It was hard. Hard. Lily stumbled forward, but she didn’t quite fall, and Beth had to hit her again. Again. Her hands were icy and numb. Her arm ached. Her brain had gone somewhere else, somewhere this wasn’t happening, where time had no meaning. Maybe it had taken a few seconds to hit Lily with the ashtray; maybe it had taken hours. Beth would never know.
There was blood, and Lily was on the floor, but she wasn’t dead. She twisted onto her back and hit Beth in the face, her fist smashing into Beth’s cheek, and this time Beth had to hit Lily in the forehead. She thought she might be screaming.
When Lily went quiet, bleeding and moaning softly, Beth dragged her into the bathroom. The bathtub had started to overflow, water running onto the tiled floor. Beth pulled Lily’s body to the tub and shoved her under the water, holding the back of her bloody head until her sister finally went still.
It was easy, you know, Lily said. I thought it might be hard.
There’s a moment where you have the power of life and death, and then you realize it doesn’t make you any different than you were before.
Beth wasn’t crying now. She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t making any sound at all.
She couldn’t feel her hands in the warm water. Her knees were soaked. Her arms ached, and her stomach was hot and liquid. For a humiliating second, she thought she might shit herself, but somehow she didn’t. Somehow she turned the water off and sat back, gasping breath after breath as if she’d been running.
The house was quiet, so quiet. If Beth had been screaming—she thought she might have been screaming—none of the neighbors would hear. She was alone.
No one was coming.
She breathed for a while, and then she thought about it, feeling strangely calm. There was the ashtray. Blood on the bedroom floor. The crumbs of old ashes. The water sloshing on the bathroom tile. The body.
She would need to clean up all of it.
She would need to put Lily somewhere no one could find her. She would have to do that alone.
But she thought maybe she could do it.
She looked at Lily’s slumped body, still in the kimono, and she thought about crying. She thought about taking her sister’s cold hand in hers, telling Lily she was sorry. She didn’t do any of those things, because Lily would have hated it.
She reached out and touched her fingertips to the small of Lily’s back, leaving them there for only a second before pulling them away again. Lily had always hated to be touched.
Beth got to her feet and got to work.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
October 2017
SHEA
I was drowning. I opened my mouth, and salt water rushed in, pushing its way down my throat. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t open my eyes. Every part of my body was in pain.
I thrashed, and my hands scrabbled against rocks under the water, cold and slick. I clawed at them, trying to get my head above water. My head throbbed like it was going to explode. I was so disoriented I didn’t know which way was up until the soles of my feet hit rock and I pushed off, screaming.
I broke the surface and screamed out loud into the air. I couldn’t help it—pain was radiating from my knee up and down my leg, throbbing as my feet pressed against the rocks. The water was only waist-deep, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I sank again, resting on my good knee as I tried to wipe my hair out of my face and open my stinging eyes. I could only use my right arm; the left was useless, dangling in the water in a dead mass of agony.
I pushed my hair back, gasping and sputtering, blinking the salt into my eyes. I was at the bottom of the cliff, below the Greer mansion. I had fallen to the rocks where the tide was coming in. The freezing waves shoved at me, jerking at my useless arm and trying to unbalance me on my one good leg. I remembered Lily’s hand gripping mine, the way she’d pulled me. Let’s go, she’d said. But I didn’t remember the fall itself. Was that a protective instinct in my brain, blocking out the fall? Or was that Lily?