* * *
—
“She’s messing with me,” I said.
I was fully dressed in my hospital room, sitting in a wheelchair, talking on the phone as the nurse put my bag in my lap. I was being discharged after a monthlong stay that included surgeries on both my elbow and my knee. My arm was in a sling and I’d be on crutches for a few months at least, but I was finally going home. It should have been an exciting moment, but I was too busy talking to Joshua Black to notice.
“Messing with you?” he said. “She just seems angry to me.”
Of course Beth was angry. The full force of the Claire Lake PD had come down on her. What Joshua Black had to do with any of it, I could only guess; for a man who had been retired for a decade, he seemed to be central. No one in the department held more respect or more sway.
“She’s screwing with my head,” I said as the nurse started pushing my chair down the hallway. “She’s gone to the media to tell everyone who I am, and that she’s planning to sue me. She’s sent so much traffic to my website that the server crashed. I have over two hundred emails in my inbox, and my phone won’t stop ringing with requests for interviews. She’s just made me famous.”
“Sounds terrible to me,” Black said.
“It is terrible. I haven’t talked to my bosses yet, but I could easily get fired over the publicity. And I’ve never wanted to be in the public eye.” Even now, all I wanted was to go home to my condo and get Winston Purrchill back from Esther, who had taken him in while I’d been in the hospital. I wanted one of my quiet nights with my laptop, my cat, and my familiar anxieties, and I had the feeling I was never going to have one of those nights again. “And at the same time,” I said to Joshua, “I called my health insurance company this morning. I assumed I was going to be in debt for the rest of my life, but guess what? I’m not. Everything is paid for.”
“Wow,” Joshua said. “And you think that was Beth?”
“She’s the only rich person I know.” I’d had two surgeries, including titanium pieces inserted into my crushed left elbow. I’d had drugs and antibiotics and physical therapy, which I was going to continue for months as an outpatient. Even with the insurance from my job, I’d thought I’d be underwater forever. The bill for the deductibles alone was probably more than my annual salary. And yet I didn’t owe a penny.
I could practically hear Beth’s voice, dry and a little impatient: Well, my dead sister did try to kill you. I suppose I’m somewhat responsible.
She’d paid my hospital bill, and then she’d made a statement that threatened to sue me, and threw me to the publicity wolves. Game on, Beth.
“God only knows what she’s thinking,” Joshua said. “I’ve never known.”
He was angry, too. Since my accident, he’d visited me in the hospital a few times and we’d talked on the phone. I liked him so much it was a little scary, and I felt for him. He’d spent forty years believing that Beth wasn’t a murderer, and now he wasn’t so sure. I knew that his original intuition was right—Beth wasn’t a murderer, at least while she was accused and on trial. The murder had come after. But I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that, because Joshua Black didn’t seem like the type to believe in ghosts.
What I had given him was everything I knew about the existence of Lily Knowles, starting with her birth certificate. Lily Knowles, who had left no legal trace behind since aging out of the foster system at eighteen. It had taken Black maybe half a minute to ask himself if Beth’s missing half sister was connected to the remains found by the lake. Now he and the Claire Lake PD had taken over.
“I don’t know what she’s thinking, either,” I said, though that was a lie. I knew exactly what Beth was thinking. She wanted me off-balance, wondering what she was going to do next. She wanted me to understand how much power she had. And she wanted a fight. “Are you going to tell me what they found in the master bedroom?” I asked him. “The police will only say that any evidence they find will be sent for testing. It’s frustratingly vague.”