September 2017
SHEA
“Okay,” I said, pulling out my cell phone and turning on the recorder. “Let’s talk about the Lady Killer murders.”
“Let’s,” Beth said, her tone dry.
I looked at her. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in me asking you if you committed them or not?”
She didn’t blink. In the merciless light from the windows, her high cheekbones and large eyes were especially striking. “You’ll form your own conclusions,” she said. “Everyone does.”
I looked around at the old-fashioned figurines, the expensive dark wood paneling, the now-vintage print of a racing horse on the wall. “You were living in this house when it happened,” I said. “Alone.”
Beth waited. She had a talent for stillness.
“Your parents had died, and you’d been on your own for two years,” I said.
“Is there a question in there?”
“Didn’t you hate it?” I asked. “Living in this house?” It was oppressive in here. Beautiful in a way, but oppressive. Like the house of someone who’s died. Everywhere you turned, you could see the windows with their cold, bleak view, and even with the light coming in I found myself wishing Beth would close the curtains again. “Your mother must have decorated this place,” I reasoned. “You were living with your mother’s decorations after she died. You’re still living with them.”
I looked back to Beth to see her watching me from her seat on the sofa, her expression unreadable. “No one has ever asked me that before,” she said. “Did I do it? That’s all anyone wants to know.”
“I just can’t imagine it,” I said. “Living in my parents’ house after they were gone. After all that tragedy. Why didn’t you move?”
Her gaze shifted to the windows. “It’s such an easy thing to say. Just pack up and leave. I’ve said it to myself a thousand times. But some places hold you so that you can’t get free. They squeeze you like a fist.” She turned back to me, something quietly stark behind her eyes. “Sometimes you just get stuck. For years, even. Like you and your silly car phobia.”
I opened my mouth to get defensive: My phobia isn’t silly. But I stopped myself, sensing a trap. Was this misdirection? If so, from what?
I cleared my throat. “I suppose it would be hard to leave the house your parents lived in.”
Beth seemed almost amused at that, though I didn’t know why. “Are your parents dead?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, they’re in Florida.”
The ghost of a smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Should I bother making a joke about how that’s the same thing?”
“I don’t think you need to.”
“Then I’ll refrain.”
She was charming. Really charming. According to everything I’d read, sociopaths often were. I had to remember that. “What was it like for you at that time?” I asked her. “After your parents’ deaths, and before the murders?”
“I was numb,” Beth said. “I was nineteen when my father died, twenty-one when my mother died. In 1977, you didn’t go to therapy or grief counseling. I was a legal adult and I’d inherited a lot of money, so everyone assumed I must be just fine. There was no one to look out for me, and I didn’t know how to look out for myself. There were some people my age that I knew, people my parents would have hated. They started showing up, or maybe I invited them—I don’t remember. They’d come here, and we’d drink. Or I’d go to a party and we’d drink. There was no one to stop me, and it never crossed my mind to stop myself. I just knew I didn’t want to be sober.”