The Book of Cold Cases(59)

Beth had no idea how fourteen-year-old Lily would get this house, but she said, “I hate this house.”

“That’s because you don’t understand it.”

“It’s ugly.”

“It’s an abomination that shouldn’t exist,” Lily said, “and it knows it. That’s why I like it. It’s exactly like me.”

“You can’t own a house,” Beth said, tentative because she didn’t want Lily to get angry. “You’re too young.”

“Not for long.” Lily looked at Beth, really looked at her for the first time in a long time. “What do you want?”

I want you to get away from my mother, she thought. I want you to leave and never come back. But, no, she didn’t mean that. Beth was just afraid. She’d be lonely and desolate if she didn’t have Lily.

She needed Lily. Just like she needed Julian and Mariana. Beth had to get through another day, and another year, and she needed all three of them to get there. But she needed Lily most of all.

So she said the one thing she knew would work, the one thing that Lily was susceptible to. The one thing that would keep Lily on her side. “I want to be like you,” she said.

There was a moment when she wasn’t quite sure Lily believed it. And then her sister smiled.





CHAPTER THIRTY


December 1968





BETH


The Christmas Beth was fourteen, Lily came to the Greer house with a bruise on her temple and faded yellowy green marks under the skin of her cheekbone. Mariana pretended not to notice, but later that night both of the girls could hear her sobbing in her bedroom as Julian told her to stop, please stop. It’s my fault, Mariana said. All my fault.

Lily didn’t want to talk about it, but Beth knew that something had happened at her foster home. Lily wasn’t above faking bruises to get sympathy, but she wasn’t faking this. That year, she was quieter than usual and her eyes were hollow, her mouth set tight.

Surprisingly, Julian stayed home that year, the first Christmas he’d done so since Lily had first visited. Something about seeing Lily bruised and angry must have made him feel more comfortable having her around, as if she’d lost a round in their endless contest. They avoided each other and barely spoke, but Beth saw Lily’s gaze follow Julian whenever she saw him, and she didn’t like the look in Lily’s eyes.

That was the year David disappeared.

David was a groundskeeper. In the summer, there was a small crew of men who came to maintain the lawns and the gardens, but in the winter there was only David. He came at the end of every month and spent a few hours cutting out dead annuals, removing any snow and ice on the ground, and raking old leaves. He was supposed to come the day after Christmas, but he never showed. As days passed, it became clear that he was gone, and no one knew what had happened to him. Maybe he had suddenly left town. He was just a groundskeeper, though, so it was considered a minor mystery, shrugged off by Julian and Mariana and never spoken of again.

Lily went home on the twenty-eighth, and for once Beth was glad to see her go, glad to be free of the flat look in Lily’s eyes.

They didn’t find David until late April, his broken body on the rocks below the cliff. They couldn’t pinpoint how long he’d been there, but it had been months. It was declared a suicide, but Beth had an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Lily . . . But she had never seen Lily anywhere near David, never seen her look at him or talk to him. So, no, it wasn’t possible. What would be the reason? There wasn’t one.

Beth put her suspicions away and didn’t think about them anymore.

The next year, Lily’s bruises were gone and she was thinner, her cheekbones sharper, her hipbones as hard as diamonds. She was seventeen, a year from aging out of the foster system. “My new family barely pays any attention to me,” she said. “They let me do whatever I want.”

“What happened to your old family?” Beth asked.

“Bad things,” Lily said, and for the first time in months, Beth thought of David again.

“What bad things?” she asked as fear curled into the pit of her stomach.

Lily only shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. People do bad things to themselves. It’s their own fault. Let’s go do a cartwheel race on the lawn.”

They hadn’t done cartwheel races for a few years, and Beth didn’t really want to go near the edge of the drop right now, when she was thinking of David down there, his bones broken. But she went, and she cartwheeled close to the edge, the cold air and the excitement making her breath come short. After a while, she forgot about David again.

That night, the half sisters sat in Beth’s new room—she’d graduated a few years ago from her little-girl room to a teenager’s room down the hall, though the little-girl room was still intact—and listened to records on Beth’s record player. Lily sat cross-legged on Beth’s newer, bigger bed, her legs slim and flawless in her tight jeans, her breasts obvious beneath the fabric of her striped turtleneck, making the black and blue stripes bend into wonky shapes. “I’ve got something for you,” she said.

Beth looked up from the Neil Diamond record she was putting on the player—Lily said she had atrocious taste in music, but Beth disagreed—and saw that Lily was holding her hand out, and there was a small white pill in her palm.