Pretty Girls (46 page)

His hand went to her thigh. His fingers drilled toward the bone. “Don’t you want the pain to go away?”

Lydia was too exhausted to cry out. She wanted him to get it over with—the punch, the jab, the slap, the electric cattle prod, the branding iron, the machete. She had seen what the masked man had done with the tools of his trade. She had seen what Paul’s father had done to Julia. She had experienced firsthand the type of torture Paul was capable of and she was certain that his role in the movies had been far from passive.

He was enjoying this. No matter what derogatory things he’d said, Paul was aroused by Lydia’s pain. She could feel the hard shaft of his prick when he leaned in close to gorge himself on her terror.

Lydia just prayed that she would be dead by the time he finally got around to raping her.

“New strategy.” Paul snatched the pill bottle off his leg. He placed it on the rolling table where he was keeping his tools. “I think you’re going to like this.”

Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner
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He stood in front of the metal shelves beside the computer. Her anxiety ramped back up, not because he was going to do something terrible and new but because he was going to mess up the order of the items on the shelves.

Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner
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They had to stay that way—in that exact order. No one could touch them.

Paul dragged over a step stool.

Lydia nearly cried with relief. They were safe. He was reaching up to the top shelf, past the equipment, past the floppy disks. He pulled down a stack of notebooks. He showed them to Lydia. Her relief dissipated.

Her father’s notebooks.

Paul said, “Your parents are quite the prolific letter-writers.” He sat down across from Lydia again. The notebooks were in his lap. A stack of letters she hadn’t noticed before were on top. He held up an envelope for Lydia to see.

Helen’s handwriting—precise and neat and so sorrowfully familiar.

“Poor, lonely Lydia. Your mother wrote you tons of letters over the years. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “Of course you didn’t know that. I told Helen I tried to get them to you, but you were homeless and living on the streets or you were in rehab but you checked yourself out before I could get to you.” He tossed the letters on the floor. “I actually felt bad every time Helen asked me if I’d heard back from you, because of course I had to tell her that you were still a fat, worthless junkie sucking cock for Oxy.”

His words had the opposite effect. Helen had written to her. There were dozens of letters in the pile. Her mother still cared. She hadn’t given up.

“Helen would’ve been a great grandmother to Dee.”

Dee. Lydia couldn’t even summon her face. She had lost all images of her daughter the second time Paul had electrocuted her with the cattle prod.

“I wonder if she’ll check out when Dee goes missing the same way she did after Julia was gone.” He looked up. “You wouldn’t remember this, but Claire was all alone after Julia.”

Lydia remembered it. She had been there.

“Every night, poor little Claire was all by herself in that big house on Boulevard listening to your worthless-piece-of-shit mother cry herself to sleep. No one cared if Claire cried herself to sleep, did they? You were too busy stuffing every hole in your body. That’s why she fell so hard for me, Liddie. Claire fell for me because none of you were there to keep her from falling.”

Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner
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“These.” Paul held up one of her father’s notebooks. “Your dad didn’t care about Claire either. All of his letters were to Julia. Claire read most of them, at least the ones he wrote before she went to college. Think about how that made her feel. Her mother was a borderline alcoholic who couldn’t get out of bed. Her father spent hours writing to his dead daughter when his living daughter was standing right in front of him.”

Lydia shook her head. It hadn’t been like that—at least not entirely. Helen had eventually pulled herself out of her depression. Sam had tried so hard with Claire. He had taken her shopping and to see movies and to visit museums.

“No wonder she didn’t want to go see him after he had the stroke.” Paul thumbed through the pages. “I made her go. I told her that she would regret it if she didn’t. And she listened to me, because she always listens to me. But the funny thing is, I really liked your dad. He reminded me of my own father.”

Lydia felt her jaw ratchet down so she wouldn’t scream at him.

