Pretty Girls (17 page)

Her cell phone chirped in the other room.

Rick knew better than to ask her to ignore the phone when Dee was away.

She told him, “Keep going without me. I’ll catch up.”

Lydia picked her way past the dogs and a pile of laundry as she made her way into the kitchen. Her purse was in a chair. She dug around in the bag for several seconds before spotting her phone on the counter. There was a new text.

“She all right?” Rick was standing in the doorway.

“She probably forgot her math book again.” Lydia swiped her thumb across the screen. There was a text from a blocked number. The message listed an unfamiliar address in Dunwoody.

Rick asked, “What’s wrong?”

Lydia stared at the address, wondering if the text was sent by mistake. She ran a small business. She didn’t have the luxury of clocking out. The voicemail at work gave her cell phone number. The work number was on the side of her van alongside a photo of a giant yellow Lab that reminded her of the dog her father had rescued after Julia was gone.

“Liddie?” Rick said. “Who is it?”

“It’s Claire,” Lydia said, because she felt it with every ounce of her being. “My sister needs me.”

SEVEN

Claire sat in her office because she couldn’t stand being in Paul’s anymore. Her desk was an antique Chippendale secretary that she’d had painted a soft eggshell white. The walls were pale gray. The rug on the floor was patterned with yellow roses. The overstuffed chair and ottoman were covered in a muted lilac velvet. A simple chandelier hung overhead, but Claire had replaced the clear crystals with amethysts that spotted the wall in a purple prism when the sun hit it just right.

Paul never came into her space. He only stood at the doorway, afraid that his penis would fall off if he touched anything pastel.

She looked down at the note Adam Quinn had left on the car.

I really need those files. Please don’t make me do this the hard way. AQ

Claire had stared at the words so long that she could see them when her eyes were closed.

The hard way
.

That was certainly a threat, which was surprising because Adam had no reason to threaten her. What exactly was the hard way? Was he going to send some goons around to rough her up? Was there some sort of sexual innuendo intended? Her dalliances with Adam had been a little rough sometimes, but that was mostly because of the illicit nature of their affair. There had been no romantic hotel rooms, just quickies up against the wall at a Christmas party, a second time at a golf tournament, and once in the bathroom inside the Quinn + Scott offices. Honestly, their clandestine phone calls and secret texts had been more titillating than the actual acts.

Still, Claire couldn’t help wondering which files Adam meant—work files or porn files? Because Adam and Paul had shared everything, from a dorm room in college to the same insurance agent. And Claire supposed she belonged on that list of shared items, but who the hell knew whether Paul had figured that out?

Then again, what exactly had Claire figured out?

She had looked at the movies again—all of them this time. Claire had rigged up Paul’s laptop in the garage so she wouldn’t have to sit in his office. Halfway through the first series of movies, she’d found herself somewhat anesthetized to the violence. Habituation, Paul would’ve explained, but fuck Paul and his stupid explanations.

With her new-found distance, Claire was able to see that each movie series told the same linear story. At first, the chained girls were fully clothed. Subsequent installments revealed the masked man slowly cutting or slicing away their clothing to reveal leather bustiers and crotchless panties that they had obviously been forced to wear. Sometimes, their heads were covered in a black hood made of a light fabric that showed their desperate inhalations as they gasped for breath. As the story progressed, the violence ramped up. There was beating, then whipping, then cutting, then burning them with a branding iron, then the cattle prod.

The girls were unmasked toward the end. The first woman’s face was exposed for two of the movies before she was butchered. The girl who looked like Anna Kilpatrick was hooded until the very last movie on Paul’s secret hard drive.

Claire had closely studied the girl’s face. There was no way of telling whether or not she was looking at Anna Kilpatrick. Claire had even pulled up a photo from the Kilpatrick family’s Facebook page. She had positioned them side by side and still been unsure.

Then she had clicked the PLAY button and watched the last movie all the way through. Claire had the sound on at first, but she couldn’t take the screaming. The man entered wearing the same unnerving rubber mask. He had the machete, but he didn’t use it to kill the girl. He used it to rape her.

