“Have you spoken to the cops about this?” Betty asks, looking between Elsie and Margot.
“We’re sort of doing our own thing,” Margot explains. “And let’s just say the cops aren’t really on our side.”
“Understood.” Betty smiles tightly. “Look, if the girls come across someone unusually violent, he’ll be in the book.”
“ ‘The book’?”
“The Beware Book,” Betty explains. “At least that’s what the girls call it. The cops were forced to use it when all those students went missing in ’sixty-one.”
Margot’s heart picks up speed.
“It has details of each encounter—where it happened, a description of the guy and sometimes a number plate, if the girl’s had a chance and the wherewithal to note it. There are a lot of bad guys in that book.”
“Any idea how we can get hold of it?” Elsie asks.
Betty glances behind them, down the hallway. “Wait here.”
When she returns, she has in her hand a bunch of papers fastened with a large clip. She holds it out to Elsie. “This is precious information. It keeps the girls safe. I’ll need it all back later today, okay?”
Elsie takes it, holds it to her chest.
Margot nods. “You have our word.”
Twenty-Eight
Beverley scratches theinside of her elbow and shifts on the hard red couch. Her legs are tightly crossed, her back unnaturally straight. She wishes she had a glass of water at hand.
She was forced to do this. Another girl was missing, a girl from Berryview. The victims were stacking up, and Beverley has received her own warning now, too. She can’t put this off any longer. She knows she has to do whatever it takes to get the word out there.
The television studio is vast. The lights are pointed directly at her, hot enough to melt makeup. Someone smelling of hair spray approaches and brushes her cheeks with heavy powder. She asks Beverley to purse her lips so that she can reapply, holds out a sheet of paper, orders her to blot.
Beside Beverley, on a smaller couch, is a man in a gray suit, his trousers having lifted to show apricot-colored socks. Staff busy about behind the cameras, adjusting the lighting, speaking in strange code she doesn’t understand. Behind her head, on a huge screen, is a bright, innocuously artificial sunrise. It makes Bev’s eyes ache.
She knew from the moment she learned of the Jane Doe, of Cheryl Herrera, that it might come to this. The thought, the number stashed away in the kitchen drawer, lingered like an unattended itch at the back of her mind. Now three girls are dead and another has gone missing. The women of California are in danger, and that includes Margot and Elsie; it includes her mother and every other woman who locks her door at night hoping it’s enough to keep her safe.
She was powerless to do anything about it—until now.
So Beverley walked to her kitchen and found the slip of paper she’d hidden away along with a bunch of business cards and scrawled notes. On it was a telephone number and three words:The California Day.
It was five years since Henry was imprisoned for the murders he committed. If she has to talk aboutthatwith host Charles Marston to get her own message across, then so be it.
The producer seemed surprised when she called him back after all this time, after so many ignored messages and phone calls. “Anything I can do to stop it from happening again…” she said. He booked her for the next available slot.
But that does not mean she isn’t nervous. It does not mean she doesn’t want to tear off her own skin. She barely slept last night, turning in a tangle of bedsheets, doubting her decision. The police gala was excruciating enough, and that was only a few hundred people.The California Dayis broadcast across the entire state. There are likely to be millions of viewers. Charles Marston is a well-known TV personality who appears on billboards next to the highway and in television commercials for golf clubs and weight-loss pills. But that’s exactly what she needs, isn’t it? She needs to reach as many women as possible. She needs to ask them a question.
“So, Mrs. Lightfoot…” A runner with a clipboard and a headset bends in front of her and speaks quickly. “Charles is going to do a briefintroduction, touching on your story, your husband, the date, et cetera, et cetera. Then he’ll ask you a few questions, nothing too taxing. You can make your apology, and ta-da! Home by lunchtime.” He stands and claps her on the shoulder before she has time to ask any questions. Her cheeks redden at her own foolishness.An apology.Of course that’s what they expect of her; that’s all anyone expects of her. She has spent years apologizing for Henry’s actions.
When it all happened, she felt a fuzzy, consuming need to beg for forgiveness. She wrote to the mothers, cousins and siblings of Henry’s victims. Only one replied, the sister of Annie Milton, who was not much older than Beverley when Henry killed her. Following a string of unanswered messages, the woman eventually agreed to meet for coffee.
Beverley waited at the café for four hours, draining cup after cup, not even leaving the table to use the restroom, desperate to cling to the idea that Annie’s sister would eventually walk through the door and listen to Beverley’s apology. She never showed, and when the server stopped by with the boiling coffeepot once more, Beverley wanted to snatch it from her and hold the scalding metal to her own skin.
She turned to her mother for comfort then, showing up in tears on her doorstep. Alice let her in, put a blanket around her shoulders, sat her down.
“But, darling,” Alice cooed, and Beverley waited for the moment she’d always yearned for—a mother making everything better, kisses and Band-Aids. “You can’t simply expect people to forgive you. Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling you that that is not what you deserve.”
“Okay, Charles. Ready for you in thirty.”The radio bleeps with static.
Charles shifts forward on the couch.
