The Book of Cold Cases(64)

She’d send a letter. She didn’t need her parents for that. Late that night, when they were asleep, Beth went into her father’s study and rifled through his desk. She found a piece of paper in his handwriting with Lily’s address on it, a house in Portland that was likely a boardinghouse, because her hunch had been right—Julian did know where Lily was.

Beth wrote Lily a letter in her neat, well-schooled handwriting, a letter that was full of panicked pleas:

    I wanted you here this Christmas. It wasn’t my idea not to invite you. They made me go to a party and meet a man named Gray, because everything you said is true. Help me. Write me and I’ll find a way to give you money. I’ll do anything. Just please write me, and come visit, and don’t do anything stupid. Please, please.



She mailed the letter and waited. She never got a reply. But she never got the letter back, either, so she knew it had been delivered.

Maybe Lily didn’t write because she was angry. Maybe she wasn’t talking to Beth anymore. Maybe she was finished with the Greers and starting a new life.

Or maybe everything Beth wrote in her letter, Lily already knew.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO


October 2017





SHEA


“Stop,” I said. “Stop.”

Beth stopped talking, and silence fell. We were in the living room of the Greer mansion, surrounded by its musty vintage furniture. Outside the curtains, darkness had fallen. The dinner hour was long over, but neither of us had eaten. Beth had been talking for hours.

The house was still, as if the entire place was listening to Beth. There was no movement past the curtains on the lawn outside. The ceramic mermaid and shepherdess sat unseeing on the shelf behind the sofa, their glassy eyes blank. On the coffee table next to Beth’s elbow was a glass ashtray the size of a baby’s head. I hadn’t noticed it before. It likely hadn’t been used in decades, and yet it was still there, gleaming in the dim light.

“Yes, Shea?” Beth said. “Did you get all of that?”

I grabbed my phone, which was still recording, and jabbed it with my thumb. Then I picked up my papers, though I knew all of the dates by heart. “You’re talking about Christmas 1970,” I said. “Your father died in March 1973.”

Beth’s face was still, pale and beautiful. “Yes,” she said softly.

“What happened in those two years? Where was Lily?”

“Seattle for a while,” Beth said. “Salt Lake City. There were a few months in San Francisco, then Arizona. Those are the places I know of because those are the places I sent money when she eventually wrote me and asked.”

“You sent her money?”

Beth’s smile was bitter. “I didn’t have much money of my own at sixteen, but I sent her whatever I could beg, borrow, or steal. I thought I was helping my poor half sister who had been treated so badly. I was stupid in those days. All I can say for myself is that it was the last time she fooled me.”

“How did she fool you?”

“Because my father was sending her money, too. She’d blackmailed him with threats that she’d start telling the truth about whose daughter she was. My father hated Lily, but it was easier to shut her up than to fight her. At least at first. I think he figured if he just paid her, she’d stay away forever. But I didn’t know about that until after he died. I just stupidly thought the money I sent her was the only money she had.” Beth looked away from me, at the windows, seeing nothing as she spoke. “What you don’t understand, Shea, is that everything is my fault. All of it. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might as well have. Everything is on me.”

The air in the room was cold now, oppressive, hard to breathe. I felt beads of sweat start along my hairline. “Why?” I asked.

“Because I could have stopped her,” Beth said, still not looking at me. “I knew what she was, even then. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone, but I knew. I was the only one who suspected about David. But Lily left town, and I chose to believe it was over. I finished high school and stopped thinking about it, except when I sent her money. I made the same mistake Julian did, but the difference was that I knew better. I knew Lily, and he didn’t. So while I was worried about math tests and the fact that my parents wanted me to marry Gray, Lily was . . .”

I was leaning forward, entranced despite the cold sweat running down my skin. “Lily was what?”

“She never told me,” Beth said. “But I’ll bet there are deaths in those cities, when Lily was there, that no one could ever explain. Unsolved murders, even. They’d be buried under decades of other murders by now, forgotten. But they’re there, like David’s death. Like whatever happened to her foster family.”

The silence was a heavy weight in the room. This was the crux of it, then; this was what Beth wanted me to believe. She wanted me to believe that at eighteen, her sister had become a serial killer.

It wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, I’d been willing to believe that Beth was one herself.

“I should have looked for her,” Beth said. “I should have found a way. She’d given me addresses to send money to. She was using assumed names—Veronica Jenshak, one or two others. I should have taken my money, gotten in my car, and gone to find her. Tried to stop her. Done whatever it took. I think part of her wanted me to do it—to defy my parents, leave town, and go look for her, even if it was only to have her locked up. Part of her wanted me to care. She called me and begged me once. It was the only time in my life I ever heard her distressed.”