The Book of Cold Cases(80)

She looked me over. “You don’t look so good.”

“I think I’m feverish.” I gathered my things, put on my sweater. This was a doctor’s office; the last thing we were supposed to do was spread illness to the patients. “I’ll go home and go to bed.”

She shrugged and turned away as a patient came to the window.

I left the office and stood on the sidewalk. What I’d just read in the file was still going around in my mind, but it also seemed off. It had something to do with why Beth had agreed to talk to me, but it wasn’t the only reason. There had to be something else.

I pulled out my phone and opened my email, scrolling back for the message from Michael about the Linwood Street property records. I had a gut feeling I was missing something, a detail that was an important piece of the puzzle. Maybe it was buried in the past, in the property records.

I stopped scrolling when I saw the Google alert that had come into my inbox days ago. It was an alert I’d had for years, set to deliver me anything to do with crime in Claire Lake, in case there was a juicy story I could use for the Book of Cold Cases. There was so little crime here that I didn’t get an alert very often. I’d forgotten about this one almost as soon as it came in, and it was still unopened.

Feeling something strange in the pit of my gut, I opened it.

It was a news article scraped from the Claire Lake Weekly Press, one of the few newspapers—if you could call it that—left after the gutting of local media over the past twenty years. It usually focused on upcoming street festivals and farmers’ markets, mixed with laconic paragraphs about the occasional break-in and bicycle theft. Any darker crimes that happened in Claire Lake—domestic violence, drug overdoses—were ignored, as if they never happened at all.

The Weekly Press had reported this story because its air of mystery was of the safe, cozy kind that wouldn’t upset the tourists too much. The underpaid stringer who wrote it had done the usual bare minimum for his tiny fee:

UNIDENTIFIED REMAINS WILL UNDERGO DNA TESTING

    Human remains, possibly several decades old, were found near the east shore of Claire Lake by two children playing in the woods last month, according to the Claire Lake Police Department.

The remains were found on the uninhabited side of the lake in early September. They were in a state of advanced decomposition, and only a few parts were recovered. “We do not yet know who this person is,” said Officer Martin Furlong of the Claire Lake PD in a statement. “There are no residences near where the body was found. It appears to be a hiker who possibly got lost, or it is a body that was left there by someone unknown.” Asked if the body could be the victim of a crime, Officer Furlong replied, “We don’t know yet, and given the state of the remains, we may never know. That’s up to the coroner.”

County coroner Tamara Li has stated that the remains are those of a Caucasian woman who has been dead anywhere from 25 to 45 years. She was in her mid-20s when she died. The coroner’s office is not releasing any other details, but they have confirmed that the remains are being tested for DNA to help narrow down who the woman might be.

Asked for a cause of death for the unknown woman, the coroner’s office declined to comment.

It’s possible that no cause of death is able to be determined with remains that old. Police are trying to match the body to missing persons reports, and anyone who may have information on the unidentified woman is asked to call the Claire Lake Police Department.



It was right there, in my inbox: the reason Beth Greer had agreed to talk to me, to have the entire story come out right now.

Lily had been found.

I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. That was Lily, out there in the woods at the edge of the lake. They would run the DNA, and then—what? There had been no DNA testing in 1977, but Beth’s blood and saliva could have been taken when she was arrested. Or maybe they’d find another connection through her family tree. They might not connect the body to Beth tomorrow, or next week, or next month, but they would connect it sooner or later. And Beth knew it.

I sent the article to Michael with the message: I want to know everything about this. I started for the bus stop, my feet moving slowly at first, then faster. It was starting to make sense now, this crazy story. But there were still pieces missing. Pieces I had no choice but to find.

I’d gone this far; it was time to go the rest of the way.

Before the bus arrived, I did one last thing: I called Esther’s cell phone.

She answered on the second ring. “Shea? Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I know you’re working.”

“It’s okay. What’s the matter?”

Because she knew something was the matter. She always knew.

“I just wanted to tell you,” I said to my sister, “I met this woman. She was acquitted of murder forty years ago. No one has ever been sure if she’s innocent. She agreed to do an interview with me. I’ve been talking to her for weeks now.”

“Alone?” Esther sounded alarmed.

“Yes. I thought it would be fine. She’s been telling me things. Some of it might be lies, but I think most of it is the truth. I don’t think she did the murders, but I think what really happened might be worse. There are ghosts in her house that terrify me. And I met Michael, my private detective, face-to-face for the first time, and I kissed him. The second time, not the first time. And I got a cat by accident. His name is Winston Purrchill.”