I’d see someone falling over that cliff. A pair of feet leaving the edge, sailing into the cold air above the ocean. I’d feel a cold gust of air from a broken-in door, and I’d see blood spiraling in that sink, red turning pinkish in the water.
I’d wake up certain that the taps in my bathroom were turned on, that the curtains on my window had changed position. Then I’d lie awake, alone in the dark, listening for sounds. Was that a footstep? A tap on the roof, as if someone were walking there? Was there someone in my living room right now, prowling quietly? If there was, how stupid was I to get out of bed and go look?
By day, I’d sit at the reception desk and wonder if the file cabinets behind me were opening while my back was turned, if the papers were moving from one side of the desk to the other. By night, I waded into the Book of Cold Cases and used my online searching skills to find Sylvia Bledsoe, the woman who had once worked as Julian Greer’s secretary. Because there had to be answers out there somewhere. Anywhere.
“Come to dinner,” Esther said to me on the phone one night after work.
“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I’m kind of busy.”
“Doing what?”
I hadn’t told Esther about my meetings with Beth Greer. She wouldn’t know who Beth was, and once I told her, she would probably have an anxiety attack. “My usual stuff.”
“Shea, I’m playing my sister card. You know I don’t do it often. Come to dinner.”
I caved. I really was tired of sitting here alone, wondering what those sounds were. “Okay. Tomorrow. I’ll come after work.”
“Yay!” She actually said that, unironically, as a thirty-three-year-old woman. “I’ll make chicken tetrazzini.”
“You don’t have to do that.” She knew that was my favorite meal, but it wasn’t simple to make. Esther made the sauce from scratch, which immediately made me feel bad. “We’ll order in. You don’t have to cook. It’s fine.”
“I’d like to do it. Besides, we eat out all the time anyway. Will is going to be overjoyed.”
I sighed. They were going to make a fuss, or at least Esther was.
“You know, Will has a cute coworker,” Esther was saying. “He’s single. Maybe I’ll invite him, too.”
Oh God. “Please don’t. I’m begging you.”
“I just think—”
“Esther, I don’t want to be set up.”
“It isn’t a setup exactly. It’s just dinner. You can’t be single forever.”
“I can. I literally can. That’s a thing.” No one understood single people. If you didn’t have a partner and babies, how were you spending your time? I’d tried the marriage thing, and I’d still been me. Except an unhappy version of me.
“Okay,” Esther said, “but being a spinster isn’t healthy. This guy is a junior lawyer. He’s really nice.”
“Did you know that Ted Bundy was executed in 1989, but they didn’t type his DNA until 2011?” I said.
Esther paused. I’d surprised her. “What?”
“No one actually knows how many women he murdered,” I said. “With DNA, they can try and close old cold cases. But it’s taking them years. We could find out about Bundy victims we didn’t even know about.”
“Shea,” my sister said.
“Did you know that Gary Ridgway’s coworkers called him Green River Gary?” I said. “They teased him about secretly being the Green River Killer. None of them knew that he actually was. He killed almost fifty women. That must have been pretty weird for those guys, reading in the paper that he was arrested, don’t you think?”