“I don’t get this,” Esther said. “There’s no such thing as someone who doesn’t care about murder charges.”
“That’s because you haven’t met Beth.”
I didn’t tell her about Beth’s aneurysm. Beth thought her time was limited, and she didn’t care about how the last part—whether weeks or months or possibly years—played out. She’d been tied to that house, to Lily and Mariana and Julian, for forty years. She was done.
At one in the morning that night, my cell phone rang. I was alone in bed—Michael had an early flight to San Francisco in the morning—and I was halfway between waking and sleeping. Winston was curled against my chest, kneading imaginary biscuits on my T-shirt, and he flattened his ears in annoyance when I reached over him and answered the phone.
“Hi, Beth,” I said. She only ever called me at one in the morning.
“？‘An anonymous source’？” she said, not bothering with hello. “Did they actually buy that? I don’t know whether to be insulted or amused.”
“Try both,” I said, using one of Beth’s own lines. She was talking about an article that had just run on CNN’s website, in which I said that “an anonymous source” had tipped me off to the possibility of Beth murdering her half sister in 1978.
“Whatever,” Beth said, sounding more like the twenty-three-year-old she’d been in the seventies instead of a woman who was over sixty. “I also saw the 60 Minutes thing. Were you trying to pull at my heartstrings?”
The 60 Minutes piece was an interview with the wives and grown children of Thomas Armstrong and Paul Veerhoever about the devastation the murders had left in their lives. “No, that was all Michael,” I said to Beth. “I know better. You don’t have a heart.”
“Neither do you.”
I smiled, stroking Winston Purrchill’s grumpy head. “I have a heart, Beth. I just don’t let you see it. How’s Lily? I haven’t seen her since she pushed me off a cliff.”
“What a bitch you are,” Beth said mildly. “I knew it when I first saw you in that park, thinking you could follow me. I knew you’d be a pain in my elderly ass.”
I leaned back against my pillows. “If I’m such a pain in your ass, then why are you calling me?”
“Because Ransom is dead.”
I went quiet, staring into the darkness. I wondered what to feel. Sadness, anger, pity? Try all of them. “I’m sorry,” I said, the phrase we all use when we can’t think of what to say, one that provides no comfort at all.
Beth was quiet for a long moment, and I realized she was collecting herself. I’d never known her to have any kind of strong emotion, let alone one that made her speechless. I was witnessing it now. I waited.
“Well,” Beth said at last, her voice tight. “Don’t think this means anything. There are other lawyers. He left me in the hands of his successor, in fact. I’ve still got some fight in me. So what’s your next move?”
“Your DNA,” I said.
“You must have been so disappointed to find out they didn’t take samples in 1977,” Beth said. “It was blood type they looked at back then, not DNA. But they never even asked for my blood, because they had nothing to compare it to.”
“They’ll get it now,” I said.
“My lawyer is fighting that.”
“He’ll lose.”
The first time we’d had one of these middle-of-the night conversations, it had felt utterly strange. Beth and I were supposed to be enemies. I was trying to get her put away for murdering Lily. But she’d call me, and we’d spar like we had in her living room in the Greer mansion.