THE KILLER WHO HID AMONG THE LIARS

Cleo had found himself a clever little business. Miniature golf was the latest craze sweeping America in the late 1920s, and he built the courses. Families loved them. It was cheap, it was fun, and for a few short years it seemed like every town in the country wanted one.

Then came October 1929. The stock market crashed, the Great Depression set in, and suddenly nobody had money to spend on knocking a golf ball through a windmill. Cleo's business collapsed, and his savings went with it.

A year later, his car was sitting empty on that bridge.

Phoebe Short didn't have time to fall apart. With five girls depending on her and no husband bringing home a wage, she moved the family into a small apartment in Medford and went to work as a bookkeeper. Money was always tight. These were the Depression years, when families right across America were going without, and the Shorts were no different.

I think it's worth stopping here for a moment to think about what all this did to a little girl. Betty grew up believing her father was dead. Believing he'd chosen the river over her, her mother and her sisters. Whatever she felt about him, whether it was grief or anger or both, she carried it with her for the next twelve years.

Betty was a lively girl, but her health let her down. She suffered from bronchitis and severe asthma, and the cold, damp New England winters were hard on her lungs. When she was fifteen, she had to have surgery on her lungs. Afterwards, her doctors advised that she spend the worst of the winters somewhere warmer.

So from around the age of sixteen, Betty spent her winters in Florida and the rest of the year back home in Medford with her mother and sisters. For a young girl from a struggling family, it must have felt like an adventure. Sunshine, palm trees, and a taste of freedom that most girls her age in Medford could only dream about. She picked up work as a waitress to pay her way.

Like millions of people during the Depression, Betty found her escape at the pictures. For the price of a ticket, you could sit in the dark and watch beautiful people in beautiful clothes living lives that had nothing to do with unpaid bills, bad chests, or fathers who'd gone off a bridge.

Betty loved it. By all accounts, she dreamed of becoming an actress one day, and of the glamour of Hollywood. She was a pretty girl with blue eyes and brown hair, and people often said she looked older than she was. She certainly seemed to feel older than the girls around her.

School didn't hold much interest for her. In her second year at Medford High School, she dropped out.

By the time she was eighteen, Betty was a young woman with big dreams, not much money, and a restless streak that would never really leave her. Medford was home, but it was never going to be enough.

Then, in late 1942, a letter arrived at the Short home.

It was addressed to Phoebe. And it was from Cleo.

The man who'd left his car on the Charlestown Bridge twelve years earlier hadn't jumped at all. He'd simply walked away from his wife and five daughters and started a new life. He was alive and well, living on the other side of the country in California, and he was writing to say sorry.

Betty's father had come back from the dead. And she was about to go and find him.

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters in the full book.