The Book of Cold Cases(34)

But it wasn’t the wind, or white noise on the recording. It was a whisper.

With an ice-cold finger, I rewound.

My mother never wanted to get married, Beth’s voice said. 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.

There was a pause, and then I heard it clearly. A woman’s voice as if whispered into the phone’s speaker.

I’m still here.

I dropped the phone. It landed on the bed without a sound. From the recording playback came my voice: Where’s your bathroom?

I took a breath, picked the phone up again. Played it again. Heard it again. I’m still here. I remembered what came next: the bathroom taps turning on, the kitchen cupboards opening, the blood. But at that moment, the phone had been on the table between Beth and me, in plain sight of both of us.

Whatever had been in the house that day had been waiting, watching, while we talked. Waiting to be heard.

I rewound the clip again, thinking to save it off my phone. Make copies. Send one to Michael, with his theories of levers and pulleys. Play it for Detective Black. Play it for Beth and see what her reaction was.

But while my finger was still on the slider, my phone went blank. It had turned itself off, the battery suddenly empty, even though I had charged it an hour ago. I scrambled to find my charger, plug the phone in, and power it up again.

When I finally did, the entire interview was gone. Deleted from the phone, from the cloud, everywhere, as if it had never been.

Whatever it was, whoever it was, it had said what it wanted to say. And now it had gone quiet again.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


October 2017





SHEA


I was sitting behind the Plexiglas at work, hanging up the phone, when I heard a familiar voice: “I’m here to see Shea.”

I looked up to see Beth Greer standing at the counter, looking past Karen to me. She was wearing a dark gray wool wrap wound stylishly over her shoulders and neck. Beneath it, she wore elegant black pants. Her reading glasses were perched on top of her head. She looked amazing, as usual.

“You are?” I asked her, surprised. We didn’t have an agreement to meet. I hadn’t heard from her since before I’d met with Detective Black.

She gave me one of her subtle smiles, the one that barely brushed her lips. “I’m taking you to lunch,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I blinked and glanced at Karen. She had a surprised frown on her face. Doubtless, she was remembering our conversation, when I’d wondered whether Beth was famous. She probably wasn’t sure whether to risk being impolite to a famous person.

Beth raised a finger and pointed with understated command to the hinged door that would let me out of my cubicle. “Shea, I’m waiting.”

I reached down and grabbed my purse from under the desk before I formed a conscious thought. I pushed back my chair and said to Karen, “See you later.”

“We’ll be back in an hour,” Beth said, and Karen nodded as she turned away.

“Does that always work for you?” I asked her as we got in the elevator, my purse tucked under my arm.

“Does what always work for me?”

“Ordering people around.”

One of Beth’s eyebrows rose. “Shea, is it lunchtime?”

“Yes.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I guess.”

“Then we’ll have lunch. I don’t see where the confusion is.”

The elevator doors slid open on the ground floor. “You don’t have very many friends, do you?” I asked her.

“I don’t have any friends,” Beth said, her tone blunt. “You know the reason.”

“It’s been forty years.”

“Not in this town, it hasn’t.”

I followed her out onto the street, then down toward the piers. Beth led me into one of the high-end cafés that the tourists frequented. “I’m wearing scrubs,” I said self-consciously as we stepped inside.

Beth swept her gaze down me and up again, assessing. “I don’t see a problem.”

There wasn’t. We were seated immediately in a corner booth and given glasses of water in seconds. I couldn’t tell whether we were favored because Beth was infamous or because she was obviously rich. It certainly wasn’t because of me.

“What?” she asked me, looking at me from above the rims of her reading glasses as she perused the menu.

“I can’t figure out whether to like you, to feel sorry for you, or be annoyed by you,” I replied.

“Try all three,” she said, as if the answer were simple. Then she looked at her menu again. “I think you’d like the lobster bisque.”

Of course she’d order for me. “Okay.” I closed my menu.

Beth closed her menu, too, and pushed back her reading glasses again. “You haven’t called me.”

No, I hadn’t called her. After the interview with the whisper was deleted from my phone, I’d plunged back into real-world research, the kind that was based on verifiable facts. And I had no desire to go back to that house. “I’ve been busy.”

“I thought you wanted to interview me.”