The Greene County Murders Episode 10 - The Murderer

Esther Cohen

For the first time in 71 years, Beulah struggled, she really struggled, with sleep. She was the pajama type – practical, washable, always the same light blue. Once many years ago someone at school – her Secret Santa – a ritual she detested but was forced to do, gave her pink pajamas. She immediately drove them to Goodwill. Even as a child, nightgowns never seemed appropriate. Too loose. Too free. Of course she had her daily bedtime rituals: turn off the lights, drink a glass of water (hydration seemed another necessary evil), and then, teeth rituals involving brushing, flossing, and her water pik. She didn’t want to enter heaven if heaven even existed with false teeth that looked like piano keys.

Lately though, because she couldn’t rid herself of the obsession to figure out who killed Delores, she just couldn’t sleep. She’d lie down on her neatly made bed, white percale sheets, two pillows never three, with a book by her bed. After all these years she still had Jane Austen by her bed. Pride and Prejudice. She believed it was necessary to have a book by her bed. Even if she’d read it years ago.

She kept her notebook on the bed next to her pillow, just in case. And three blue ink BIC pens. She’d write the word SUSPECTS on the top of the pages, and then, she’d write Every Single Thing She Knew about every person she’d talked to: Delores’s relatives who all seemed to love her, (her children, her cousins, even her crazy evangelical uncle and aunt in a trailer park in Alabama). She had a separate notebook for lover Jim, who was well-liked too. People said he was a kind man, musical, generous, a good dancer, even-tempered. She drove down to Kingston one day to the bridge across the Hudson that Jim worked on for years, and every single person she talked to said a version of the very same thing: Jim was a Good Guy. And then, there was the question of Jim’s wife Emily. Could he have truly been a good guy if he was in love with Delores? Had Delores been one of many? And had any of Jim’s other girlfriends been found dead?

Beulah did not consider herself a feminist, really. True she’d never been married, but she always felt the reason was circumstantial. Her dating experiences had been slight, although there was a man she’d met in her forties, a man named Tim. He’d come to give a lecture at her school on Nutrition, and although that subject didn’t interest her in the least, she found herself drawn to Tim – not at all because of what he said about vegetables and fruits, but because he had a look in his eye, familiar and unfamiliar both, that caused her to walk up to him afterwards and tell him, awkwardly of course, how fascinating his talk had been.

He looked as surprised as she was, and asked, a minute or two later, after they’d discussed the useful properties of broccoli, that they meet for tea in three days time. Tea led to four months of weekly meetings between them – something neither one of them had ever done before. Sometimes they’d eat dinner at a local pizza tavern, but mostly they’d meet for tea. Beulah became accustomed to their meetings. She even liked them. They allowed her to fantasize about what it would be like if she invited him home.

She never did. One day he told her that he couldn’t handle relationships – he explained his emotional problems, his fear of closeness and connection, and he told her that if anything should ever change, he would absolutely find her again. Part of her still waited.

Oddly, she wondered now if Tim had known Delores – a woman accepting of people with problems, people with differences. A woman who could love absolutely everyone. Wouldn’t it be an odd and unlikely coincidence if the two of them were connected? Could quiet humble Tim have somehow been the killer? Seemed wildly unlikely. But maybe all murders were.