The Book of Cold Cases(17)

I looked back to Beth to see her watching me from her seat on the sofa, her expression unreadable. “No one has ever asked me that before,” she said. “Did I do it? That’s all anyone wants to know.”

“I just can’t imagine it,” I said. “Living in my parents’ house after they were gone. After all that tragedy. Why didn’t you move?”

Her gaze shifted to the windows. “It’s such an easy thing to say. Just pack up and leave. I’ve said it to myself a thousand times. But some places hold you so that you can’t get free. They squeeze you like a fist.” She turned back to me, something quietly stark behind her eyes. “Sometimes you just get stuck. For years, even. Like you and your silly car phobia.”

I opened my mouth to get defensive: My phobia isn’t silly. But I stopped myself, sensing a trap. Was this misdirection? If so, from what?

I cleared my throat. “I suppose it would be hard to leave the house your parents lived in.”

Beth seemed almost amused at that, though I didn’t know why. “Are your parents dead?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, they’re in Florida.”

The ghost of a smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Should I bother making a joke about how that’s the same thing?”

“I don’t think you need to.”

“Then I’ll refrain.”

She was charming. Really charming. According to everything I’d read, sociopaths often were. I had to remember that. “What was it like for you at that time?” I asked her. “After your parents’ deaths, and before the murders?”

“I was numb,” Beth said. “I was nineteen when my father died, twenty-one when my mother died. In 1977, you didn’t go to therapy or grief counseling. I was a legal adult and I’d inherited a lot of money, so everyone assumed I must be just fine. There was no one to look out for me, and I didn’t know how to look out for myself. There were some people my age that I knew, people my parents would have hated. They started showing up, or maybe I invited them—I don’t remember. They’d come here, and we’d drink. Or I’d go to a party and we’d drink. There was no one to stop me, and it never crossed my mind to stop myself. I just knew I didn’t want to be sober.”

“The papers portrayed it like you were partying without any guilt,” I said.

“Of course they did. I told you, I had tits and an ass, so I wasn’t a real person. A girl who had lost her parents couldn’t possibly be spiraling, unable to cope. Easier to write that she’s a slut. It sells more papers. The cops, too—they all thought the fact that I drank and partied meant I was evil. If I were a man, they would have had sympathy. They probably would have joined me.”

“Even Detective Black?” I asked. Detective Joshua Black had been one of the two main investigators on the Lady Killer case, and he’d gone on to be a detective for thirty more years. I’d seen dozens of photos of him from that time: young, dark-haired, suits with wide lapels and wide striped ties, a serious frown on his face every time he saw a camera. Frankly, he had been kind of hot. I knew he still lived in Claire Lake, though he was now retired. His partner on the Lady Killer case, Detective Melvin Washington, had died in 1980. I’d never had any luck getting an interview with Detective Black or getting any copies of the Lady Killer case file. According to the Claire Lake PD, the case was still open, which meant the files weren’t public.

“Black was a cop,” Beth said. “He still is, even though he pretends he’s retired. He’s always been too nosy for his own good.”

“I think cops are supposed to be nosy,” I said, thinking of Michael.

“It’s different when it’s directed at you,” Beth said. “When you’re sitting in a cold room in a police station with a bunch of men asking you about your sex life. I didn’t even have a sex life to speak of, as a matter of fact. I know the story goes that everyone was screwing like crazy in the seventies, but I had to be careful. I was terrified of ending up like my mother.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I knew almost nothing about Beth’s mother. “Why were you scared of ending up like your mother?”

Beth raised her glass and drained it. Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought she was stalling for time, maybe because she regretted she’d said that. “My mother never wanted to get married,” she said at last. “But it was the fifties, and my grandparents were rich. They expected her to marry well. She met my father, and that was that. More of a business deal than anything else. And a year later, she had me. She was trapped.”

I watched Beth’s face. The pain etched on it was buried deep, but I thought it was real. I also thought she didn’t want to talk about this anymore.

“Where’s your bathroom?” I asked, just to get a breather for both of us.

“Down the hall to the right.” Beth looked up, and her gaze moved past me, to something over my shoulder. Her eyes were unbearably bleak for a moment, and I wondered what she was thinking.

Then she broke the gaze, looked at me, and held up her glass. “Get me a drink in the kitchen while you’re up, if you don’t mind. Grapefruit juice and soda, with ice.”

That voice—her I’m-rich, people-do-what-I-say voice—it should have annoyed me. But instead it didn’t occur to me to question her. I took the glass from her hand and stood.