The Book of Cold Cases(72)

“Get out,” Beth said.

“Beth—”

“Get out.”

He left. Beth watched him go as a door closed inside her and another part of her died. She gripped the cold, thin mattress of her jail-cell cot, and she thought, I am not going to live the rest of my life in here. He’s wrong about that. And Lily isn’t going to kill anyone else, either, ever again.

Beth would make sure of it.

She was in jail, arrested for two murders, her lawyer home with his wife and kids. She was alone, at the bottom of a life that had had a lot of bottoms, looking at the rest of her life in prison. It was, by any measure, the worst moment of her life.

And for the first time, Beth Greer finally knew exactly what to do.



* * *



—

Six days later, Beth was taken from her cell to a room lined with folding tables, each framed with dirty glass. On each table was a phone, large and black, screwed to the table, the cord contained under a plastic shield so it couldn’t be used as a weapon. A few of the other booths had women in them, wearing inmate clothes and hunched over their phones, talking to lawyers or husbands or children. The voices in the room were low, sharp, and tense, and the air—like the air everywhere in here—smelled like sweat.

Everyone expected life in jail would break her. Even Ransom, who knew her so well, had his doubts. When he’d finished blustering, he’d asked if he could bring her anything: books, a pillow, an extra blanket. “Don’t let this get to you,” he’d said, worried. “People are watching. That’s what they want. And for God’s sake, don’t talk to your fellow inmates.”

There was no chance of that. Beth had asked Ransom for a sweater and the copy of Moby-Dick she’d always meant to read. The book had always seemed too dense and boring for her, which made it the perfect jail-time read. She spent days in her cell trying to decode the impenetrable prose about whales, ignoring everything around her. The only thing she missed, hard and long like other women missed their babies, was alcohol.

There were few phone calls for Beth in jail. Ransom always came in person, and she had no one else in the world except for Lily. She’d had two calls before this one, both of them hang-ups as soon as she came to the phone, so she knew Lily was afoot. She was playing her game.

This time, when Beth answered, Lily’s familiar voice was on the other end, though she sounded muffled and far away, as if they were talking through a two-way radio. “I bet you’re not sweet anymore,” she said.

Beth had thought she was ready for this—she knew that Lily wouldn’t be able to resist calling. But the first thing she thought of when she heard her sister’s voice was that last day with Mariana, the day they went shopping at the Edengate Plaza. Beth had been alive for twenty-three years, but that was the only day in any one of them that she would get back if she could. The thought choked her, made pain and anger rise up from her stomach into her throat. It was the first time she’d let herself feel furiously angry since the arrest.

“What do you want?” she said.

“What’s it like?” Lily asked. She sounded cheerful, unconcerned. “I admit I’m curious about prison. It’s probably not so bad. Is it full of dykes?”

“Turn yourself in and find out,” Beth said.

Lily laughed. “Are you scared in there? You always were such a coward, Beth.”

Once, before so many people had died, those words coming from Lily would have been hurtful. But Beth wasn’t six years old anymore. She didn’t feel stung. She only felt icy calm, and the certainty that Lily was underestimating her.

Lily’s weakness—maybe her only one—was that she thought she was smarter than everyone. Especially Beth.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” Beth said. As if they were having a normal conversation. Because in Lily’s world, everything was just fine.

“Do tell,” Lily said.

“I’ve been remembering the night our mother died.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Which one of us killed her, do you think?” Beth asked her half sister. “You, or me?”

More silence.

They had never talked about this. There had never been time. After that day when Lily came home, she had stayed at the Greer mansion on and off for two years. She’d show up when she needed money, stay until she and Mariana had a fight, and then she’d take off again. Over and over. When Lily was gone, Mariana would be sick with worry. When Lily came home, Mariana always welcomed her back.

Beth watched all of it, helpless. Mariana never wanted to hear the truth about Lily: that she was a user, a manipulator. That she didn’t love Mariana the way Beth did. That in the stretches when she was away, out of sight, Beth was certain that people were dying. She could never prove it, could never find Lily when she truly wanted to be lost. But Beth knew her half sister, and she knew that when Lily was in one of her cold, angry moods, someone somewhere was going to die.

“She’s just lonely,” Mariana would say in Lily’s defense, over and over. “All those foster homes. She’s starved for a mother’s love.”

I’m starved for a mother’s love, Beth wanted to shout, her inner six-year-old still in pain. But it would have made no difference; Mariana wouldn’t hear it. She had only now edged into the territory in which she could admit, even obliquely, that she was Lily’s mother. She was too fragile for anything more.