Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
“What if Peter’s in there? Or Hank?” asks Elsie, eyeing the Farrers’ house.
“You bring that knife, Bev?” Margot leans forward from the back seat.
“It’s in the bag, but I’m not going in armed, like a cop. It’s going to be enough of a shock for her.”
“Did you call Greaves?”
“The cops are too busy to chat, apparently.”
“And it was ever thus,” Elsie quips.
“It doesn’t matter,” Beverley replies. “I want her to hear it from us before the cops wade in anyway. Maybe she’ll agree to come with us to the station once she knows.”
They approach the familiar driveway. There are lights on inside the house, but it takes a while for Beverley to work up the courage to knock on the door.
She cannot imagine being in Sharon’s position.
Knowing that your husband is a killer is one thing, but a son?
Your own flesh and blood? Someone you held in your arms and rocked to sleep in the middle of the night, his tiny eyelids drooping, his fingernails like the smallest, most beautiful translucent half-moons?
She thinks of Benjamin and Audrey when they were newborns, their powdery baby smell intoxicating.
She almost doesn’t want to do it, almost turns away, but then Margot steps forward and knocks.
They wait, the three of them abreast on the doorstep, Margot with her bold red hair, her lipstick; Elsie with her bookish glasses, her neat cardigan; and Beverley, who never really knew how much she had lost until she saw another woman going through the same pain as she had.
Soon enough, the door opens and Sharon is standing there, still in her pink sweater from the previous night’s shift, her hair in rollers. She always looks so worn down and so childlike at the same time.
“What are you ladies doing here?” Sharon asks in that high, girlish voice.
Dread drops into Beverley’s stomach.
“Gosh, I would have fixed myself up nicer if I knew you were coming around. You always look so glamorous.” She’s doing that thing with her scalp where she tries to give her hair volume at the roots, but she can’t quite make it past the rollers. It makes Beverley want to howl with pity.
“Can we come in, Sharon?” Beverley asks.
“Sure, sure. Let me get you ladies a cup of coffee.” She’s going through the motions, but Beverley can hear the nerves in her voice.
She must have sensed something in the way they held their shoulders, the way they waited at the doorstep, politely, to be asked in.
People do that only when they are trying to put off giving bad news.
Sharon makes small talk as she sets about brewing coffee. She chatters about the weather, about the rowdy kids at the drive-in during her shift last night, asks the women if they’ve been watching Dark Shadows. “She’s such a great actress”—she smiles hopefully—“Lara Parker, a real knockout.”
“Come and sit down, Sharon,” Beverley says softly. She knows those are the worst words to hear—the ones that come before the real thing, the ones designed to soften a blow but do the job of delivering it anyway.
Sharon nods like a scolded schoolgirl and pulls out a chair to join them at the table. Her eyes are jittery, pinballing between them as if she might glean some clues from their tight expressions, their avoidant glances.
“Has something else happened?” she asks. “Are you here to talk about Hank again?”
Beverley feels Elsie flinch in the seat beside her.
“No, Sharon, we haven’t come to talk about Hank today. We’ve come to talk about Peter.”
“Peter?” Sharon frowns, confused. “You want me to get him? Wait—let me give him a holler.” She goes to scrape back her chair, but Beverley grips her arm, holding her tightly in place.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Beverley keeps her voice low. The last thing they want is for Peter to come out of his room. Sharon still seems confused.
A small part of Beverley had hoped, she realizes, that Sharon would do the hard work for her, that they would turn up with their grave expressions and their need to talk about her son and it would all fall neatly into place.
“Sharon.” Elsie swallows. “We’ve discovered some things about Peter that you might find upsetting.”
“What is this?” Sharon asks, growing visibly panicked.
“There are some things you need to know,” says Margot, “some things that you won’t like hearing, and we’re sorry we’re the ones who have to tell you.”
Sharon swallows. Her eyes dart, willing them on, the way a doomed soul just needs to know its fate.
“There is evidence linking Peter to the murders of Cheryl Herrera, Emily Roswell, Diane Howard Murray, Sarah Gunn and Kate McKenzie.”
There’s a gawp, a bovine stillness, four silent seconds before it finally lands.
“No.” Sharon lets out a dry, fractured laugh, shakes her head. “He’s just a boy.”
“Sharon, he’s a man now. A dangerous man. I know it’s a shock, but you have to stop protecting him. He killed five young women. We need to tell the police. We need to keep everyone safe now.”
“What do you mean, stop protecting him?” Sharon asks, eyes saucer wide with alarm.
“I know it can be difficult, as a mother, to imagine your child being capable of these things.” It smacks of hypocrisy.
How would Beverley react if someone came to her house and accused her child of being a killer?
