Beth’s smile was bitter. “I didn’t have much money of my own at sixteen, but I sent her whatever I could beg, borrow, or steal. I thought I was helping my poor half sister who had been treated so badly. I was stupid in those days. All I can say for myself is that it was the last time she fooled me.”
“How did she fool you?”
“Because my father was sending her money, too. She’d blackmailed him with threats that she’d start telling the truth about whose daughter she was. My father hated Lily, but it was easier to shut her up than to fight her. At least at first. I think he figured if he just paid her, she’d stay away forever. But I didn’t know about that until after he died. I just stupidly thought the money I sent her was the only money she had.” Beth looked away from me, at the windows, seeing nothing as she spoke. “What you don’t understand, Shea, is that everything is my fault. All of it. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might as well have. Everything is on me.”
The air in the room was cold now, oppressive, hard to breathe. I felt beads of sweat start along my hairline. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I could have stopped her,” Beth said, still not looking at me. “I knew what she was, even then. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone, but I knew. I was the only one who suspected about David. But Lily left town, and I chose to believe it was over. I finished high school and stopped thinking about it, except when I sent her money. I made the same mistake Julian did, but the difference was that I knew better. I knew Lily, and he didn’t. So while I was worried about math tests and the fact that my parents wanted me to marry Gray, Lily was . . .”
I was leaning forward, entranced despite the cold sweat running down my skin. “Lily was what?”
“She never told me,” Beth said. “But I’ll bet there are deaths in those cities, when Lily was there, that no one could ever explain. Unsolved murders, even. They’d be buried under decades of other murders by now, forgotten. But they’re there, like David’s death. Like whatever happened to her foster family.”
The silence was a heavy weight in the room. This was the crux of it, then; this was what Beth wanted me to believe. She wanted me to believe that at eighteen, her sister had become a serial killer.
It wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, I’d been willing to believe that Beth was one herself.
“I should have looked for her,” Beth said. “I should have found a way. She’d given me addresses to send money to. She was using assumed names—Veronica Jenshak, one or two others. I should have taken my money, gotten in my car, and gone to find her. Tried to stop her. Done whatever it took. I think part of her wanted me to do it—to defy my parents, leave town, and go look for her, even if it was only to have her locked up. Part of her wanted me to care. She called me and begged me once. It was the only time in my life I ever heard her distressed.”
My mouth was dry. I was on the knife-edge, listening to her words. “What did she beg you for?”
But Beth shook her head. “That was later—years later. I’d stopped giving her money by then. But before my father died, I was young and scared and stupid. I thought maybe Lily would just behave, be nice, if I gave her the money she wanted. I stayed home, and people died because of it. I don’t have to know who they were to know they died. I just know.”
I wondered if it was possible to find any murders that might be Lily’s. Without an exact timeline, it was nearly impossible. “And then what?” I asked.
“And then two things happened.” Beth ran a hand through her hair and turned back to me. “The first is that I finished high school. It was understood by everyone that I would marry Gray, but I had to finish high school first. After that, it was simply a matter of waiting for him to propose. That was all I was good for—marrying rich. College was out of the question; my parents would never have sent me, I didn’t have my own money, and my grades weren’t good enough for even a small scholarship. So that was that. I was going to be a wife.”