Twenty-Seven
The last timeMargot visited church, she managed all of five minutes. The maudlin wood of the pews, the mustiness of the air, all that stained glass—it gave her the creeps. She sat at the back, wearing one of her mother’s old dresses, thought about some sort of reflection to mark the five years since Stephen had been arrested, then thought better of it, glanced at the ceiling in a makeshift prayer and hotfooted it to a nearby hotel bar to hide.
This place is a little different. She’s not really sure you could even call it a church. There are no pews, no prayer books. Instead, beanbags and cushions have been carefully scattered across the floor. The windows are draped with jewel-toned scarves, and there’s a distinct smell of incense sticks and stale coffee. A few cross-legged women chat in small groups. Others lean against the walls, drinking from Solo cups with the tired, glazed eyes of those who know they no longer have to be on high alert.
Margot glances at Elsie, who has her attention fixed on a group of women clustered around a table at the front of the room.
“That must be Betty,” she murmurs. Margot follows her gaze to a woman who would not look out of place on the arm of a Rolling Stone. She has a tight fuchsia turtleneck and bell-bottomed jeans on, and there’s a lanyard strung around her neck. Her hair is styled in the type of glossy Supremes bob you see on magazine covers.
Margot swallows guiltily. Why did she expect paisley and tofu? She’s too quick to judge sometimes; she knows that. She gets it from her mother.
She follows as Elsie makes her way to the front of the room. Margot was surprised when Elsie had allowed her to come along, but Margot is aware of her own ability to put people at ease. She got that from her mother, too, an uncanny ability to shape-shift socially, to switch up her demeanor, her way of talking, to blend into any situation she might find herself in. She watched her mother do it at parties, in the grocery store, on the odd, awful occasion when she and her brother caught a glimpse of her with one of the men. She seemed at home wherever she found herself. Margot knew it was all an act, though, and was amazed at such strength of will, such clever manipulation of the people and the circumstances around her. So she studied it until she’d perfected the very same skills herself.
She looks to Elsie, whose expression is determined. They’ve never spent much one-on-one time together, but, to Margot’s surprise, she actually enjoyed the car ride over here. They spent it discussing the ways in which their husbands had covered up their crimes. If they could find commonalities between them, patterns of behavior, perhaps it wasn’t unreasonable to think that another woman, another wife, was recognizing the very same things in her own husband right now. There were the unsurprising things: stammered explanations for their absences, receipts for mystery purchases, endless stretches of time spent out of the house. Then there were the less obvious ones. Stephen took showers, Margot explained, so many showers—whenever hereturned home, whether it was four p.m. or four a.m. She didn’t question it at first; then, after a few weeks, she put it down to extramarital affairs—the man was hardly subtle. But with hindsight she can see that on the occasions when he wasn’t washing off blood and hair and skin, he was scrubbing away guilt.
Elsie’s experience with Albert was more complicated. She talked about masks, describing how he had seemed to wear different faces constantly, slipping seamlessly between them most of the time. But sometimes a mask would catch, and he’d be caught between the duality of two personalities: a calm, patient teacher who’d suddenly snap at passing children; a voracious reader who’d inexplicably spend a whole distracted afternoon gazing silently out the window. What Elsie saw when those masks misaligned scared her. It’s only now that she knows just how hard he fought to keep the true Albert buried beneath them.
Could whoever is killing women around Berryview have a family at home? A wife he lies to? A nice house? A shower he stands under at the end of the day, dried blood draining off with the dirty water?
At the church café, Betty raises her head as they approach, smiling quizzically. She must know most of the women who come here, spent after long nights out working, some of them reeling from the experience, others of them merely weary, looking for somewhere to rest, to lower their guard. Margot and Elsie must present an unusual sight—Elsie with her endless sincerity, Margot with her Prada.
“Ladies, welcome. You here for coffee?” Betty doesn’t miss a beat, fixing their eyes as if they belong there when it is abundantly clear that they do not. Margot is impressed.
Elsie launches straight in. “I’m a friend of Patti Fowler’s. She said you might be able to help us out with something.”
Margot notices Betty’s mouth tightening almost imperceptibly before she relaxes into a smile once again. She glances quickly around theroom, keeps that smile fixed in place. “Why don’t you ladies join me out back?”
In the hallway, a single light flickers overhead. Margot brushes against the wall, and her jacket comes away damp. There are boxes stacked atop one another, marked in red felt-tip. Underwear. Warm clothing. Toiletries.
“I’d rather the ladies didn’t hear us talking,” Betty explains, more relaxed now. “This is a safe space for them, and I assume you’re not here for the hospitality.”
A safe space.Margot considers, briefly, whether her mother had a place like this to come to when she was working. She was a strong woman, capable of handling herself, a woman who would most definitely have screamed and kicked and fought if she ever found herself in a situation that meant she might not see her children again. Even when she was so diminished by illness, when it had torn out her hair and shut off the light behind her eyes, Margot’s mother was the strongest person in any room.
Margot traveled to be with her in those last days, leaving the grand house she shared with Stephen to sit in her mother’s cramped living room, to curl up with her on the couch, to stroke her head as if Margot had been the parent and her mother the child. She had just one week with her before she died—the very same week, she later discovered, that Stephen began his awful spree.
“We want to ask you about a young woman,” Elsie says.
“Diane Howard Murray,” Margot says, pulling the photograph from her pocket. She hands it over to Betty.
Betty studies the photo, nods slowly. “She came here a few times,” she confirms. Margot watches as Betty runs a thumb slowly over the girl’s face, an almost protective gesture. “I remember thinking how young she looked. Wasn’t much of a talker.”
“She was killed.”
Margot is taken aback by Elsie’s forthrightness, her focus on the facts.
“Her body was found in an alleyway in Calabasas, dressed in a coat and suspenders.”
Betty’s eyes close for a moment, and Margot knows she’s processing dread. Then they flick open. “What do you need from me?”
“Did you know any of her clients? Anyone who might have acted aggressively toward her, might have been possessive, fixated?”
“There are plenty of men like that. These girls are always coming back with horror stories.”
“Did she, or any of the other girls, mention someone who might have had weird sexual inclinations?”
Betty exhales drily. “Defineweird.”
“Well, maybe there’s a guy who likes the girls to dress up. Maybe there’s someone who…” Elsie falters. “Maybe there’s someone who likes to hurt them.”
