The Book of Cold Cases(15)

The lawn was slightly unkempt, as if it hadn’t been tended in a while. Shading the house was a heavy overhang of mature trees, their branches brushing the rooftop and the windows. There was a single car in the driveway—an expensive Lexus—and no other sign of life. The silence seemed to envelop me as I knocked on the front door.

Beth answered immediately. She was wearing cream linen pants and a dark brown blouse that was tailored at her narrow waist. For a second, her slim figure and the seventies color combination threw me back in time, until I saw her gray hair with her reading glasses pushed back into it. She looked me up and down. “Come in,” she said.

I followed her inside. We walked through a tidy foyer to a living room, an open space that took up much of the lower level of the house. I paused, taking in the decor in surprise.

I felt like I’d stepped into an old photo album. The room was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows—now covered with curtains—lining the back wall. A sectional sofa in burnt orange and two matching chairs were arranged around a coffee table. The entire room was a throwback from forty years ago: an olive green knotted rug on the hardwood floor, the sectional low and flat with overstuffed arms, the coffee table made of heavy wood with angled legs. A bookshelf lined one wall, and I glimpsed vintage author names: Leon Uris, Sidney Sheldon, Alex Haley, Jacqueline Susann. There were ashtrays on the end tables, though they had no ashes in them and the room didn’t smell of smoke. The lamps had ceramic bases and triangular shades that were genteelly yellow with age. On a shelf behind the sofa was a ceramic mermaid with red lips and blue eyeshadow, her nipples coyly hidden by seashells. Next to her was a ceramic shepherdess with a crinolined dress and a crook in her hand, her bonnet flopping over her forehead.

There were people right this minute who would pay thousands of dollars to get a vintage look like this; the Greer mansion was the real thing. It was clean and tidy, but nothing here had been replaced since before I was born.

“I suppose we need some light,” Beth said, walking to the back wall. The curtains were cream with a dark brown diamond pattern, another vintage look that exactly matched Beth’s outfit. For a moment, it was a weird portrait of a midcentury Miss Havisham.

I looked down to see a stack of magazines on the credenza next to the door. The top one was an issue of Life from October 1977. The month of the Lady Killer murders.

There was the swish of curtains, light filled the room, and I caught my breath. The windows looked over a vista of flat lawn, slightly overgrown like out front. It was an empty square, framed on either side by dark trees, and past the end of the yard the land dropped away sharply, leaving only the dark, bruised sky and emptiness. It looked like a cliff over the edge of the world.

“I hate the view,” Beth said matter-of-factly, “but it’s better than the darkness with the curtains closed. If you want a drink, you can go find something in the kitchen.”

“I’m okay,” I managed, pulling my gaze away from the view. If you walked out onto that lawn, I guessed, you’d be able to see over the edge to the ocean, but you couldn’t see that far from here. Just lawn and sky. I watched Beth pick up a glass of something with clinking ice cubes and take a sip.

“You don’t have a car,” she said as she took a seat on the sofa.

She must have seen that I hadn’t parked in the driveway. “I don’t drive,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes a little—my tone was harsher than I’d intended—but she let it slide. “Let’s do this,” she said, picking up the glass again. “How do we start?”

I sat in one of the chairs, a little far from her. Neither of us was ready to get close yet. “Is that alcohol?” I asked, maybe because the car question had cut close to the bone. Most people assumed I didn’t drive because I had DUIs that had led to my license being revoked, which wasn’t true. It had happened so often it made me angry. I wanted Beth to be as unnerved as I was.

Beth’s smile had very little humor as she answered my question. “Not today. Not for eight years now. If you’d asked me in ’09, you would have a different answer. And in ’97 and ’84. That’s the first scoop for your article, I suppose: Beth Greer has been an on-and-off drunk since 1974 or so. She keeps kicking it, then backsliding, then kicking it again.”

“That’s tough,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Third time’s a charm. Before we start, I should tell you that I looked you up.”

I was opening my messenger bag, but I stopped. “Pardon?”

“I had to know that you’re who you say you are. Which, it seems, you are. The name you gave me is real, and you’ve worked for that doctor’s office for five years. I had to make sure you were legitimate before I let you into my house.”

It was almost funny. I was worried about being alone with Beth, but it had never occurred to me that she’d worry about being alone with me.

“What else did you find?” I asked, thinking about what had happened when I was nine. The Incident, I called it. My name hadn’t made the news, as far as I knew.

Beth put her drink down. “Not very much. I let you in. If I’m never seen again, then I guess I took my chances.” She looked at my face. “That’s what you were thinking about me, wasn’t it? That I might kill you?”

“You were acquitted,” I said.