She shakes her head. “Not really, but…” Bev frowns, pauses. “There was something.”
Elsie nods. “Go on.”
“His brother got in touch, said their father was dying.”
“So, what? Grief?” Margot asks.
“Not even grief, something different. Something more complicated.”
Elsie knows Bev’s husband had a difficult relationship with his father, that he was abusive, controlling.
“So you’re saying that anyone experiencing a challenging life situation is more likely to kill?” Bev asks.
“No, but if someone already has the propensity or the characteristics to be able to kill, something difficult in their lives might create an environment that pushes them to do so—like a padlock.” She twists her hands. “Something has to happen to make all the numbers align. Then…”
“Boom.” Margot opens her hand. “Like a pressure-cooker situation.”
“Exactly,” says Elsie.
“So if we do this—if—” Bev says, “we could be looking for someone going through financial difficulty? Or facing something else challenging?”
“Bankruptcy, a struggling business, family drama…”
“How do we even go about looking for that?” Margot asks, dubious.
Before Elsie can answer, Beverley suddenly interjects, “You do know how it will look, though, right?”
They turn to her.
“Taking an interest in Cheryl’s case, in Emily’s, is one thing, but doing a whole investigation ourselves? You know how it looks that we aren’t locking ourselves in our houses all day?” Her voice is tight. “If we go nosing around at crime scenes, what will people think?”
“Who cares how it looks?” Elsie argues. “Don’t we owe the girls this? The girls our husbands took, other girls—don’t we owe it to them to try to protect future victims?”
“Anyway,” Margot butts in, placing her tumbler on the floor, “do I really have to say it again? God. I am not what my husband did. You are not what Henry did. Elsie is not what Albert did. People might want to see us as by-products of their actions, but I am not that. I refuse to be a footnote in his story for the rest of my life. I’m in. I say we do it.”
“You keep everything in that scrapbook, Bev,” Elsie encourages. She knows they have to work together to do this. “Don’t you have those letters? From all the women who wrote to you whose husbands did bad things. Maybe the letters can tell us something about what kind of guy this killer could be—how they found out what their husbands were doing.”
“We can build a picture of him.” Margot takes the baton. “Try to track him down that way. Find outwhyhe might be doing this, what motivates him.” She watches Bev, hopeful. “We’ll tell the police if wefind anything significant, if that makes you feel better. Elsie, there must be more you can do with that logo, some digging you can do at theSignal?”
She nods. She still needs to convince Hunter to run a story about the bracelet. If the public knows about it, they can keep an eye out for it. Finding that bracelet, wherever it might be, could give them a clue to the killer’s identity, his whereabouts.
“And can you look into this missing model?” she asks Margot in return. “Try to remember if there was anything else you heard—someone she was in touch with, a boyfriend, someone she was dating, anything.”
“And you?” Margot asks Beverley. “Are you in?”
Beverley is quiet for a while, then swallows thickly. “All right.” She nods eventually. “I’m in.”
Two days missing
The weather wasfine the day you took me. The sun—high and marbled in the sky—streamed in through the windows and fell in warm pools on the floor. I could tell there was someone close by, my animal senses alert to an intruder, and the breath caught in my throat as I waited. Time seemed to stretch out slowly then as I turned, held still, a fly trapped in amber.
I could not speak, could not breathe, first struck not by the fact that you were there but by how the light cast your face in the cold, hard contours of a statue. I had mere seconds to consider whether I had time to run, and then it hit. There was only sensation. Something blunt. A searing pain. My mind flooded with black.
Fourteen
The gates ofthe San Quentin high-security prison loom above Beverley’s head. The sky must have sensed her arrival, because it has mottled itself gray with sea fog—a macabre armor that makes her skin feel too heavy for her bones.
She peers at the huge concrete building far beyond the gates, barbed wire twisted around its exterior, windows barred and bolted.
