But I didn’t have that anymore, so I had to be careful.
Everything was in place. When I was finished, I sat down in front of my computer again. I tapped it awake and logged in to the Book of Cold Cases. And I started tonight’s journey into the darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
September 2017
SHEA
I was tired at work the next day, because I’d stayed up later than I should have, working on the Book of Cold Cases. The bus had been ten minutes late, I’d dropped my bus pass, and I’d gotten to work out of sorts. I was on autopilot.
Our office was in downtown Claire Lake, and our patients were mostly rich, or at least well-to-do—Claire Lake on the whole was well-to-do, a town of chic kitchen specialty stores and French bistros laid out along the ocean shore. The spectacle I saw from the safety behind my Plexiglas was never that of people digging their nails in for survival, doing their best to get through every day. Instead it was often the foibles of the rich, the ones who had the money to make their aches and pains go away.
For a few minutes, I thought the woman who walked in might be someone famous. Her face was familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. She was an actress, maybe, one who had been on TV several decades ago. She was tall and stately, likely over sixty. Her skin was nearly flawless, with creases around the eyes and the mouth to give her character. Her hair was fashionably cut, with long bangs sweeping to her eyebrows and layers falling to her shoulders in light and dark shades of gray. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and sleek black pants under a trench coat. To me, the glamour wafting off her was worthy of Isabella Rossellini or Helen Mirren, though the woman seemed unaware of it. She looked distracted, and after slipping her ID beneath the Plexiglas to Karen, she took a seat, pulled out a pair of stylish reading glasses, and started reading a dog-eared novel.
“What?” Karen said to me as she wheeled her office chair back to the shelf and looked for the woman’s file.
“I know her from somewhere,” I said. There was a brief lull in which the phone wasn’t ringing, and I sipped my coffee and tried to be discreet as I looked at the woman again. She flipped a page in her book, oblivious. I couldn’t read the title from here, but I could see a cover of deep blue with slashes of jarring yellow lettering, which meant a thriller like the ones I read.
“She doesn’t look familiar to me,” Karen said. “Maybe she was a teacher of yours? A neighbor?”
I shook my head, studying the woman’s face, still trying to place it. There was something about her cheekbones, the line of her mouth. She was beautiful, for sure, and had likely been even more so when young. I’d never had a teacher who looked like that. She had to be an actress, yet that didn’t seem right.
“A singer?” I said, trying to jar my memory. “A politician?”
Karen shrugged, uninterested. “I don’t follow music or politics. If it bothers you, Google her.” She glanced down at the file she was holding. “Elizabeth Greer.”
I went still, the breath going out of me. “What?”
“That’s her name, Elizabeth Greer.” Karen squinted at me, frowning. “What? Is she famous? Should I try and get an autograph?”
I put my hands on the desk. My fingers were tingling, my cheeks going numb. “No,” I said. “No, you don’t want her autograph.”
“Whatever,” Karen said. The phone rang, and she turned away to answer it.
Elizabeth Greer, I thought, glancing at the woman again. Beth Greer. She sat reading her book, unaware I was staring.
Of course I knew her face. I’d seen dozens of photos of her, news footage. I’d put photos of her on my own website. I hadn’t recognized her because the photos on my site were from forty years ago, and no one had a photo of what she looked like now.