I pulled out my phone. My pulse was pounding in my throat. I was alone at night, far from home. I could call a taxi or an Uber. I could call Michael to come get me. I could call Esther and Will. I could go to the nearest bus stop and wait in the darkness, alone.
My thumb hovered over Michael’s number. He’d come for me, I knew. If I called, he’d come.
I took another breath, and another. I didn’t dial his number.
Face your fears, Shea. It’s time.
Was that Beth’s voice I heard in my head? I wiped my forehead, stood up straight. I looked up and down the quiet street. There were no cars, no one walking at this hour. The bus into Arlen Heights didn’t run this late. I’d have to walk to the bottom of the road, over a mile downhill, to catch the bus downtown.
Somewhere far off, a door slammed. The wind rustled in the trees.
Behind me, the lights went off in the Greer mansion, leaving me in even deeper darkness. I turned and looked back at the house, my sneakers crunching against the gravel of the sidewalk.
The Greer mansion was still and silent. In an upstairs window was a foggy handprint, as if someone had just pressed their palm against the glass. While watching me.
I took a step back, and then another. Then I put my phone in my pocket and started the long walk down the hill.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
October 2017
SHEA
The ocean was tame at the piers, where the houseboats bobbed in the water, but it was still the ocean. When the wind kicked up and the weather got stormy on the horizon, the boats shifted and clanked, groaning as the water tried to pull them free of their moorings. Spray slapped up on the edges of the old boards that made up the piers, and the smell was deep and fishy, salty and a little rotten. On the park bench where I sat at seven thirty in the morning, I could see the houseboats rocking, the last remnants of their flower boxes moving in the wind. Some of the boats had lights on, yellow in the dark as their occupants started their mornings. I wrapped my coat and my sweater more tightly around me.
“It isn’t going to storm,” the man next to me on the bench said. “It looks like it is, but it isn’t. It’s going to blow over.”
The man next to me was in his late seventies, but he looked much older. He was tall and too thin, his clothes hanging off him. His skin was splotchy, his eyes sunken. He looked very unwell, and he was well aware of it. A cane leaned against the bench next to him. But a few feet away, in the tiny parking lot, a sleek Mercedes waited for the man, with a hired driver inside. The man was Ransom Wells.
He had phoned me over an hour ago as I lay sleepless in bed. “This is Ransom Wells,” he said when I answered, as if it weren’t six o’clock in the morning. “Beth Greer wishes for me to speak to you, and I happen to agree. I understand you work downtown, and I don’t wish to interrupt your schedule. If you meet me at the bench in Langland Park, near the piers, I will be there at seven thirty, and I’ll say all I wish to say.”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up. Then I got up, got dressed, and took the bus to the piers.
Ransom, I knew, had been a big man, florid and exciting, his presence electric. The Lady Killer case was only one of the many cases in his legendary career; he had gone on to defend celebrity clients in other high-profile cases, always making a splash in the press. But the Lady Killer case, his brilliant victory defending Beth Greer, was the one that launched him.
He had retired only ten years ago, and those years had not been kind. He had lost most of his famous bulk, as if something was eating him from the inside. He looked tired. But his posture was upright as he sat on the bench next to me, and his hands, though the veins were blue and the knuckles prominent, were large and strong, the last vital thing about him.
“I suppose I’ve shocked you with my appearance,” he said.