I will wash the smell of you from my clothes, my skin.
I will breathe fresh air again.
Twenty-Nine
In the daysthat follow her appearance on television, Beverley receives hate mail in the post. She is not used to receiving letters anymore. Her former friends, mostly preppy onetime teen models she met in waiting rooms, find her situation unpalatable. But they do send bland, perfunctory cards at Christmastime, with updates on their husbands’ promotions at work, their Aspen ski vacations, little Robert’s grades at school. They don’t ask after her small, tragic life, as if ignoring it will scrub away the stain of blood.
But this is a deluge. Beverley opens each letter, far away from the children, early in the morning, torturing herself as the sun blares out through the treetops. She reads every single line, holding each one to her throat like a knife.
The letters tell her she’s a man-hater, a hypochondriac. They tell her she’s a bitch pushing an agenda against men, that she deserves to die a brutal death, just as her husband’s victims did.
It’s just like her mother said. Punishment. It’s only what she deserves. How can she ever have expected anything else?
Alice herself stops by to tell Beverley she is endangering her children by spouting controversial opinions so publicly. Beverley questions how the opinion that male violence is a danger to women can be controversial. Her mother simply mutters in response, tells her she really must read less.
September drags on, a gluey, endless stretching of time. Beverley studies herself in the mirror and finds only the shell of someone she once knew. She used to be elegant, used to look so much like someone whose face could sell peanut butter or kitchen cleaner. She had a ballerina’s posture once, shaped by years in front of the camera. Where is that girl now? This thing in front of the mirror is hunched and diminished.
Elsie and Margot have both called to tell her it wasn’t too bad. That Marston was an ass. That she did a good job of getting the word out there. Even if she was vilified. Even if it didn’t give them any leads, anywhere else to turn. She did her best.
Desperate, she called Roger to tell him about the incident in the supermarket—Mr. Appleton with his cartful of Lucky Charms, the way it made her skin crawl just to be near him.
“Maybe the man just really likes cereal,” he deadpanned down the crackling line.
She held the handset away from her ear and clenched her teeth. She resented being mocked, especially when people’s lives were at stake.
“Look, no guy over fifty would murder young, athletic women with his bare hands,” Roger continued, growing tired of her suspicions. “You’ve got to stop this, Bev.”
She was silent.
“Honey,” he sighed, “I can’t just stake out a guy because he has a hankering for Lucky Charms, okay?” He told her that the police werepursuing their own leads, that they now agreed that the murders could be linked, that they had their eyes on a few different suspects, each with his own history of violence and threatening behavior toward women.
She hung up frustrated and unsatisfied.
Sean Wilson, she now knows, has been alibied by his wife. But that does not explain why he was at Cheryl’s vigil in the first place. “Heston did more digging,” Elsie later told her. “He came away with the opinion that Wilson was obsessed with Cheryl and a couple of the other girls at her club, would watch them train, hang around at their meets, called himself a fan.”
“So he’s a creep even if he isn’t a killer,” Margot sneered.
Elsie promised her that she’d do more investigating at theSignal, that they’d get a break eventually—they just had to keep going. But all Beverley wanted to do was sit, the doors and windows closed, the heat bulging at the glass, the houseplants parched and abandoned, and ruminate on her punishment. Her actions—her “stunt,” as her mother called it—had let the murdered women down, and Beverley had made a laughingstock of herself. How could she have done such a poor job of sticking up for those she was supposed to protect?
—
It’s been almostten days, and Beverley is cleaning the kitchen, hair unwashed, radio on full blast, when she realizes she has not yet checked the mail. In her robe and slippers, no longer caring what the neighbors think, she trudges out into the blinding sunlight and pulls open the mailbox. There is just one letter tucked inside, and she is relieved that the number has finally started to dwindle. She looks from left to right and across the street. No gawping neighbors, no Mrs. Akerman walking her dachshund. Just Mr. Appleton doddering up hisfront path, returning home from a rare outing. She peels the envelope open and gingerly unfolds the letter, bracing herself for the sting of the words she knows she deserves.
Dear Beverley Lightfoot,the letter reads,I am writing about my husband.
Thirty
Five days later
Beverley checks herwatch. Five past eleven. They were supposed to be meeting inside the diner on the hour, but she can’t seem to leave her car. She considers driving off and saving herself the humiliation of being stood up, of exposing herself to a setup, but the image of Diane Howard Murray in her cleaning apron flashes into her mind, then the image of Sarah Gunn twirling her majorette batons. She pushes open the car door, steps out into the sweltering heat and makes her way across the lot.
She takes a table at the very back of the room so she can watch the door. It’s close to the bathroom, in case she needs to hide. There’s an old song playing on the jukebox—“Dream Lover” by Bobby Darin. It makes Bev pause, bristle. Henry used to whistle it around the house, catching her with his arm as she passed by in the hall, swaying her into a playful dance. She puts the palms of her hands to her ears to try to block out the sound.
The waitress stops by and Beverley orders a coffee, then calls her back to order another. She doesn’t want to be seen as rude.
The woman signed off with a name, Sharon Farrer, although whether that was a pseudonym, Beverley couldn’t be sure.
She spent the evening poring over the letter, searching every line, looking for the ruse, the trap. But there was something in Sharon’s words that made Beverley certain that she wasn’t lying.
