When I had turned the corner and could no longer see him, I pulled out my phone and called Michael.
“Where are you right now?” I asked when he answered.
“At home, going through property records until my eyes cross,” he said. “Why?”
I looked out the window at the city going by. “Are you really divorced?”
“Considering how bad my marriage was, I sure as hell hope so. What is this about, Shea?”
I read the street signs as they passed. I could see the ocean from here, inky black in the darkness beyond the lights of Claire Lake.
“I’m on the bus,” I said. “I just passed Sixth Avenue and Harbor Street. If I get off at the next stop, will you come and have a drink with me?”
There was a brief pause of surprise.
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Michael said. “Yes, I’ll have a drink with you. I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
October 1977
BETH
The bar was called Watertown’s, a big, high-ceilinged room with dim lighting and loud music coming from a jukebox. It was twenty-five miles outside the Claire Lake city limits, which was why Beth went there to drink.
They hadn’t arrested her yet. It was going to happen; she could feel it the way you can feel electricity in the air when a thunderstorm is coming, when you see the lowering clouds on the horizon and feel the wind kick up. She didn’t sleep much. Her life as she knew it would be over soon.
The Claire Lake papers had already convicted her: local heiress suspected of murders and did she kill them? No one came forward to say they didn’t believe it, that Beth would never do something like that. Except for Ransom—who was paid to defend her. Other than maybe her father, who was dead, Beth couldn’t think of anyone else who would say that.
Instead there was a long line of people—the neighbors, girls Beth had gone to school with, grocery clerks, a few of the people who had gotten drunk at Beth’s parties—who wanted to tell the press that Beth was strange, that she was frightening, that she had fits of anger. Stories were surfacing about noises at the Greer mansion while her parents were alive—shouting, furniture overturned, china broken. And of course they all said that Beth lived alone now, that she had no friends or husband, that she spent most of her time as a hermit except when she was partying. “She doesn’t seem to like people,” a girl who had known Beth briefly in seventh grade told the press. “I think she hates everyone.”
Hating people in seventh grade made her a killer. Living alone because both of her parents were dead made her a killer. The pieces fit so nicely together. Beth had gone driving a few more times, but when she noticed a car following her, she turned around and went home. Was it the press? The police? It didn’t matter.
Now Beth stayed home like Ransom had told her to, the curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows closed, the TV on. She lay on her sofa and drank and thought about what had happened to her and why. About how neat it all was.
About how angry she was. People were right about that, at least.
She was sick of drinking alone on the sofa, so tonight she broke Ransom’s commandment. She got dressed, got in her car—a Cadillac, because the police had impounded the Buick—and drove to a bar to drink.
It was second nature. Both of her parents had drunk from morning to night, and Beth had snuck her first drink at eleven. Now she sat at the dim bar, wearing a ringer T-shirt and high-waisted jeans, her hair twisted back. She started with vodka and stuck with it. Men came on to her, which she’d expected. She turned them down. All she cared about was that no one recognized her, or at least that none of them would let on.
She wanted to get blind drunk, but three-quarters of the way there an alarm went off deep in her belly, warning her to stop. She couldn’t afford to lose control around strangers, couldn’t afford to end up crawling all over a man in the back seat of his car and telling him everything. No mistakes, at least not big ones. At one o’clock, she paid her tab and walked outside to the parking lot, trying to keep her steps in a convincingly steady line.