The Book of Cold Cases(53)

There was no part of this house that was a good place, really.

But still, people said she was lucky. She was. The house so beautiful, so big. The fact that it wasn’t good didn’t seem to matter to the people who told her she was lucky. Those people didn’t have to live here.

If someone had asked her—which no one did—what exactly was wrong about the house, she couldn’t have said. There weren’t creaks or cobwebs or groaning ghosts. It was something about the high ceilings, the elaborate moldings, the slightly off angles of the rooms when you walked down the corridors. There was an older house that had been partly torn down and remodeled into a newer one, and the old house didn’t like it. It was still in pain. It was a silly, childish thing to believe, and yet when she lay in bed at night, she imagined it was true.

Her father, in some before-Beth-was-born renovation, had had plate glass windows put in the living room, overlooking the lawn, and then had floor-to-ceiling curtains installed over them, as if he found that he couldn’t quite bring himself to look out the windows he’d bought. Beth never asked him why, because she didn’t like looking out those windows, either. When she peeked behind the curtains during the rain—and it rained much of the time—the water flattened on the glass and made shapes in the wind, reminding her of palms and fingers running down the glass. The lawn beyond was as empty as if all of humanity had vanished, and the dark gray ocean in the distance looked angry. There was something about the view that made it feel like the house was a ship sailing over the edge of the world.

In the living room the sofa, low and squat and square, didn’t match the intricately carved fireplace mantel that looked like it was from a century ago. None of the art—modern splashes of paint on canvas that were expensive and were supposed to represent something or other—looked right on the walls. The house was her father’s; the attempt at decorating was her mother’s. Much like her parents’ marriage, none of it went together. And none of it was Beth’s. Her room was girlish, but it was subdued. There were no play areas or places for a little girl to run around in the Greer mansion. Another thing Beth assumed was normal.

From her bedroom window upstairs, she could see trees at the edges of the lawn and the roofs of the houses on either side. Upstairs felt less like drowning, and her room was her own. With no one to talk to but her dolls, she had no idea she was lonely, because she had never known anything else. Until the day she saw the footprints.

It was an early morning, sometime around Thanksgiving. Beth woke early; maybe she’d heard a sound, unusual in the silent house. The sky was chalky gray, and for once it wasn’t raining. Pulling herself out of bed, Beth went to her bedroom window.

The lawn was laced with dew, wet and silver. Marring the dew, a set of footprints crossed the grass.

The prints were made by small feet, maybe a little larger than her own. Barefoot. A child not much older than herself had come from the left side of the lawn, approached the plate glass windows. Walked along them, as if looking in. And then, as if frustrated by the curtains, the prints circled back the way they had come and vanished.

Beth stared at the footprints in silence. Against the carpet of her bedroom, her bare toes curled. The dew would be cold this time of year, just barely liquid, almost icy frost. It would be numbing on bare feet. There were no children in the neighboring houses on either side. Where had a child come from?

She left her room and went downstairs, moving quietly through the silent house. Her father had left last night, but her mother was home. Her mother was an insomniac who regularly slept until eleven o’clock or noon, and the house had no servants. In her pink and white nightgown, her hair down her back, Beth walked through the gloom to the plate glass windows in the living room.

She pulled back the edge of the heavy curtains. The footprints were still there in the dew, just outside the glass. And at eye level, as if the child who made the prints had blown hot breath on the glass and written in the fog, were the words:

    I WAS HERE



It took Beth a moment to realize that for the words to be readable, the child outside would have had to write them backward. Which she had done, flawlessly.

How she knew the other child was a girl, she couldn’t have said. She just knew.

A pulse began to beat in Beth’s neck. The house around her was dark and silent, her mother still asleep. There was no one around, no one to talk to, probably for hours. Just Beth and her dolls.

She leaned forward and blew on the glass until a patch of fog came up. Then, writing carefully backward herself, she wrote her own message:

    COME IN.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


December 1960





BETH


Christmas, for the other kids on the school bus, was exciting. It meant presents and sweets and, most importantly, school break. Today was the last day before the Christmas holiday, and they were on their way home.

Beth sat alone, looking out the window and listening to the boisterous shouts and laughter of the other children. Though she had a thick wool coat and an expensive pair of shoes, a fine wool scarf wound around her neck and matching mittens, she was cold. The damp chill seeped up from her feet and shivered through her body. Her fingertips were numb.

There was no snow outside, but it was still Christmassy. Downtown, the stores were lit up with shopping displays, and the school was decorated with the kids’ drawings. In January, the damp paint-soaked papers would be drooping from the walls, and they’d be sent home with the kids for their parents to put away. Beth would throw hers in the garbage. But today, on the last day of school before Christmas, even the cold chill of the school had felt almost festive.