The Book of Cold Cases, page 28
I moved my good leg and my good arm, pulling myself forward. I slipped and fell, then got purchase again. The pain was so bad I screamed, over and over, as I inched another step, and then another.
Did something touch the back of my neck?
I crawled faster, letting the pain wash over me. This is it, I thought grimly. Drowning or hypothermia—that’s how I’m going to go. Or maybe Lily will just grab me and finish me off. She could push my head under the water, kill me the way Beth had killed her. If she bothered, I wouldn’t be able to put up much resistance.
My body was shaking—adrenaline, fear, pain, shock, and cold taking over. My vision was blurred. I thought I saw a shape moving from the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be sure. I lurched to the left as my damaged knee buckled again, and reached out with my good hand to break my fall. I was emerging slowly out of the water now, into the shallower depths on the rocky shore, beating the incoming tide.
My elbow was broken. I knew it; the pain was too much, and I could feel bone grind against bone as I limped over the rocks. I blinked and realized that there was something red in my eyes. I touched my forehead and found a gash, open and salty and bleeding. I pressed my fingers to it, remembering some long-ago first-aid tip about stanching a wound. My neck was wrenched, and even my teeth hurt. Where was I going to go from here? Where was the nearest house? My bag and my phone were long gone, vanished into the ocean, and, despite my situation, I mourned all of those interviews, all of my notes, drifting away on the current somewhere.
I managed to get into knee-deep water, and then I turned course along the shore, parallel to the cliffs. With the blood slowing its flow into my eyes, I could see that I was heading in the direction of Claire Lake proper, away from Arlen Heights. Far in the distance, the cliffs tapered down, toward the inland lake that gave the town its name. To my right were the cliffs, and to my left was the ocean. The only way to go was forward.
I didn’t know how long it would take me, and I didn’t know if I would make it before the tide came all the way in. My feet had long ago gone numb in their sneakers.
But I sloshed one foot in front of the other, and I started to walk.
* * *
—
I didn’t know how long I walked—it felt like hours. I was limping harder, barely able to put weight on my bad knee, and now that my arms were out of the water my left elbow was starting to swell. The sleeve of my shirt was tight and getting tighter, and the rising tide was up to my thighs.
I realized sluggishly that the wall of cliffs to my right had diminished. There was a path leading up the rise, and then a low wrought iron fence. I could glimpse something bright blue and bright yellow past the fence—a children’s slide, I realized. It was a playground.
The sky was getting dark, though I still had no idea what time it was. I changed course, leaving the water and pulling myself painfully up the path. There was no one on the playground. I limped to the swing set and lowered myself to one of the swings, shaking with cold.
There was a creak, and then movement at the corner of my eye, and a little boy appeared. He was seven or eight years old, maybe, wearing rubber boots and a thick wool coat, a wool cap on his head. He had come around the corner from the monkey bars and stood looking at me with his big brown eyes, keeping a wary distance away.
“Hi,” I managed to say, wondering how to sound unthreatening when sitting on a child’s swing, shaking and shivering and bleeding, my arm twisted at the wrong angle. “I’m hurt. Can you help me?”
The boy rubbed his fingers together in a nervous gesture, watching me but not coming any closer. He didn’t speak.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked him.
He pointed behind him, though I could only see the monkey bars and the other side of the fence.
“What’s your name?” I asked him as pain throbbed in my feet, which were no longer as numb as they had been in the ocean. My knee was seizing up, too; there was no way I was ever getting off this swing.
The boy spoke softly at first, and then he repeated himself: “Toby.”
“Toby,” I said. And then it hit me—this lonely place, this little boy, the absence of any other kids or parents. “Are you real?”
His eyes went wide. “Are you?”
Would a ghost ask me that? I didn’t know. Maybe not. “Yes,” I said. “I’m real, and my name is Shea. I need help. Can you find your mother for me?”
Toby took a step back, but he was still staring at me.
“Please,” I said to him, my voice thin with pain.
“Toby!”
A woman came through the gate, running. She was wearing jeans, a thick sweater, and a thick coat. She resembled her son, her hair in short twists, and she looked alarmed. “Toby, I told you not to go to the monkey bars! Get away from that lady!” She stopped when she got to the boy and looked at me. “Oh my God.”
The world faded out for a second, then came back into focus. “I had an accident,” I managed as the woman pulled her cell phone from her back pocket. “Can you call an ambulance, please?”
Stay awake, I thought as the woman dialed 911. Another half-forgotten piece of wisdom—weren’t you supposed to avoid passing out? Was that for a concussion or hypothermia? I couldn’t remember. I gripped the cold chain of the swing and tried to stay upright. I looked at Toby, whose back was pressed into his mother’s legs now. He was still watching me.
“Why didn’t you ask the lady?” he said as his mother spoke into the phone.
“What?” I said.
“The lady behind you. Why didn’t you ask her? Didn’t she want to help?”
I stared at him. I didn’t want to turn around. I couldn’t. “There’s a lady behind me?” I asked the boy, my voice almost a whisper.
