“How did you do it, Beth?” I asked. “How did you kill her?”
“You have so many questions,” Beth said. “Go ask her. She’ll tell you.”
Lily was in there, lighting up the windows and wandering the halls. If I went in, it would just be her and me.
Then again, maybe that was what I’d come here for. To talk to Lily alone.
As if someone knew what I was thinking, the front door of the Greer mansion opened with a click. It swung wide, the light spilling onto the front porch. She was inviting me in.
I knew I shouldn’t go. I wondered if she’d kill me. I wondered if she’d try.
I wouldn’t let her. Lily didn’t get to kill everyone.
“You may as well do it,” Beth Greer said in my ear. “She wants you to, and you know you aren’t going to say no.”
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
“What I want is for this to be over. I want to stop doing penance. It’s time for the real story to come out, and you’re the one to tell it. If you have the guts.”
I looked at the house. What was I going to do? Go home? Lock my doors and hide, like I’d been doing for twenty years? Spend the rest of my life in hiding?
If I did that, what would I have to live for? What kind of life had I chosen since that cold winter day when I was nine?
“Screw it,” I said to Beth, and I hung up the phone. I dropped it in my bag and walked to the front door, not giving myself time to think. I’d been thinking too long, too hard. I’d done nothing but think. Where had it gotten me?
I stepped through the door expecting to be blinded by the bright light inside, but the Greer mansion looked the same as always. It was dim and clean, untouched and faintly musty. I stepped into the corridor as the front door slammed shut behind me. “Lily?” I said.
There was no answer. I walked into the living room, taking in the burnt orange sofa, the squat coffee table with its angled legs, the shelf of awful figurines on the wall. The curtains on the windows were closed. The silence was oppressive, like someone was watching me.
I turned toward the corridor, the stairs. I could go into the kitchen, but I didn’t want to. There was a bad, coppery smell coming from there, and it made my stomach turn. I had the feeling that if I went into the kitchen, I’d see something I didn’t want to see. How had Beth ever come back into this house? Why didn’t she tear it down, brick by brick?
The stairs creaked under the soles of my sneakers as I climbed. I reached the landing and looked down the corridor. The upstairs hall was dim and silent, the doors closed. The quiet was so heavy it was a living thing, pressing into my skin and trying to push down my throat.
I walked to the end of the hall to the last door—the master bedroom. I pushed open the door and saw a king-sized oak bed, matching nightstands, large dressers, a wardrobe. There were ashtrays on the nightstands, a yellowed book next to one of them, and through the half-open closet door I could see the sleeve of a red dress.
Beth sleeps here, I thought in horror. It was like a museum for a bygone era, for people who were long dead. The only sign that Beth lived in this room was the unmade bed and a tube of Sephora hand cream, the modern label jarring, like something in a dream.
I walked to the closet and opened it. I recognized some of the clothes as Beth’s, but there were polyester dresses in here, leopard-print blouses and cork-soled shoes. Mariana’s clothes.
Beth Greer lived like this, buried in her parents’ belongings. She’d lived like this all these years.
This place was suffocating and dead. I could barely breathe in this closet; I had no idea why Beth had lived like this for so long. Why she’d wanted to.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted to.