Lily had made her a murderer.
Beth leaned away from Washington, angling her body toward the microphone. The pose, with her hands behind her back, outlined her figure for the cameras, even with the trench coat on. She knew it as well as she knew her own body in the mirror. She kept her voice calm, as if she were talking to someone boring at a cocktail party. “The police can manhandle me all they want, but it still doesn’t make me guilty,” she said.
There was a murmur of reaction, more shouted questions, and then Washington was putting her into the back seat of the brown Pontiac, his hand on her head. “Watch it,” she heard Black say to him.
“Beth, I’ll follow you,” Ransom shouted. “Don’t say anything.” He turned and hurried back to his car, shaking his head as reporters followed him, trying to get him to comment.
It was awkward sitting in the car with her hands cuffed behind her back. Beth shifted on the seat, trying to brace herself without pinning her arms and twisting her shoulders as the detectives got in front and Washington put the car into gear.
“We need to switch her cuffs,” Black said as the car inched down the driveway, crowded with people.
“No, we don’t.” Washington shot back. “She’ll live. We’re not getting her back out of the car now.”
Black was silent as they finally pulled free of the crowd of people, which was starting to disperse. From the window, Beth could see reporters running back to their cars, the TV cameraman getting a last shot of the car backing out before lowering his camera and turning back to his van.
“Beth, are you all right?” Detective Black asked her.
She ignored him. The neighbors were talking, and thanks to the reporters her arrest would be all over the news by six o’clock. She had been arrested for murder, a catastrophe that meant life as she knew it was over. Everyone thought she was the Lady Killer. She was on her way to jail, and then to a trial, which she could very well lose. She had just been publicly humiliated, dragged from her front porch and pushed into a police car in a spectacle of an arrest. It was all because of Lily, who by now was probably on the road out of town, the pay phone she’d called from sitting empty.
And still, as Arlen Heights receded in the background, Beth could only think one thing:
That was goddamned fun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
October 2017
SHEA
In the first days after my last visit to the Greer mansion, I was afraid.
I kept my cracked phone in the bottom of my purse, unable to look at it. I went to work and back in silence, sitting alone on the bus with my bag in my lap. I stopped listening to audiobooks, because I didn’t want to hear about death anymore. Instead I sat with a roaring in my ears, as if something were going to happen any second and I had to be ready.
I forced myself to concentrate at work. I never went out after dark. I checked my security system multiple times before going to bed. And when I finally slept, my dreams were full of blood and a familiar voice, saying: Hi there. Are you cold?
No matter how many times I awoke thrashing and sweating, Winston Purrchill was always on the bed next to me, regarding me with his sleepy eyes, drowsily wondering what was wrong. I fell asleep over and over with my hand on his soft fur or my face next to the solid curve of his back, watching the rise and fall of his breathing, listening as the low, uncouth rumble of his purr drifted off into sleep. I would have lost my sanity without my cat that week. If Alison or her ex-husband ever showed up to take him back, they would do it over my dead body.
And then something changed. Maybe I got tired of the fear; maybe it just lost its grip. But instead of being afraid, I got mad.
I thought about those blows against the door of Julian’s study, and instead of terror I only felt anger. I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t even trace it to a source—I was suddenly furious at everything. At Beth. At the man who had tried to abduct me when I was a child. At whoever had killed Thomas Armstrong and Paul Veerhoever and left them by the side of the road like trash. At all of the murderers—so many of them—who got away with it and left the victims to end up on the Book of Cold Cases, one after another. It all tumbled together in my mind. I’d never been this angry, and now I started to see what I’d been missing.