He shook his head. “Not now. Before.” He pointed to a spot right behind the swing set. “She was right there.”
I could hear a siren, far away now but getting closer. Toby’s mother held the phone to her ear with one hand, and she dropped her other absently to her son’s shoulder, keeping him close.
Everything spun, and I gripped the swing chain tighter. “Toby,” I said, “I want you to promise me something. If you ever see that lady again, don’t talk to her. Run.”
I thought maybe he nodded. But I couldn’t be sure, because the world faded and I closed my eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
October 2017
SHEA
When I awoke, the first thing I saw was Michael.
He was sitting next to my hospital bed, absorbed in reading something I couldn’t see. He was wearing a black zip-up hoodie, and he had several days’ worth of dark stubble on his jaw. He had a frown of concentration between his eyebrows, but when he heard me move it disappeared as he looked at me.
“The drugs are wearing off,” he said in a gentle voice.
They’d been wearing off for a while. I’d opened my eyes once before, though I had no idea how long ago. That time, no one had been in the room. I saw the empty coffee cup next to Michael and guessed why he’d been gone last time.
“I can’t move,” I said, my voice a croak.
Michael reached to a table out of my line of sight and brought a cup of water with a straw, putting the straw to my lips. “Your elbow is broken,” he said as I drank. “So is your knee. Two fractured ribs, the gash on your forehead got ten stitches, and you were halfway to hypothermia. Still you walked three miles. No one knows how you did it.”
Lily, I thought as I let the straw go. But no, that wasn’t right. Lily had been there somewhere as I walked, but she hadn’t done it for me. I’d done it myself.
Lily might have pushed me over the edge, but everything after that had been me.
“Your sister was here,” Michael said as he put the cup of water away. “She wanted to take leave from work, but I told her to go and I’d call her if you woke up. Which I’m going to do shortly.”
Esther would be worried. Really, really worried. What she wouldn’t know yet was that now, at what looked like my lowest point, it was finally time for her to stop worrying about me. “I have to tell you something,” I said to Michael.
“Yes, you do,” he said. He was calm, confident, and sure, concerned without being rattled, and I knew to my bones that I’d picked the right man. That he’d be what I needed him to be. “I hope it’s a story about how you fell over the cliff behind the Greer mansion and ended up in the ocean.”
“How did you know that’s where I went over?”
“Because Beth Greer says her motion sensors went off and you told her you were at her house.”
I felt my first pulse of trepidation. “Beth is here?”
Michael gave me a look. “Of course not. She called someone, though it wasn’t me, and told them. I heard it through official channels.”
That sounded like Beth: manipulating as much as she could without getting directly involved. I felt the fire of something burn deep in my belly. Revenge, maybe. “Listen,” I said to Michael.
He turned his dark eyes to me. “I’m listening.”
I took a breath, organizing my thoughts, and then I started. “When I was nine, I was walking home from school. A man pulled up beside me in his car.”
This wasn’t the story he was expecting. I saw a flicker of recognition cross his eyes, but he didn’t interrupt.
“He asked if I was cold, and then he told me my parents were waiting for me and he had to take me to them. He told me to get into his car, and I did.” I lay back against the pillows. The painkillers were definitely wearing off, and everything was starting to hurt, but I was used to pain now. I had to get this out before they gave me pills that put me to sleep again. “I knew something was wrong almost right away,” I told Michael. “It was a gut feeling, even though I was only a kid. We weren’t heading in the direction of my house. I asked if I could get out, and the man said no. Then he put his hand on my leg, trying to push it under my uniform skirt.”
There was silence in the room except for the busy murmur of the hospital outside. Michael looked tense, but still he didn’t interrupt, and again I knew I’d picked the right man. “I won’t go into details,” I said. “We struggled. He didn’t manage to sexually assault me, because he was still driving the car. He did hit me hard enough to make me bleed. The car slowed down and I got the door open. I jumped out and ran.”
Michael closed his eyes. His breathing was a little harsh.
“I was sure the man was chasing me,” I said. “I thought he would get out of the car and run after me, or that he’d circle the block, looking to grab me again. I didn’t think he’d just let me run.” Pain throbbed up from my broken elbow, and I tried not to wince. “I ran into a stranger’s backyard and hid in the garden shed. I crouched in there, barely daring to breathe, jumping at every sound. I had no idea how long I stayed in there, but I found out later it was three hours. It was winter, and by the time I got home it was fully dark and I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet.”
Michael opened his eyes again, his jaw working as he bit back whatever he wanted to say.
“My parents were frantic,” I said. “There were police at my house. My father was crying. I’d never seen my father cry. I didn’t think it was possible. They were in a panic because I hadn’t come home from school, and when my parents called the police about it, the police had showed up in minutes. They were alarmed because a girl had been found dead fifteen miles away, and they wanted to be sure it wasn’t me.”
Finally, Michael spoke, and though his voice was tense, he kept it low. “Anton Anders,” he said.
