, watched them die, and felt nothing. That’s what you think, yet you know I didn’t actually do it. It’s driving you crazy, and it’s so boring.”
Black shook his head. There were splotches of red on his cheekbones. “You’re trying to piss me off. But, Beth, I’m trying to help you.”
“No one,” Beth said clearly, slowly, letting the words ring through the cold cell, “no one is trying to help me. No one is coming for me.” Black opened his mouth, but Beth talked over him. She was so sick of people talking over her, of men interrupting her and speaking on her behalf. As if they knew even a fraction of what went on in her mind, as if they knew what it was like to be her, for a day, for an hour. Sometimes she was so angry she wished she’d shot those men herself, which was exactly what Lily understood about her.
“I can help myself,” Beth told him. “I don’t need you. Go home to your kindergarten teacher. Go marry her and make your conventional little life. And don’t ever come back here.”
Now Black had his own flare of anger, rare and welcome, at least to Beth. “You’re being a fucking idiot. I’m the only one who wants to get you out of this—not because you’re paying me a fee, but because I actually want to. If you’re convicted, your life is over.”
“So what? I’m nothing to you. Get out.”
He held steady. “I’m not giving up. If you didn’t do this, then whoever did goes free to do it again. Whoever has that gun. Whoever wrote those notes and shot those men. It’s a woman, isn’t it? You know it is. If she isn’t you, Beth, then she’s going to kill more people until she’s stopped. Are you going to be a part of that?”
“Get out,” Beth said.
“Beth—”
“Get out.”
He left. Beth watched him go as a door closed inside her and another part of her died. She gripped the cold, thin mattress of her jail-cell cot, and she thought, I am not going to live the rest of my life in here. He’s wrong about that. And Lily isn’t going to kill anyone else, either, ever again.
Beth would make sure of it.
She was in jail, arrested for two murders, her lawyer home with his wife and kids. She was alone, at the bottom of a life that had had a lot of bottoms, looking at the rest of her life in prison. It was, by any measure, the worst moment of her life.
And for the first time, Beth Greer finally knew exactly what to do.
* * *
—
Six days later, Beth was taken from her cell to a room lined with folding tables, each framed with dirty glass. On each table was a phone, large and black, screwed to the table, the cord contained under a plastic shield so it couldn’t be used as a weapon. A few of the other booths had women in them, wearing inmate clothes and hunched over their phones, talking to lawyers or husbands or children. The voices in the room were low, sharp, and tense, and the air—like the air everywhere in here—smelled like sweat.
Everyone expected life in jail would break her. Even Ransom, who knew her so well, had his doubts. When he’d finished blustering, he’d asked if he could bring her anything: books, a pillow, an extra blanket. “Don’t let this get to you,” he’d said, worried. “People are watching. That’s what they want. And for God’s sake, don’t talk to your fellow inmates.”
There was no chance of that. Beth had asked Ransom for a sweater and the copy of Moby-Dick she’d always meant to read. The book had always seemed too dense and boring for her, which made it the perfect jail-time read. She spent days in her cell trying to decode the impenetrable prose about whales, ignoring everything around her. The only thing she missed, hard and long like other women missed their babies, was alcohol.
There were few phone calls for Beth in jail. Ransom always came in person, and she had no one else in the world except for Lily. She’d had two calls before this one, both of them hang-ups as soon as she came to the phone, so she knew Lily was afoot. She was playing her game.
This time, when Beth answered, Lily’s familiar voice was on the other end, though she sounded muffled and far away, as if they were talking through a two-way radio. “I bet you’re not sweet anymore,” she said.
Beth had thought she was ready for this—she knew that Lily wouldn’t be able to resist calling. But the first thing she thought of when she heard her sister’s voice was that last day with Mariana, the day they went shopping at the Edengate Plaza. Beth had been alive for twenty-three years, but that was the only day in any one of them that she would get back if she could. The thought choked her, made pain and anger rise up from her stomach into her throat. It was the first time she’d let herself feel furiously angry since the arrest.
“What do you want?” she said.
“What’s it like?” Lily asked. She sounded cheerful, unconcerned. “I admit I’m curious about prison. It’s probably not so bad. Is it full of dykes?”
“Turn yourself in and find out,” Beth said.
Lily laughed. “Are you scared in there? You always were such a coward, Beth.”
Once, before so many people had died, those words coming from Lily would have been hurtful. But Beth wasn’t six years old anymore. She didn’t feel stung. She only felt icy calm, and the certainty that Lily was underestimating her.
Lily’s weakness—maybe her only one—was that she thought she was smarter than everyone. Especially Beth.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” Beth said. As if they were having a normal conversation. Because in Lily’s world, everything was just fine.
“Do tell,” Lily said.
“I’ve been remembering the night our mother died.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Which one of us killed her, do you think?” Beth asked her half sister. “You, or me?”
More silence.
They had never talked about this. There had never been time. After that day when Lily came home, she had stayed at the Greer mansion on and off for two years. She’d show up when she needed money, stay until she and Mariana had a fight, and then she’d take off again. Over and over. When Lily was gone, Mariana would be sick with worry. When Lily came home, Mariana always welcomed her back.
Beth watched all of it, helpless. Mariana never wanted to hear the truth about Lily: that she was a user, a manipulator. That she didn’t love Mariana the way Beth did. That in the stretches when she was away, out of sight, Beth was certain that people were dying. She could never prove it, could never find Lily when she truly wanted to be lost. But Beth knew her half sister, and she knew that when Lily was in one of her cold, angry moods, someone somewhere was going to die.
“She’s just lonely,” Mariana would say in Lily’s defense, over and over. “All those foster homes. She’s starved for a mother’s love.”
I’m starved for a mother’s love, Beth wanted to shout, her inner six-year-old still in pain. But it would have made no difference; Mariana wouldn’t hear it. She had only now edged into the territory in which she could admit, even obliquely, that she was Lily’s mother. She was too fragile for anything more.
Beth stayed silent to keep her mother safe. But when Lily was home, she always hurt her mother, cutting her with words, punching her with accusations: Look at you. What’s wrong with you? You don’t care about me. You never cared. That’s why you sent me away every year.
One night, Lily and Mariana screamed at each other, Mariana with tears streaming down her face. You failed me, Lily shouted while Beth stood in the living room doorway, unable to stop either of them. You never loved me. I hate you. Everything that’s happened to me is your fault.
