“We’re all fine,” Elsie assures her. “Margot came back for me.” She says it proudly. “Enid’s okay, too.”
“Well, I didn’t want to miss out on all the drama,” Margot jokes, but a smile doesn’t follow. They’ve been through so much. Beverley wonders if they’ll ever be the same again.
“Is Roger…?” She almost doesn’t want to ask.
“He’s alive,” Elsie replies flatly. “We saw the ambulance take him away. The cops are in his room with him now.”
Beverley’s face crumples. “I’m sorry.” She shakes her head. More tears. “I should have seen it. I didn’t see it.”
Mass killers are master manipulators. She knows that. They’re experts at hiding in plain sight. That’s exactly what Roger did.
“Are we really doing that again?” Margot sounds tired. “No one can stop these people, Bev. No wives, no sisters, brothers, cops. But we got him—in the end. We got him, Bev. He’s done.”
There’s a sudden knock at the door, and the women freeze. A young nurse stands at the doorway, a worried look on her face. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a reporter here to see you.”
“Oh Jesus,” says Margot, fixing her hair. “Here come the press.”
“It’s okay,” says Elsie softly. “Send her in.”
A woman appears at the doorway, and Beverley turns her headtoward her. She has wild hair, a steeliness in her eyes and the languid posture of someone who knows her own worth.
“This is Patti,” Elsie says as the woman smiles calmly, then takes a seat, pulls a notebook from her purse.
“Ladies”—she looks among them—“you ready to tell your story?”
Five days freed
Foiled by women.Oh, it pleases me deeply to know how much he will detest that.
He always thought he was so clever. He thought that we, women, could never see him for who he really was. But of course, as with so many things over the years, he was wrong about that.
I was planning to leave him. I knew about the affair. I knew he had another woman. I never hated her, though, and now I know she was just a pretty, young, vulnerable woman he felt it was his right to take advantage of. I owe her my life, I suppose, my husband’s mistress. Irony has such a wicked sense of humor.
I’d packed a bag, but he hadn’t noticed—he rarely noticed anything that didn’t concern his career. I’d stashed it in the back of the closet, with the golf clubs, made inquiries about a little apartment on the coast. I’d rather have been alone than with a man like my husband, a man who slung his dirty shirts in the laundry basket at the end of each day, not even considering that I might see the lipstick smears,smell the perfume. What an insult. How embarrassing, a cop who couldn’t even have an affair convincingly.
When I found that my coat was missing, that was when I got angry. I thought he had given it to her, my best Burberry. Now I know, of course, that he put it on that poor Calabasas girl, Diane—all part of his twisted show, part of his quest to be “special,” to be remembered.
The police told me that he confessed. Five girls. My God, it’s far worse than what he’d taunted me with when we were down in that basement.
I could call him evil. I could call him poison, a monster, a maggot, a beast. But to put a name to him, to what he has done, would give him the sort of power that he could never deserve.
I did love him once, a long time ago, when we were young and hopeful that life would deal us a good hand of cards. But I fell out of love years ago, long before he became a killer. And now I am going to wash my hands of him forever.
To me, he’s nothing, and I hope that for those girls’ families he will become nothing one day, too. Simply a footnote. An afterthought. A meager insignificance. Shut away, forgotten, cast into the shadows so that the light of their daughters, sisters, friends, can shine through, bold and bright.
Fifty
Six months later
Beverley steps outof the car and peers up at the house. The air is crisp, cut through with a chill, the sun glassy and bright, a sign that spring is coming.
Does it look any different, her home? She doesn’t think so. But what it represents has changed for her now. No longer is it a prison to be barricaded before she goes to sleep each night.
A flock of birds passes overhead, black silhouette curves streaking across the lucid sky. The cool breeze nips at her skin, and she pulls her jacket tightly around her.
Mrs. Akerman, the neighbor, walks by with her dachshund.
“Afternoon,” Beverley calls cheerily.