“You never know with parents, do you? They can be selfish bastards. For instance, I thought Dad and I were close, but he took Julia without me.” Paul looked up from the notebooks. He obviously liked what he saw in Lydia’s surprised expression. “I gotta say, I was upset about that. I got home from Spring Break and there your big sister was in the barn. He hadn’t left much of her for me to enjoy.”

Lydia closed her eyes.
Apple Macintosh
. What came next? She couldn’t look at the shelves. She had to think of it on her own.
Apple Macintosh
.

He said, “Sam was smart. I mean, a lot smarter than any of us gave him credit for. He would’ve never found Julia’s body, I’m the only person left alive who knows where she is, but your father was on to me. He knew about my dad. He knew that I was somehow involved. Did you know that?”

Lydia had become anesthetized to surprises.

“Sam asked me over to his apartment. He thought he was going to trick me, but I did some reconnaissance before we were supposed to meet.” He held up her father’s notebooks like a trophy. “My advice: If you’re trying to trick somebody, don’t leave your playbook lying around.”

Lydia gripped the arms of the chair. “Shut the fuck up.”

Paul smiled. “There’s my little fighter.”

“What did you do to my father?”

“I think you know what I did.” Paul shuffled through the stack of notebooks. He checked the front pages. He was looking for something. “I arrived at his apartment at the requested hour. I poured us some drinks so we could talk like men. Your father liked doing that, didn’t he? Making sure we knew who the men were and who were the boys.”

Lydia could hear her father’s voice in his words.

“Sam drank his vodka. He called himself a social drinker, but we know he drank himself to sleep at night, don’t we? Just like Helen did while poor Claire was sitting alone in her room wondering why no one in her family noticed that she was still alive.”

Lydia swallowed. She tasted the sour burn of his piss.

“I guess the vodka masked the sleeping pills I ground up in his drink.”

Lydia wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to block him out. But she couldn’t.

“I watched his head dip.” Paul imitated her father falling into a stupor. “I tied him up with some sheets that I brought with me. They were torn into long strips. His hands were so limp when I tied him up that I was worried he’d died before the fun could start.”

Lydia felt every sense lock onto him.

Paul leaned back in the chair with his legs spread wide. Lydia forced herself not to look down because she knew exactly what he wanted her to see. “If you use strips of bed sheets to tie somebody up, then the marks don’t show when the coroner gets them. If you’re careful, I mean, because of course you have to fold the sheets properly, which I did because I had time with your father. I want you to hear that, Liddie: I had lots and lots of time with your father.”

Lydia’s mind had gone haywire. It was too much. She couldn’t take in what he was saying.

“When Sam woke up, we watched the tape together. You know the tape I’m talking about? The tape with Julia?” Paul rubbed the sides of his face. His beard was growing in. “I wanted us to watch all of the tapes together, but I was worried the neighbors would hear his screams.” Paul added, “Not that Sam didn’t scream a lot at night anyway, but still.”

Lydia listened to the steady in and out of her own breathing. She rearranged his words in her head until they fell into digestible sentences. Paul had drugged her father. He had made her father watch his oldest daughter being brutally murdered.

“At the end, I debated whether or not to tell Sam where Dad and I had dumped Julia’s body. What’s the harm, right? We both knew he was going to die.” Paul shrugged. “Maybe I should’ve told him. It’s one of those questions you still ask yourself years later. I mean, Sam was so tortured, right? All he wanted to know was where she was, and I knew, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him.”

Lydia knew that she should rage against him. She should try to kill him. But she couldn’t move. Her lungs were wet with urine. Her stomach was filled. Her body was seized by pain. There were welts on her arms where he’d electrocuted her. The cut on her forehead had been opened. Her split lip had been torn in two. Her ribs were so bruised that she felt like the bones had turned into knives.

He said, “I used Nembutal. You know what that is, right? They use it to put animals out of their misery. And he
was
miserable, especially after he watched the tape.” Paul had found the notebook he was looking for. “Here you go.” He held up the page so Lydia could see. The bottom half was torn away. “Look familiar?”