Claire had nearly been sick again. She’d had to take a walk down the driveway and up again just to get air back into her lungs.

Was it real?

Captain Mayhew had claimed there was a wire running down the girl’s side that controlled the release of fake blood. Claire had found a magnifying glass in one of Paul’s drawers. All that she could see at the girl’s side were pieces of flayed skin sticking out like broken glass. There was certainly no wire on the floor, and surely if there was an operator standing off-camera with a control unit, the wire would have to be connected somehow.

Next, Claire had searched the Internet for information on squibs, but as far as she could tell, all of them were remotely controlled. She had even done a general search for snuff porn movies, but Claire had been terrified to click on any of the links. The descriptions were too unsettling: live beheadings, cannibalism, necrophilia, something called “death rape.” She’d tried Wikipedia, but gathered that most recorded murders were frenetic and amateurish, not carefully framed and following a set progression.

So, did that support Mayhew’s assertion that the movies were fake? Or did it mean that Paul had found the best snuff porn the same way he found the best golf clubs or the best leather for his custom-made office chair?

Claire hadn’t been able to take any more. She had left the garage. She had gone inside the house. She had taken two Valium. She had held her head under the kitchen faucet until the cold water had numbed her skin.

If only she could numb her brain. Despite the pills, her mind would not stop racing with conspiracies. Were these awful movies the files that Adam wanted? Was he in cahoots with mustachioed Captain Mayhew? Was that why Adam was at the police station? Is that why Mayhew had been so strange at the end of their meeting, going out of his way to confirm that there were no more copies of the movies when he’d just told Claire that they weren’t real and she shouldn’t worry about them?

What if they really were fake, and the girl wasn’t Anna Kilpatrick, but an actress, and Adam was at the police station tonight because he had a key to the house and Mayhew knew about the Law of Truly Large Numbers because he’d seen a special on the Discovery Channel and Claire was some kind of paranoid housewife with nothing better to do than smear the reputation of the man who had spent his every waking moment trying to please her?

Claire looked at the orange prescription bottle on her desk. Percocet. The top was off because she’d already taken one. Paul’s name was on the label. The directions said: TAKE AS NEEDED FOR PAIN. Claire was certainly in pain. She used the tip of her finger to topple over the bottle. Yellow pills spilled onto her desktop. She placed another Percocet on her tongue and washed it down with a sip of wine.

Suicides ran in families. She had learned this during a class on Hemingway taught by an ancient professor who seemed himself to have one foot in the grave. Ernest had used a shotgun. His father had done the same. There was a sister and brother, a granddaughter, maybe others whom Claire could not recall but she knew that they’d all died by their own hands.

Claire looked at the Percocet spilled across her desktop. She moved the pills around like pieces of candy.

Her father had ended his life with an injection of Nembutal, a brand of pentobarbital used to euthanize animals. Death by respiratory arrest. Before the injection, he had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills with a vodka chaser. It was two weeks before the six-year anniversary of Julia’s disappearance. He’d had a mild stroke the month before. His suicide note was written in a shaky hand on a torn-off sheet of notebook paper:

To all of my beautiful girls—I love you with every piece of my heart. Daddy

Claire recalled a long-ago weekend spent at her father’s dismal bachelor apartment. During the day, Sam had done all the things that recently divorced fathers do with their children: bought her clothes he couldn’t afford, taken her to a movie her mother had forbade her to see, and let her eat so much junk food that she’d almost been comatose by the time he’d finally brought her back to the sickly pink room with pink sheets that he’d decorated especially for her.

Claire had been well past her pink years. Her room at home was painted robin’s-egg blue with a multicolored wedding quilt on the bed and absolutely no stuffed animals but one, which she kept sitting in the rocking chair that had belonged to her mother’s father.

Around midnight, the hamburgers and ice cream had commenced an ungodly battle inside Claire’s stomach. She had run to the bathroom only to find her father sitting in the tub. He wasn’t taking a bath. He was wearing his pajamas. He had his face buried in a pillow. He was sobbing so uncontrollably that he barely noticed when she turned on the lights.

