They’d denied his parole. The first person I wanted to call when I heard the news was Beth. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was.
I didn’t call her, but she heard the news anyway. The next week, I got a package in the mail: a red shawl, old and well cared for, folded neatly in tissue paper. It took me a minute to realize it was the shawl Beth had worn the day she was acquitted, when she stood next to Ransom in front of all those reporters. The shawl from the photo that had gone on the cover of Life.
Beth hadn’t put a note with the shawl, but she didn’t have to. She was telling me that she knew what victory felt like, especially when it was hard-won. I put the shawl in the closet, neatly tucked into its tissue paper, and I didn’t tell anyone about it.
Beth Greer was dead.
She was a murderer. A bitch. A cipher. A lonely girl raised by a broken family. She was brave and manipulative and selfish, and I owed her. I hated that, but I did.
I wondered if she’d seen Lily at the end. Because when I drifted off to sleep at night, I still felt Lily’s hands on me, and I still heard her voice, icy with death, in my ear:
Let’s go.
I pushed my wet hair out of my eyes, started the car, and headed home.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
February 2019
Someone new had bought the Greer mansion.
Why not? It was a beautiful structure on a piece of Arlen Heights’ prime real estate. It was a piece of Claire Lake history, now that Beth Greer was dead. The rumors that it was haunted only added to the mystique, and no one really believed that, anyway. It was true that Julian Greer had been murdered in the house, but that was in 1973—too far back to seem real to the family that was moving in. It was rumored that Beth Greer had killed her own sister in the master bedroom, and she’d died before they could prove it. But it didn’t matter much. The couple who bought the place were in their thirties, their kids eight and ten. The seventies were a bygone era to them.
The family had money—lots of it. They had plans. All of Beth’s dusty midcentury furniture was cleared out, sent to high-end consignment services to be sold to collectors. The old magazines and old ashtrays, Mariana’s jar of cold cream and Julian’s ties, were disposed of. Walls were going to be knocked out, and the living room and kitchen would become an open space. The old kitchen cupboards would come down, and stainless-steel appliances would make an appearance. A fence went up along the cliff to the ocean, and in spring a landscaping company would start digging to make a sleek stone patio for entertaining, with a retractable roof to keep out the rain. People would sip drinks and look out over the ocean in summer, making boisterous conversation as the kids ran in the yard.
For a while, there were only workers coming and going in the house, handling everything: paint, pot lights, hardwood flooring. But once the house was livable—and once the all-important fence went up—the family moved in. For the first time in decades, the Greer mansion had life in it.
Cars came and went. The kids went to school; the parents went to work. Friends and family visited. Weekends were nonstop, as the kids went to their friends’ homes or had them over, and the adults ran errands. There were dinner parties and birthday parties and outings with grandparents.
But at night, after the exhausted kids were asleep and the parents were drifting off, thinking about tomorrow’s to-do list, there was a light in the window of a room upstairs. A soft light that moved, as if someone were pacing. Watching. Someone who never slept.
Sometimes, there were two lights.
The family never talked about the cold spots in the hallways, or the strange dreams they sometimes had about someone walking through the house. They never talked about the doors left open, or the feeling you often got, especially when you were home alone, that someone was just behind you. The little girl never told anyone about the footprints she saw in the dewy grass some mornings, as if someone had come to the living room windows and looked in. The little boy never told anyone about the time he woke up to find someone—something—holding his hand, holding it in an icy grip as he lay paralyzed on the bed. He always told himself he’d dreamed that hand, though he never quite believed it.