I shifted my messenger bag and walked down the street toward the Greer mansion. I pulled my phone out and texted Michael.
I’m on my way to the interview. She isn’t going to kill me, right?
Unlikely, he replied. But I can track your phone if it makes you feel better.
I thought about it. I had a lot of rules about meeting strangers, but this was Beth Greer. It’s fine, I texted back. She isn’t Ted Bundy. I think. Besides, I have a confession. If Beth Greer murders me, I don’t think it’s the worst way to go.
His humor, as always, was equally grim. At least you’ll make the history books. I’ll make sure of it.
My fingers hovered over the screen. I had something else to say, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Did I want him to tell me I wasn’t crazy? I already knew there was plenty wrong with me. Maybe I wanted to tell him the truth about me. Maybe I just longed to hear someone say, You’re trying. You’re doing the best you can. Or maybe I really did want him to reassure me that Beth wasn’t going to kill me.
She’d been acquitted, after all. But her own lawyer had said of her: I know pure evil when I see it.
I was breaking every one of my careful rules. I was going to an accused murderer’s house alone. For someone who lived like I did, this was the height of insanity. And I was looking to Michael, a complete stranger, for reassurance. Statistically, it was Michael who was more likely to be Ted Bundy, not Beth.
This is why you don’t have any friends, I thought. Or any actual dates.
I had Xanax in my purse, but I didn’t take it. I wanted to be sharp. The Xanax was a gesture from my doctor when I had a series of anxiety attacks after the divorce. Sometimes just knowing you have it lowers the anxiety, she’d said. Just knowing I had pills did not, in fact, lower my anxiety, but I carried them with me anyway, in case the theory started working.
I turned up the drive to the Greer mansion, taking in the sight. Something about this house always fascinated me. It was half pseudo-Victorian, half midcentury, an unlikely mix of peaked gables with yellow brick, brown wood, and glass. It was ugly—very, very ugly—but it drew the eye, moving your gaze over one line and then another, as if every time you looked it created itself anew. Julian Greer, Beth’s father, had bought this house and remodeled it. He’d also died in the kitchen, shot by an unknown robber in his home.
The lawn was slightly unkempt, as if it hadn’t been tended in a while. Shading the house was a heavy overhang of mature trees, their branches brushing the rooftop and the windows. There was a single car in the driveway—an expensive Lexus—and no other sign of life. The silence seemed to envelop me as I knocked on the front door.
Beth answered immediately. She was wearing cream linen pants and a dark brown blouse that was tailored at her narrow waist. For a second, her slim figure and the seventies color combination threw me back in time, until I saw her gray hair with her reading glasses pushed back into it. She looked me up and down. “Come in,” she said.
I followed her inside. We walked through a tidy foyer to a living room, an open space that took up much of the lower level of the house. I paused, taking in the decor in surprise.
I felt like I’d stepped into an old photo album. The room was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows—now covered with curtains—lining the back wall. A sectional sofa in burnt orange and two matching chairs were arranged around a coffee table. The entire room was a throwback from forty years ago: an olive green knotted rug on the hardwood floor, the sectional low and flat with overstuffed arms, the coffee table made of heavy wood with angled legs. A bookshelf lined one wall, and I glimpsed vintage author names: Leon Uris, Sidney Sheldon, Alex Haley, Jacqueline Susann. There were ashtrays on the end tables, though they had no ashes in them and the room didn’t smell of smoke. The lamps had ceramic bases and triangular shades that were genteelly yellow with age. On a shelf behind the sofa was a ceramic mermaid with red lips and blue eyeshadow, her nipples coyly hidden by seashells. Next to her was a ceramic shepherdess with a crinolined dress and a crook in her hand, her bonnet flopping over her forehead.