Chapter Seventeen
Lying on the thin mattress in her jail cell, Mary Beth stares at the water stain on the ceiling.
Depending on the hour and the weather outside the high rectangular window above the bunk, it sometimes looks to her like the state of Idaho.
Other times, she sees it as a man in profile, wearing a stovepipe hat.
Not Abe Lincoln.
No, the man she’d occasionally glimpsed when she was growing up in the house on Fourth Street in Mulberry Bay—a shadowy figure standing over her bed in the night, wearing a tall hat and a cloak of some sort.
A dream, she figured, the first time it happened, even though she was pretty sure she was still awake.
Or maybe a ghost, she decided, the second time he appeared in the childhood bedroom she shared with her sister Caroline.
The house had been built way back in the eighteen hundreds.
Having lived there all her life, she was too familiar with it to find it creepy, but that’s what her friends thought of it.
Or perhaps the Hatman was simply a figment of her imagination.
The terror that accompanied those sightings was all too real. As Caroline peacefully slumbered in the adjacent bed, Mary Beth could only lie there looking up at him, unable to make a sound or move a muscle.
Sleep paralysis.
She learned that years later, in a book she stumbled across in the prison library. The phenomenon dates back to ancient times. The weird thing is that a lot of people who experience it share the same bizarre hallucination: the Hatman.
She found that comforting. It’s nice not to feel alone in the bad things that happen to you.
It’s also nice that she hasn’t seen the Hatman standing over her bed in many years, unless you count the water stain.
She does not. This is more like one of those Rorschach ink blobs that sometimes looks like a man in a hat, and sometimes looks like Idaho, and sometimes, like right now, just looks like a stain.
She can hear the usual din beyond her cell—inmates laughing, arguing, cursing, moaning, crying. Guards talking, shouting; keys rattling, toilets flushing, footsteps echoing, doors clanking.
Her hair is damp with sweat, and her orange jumpsuit is plastered to her body. It’s so damned hot in here, not a breath of air.
She reminds herself of how the dead of winter felt in the federal penitentiary where she served ten years of a twelve-year drug-trafficking sentence. She remembers shivering beneath a flimsy blanket, teeth chattering, every muscle in her body painfully clenched. That was far worse.
This is just jail.
She’s here because in June, she went to Haven Cliff and threatened Caroline’s friends with a gun.
That wasn’t her intention. She was armed for her own protection. She hadn’t lured them there, as they claimed. She herself had been lured with a text.
Please come to Haven Cliff. Midnight by the statues. I need you.
She suspected it might be a trap, but there was no way she was going to ignore that text.
Of course she went.
It all fell apart so quickly. As Midge, Kelly, and Talia accused her of crimes she hadn’t committed, she realized what must have happened, and who was really responsible.
For the crimes, and for bringing Mary Beth face-to-face with her sister’s friends on that spot on that night—the twenty-fifth anniversary of Caroline’s disappearance.
Her sister’s little tomboy pal Midge is a cop now, and a powerful one.
Why would she believe anything a convicted felon has to say?
Why would she doubt that Mary Beth lured Gordy Klatte to his fatal fall? Or that she killed another man, a random stranger known locally as the Walking Man, on that same night?
Murder?
Two murders?
If Midge Kennedy has her way, Mary Beth will be charged with both, convicted, and sent away for life.
Mary Beth has made a lot of wrong, selfish decisions in her life. She’s pretty much betrayed everyone she ever cared about.
Not this time.
Midge, the lawyers, the judge and jurors, the public . . .
They can think whatever they want about her. Let them.
Let them assume she’s a monster. They won’t be the first to do so.
Let them believe she’s responsible for all of it. Not just what happened to her sister all those years ago, but what happened to Gordy this summer.
Let them.
Because Midge, Talia, and Kelly have no idea who Mary Beth Winterfield really is, or how she got to this place.
And they’re not the only ones willing to keep a dark secret for someone they love.