The Book of Cold Cases(85)

There were tears running down my face now. I banged my fists on the glass over and over, shouting “No,” but I knew it would make no difference. It was October 15, 1977, and what was going to happen was going to happen. It was already done.

I was still screaming when the gun went off twice. Still screaming and banging on the glass when Lily stepped over the body and dropped a note on it. Still screaming as she slammed the hood of her car, got in, and drove away.

I leaned against the glass, my throat ragged. I was crying; I couldn’t say why. Thomas Armstrong had been dead for forty years, and this was some kind of sick movie, a replay so Lily could torture me. I had to get out of here. I didn’t want to be in this place, in this time.

I took a step back, and I was standing in Beth’s old bedroom, my hands on the glass of the window that looked out over the yard. My skin was cold and clammy, and my face was wet. I blinked my burning eyes and lifted my hands off the glass.

“What was that for?” I shouted into the silence. “Why did you show me that? I already know the ending.”

Behind me, footsteps came down the hall from the master bedroom, nearly at a run. A figure flashed past the doorway, and I glimpsed blond hair, much like Lily’s. Except that wasn’t Lily.

I stepped out the door as the footsteps rushed down the stairs. “No,” a voice said in soft panic. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry.”

“Mariana?” I called.

I hurried down the stairs, following her. I didn’t care that she’d been dead for decades, that I was chasing a ghost. Her voice sounded terrified, almost ragged with pain. I caught sight of her in the front hallway, which was ice-cold. I descended the last step with my breath pluming from my mouth.

Mariana Greer—it was definitely Mariana, the woman I recognized from her wedding photograph—was standing at the front door. She was in a silk negligee under a white bathrobe, her feet bare. Her hair was tied back with a headscarf, the kind women used to wear to bed to preserve their hairstyles, with her blond hair spilling out the back. In that moment, even though she had died in 1975, she was as real as I was. I could see the tears tracking down her face as she fumbled clumsily at the door.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Where did you go, baby? Please don’t leave. I’m so sorry.”

What had happened? An argument? Had Lily left? Why was no one trying to stop Mariana from leaving in her nightgown in the state she was in?

“Don’t go,” I said, but she had figured out the lock now, and she was turning the knob. I lunged forward, thinking to hold the door closed, but nothing I did mattered. Mariana Greer opened the door and ran outside, heading for her car, trying to find her daughter. Heading for the accident that would kill her.

I ran out the front door after her, but Mariana was gone. The cold, wet air hit me in the face. The sky was bleak and gray, as if someone had bleached it; the clouds were inky black. What time was it? What day was it? How long had I been in the house?

I had to get out of here.

I took a shaky breath and stepped onto the porch, and then I looked down. There were wet footprints here, the impressions of rubber sneakers. Had Mariana been wearing sneakers, or had her feet been bare? Who had been standing on the porch with wet shoes? The tracks led into the grass, which was tamped down where someone had walked on it. The droplets of rain were disturbed in a path leading toward the trees and around the house.

Everything had been too strange for too long, and nothing mattered anymore. I stepped off the porch and walked onto the lawn, following the footprints through the trees.

In a moment, the wet, stark, black trees thinned and the vista behind the house opened up in front of me, the bare grass, the drop, the gray sky. It had the same effect it always had: It was awful and hypnotic at the same time, like the view looking down from a great height. I wanted to walk toward it; I felt the draw. I made my feet stay still, and I locked my gaze with Lily Knowles’s at last.

She was standing in the middle of the lawn, her sneakered feet in the cold grass. She looked to be in her twenties; she had the narrow face I’d seen in the Christmas photo with a few more years passed, though in person—was this in person?—she was more beautiful. She was wearing jeans and a coat of army green, and both items hung off her frame, as if she’d either borrowed them from someone bigger or lost weight. Her blond hair was down around her shoulders, and it lifted in the wind as if she were really here.

“You’re finally here,” Lily said. Her voice was unreal, an echo. And yet I knew it was her real voice, coming from wherever she was.

And for a minute, I wasn’t terrified. I was just standing on the lawn, looking at Lily Knowles, who was the reason I’d come. She was the reason I’d come from the beginning, though I hadn’t known she existed at the time.

“You died,” I said to her.

Lily, who wasn’t real, who wasn’t alive, shrugged in that way I instantly recognized from her half sister. It was the way I’d learned to shrug, too: Maybe what you say is interesting, and maybe it isn’t. “Everyone dies,” she said, her voice echoing.

“Why are you still here?”

“I’m waiting for Beth, and she knows it.”

“Tell me why,” I said, because I was looking at a serial killer, and I had no idea how much time I had. “Please, just tell me why.”