Her father’s suicide note had been written on a torn off-sheet of notebook paper. Lydia could still see his shaky words in her head:

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

Paul said, “I think I chose a good line. Don’t you?” He put the notebook back in his lap. “I chose it for Claire, really, because I thought that the line was particularly true about her. All his beautiful girls. You were never really beautiful, Lydia. And Julia—I told you I still visit her sometimes. She’s no longer beautiful. It’s been sad watching her decay over the years. The last time I checked in on her, she was just rotten bones with long strands of dirty blonde hair and those stupid bracelets she used to wear on her wrist. You remember those?”

Bangles. Julia had worn bangles on her left wrist and a big, black bow in her hair and she’d stolen Lydia’s saddle oxfords to complete the outfit because she’d said they looked better on her anyway.

Suddenly, Lydia had too much saliva in her mouth. She tried to swallow. Her throat spasmed. She coughed.

“Don’t you want to know where Julia is?” Paul asked. “It’s really the one thing that broke you all apart. Not her disappearance, not her probable death, but the never knowing. Where is Julia? Where is my sister? Where is my daughter? The not-knowing completely destroyed every single one of you. Even Grandma Ginny, though the old bitch likes to act like the past is past.”

Lydia felt herself start to slip back into that in-between space. There was no use listening to him anymore. She already knew everything she needed to know. Dee and Rick loved her. Helen had not given up. Lydia had forgiven Claire. Two days ago, she would’ve panicked if someone had told her that she had a finite amount of time to settle all of her affairs, but when she got down to it, her family was really the only thing that mattered.

“I visit Julia sometimes.” Paul was studying her face to gauge his words. “If you had a dying wish, wouldn’t it be to know where Julia is?”

Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner
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“I’m going to read you some selections from your father’s journals, and then I’m going to waterboard you again in …” He looked at his watch. “Twenty-two minutes. All right?”

Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner
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Paul rested the notebook in his lap on top of the others. He started reading aloud, “‘I remember the first time your mother and I walked you through the snow. We wrapped you up like a precious gift. The scarf was wound so many times around your head that all we could see was your little pink nose.’”

His voice. Paul had known her father. He had spent hours with him—even up to his last hours—and he knew how to read Sam’s words with the same soft cadence that her father had always used.

“‘We were taking you to see your Grandma Ginny. Your mother, of course, was not pleased with this particular errand.’”

“Yes,” Lydia said.

Paul looked up from the page. “Yes what?”

“Give me the Percocet.”

“Sure.” Paul dropped the notebooks on the floor. He unscrewed the top from the spray bottle. “But first you have to earn it.”

NINETEEN

Claire sat on the toilet with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She had cried herself out. There was nothing left inside of her. Even her heart labored to beat in her chest. The slow thumps were almost painful. Every time she felt the pulse, her brain silently said the word: Lydia.

Lydia.

Lydia.

Her sister had given up. Claire could hear it in Lydia’s voice, which had no tone except the tone of complete and utter surrender. What terrible thing had Paul done that made Lydia believe that she was already dead?

Thinking about the answer to that question would only drive Claire deeper into despair.

She rested her head against the cold wall. Her eyes closed. She was punch-drunk with exhaustion. The God’s honest truth was that Claire desperately wanted to give up, too. She felt the desire with every fiber of her being. Her mouth was dry. Her vision was blurred. There was a high-pitched tone ringing in both of her ears. Had she slept inside the interrogation room? Could she count being knocked out by Paul as resting?

All that Claire knew was that she had been awake for almost twenty-four hours. The last time she’d eaten was when Lydia made her egg bread yesterday morning. She had two and a half hours before she was supposed to go to the bank in Hapeville—for what? Adam had the USB drive. He was the one Claire should be talking to. The Quinn + Scott offices were ten blocks away. Adam would be there in a few hours for his presentation. Claire should be waiting in front of the office doors, not sitting on the toilet in the Hyatt. If her Hapeville lie had been designed to buy more time, then she’d bought herself another useless four or five hours.