CHAPTER FIVE
September 2017
SHEA
“I’m taking my lunch break,” I said.
It was early for lunch, but Karen shrugged. I was entitled, and the sooner I went, the sooner I could come back and relieve her. I pulled my purse from under the desk and grabbed my coat.
Beth Greer had taken forty-five minutes for her appointment. Then she’d walked through the waiting room, disappearing into the elevator without a backward glance. I couldn’t have said what possessed me to follow her, but I had the impulse not to let her out of my sight.
The rain had let up today, the sky a chalky gray-blue, the wind carrying the scent of ocean. On the street, people sat at the outdoor cafés or window-shopped, taking pictures of the houseboats on the water. Claire Lake had a neighborhood of citizens who lived on their boats, docked in the marina. They had walkways and window planters, garden gnomes and pinwheel birds, like any other home. In some past decade, the city had made the houseboats legal residences, and subsequent attempts to change the zoning had failed. Now it was one of Claire Lake’s tourist attractions, a pretty spot for people to stroll and enjoy their fancy take-out coffee. People came here to stay in the B&Bs, stroll the tidy, cobblestoned streets, and get away from the bigger, more crowded cities.
Beth didn’t head toward the marina. Instead she turned a corner down a side street. I followed at a safe distance, under cover of the downtown crowd. Beth turned another corner, then another. Then I lost her.
I stood next to a small, shaded park and turned in a circle, wondering which way she’d gone. Then a voice came from the park: “Why are you following me?”
It was Beth. She was sitting on a park bench under the canopy of trees, watching me. She wore sunglasses, the big kind that covered half her face, even though it was a cloudy day. Behind her was a statue of a man getting out of a boat—some Oregon explorer. Beth’s purse was on the bench next to her, and she had one knee crossed over the other. She watched me, waiting politely for an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know who you are.” That sounded vaguely threatening, so I hurried to add, “I’m a crime writer.”
Beth looked me up and down, taking in my scrub top. “You don’t look like a crime writer.”
“I do it in my off-hours. I run a website.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. My name is Shea Collins.”
Beth Greer tilted her head, watching me.
When I was researching my article on the Lady Killer case, I’d found a video on YouTube of Beth right before her arrest. She was getting out of her car and walking up the lane to the Greer mansion. The reporter—a man in a belted trench coat and plaid wide-legged pants, straight from 1977 central casting—had caught Beth as she pulled up and opened the car door. The reporter must have gotten a scoop, because there were no other reporters there. It was raining, and Beth was wearing a trench coat, too. It was an uncanny image, that of a woman in red hair and a trench coat, just like the witness to the second murder had reported seeing.
Beth Greer looked like she could have been walking the Paris runway any time in the twenty-first century.
“Miss Greer!” the reporter had shouted as he followed her, waving his wired microphone. “Miss Greer! Do you have anything to say about the murder accusations against you? Are you the Lady Killer?”
Beth slammed her car door and put her hands in her pockets. She looked at the reporter and leaned toward the microphone. “I’m just a girl who minds her own business,” she said. Her tone was cold and without inflection, almost robotic.
In 1977, everyone thought that Beth Greer’s lack of emotion about being put on trial for murder made her unfeeling, almost unnatural, like a witch. Watching the clip in 2017, I heard in her voice a woman who was sick to death of everything, a woman who had lived through the trauma of her parents’ deaths and was living through a media frenzy, a woman who knew that nothing she said or did would ever matter. It wasn’t that she was unfeeling. It was that she’d stopped caring, stopped being afraid.