“You still thought he was having an affair…”
“I reasoned that I could cope with an affair,” Beverley scoffs. “When I felt so awful every day, with the baby coming and with a two-year-old to look after, I told myself that an affair was manageable, understandable,even. He’d get over it. He’d stop sneaking around at some point, and we’d settle into being a family again.”
“But there was no other woman?”
“I went out first thing in the morning to check the trash can.” Beverley bites her lip, nods. “It was barely light, but it was already hot. I remember, there was a coyote halfway down the street, watching me. No one else was awake. Henry was still in bed, and the clothes were still there, right at the top of the trash can, not even hidden. I pulled out Henry’s shirt and his pants and—”
She pauses.
“There was…blood. All over them. I dropped them and threw the lid back on. He must have got into a fight. That’s what I thought at first. He must have got into a fight at a bar and been too drunk or too embarrassed to tell me. He always had a rotten temper. It wouldn’t have been the first time. The blood could have been from the other guy. I’ve seen people smashed in the face with glass—y’know, on TV? Maybe that’s what happened, a really, really bad fight.”
“You convinced yourself of it, huh?” Elsie feels leaden. She knows what it’s like when your brain tries to convince you of something your body knows is untrue.
“I was pregnant. I had a young child. I couldn’t let my mind go anywhere else,” Beverley says. “So I let myself believe that. I didn’t even ask him about it. I never brought it up. But if I’d thought—if I’dreallythought—about it, about everything else he’d been doing, the way he was behaving, I could have stopped him.”
Elsie starts to shake her head.
“He killed two more women after that, Elsie.” Beverley’s eyes are wide with panic. “I could have saved them. If I hadn’twantedto think that it was an affair, or late-night drinking, or fights, because that was easier formeto deal with, I could have stopped him. So actually it was my fault. Just like this. Just like now. Itismy fault.”
“Beverley? No.” Elsie’s voice hardens. “You have to stop this, for Christ’s sake.”
Bev crumples. She looks wounded, so completely exhausted.
Elsie moves closer to her, softens her tone. “Look.” She touches Bev on the shoulder. “We have to make our peace with being a little bit in agony for the rest of our lives. That’s what’s going to happen, okay? And we need to get used to that.”
Beverley lets out a slow, defeated sigh.
“We’re never going to get answers to our questions.Why did he do it? What could I have done to stop it? How can I stop it from happening to someone else?” She leans against her friend. Beverley is so good at giving advice to others, yet so terrible at taking it herself.
“If you let the questions take over, if you let them becomeeverything, you’ll drown. Do you hear me, Bev? You’ll drown. It will be the end of you. And I’m not going to let that happen. Not to me, not to you, not to Margot. We did a good job looking into Hank, okay? Getting the word out there. Putting the pressure on the cops. I know that had an impact. I know we made a difference. I know they’ll find who did this.”
“Well, what do we do now?” asks Beverley, her voice thin. “We’re not going to give up, are we?”
“No, we’re not going to give up,” Elsie says, eyes cutting to the window and the shadows slanting across the backyard, cast by the lowering sun. She leans back, making herself comfortable on the couch. “Not when women here are still in danger.” She clasps her hands together. “We’re going to take a breath. We’re going to reset. Then we’re going to outsmart him.”
Thirty-Nine
The weather breaksand the rain finally comes, washing the pretty streets of Berryview in an insipid gray.
It’s better this way, Beverley supposes. She doesn’t have to explain to the kids anymore why she will not open the windows. This way she can keep them indoors and nobody will ask questions—not even her mother, who picks them up wordlessly every evening, an umbrella held above her head. When she leaves, Beverley retreats to the kitchen, pours a long slug of whiskey and turns to the pages of her scrapbook.
With her defenses down, like this, she’d let her secrets slip. She told Elsie about the pig, about the affair. She didn’t have the strength to keep anything to herself any longer. Elsie had looked pained and dropped her eyes to the floor. Beverley knew she was finding it hard not to judge her for the affair, and she wouldn’t blame Elsie for judging her. Beverley judges herself. She knows she is weak.
She called Sharon and told her that she, Margot and Elsie were no longer looking into Hank. Sharon seemed relieved, in a way, but Beverley also sensed something else in her voice: disappointment. If Hankwas not the killer, that meant he would remain out of prison, free to harm Sharon, maybe even harm the kids. Beverley replaced the receiver and wept. It should have been good news. Instead, it was just another way she had let someone down.
She still hasn’t spoken to Margot. Their coarse words play over in her head as she sits, her feet tucked up on the couch, watching mindless television. Hours slip by, a star-blurred emptiness, the mute passing of days. Weeks melt into one another in a slow, drowsy haze, gluey time stretching endlessly.
She thinks of the girls also. Of Kate, who loved horses, whose family said she had a wicked sense of humor and a childhood hip injury. Of Sarah, a talented majorette who by all accounts read romance novels by the truckload. Of Diane Howard Murray, about how her humble background never stopped her from going after her Hollywood ambitions, and about that dazzling smile, that confidence, just like Margot’s. Of Emily Roswell with her cheerleading pom-poms, her talent for science, which made her want to be a professor. Beverley sees, in her mind’s eye, Cheryl Herrera rising early and pulling on a hooded sweatshirt for training, kissing her father on the cheek before jogging out into the street, making her way to the athletics track.
Each morning, Beverley takes the paper and cuts out the articles she needs, pasting them into the book. It’s like sinking into a warm bath. The police have established a task force to catch the “Central Valley Slaughterer.” The papers report the latest breaks in the case. There are vague allusions to new suspects, new information from the families.
She has returned to other parts of her routine. She reclines now, in bed, her head on Roger’s stomach. She knows she shouldn’t have called him, that she should have the strength to move on by now. Their affair is disrespectful to Enid. Not only that, but it could also put his job in jeopardy. Yet there is something empty inside of her that only hiskindness can fill. She needs his smoky scent, his touch, his low, soothing voice between the bedsheets. The fact that he has been a means to get more information about the girls and their murders is not lost on her. At one point, the fantastical thought crossed her mind that she might have been using him; that, were it not for her fixation on the case, had she not wanted to catch this killer so badly, she might have ended things long ago. It was an intoxicating feeling, and she had allowed herself to relish it briefly—to hold the power, to know what it’s like to exploit. She could see why men have such a taste for it.
Tonight, they have been talking about the case again. Roger’s team has identified a suspect out in Ventura, a man who spent time in jail for stalking and kidnapping a girl back in the fifties, when he was just a teen.
“Is he the one?”
“I don’t know, Bev.” Roger softly twists her hair between his fingers. The late nights at the station are showing on him. Dark crescents puddle beneath his eyes.
