But the cat wasn’t just annoyed. He tensed, got his feet under him, and crouched low, his sleek body pressed down in terror. His tail bloomed wide as the fur on it stood up. He hissed, gave a low growl, and bolted off the bed and out of the room.
“Winston?” I said, and then I heard it. Something on the recording.
I picked my phone up and put it closer to my ear. Beth and I were talking—about my parents, about her parents. But in the background was a shushing sound. I turned up the volume and pressed the phone to my ear, wondering if the recording had picked up wind, or had created noise because of a technical problem.
But it wasn’t the wind, or white noise on the recording. It was a whisper.
With an ice-cold finger, I rewound.
My mother never wanted to get married, Beth’s voice said. But it was the fifties, and my grandparents were rich. They expected her to marry well. She met my father, and that was that. More of a business deal than anything else. And a year later, she had me. She was trapped.
There was a pause, and then I heard it clearly. A woman’s voice as if whispered into the phone’s speaker.
I’m still here.
I dropped the phone. It landed on the bed without a sound. From the recording playback came my voice: Where’s your bathroom?
I took a breath, picked the phone up again. Played it again. Heard it again. I’m still here. I remembered what came next: the bathroom taps turning on, the kitchen cupboards opening, the blood. But at that moment, the phone had been on the table between Beth and me, in plain sight of both of us.
Whatever had been in the house that day had been waiting, watching, while we talked. Waiting to be heard.
I rewound the clip again, thinking to save it off my phone. Make copies. Send one to Michael, with his theories of levers and pulleys. Play it for Detective Black. Play it for Beth and see what her reaction was.
But while my finger was still on the slider, my phone went blank. It had turned itself off, the battery suddenly empty, even though I had charged it an hour ago. I scrambled to find my charger, plug the phone in, and power it up again.
When I finally did, the entire interview was gone. Deleted from the phone, from the cloud, everywhere, as if it had never been.
Whatever it was, whoever it was, it had said what it wanted to say. And now it had gone quiet again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
October 2017
SHEA
I was sitting behind the Plexiglas at work, hanging up the phone, when I heard a familiar voice: “I’m here to see Shea.”
I looked up to see Beth Greer standing at the counter, looking past Karen to me. She was wearing a dark gray wool wrap wound stylishly over her shoulders and neck. Beneath it, she wore elegant black pants. Her reading glasses were perched on top of her head. She looked amazing, as usual.
“You are?” I asked her, surprised. We didn’t have an agreement to meet. I hadn’t heard from her since before I’d met with Detective Black.
She gave me one of her subtle smiles, the one that barely brushed her lips. “I’m taking you to lunch,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I blinked and glanced at Karen. She had a surprised frown on her face. Doubtless, she was remembering our conversation, when I’d wondered whether Beth was famous. She probably wasn’t sure whether to risk being impolite to a famous person.
Beth raised a finger and pointed with understated command to the hinged door that would let me out of my cubicle. “Shea, I’m waiting.”
I reached down and grabbed my purse from under the desk before I formed a conscious thought. I pushed back my chair and said to Karen, “See you later.”
“We’ll be back in an hour,” Beth said, and Karen nodded as she turned away.