After I got home from work one day, I got a text from Michael. I had to pull my cracked phone from the bottom of my bag to read it. There’s some missing information in the online property records. We’ll have to try the records office downtown to see if they have the archive.
Okay, I texted back.
Sending you an email now, he wrote. There are two addresses that are missing records prior to 1960. I’m sending you everything I have.
Okay, I wrote again.
His next text came back right away: Are you all right?
Of course Michael knew something was wrong. I stared at the words, wondering what the answer was. Based on what was going on in my head, I seemed to be going crazy. But to tell the truth, I wasn’t so sure.
I looked at the crack on my phone screen. I’d dropped my phone when something—maybe something dead—had banged on the door of Julian’s study. I’d thought about getting my phone fixed or replaced, but I hadn’t done it yet. Suddenly I wasn’t sure I was going to.
I opened a drawer in my desk, pulled out the number Detective Joshua Black had given me, and dialed it before I could lose my nerve. “It’s Shea Collins,” I said when he answered.
“Shea.” His voice sounded pleased. “What can I help you with?”
There were a hundred questions I could have asked him, but that wasn’t why I called. Instead I said, “Have you ever hated Beth?”
“On and off for forty years.” He said it without missing a beat, and I immediately knew I had called the right person. “Are you in that phase right now?”
“I’m so angry,” I admitted as I gripped my cracked phone. “I can’t stop. I don’t know what to do about it.”
Detective Black was quiet for a long minute, his breaths somehow soothing on the other end of the line. Then he said, “Shea, I’m going to say something, and you’re not going to like it. But it’s my job to tell the truth.”
I swallowed. “Go ahead.”
“Anton Anders has a parole hearing coming up.”
It was my turn to be silent, the emotions churning in my gut robbing me of words.
“You don’t want to go,” Black said. “I’ve seen it so many times with victims. And for some of them, it’s the wrong thing to go. But you need to go to that hearing.”
“No.” The word was automatic. The letter from the parole board was still buried in a pile of mail. I hadn’t touched it.
I also hadn’t thrown it out.
“Think about it,” Detective Black said. “Because the truth is, you don’t have to sit home, afraid. And you can hate Beth—God knows, I have. But even if you hate her, you have to keep going. Because the truth is going to come out.”
I thanked him and hung up a few moments later. I was calmer now. I woke up my laptop and checked my email.
The first email that came up was a Google alert. I had a few alerts set up for various true-crime cases I’d written about, in case there were any updates. This one was my alert for crimes in Claire Lake. I would read that one later.
The second email that came in was from Michael—the property records on Linwood Street. All I had to do was open the email and start the work of filling in the missing parts.
Instead of being angry or afraid, I could get to work.
I looked again at Michael’s text on my phone: Are you all right?
I let out a breath and texted back: I am now.
* * *
—
The next day, I left work an hour early. Still wearing my scrub top and jeans, my purse over my shoulder, I hurried four blocks from the office to the city courthouse, getting to the records office half an hour before it closed. The records office sent me to the archives office—apparently a different thing entirely—so I lost an extra five minutes wandering the basement hallways, looking for the right sign.