SHEA: We don’t hang out. We have talked—I’ll say that she knows my number, and I know hers. We don’t shoot the shit or anything. As for what she’s like, I don’t really know how to describe it. I think the Beth you see in the media, in the photos, a lot of that is the real Beth. It isn’t like she’s at home baking cookies or something. She’s hard to figure out, and she likes it that way.
PAULA: If you guys have wine parties or start a book club or something, call me. I’ll move to Oregon for that.
SHEA: If we do that, I’ll definitely call.
* * *
—
The doctor’s office fired me.
I couldn’t blame them. I’d left work one day a nobody, and then I’d been in the hospital for a month and I’d come back famous—or maybe I was infamous. I never really knew which it was.
It didn’t matter. I was busy. Traffic and memberships on the Book of Cold Cases skyrocketed. I got a lot of interview requests, though I didn’t accept many of them. I started work on an article about my interviews with Beth, the amazing story she’d spun. The article was long, and it was by far the best thing I’d ever written, and, to my amazement, Rolling Stone bought it. After that came more requests—for more articles about the Lady Killer case, and for articles about the other cases I’d researched. I was a guest on a few podcasts, and then, with Michael’s help, I tried the unthinkable: I started a podcast myself. The numbers started out good, and then they got better.
I’d never planned to be this person, talking all the time in the spotlight. I’d never chased fame, and I wouldn’t have chased it now except for the fact that my fame served one important purpose: It kept the spotlight on Beth.
Michael’s private detective business started to climb, too, and he took on better and better cases. Our relationship was serious, and it was the best thing in my life—I was crazy about him, and I thought he felt the same about me. We worked together on a lot of projects, both mine and his, and we spent a lot of nights at either his place or mine. But we mutually agreed that we weren’t living together yet, and we made no mention of marriage. We were both too burned. It was one of the things we understood instinctively about each other without having to talk it to death. There were a lot of things like that with me and Michael.
“I like him,” Esther said when we had lunch together one Saturday in a diner in downtown Claire Lake. “He’s ultraserious, like you are. He’s smart. He likes you. And as the girls say today, he’s a snack.”
I flinched. “Please don’t say things like that. You’re an embarrassing mom already, and the baby isn’t even here yet.”
My sister smiled and sipped her sparkling water with a twist of lime. She and Will had been scheduled for their first round of IVF when they found out she was already pregnant. Now she was quietly happy in a way I’d never seen her, though of course she was still Esther the overachiever. Everything about this baby was being organized to the smallest detail. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a 401（k） already. “You can be the cool aunt,” Esther said. “I’ll be the awkward mom. It works for me. How is the physio going?”
I shrugged and speared a piece of roasted potato—using my right hand, because my left elbow ached almost constantly. “I go as often as I can.”
“Shea. You’re working too much. You had a terrible trauma. You have to take care of yourself.”
“I am,” I argued. “I will. Just as soon as all of this is over.”
Esther frowned. “I know that Beth is over sixty, but she looks pretty healthy to me. You’re exposing her as a murderer. Maybe you should be careful in dark parking lots.”
“I never go into dark parking lots,” I said. “And Beth talks a big game about suing me, but that’s bluster. She doesn’t actually care about murder charges. If she did, she would never have agreed to talk to me at all.”