Josie took in a couple of breaths, waiting for her heart rate to return to normal. “Looks like Vera—or Alice—wasn’t living alone, after all.”
Gretchen picked the cat up and talked softly to it. It purred in her arms. She held it away from her body before hugging it again. “It’s a she,” she told Josie. “No collar though. Let’s hope Alice took her to a vet regularly. Maybe they’ll know her name.”
She placed the cat back onto the floor so she could help Josie explore the contents of the closet, but the cat stayed close, weaving in and out of Gretchen’s legs. “She likes you,” Josie noted. The closet took up almost an entire bedroom wall. There was a rack filled with clothing and then several shelves from floor to ceiling holding shoes, folded sweaters, and jeans as well as some plastic bins. Josie pulled one of them down and handed it to Gretchen before retrieving another. They set them on the bed and began going through them.
Gretchen said, “This looks like old medical bills for Alice Adams. Paid, paid—these are all paid. Looks like with cash. Oh, here’s a bill for a vet. It says the cat’s name is Poppy.” She took a photo of it and kept going, mumbling, “A copy of her lease. Receipts from when she paid rent…”
Josie pawed through the other bin. “I’ve got photos.”
Hundreds of photos had been piled into the bin. They seemed to span from Vera’s own childhood through Beverly’s birth and beyond. There were several pictures from Vera’s baby shower similar to the ones that Sara Venuto had provided them with. Then there were photos of Beverly as an infant, sleeping in a swing, in her crib, and one or two of her cradled in Vera’s arms.
“Wonder who took those?” Gretchen said, looking over Josie’s shoulder.
“Here,” Josie said. “Connie Prather.”
She fingered another set of photos showing Connie holding baby Beverly. There was the occasional photo of some of Vera’s co-workers with Beverly as well, taken both at the salon and at what looked like Vera’s home. However, by the time Beverly was five or six—from what Josie could estimate—it was only Beverly in the photos. Dressed up for Halloween; blowing out candles on a birthday cake at a park surrounded by other small children; wearing a backpack on what Josie assumed was a first day of school: the photos captured all the small milestones and other hallmarks of a normal, American childhood. Milestones and hallmarks that Josie herself had never gotten to experience. Again, she wondered what had gone wrong between Beverly and Vera. Or maybe nothing had gone wrong. Maybe something had happened to Beverly sometime during her otherwise idyllic childhood to lead to her behavioral issues. Or was it chemical? Had she had some psychological condition or mental health issue that made her so volatile? Josie wondered if they’d ever know.
Poppy jumped up onto the bed, walking right across the photos that Josie had spread out, again headed directly for Gretchen. Josie laughed. “Tell your friend there she needs to wear gloves if she wants to handle evidence.”
The photos went up through high school, although sometime around Beverly’s adolescence they suddenly seemed to reduce in volume. Either Vera had taken fewer photos during that time or Beverly had refused to be photographed. Perhaps a combination. Or, Josie thought, after Vera’s back injury, she simply wasn’t up to taking photographs.
Josie went to the closet to retrieve another bin. Gretchen said, “It’s strange that she kept these, don’t you think? She went into hiding, changed her name, but kept all this evidence of her former life.”
Josie set the next bin onto the bed. “True, but by all accounts, she genuinely loved her daughter. We still don’t know what happened at the end of Beverly’s life and how much involvement Vera had with it. We know that Vera knew she was pregnant, but we have no idea how Vera felt about Beverly by that time. Vera returned to Denton after Beverly’s body was found. Why would she do that?”
Gretchen didn’t answer. Josie lifted the lid of the bin and started pulling out items. There were yearbooks from Denton East High School. “I think these were Beverly’s things,” Josie said. There were some CDs from bands Josie had liked in high school, a few items of costume jewelry, and a handful of photos of Beverly with her best friends: Lana Rosetti and Kelly Ogden. There was a journal which gave Josie a jolt of hope until she opened it to find one unenthusiastic entry about how her “dumb mom” thought she should “write down her feelings” and then empty pages after that.
“Guess Beverly wasn’t much for a diary,” Gretchen sighed.
There were three paperback books, all of them well-used and dog-eared. One of them was False Memory by Dean Koontz. The other two were by V.C. Andrews, one titled Ruby and the other Pearl in the Mist. Josie remembered how the girls in her school loved to pass around the V.C. Andrews books, whispering about the scandalous stories within them. She opened Ruby and flipped through its pages. A photo fell out and fluttered to the bed. Gretchen picked it up as Josie fanned through the rest of the book to see if there was anything else pressed into it. There was nothing. She tossed the book back onto the bed and studied the photo. It was of a young man with blond hair. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans with a workbelt hung low around his waist. Something about the tension in his smile suggested he was uncomfortable being the object of the photo. Behind him was a wall with a blue tarp hung on it and next to that, a doorway that looked as though it led to a set of steps going downward. Josie said, “This is Ambrose, the guy from the basement waterproofing company that Beverly was flirting with.”
Gretchen peered at it. “Yeah, that matches up with the driver’s license photo we have of him.”
“This must be the house on Hempstead.” Josie pointed to the doorway. “He’s on his way down to the basement to work.”
“Yeah,” Gretchen agreed. “And I’ll bet that tarp is one of the tarps the killer used to wrap up Beverly.” She took the photo from Josie and turned it over, but the back of it was blank.
Josie picked up Pearl in the Mist and shook its pages. Only an old bookmark fell out. She set it down and grabbed False Memory, flipping the pages. Three photographs fell out. One by one, Josie lined them up so they could study them. One photo was of Vera and a man standing in a kitchen, a sink and stove behind them. The photo had caught them in profile, facing one another. The man was thin and a head taller than Vera. He looked as though he was in his mid-thirties from what Josie could tell. He had short brown hair and light stubble covering what they could see of his face. It looked as though the picture had been taken from behind a doorway, as half the photo showed a close-up of wooden molding. Josie pointed to it. “She took this without them knowing.”
Gretchen nodded. “You think this was Vera’s drug dealer? Or her friend?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We really have no way of knowing when this was taken, but it’s the only contact we can definitively establish between Vera and someone besides her co-workers and old clients.”
They turned their attention to the next photo. Josie’s breath caught in her throat as her late husband’s face smiled up at her. It was Ray at sixteen years old in his baseball uniform. His cap was pushed up just a little, the way it used to get when he’d wipe the sweat from his forehead. He was leaning on a fence, his elbows hanging over it. Behind him, Denton East’s baseball field was filled with other players, out-of-focus blobs against the green grass.