“I can help myself,” Beth told him. “I don’t need you. Go home to your kindergarten teacher. Go marry her and make your conventional little life. And don’t ever come back here.”
Now Black had his own flare of anger, rare and welcome, at least to Beth. “You’re being a fucking idiot. I’m the only one who wants to get you out of this—not because you’re paying me a fee, but because I actually want to. If you’re convicted, your life is over.”
“So what? I’m nothing to you. Get out.”
He held steady. “I’m not giving up. If you didn’t do this, then whoever did goes free to do it again. Whoever has that gun. Whoever wrote those notes and shot those men. It’s a woman, isn’t it? You know it is. If she isn’t you, Beth, then she’s going to kill more people until she’s stopped. Are you going to be a part of that?”
“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.