Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Beverley scratches the inside 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 about that with 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 Day is 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 brief introduction, 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.
Beverley rearranges her skirt yet again. Is she really going to do this? On live television?
“And that’s ten…”
She used to be good at this, flashing a Vaseline smile and gazing into the camera, feeling as if it were where she belonged.
“…nine, eight, seven…”
They could fill her slot with news about something else—Labor Day telethons, that new Star Trek show, nuclear tests in Kazakhstan…
“…three, two…” The camera operator holds up one silent finger, and Charles Marston erupts into life.
“Welcome back to The California Day on this bright, sunny September morning. Jeez, it’s hot out there, isn’t it, folks? Hot enough to fry an egg. Hot enough”—he pauses briefly—“for the Heatwave Killer to strike.”
There is a loud ringing in Beverley’s skull.
“If that moniker sounds familiar, that’s because it was the nickname given to Henry Lightfoot, the Bay Area air-conditioning salesman turned killer who snuck into young women’s houses through open windows and back doors.”
It sounds as if he is talking about a stranger, the plot of a movie. That is not life; that is surely not Beverley’s life.
“Five years ago, after taking the lives of seven victims, he was captured by police.” She thinks of the pink visiting room, the reek of bleach, Henry’s crocodile smile. I’m getting married.
Beverley senses eyes on her—not just those in the room, but a million pairs of eyes watching her from kitchens and living room sofas.
What must the audience think of her? That she’s crass?
Pitiful? Evil? Stiffly, she smooths down her skirt again and tugs at the hem.
She wants to cover every inch of her skin, to disappear into the seat cushions, pretend she never agreed to do this.
“And with us today, marking the anniversary of her husband’s conviction, is Beverley Lightfoot, the wife of Henry Lightfoot, the Heatwave Killer. Beverley, thank you so much for joining us in the studio. I know this can’t be an easy thing to talk about.”
“Ex-wife,” Beverley says quickly. “Thank you for having me.” It’s a privilege? An honor? “It’s a pleasure to be here.” Shit. No, not pleasure. Anything but pleasure.
Charles raises his eyebrows, continues. “Tell us, how did you feel when you first discovered that your husband, Henry Lightfoot, was the Heatwave Killer?”
Like she wanted to hack off her own ears so she wouldn’t have to hear what he had done. Like she could grab a knife from the kitchen counter and slice his neck open. “Well, I felt shock,” she says quietly. “Horror. Disbelief.”
“You had no inkling at all that he was out there at night, murdering young women in their homes?” She recognizes his tone, the undercurrent of judgment.
She takes a deep breath and lets it out. “None at all.”
“He never showed signs of it in the house? Never harmed you?”
She feels a sticky heat creep up to her chin.
“What about the children? You had children together, right?” He checks his notes. “Benjamin and…”
“Audrey. Henry never harmed the children.”
“Don’t you worry that they might turn out like him? Little Benjamin in particular?”
The space is stifling. This isn’t what she had agreed to talk about—not the kids. She wanted to protect them from things like this.
“I never really…”
“Do you think there was something in the home that caused him to do what he did, to flip?”
“Flip?”
“With these guys, there must be something that makes them just…explode.” He opens his fingers like a detonating bomb. Beverley remembers Margot doing just the same. “Can you explain that for our viewers, the role that family, surrounding loved ones, can play in enabling these crimes?”
She looks around the studio. A dozen cameras are on her, blurred faces muttering to one another, making notes, choosing the best frames. No one is telling Charles that what he’s saying, what he’s suggesting, might be wrong.
“I don’t really know about that,” she manages to stammer out. “We were all shocked by what happened.”
His right eyebrow folds. She realizes she has not given a satisfactory answer, and she scrambles to rectify it. “But I’m just so incredibly sorry. I’m so sorry for the families of the victims who have to live with the consequences of Henry’s actions.” She resents her own weakness.
“You feel responsible, in a way.”
He doesn’t give her a chance to answer.
“What was Henry’s upbringing like?”
The police had asked her this; briefly, she is back there. Coffee stains on the table. Stale air. Rolled shirtsleeves and cigarettes.
“It was relatively normal,” she says, blinking.
“ ‘Relatively’?” Charles pushes.
She remembers suddenly that there are cameras pointing at her, and she straightens her back with a jolt. “His father was…overbearing. He expected a lot of his children.”
“Children. That means Henry has siblings. What do they think about the fact that their brother is a murderer?”
She mustn’t get rattled; she knows how that would look. She glances quickly at the camera and forces a smile, immediately wincing at how wrong it feels.