“He didn’t chase me,” I said. The words were harder to get out, because I was gritting my teeth through the growing pain. “He didn’t come after me at all. When I ran, he drove to a different neighborhood and waited near a schoolyard. He picked up a girl named Sherry Haines. She was nine, just like I was. He raped and murdered her and dumped her body by the side of a two-lane highway. He did all that in the three hours while I was hiding in the shed.” I looked at Michael. “You know the Anton Anders case, I assume, since you were a cop, and so were your father and uncle.” When he nodded, I said, “I was Girl A. I am Girl A. She’s me.”
“I wondered about it,” Michael admitted. “The way you reacted when I said that Joshua Black solved the Sherry Haines case. It seemed personal somehow. You’re the right age to be Girl A. I could have gotten access to the files, found your name for myself. But I didn’t.”
“You’re supposed to be nosy,” I said.
He looked at me and saw that I was trying, however weakly, for humor. A smile touched the corners of his handsome mouth. “Professionally nosy,” he corrected me. “If you wanted to tell me, I figured you would.”
He was right. “If I hadn’t hidden in the shed,” I said, “if I’d gone straight home and my parents had called the police, maybe Sherry Haines would still be alive.”
“Or maybe not,” Michael said. “Maybe he would have found a different victim on a different day. They’ve never been able to tie Anton Anders to any other cases, but no one who looks at the Sherry Haines case believes she was his first victim. He was too practiced. You were a terrified nine-year-old girl who had just been assaulted, Shea. Nothing was your fault. Nothing at all.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve thought about every angle for the past twenty years. I know I’m not to blame. But I’m not a little girl this time around.” I shifted in the bed as the pain got fiercer. “Don’t call a nurse yet,” I said when Michael reached for the call button. “Just listen. Beth Greer murdered her half sister, Lily, in 1978. She hit Lily over the head with an ashtray in the master bedroom of the Greer mansion, then drowned her in the bathtub. Then she dumped Lily’s body in the thick of the woods at the end of Claire Lake. Lily has been there all this time, until her remains were found a few weeks ago.”
“Jesus Christ, Shea,” Michael said, shocked. “Did Beth confess?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how do you know this?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” Behind Michael, the door opened and a nurse came in. She pulled a wheeled tray with her: a blood pressure cuff, pills in a small paper cup. I ignored her and put my good hand on Michael’s arm. “Call your cop friends,” I said. “And call Joshua Black. Tell all of them that Beth killed Lily Knowles because Lily was the Lady Killer. It’s her remains that were found, that I messaged you about. DNA will prove it if they do a test. For all I know, Beth is going to try and find some way to stop all of this from happening. Call them now.”
“You’re awake,” the nurse said, coming along the other side of my bed. “We need a moment, please,” she said to Michael.
“Shea, this is crazy. If Beth didn’t confess, there’s no way you can know this.”
“Lily killed all of them, including Julian,” I said. “We’ll give them everything Ransom gave us. We have to re-create the timeline and look for murders we didn’t know about before. Mariana was an accident. She drank too much, or maybe took medication, after a fight with Lily. She thought she was going to find Lily, to apologize to her, when she got in that car.”
“Um,” the nurse said, probably shocked. But I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Michael.
His gaze held mine. He guessed how I knew, maybe. I had too many details. I had seen it.
But like he’d said before, if I wanted to tell him, I would.
“This is it, isn’t it?” he said. “This is the end after all these years.”
“This is the beginning,” I said as the nurse lifted my arm. “Call them. Now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
From the Claire Lake News Online, October 2017:
POLICE INVESTIGATION IN ARLEN HEIGHTS SPARKS QUESTIONS
Police were recently seen entering the Arlen Heights home of Beth Greer, who was acquitted of a series of murders in 1978. They were inside the home for several hours, apparently with the authority of a warrant.
Carl Contreras, chief of police with the Claire Lake Police Department, declined to give a statement except to say, “I cannot comment on any ongoing investigation.”
Greer was arrested and tried for the murders of Thomas Armstrong, 31, and Paul Veerhoever, 36, in 1977. She was found not guilty. The murders have never been solved.
“She’s quiet,” a neighbor, Winifred Platts, said of Greer, who has lived in her childhood home since the acquittal. “The press used to hang around after the trial, but they went away and it’s been quiet ever since. We don’t see her much, just at the store or whatnot. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. We’re not happy to have a murderer in the neighborhood, but she had her day in court. If she didn’t do it, then I guess she didn’t. But I don’t like this police search at all.”
Claire Lake Police will not comment on whether the warrant is connected to the so-called Lady Killer murders. Because of double jeopardy laws, Greer cannot be charged with those murders a second time.
“So what does it mean, then?” asks Timothy Garge, another neighbor who was busy raking his lawn. “Did she kill someone else? That’s just great. If she doesn’t sell, we might have to.”
* * *
—
From the Oregon News, October 2017:
“There’s nothing to find at my house,” Beth Greer said.