“But we can never really know what people are capable of, even those we love the most.”
“What evidence?” Sharon snaps. Beverley is surprised to see the scratch in her, the fight.
The evidence. Beverley draws a breath and looks to Elsie and Margot, who indicate that she should be the one to deliver it.
“First of all, there is the bracelet in the car, Cheryl Herrera’s bracelet. Peter works at the garage with Hank and would have access to the same cars, so he could have mislaid the bracelet in there.”
Sharon’s jaw clenches as she looks to the table. Beverley can see a creep of red growing from the base of her throat.
“We now know that the killer took his inspiration from movies. The methods of killing, the way he posed the bodies after death, the rituals—they all relate to scenes from movies. And Peter—well, you said yourself that Peter is a cinema fanatic.”
“But that’s ridiculous—”
“And there’s the camera.” She cuts Sharon off. She doesn’t want to give her a chance to bury herself in denial.
“What camera?” Sharon demands. The redness has spread to her face. Beverley can see her shaking.
“There was a camera found just yards from the murder scene eight nights ago, when Kate McKenzie was killed in her shower.” Beverley reaches into her bag and pulls out the Polaroid. She places it in the middle of the table. Sharon immediately sweeps it toward her with chipped pink nails.
“Isn’t that Peter’s camera?” Beverley urges softly. “With the checked strap. It was here the last time we visited.”
Sharon looks up at her, a furrow between her eyebrows. “But they took the camera.”
Beverley holds Sharon’s haunted gaze, but out of the corner of her eye she sees Margot and Elsie turn to her, just ever so slightly.
There is a pause, a beat too long, during which no one says anything.
“What do you mean, they took the camera?” Beverley asks.
“The cops,” says Sharon, “a couple of weeks ago now. They took the camera away.”
“Who?”
“The police.” Then, slowly, “An officer came around to the house, said he needed our fingerprints to eliminate us, eliminate Hank, as suspects in a local case. But I knew it wasn’t Hank, because you’d told me that, Bev. Then he took the camera from Peter’s room.”
Beverley’s heart falters, the mechanism out of whack. What does Sharon mean, they took the camera? They can’t have taken the camera. Peter left it there, at the last murder, probably when he got spooked.
“Which officer?” Margot asks, her back straight, looking intently at Sharon.
Beverley’s eyes swivel from Margot to Sharon, back and forth. She’s waiting for the answer but dreading it at the same time.
“Hank sorta knew him.” Sharon’s shaking hand goes to the back of her neck, pulls at the dark roots there.
“Said he’d brought his cars in on and off for the past year.
Hank had been working on those cop vehicles.
I can’t remember his name.” She moves her fingers to her mouth, starts biting her nails, then withdraws them.
“Gray hair…well, not gray, more like silver. Blue eyes. A Paul Newman type.”
Beverley feels as if the ground below her is slowly fissuring, as if the chair she is on is beginning to sink, foot by foot. Then she remembers the receipts in Roger’s pockets, the movie stubs.
“Was it perhaps Detective Greaves?” Elsie asks, avoiding Beverley’s panicked glare. “Detective Roger Greaves?”
“That’s it.” Sharon’s eyes snap up. “Good-lookin’ guy.”
“He took the camera?”
“Two weeks ago. Said he needed to run some tests on it, that he’d return it. Then he took our prints. It took days for me to get that damn ink off my fingers.” She half laughs and trails off, looks between the women.
“When was the McKenzie murder?” Margot asks the room.
“Eight days ago,” says Elsie.
They both look at Beverley.
“Why? What is it?” asks Sharon.
“Oh, Sharon”—Elsie’s hand flicks to her forehead—“we’re so incredibly sorry.”
There’s a wailing now in Beverley’s head.
“What’s going on?” Sharon asks, confused.
“Please.” Elsie seems lost for words. “This is all just a big mistake. You’ll have to forgive us. I can’t believe we…”
Sharon frowns as Elsie pushes her seat back, followed by Margot, who gathers their mugs and takes them hurriedly to the sink. Sharon’s head swivels from left to right.
Beverley cannot bring herself to move. Her mind is wheeling, clawing back through time, finding those sensations again: the way her body crumpled in half, entirely winded; the way she knew—knew—when she saw the first flash of red light arcing across her kitchen window that her life was about to change forever.
Now she feels a sensation of being uprooted, the way the guts know before the mind makes the connection.
There’s something inside her, inside all women, that knows the truth before she is able to speak it.
Denial—it’s a physical force. There is a lot that can be dismissed before things start to harden into a shell of indisputable truth.
She tries to stand but finds that she can’t.
If she gets up from this chair, that will mean that it is true.
It will mean that she has missed it, that it has happened all over again.