The Book of Cold Cases(36)
Beth listened carefully, as if this was of keen interest to her. God knew why. But she narrowed her eyes as I talked, paying close attention. Like the last time I’d confessed to Beth, it was intrusive and freeing at the same time. When I’d finished, she spoke.
“Your problem is a simple power imbalance,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means this man knows everything about you, and you know nothing about him. He knows where you live, where you work, the fact that you’re single. Has he told you if he’s married?”
“He says he’s divorced.”
“Which could be a lie.” She paused. “If he’s a former cop, he might know about what happened to you as a child. Or he can easily find out.”
The thought gave me chills. “I’ve never told him about that.”
Beth shrugged. “In return, all you know is what he’s told you over the phone. You have to believe what he says, because you don’t know anything else. That’s a power imbalance, and you know it.”
I shook my head. “Michael’s personal life is none of my business. We have a professional relationship.”
“Except for the fact that you’d like to screw him.”
“Beth, I pay him.”
“Obviously, you wouldn’t pay him for that part,” she said. “That part would be volunteer.”
With horror, I realized that my cell phone was still recording. I reached out and stabbed the recording off.
Beth watched me do it. “Apparently, you don’t want to talk about sex,” she said.
“I’d prefer to talk about your sex life,” I shot back.
“We’re not at that part of the interview yet,” she replied, unfazed. “Maybe later. In the meantime, we’re talking about you.”
“I really wish we weren’t.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were mesmerizing, so large and deep, easy to get lost in, even now. She must have been impossible to resist when she was twenty-three. “For the record, I think this detective is probably exactly what he says he is,” she said. “He’s probably even nice. And actually single. But you’re never going to know if you let him stay a mystery because it’s more comfortable that way. That’s my advice.” She shrugged. “It’s your call. Make it.”
It wasn’t until hours later, when the lobster bisque was finished, the bill paid, and I was sitting at my desk at the end of the day, that I realized four things about that lunch with Beth:
One, she really had come to find out what had happened in the interview with Detective Black. And because I hadn’t called her. So she had at least one weakness.
Two, she’d said her mother had lived her whole life in shame. Why?
Three, she had deftly turned the subject away from her childhood, then made me turn the recorder off by embarrassing me.
And four, when I’d mentioned Mariana’s possible mental illness, Beth had been angry. That was what that cold expression of hers was, the dead voice that gave me the chills. Beth hadn’t been bemused or dismissive at the suggestion that her mother had been crazy. She’d been suddenly, icily angry.
When Beth was that angry, she was terrifying.
I was on the right track, which meant the answers were there. I just had to figure out where they were.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
October 2017
SHEA
My sister was the executive assistant to a bank CEO, which was where she met her husband, one of the bank’s lawyers. She and Will lived in one of the new low-rise condo buildings downtown, not far from the waterfront, in a neighborhood that had been built for well-to-do people like them. When I arrived for dinner, Esther answered the door in linen pants and a blouse that would have cost a month of our father’s salary growing up. By contrast, I was wearing dark jeans, a black tee, sneakers, and a stretched-out black hoodie, my hair in a ponytail. I looked like I’d just finished prowling the neighborhood, staring into everyone’s windows, but Esther made no comment.
We probably shouldn’t have liked each other, Esther and me. We were so different, even though we had the same black hair and dark eyes. Esther wore her hair in a fashionable layered cut that ended at her chin and looked amazing on her, and I left mine long and usually tied back. We probably should have hated each other, but we’d never quite managed it. We’d been through too much together.
Will gave me a hug in greeting. He smelled like aftershave and men’s deodorant, scents I wasn’t familiar with anymore. “It’s so good to see you,” he said.
I handed him the bottle of wine I’d brought, warm from my lap, where I’d held it on the bus. “It’s good to see you, too.”
In her early twenties, before Will, Esther had dated a man who hit her. I’d helped her leave him, packing a U-Haul in the middle of the day while her boyfriend was at work, shoving garbage bags of her belongings into the trailer as fast as we could. We may be very different now, years later—Esther successful and put-together, me a divorced wreck—but we still had the experience of the garbage bags in the U-Haul, of me sleeping with her those first nights in her rented apartment, eating Pringles out of a tube for dinner. When you share something like that with your sister, it never leaves you, for better or for worse.