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea.” His voice had been so soft that she had to bend down to hear it. Oddly, as she’d knelt by the tub, Claire had imagined that this was what it might be like one day when she bathed her own children.

She’d asked, “What is it, Daddy?”

He’d shaken his head. He wouldn’t look at her. It was Julia’s birthday. He had spent the morning at the sheriff’s office going through her case file, looking at photographs of her old dorm room, her bedroom at the house, her bike that sat chained outside the student center for weeks after she was gone. “There are just some things you can’t unsee.”

Every argument between her parents featured some variation of Helen telling Sam to just move on. Given the choice between her seemingly cold mother and her broken hull of a father, was it any wonder that later in life, Claire’s court-appointed therapist had accused her of not being forthcoming with her feelings?

Her father overflowed with feeling. You couldn’t stand near him without absorbing some of the sorrow that seemed to radiate from his chest. No one who looked at him saw a whole human being. His eyes were perpetually weepy. His lips trembled from dark thoughts. He had night terrors that eventually got him evicted from his apartment complex.

Toward the end when Claire would stay with him—honestly, when her mother forced her to stay with him—Claire would lie in bed and press her hand to the thin wall between their bedrooms and feel the vibrations as her father’s screams filled the air. Eventually, he would wake himself up. She would hear him pacing the room. Claire would ask him through the wall if he was okay and he would always say he was okay. They both knew this was a lie, just like they both knew she wouldn’t go in there to check on him.

Not that Claire was completely heartless. She’d checked on him dozens of times before. She’d run into his room with her heart in her mouth and found him writhing in bed with the sheets tangled around him. He was always embarrassed. She was always conscious of how useless she was to him, how Helen should’ve really been there, but this was the reason that Helen had left in the first place.

“Kind of makes me love your mom less to hear that,” Paul had said when Claire finally told him what life was like after Julia.

Paul.

He had always been Claire’s biggest champion. He always took her side. Even the day he’d bailed her out of jail when everything that had happened was clearly a shitstorm of her own making, Paul had said, “Don’t sweat it. We’ll get a lawyer.”

Eighteen years ago, Lydia had told her that the problem with Paul Scott was that he didn’t see Claire as a normal, imperfect human being. He was blind to her faults. He covered her missteps. He would never challenge her or scare her or infuriate her or stir up any of those fiery emotions that made it worthwhile to put up with a man’s bullshit.

“Why are you saying all of that like it’s a bad thing?” Claire had demanded, because she was desperately lonely, and she was tired of being the girl whose sister had disappeared, or the girl whose sister was an addict, or the girl whose father had killed himself, or the girl who was too pretty for her own good.

She wanted to be something new—something that she chose to be on her own. She wanted to be Mrs. Paul Scott. She wanted a protector. She wanted to be cherished. She wanted to be clever. She certainly didn’t want someone who made her feel like the ground could shift under her feet at any moment. She’d had quite enough of that in her early life, thank you very much.

Besides, it wasn’t like Lydia had found a better alternative. She thrived on insecurity. Every part of her life had been tied up in being popular. She’d started taking pills because all the cool kids were into them. She’d snorted coke because a boyfriend told her that all the fun girls snorted coke. Time and again, Claire had watched her sister ignore the nice, normal guys so she could throw herself at the flakiest, best-looking assholes in the room. The more they ignored her, the more she wanted them.

Which is why it was not surprising to Claire that a month after they had stopped talking to each other, Lydia had married a man named Lloyd Delgado. He was very handsome in a snaggle-toothed kind of way. He was also a cokehead from South Florida with a series of petty arrests on his record. Four months after they married, Lloyd was dead of a drug overdose and Lydia had a court-appointed guardian assigned to protect her unborn child.

Julia Cady Delgado was born eight months after that. For almost a year, they lived in a homeless shelter that offered daycare. Then Lydia got a job at a vet’s office cleaning cages in the back. Then she got promoted to grooming assistant and was able to afford a hotel room that she rented by the week. Dee went to private preschool while Lydia skipped lunch and sometimes dinner.