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 read: 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 shit storm 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 tir
ed 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.
After two years as an assistant, Lydia got promoted to head groomer. Almost a full year later, she was able to buy a reliable car and rent a one-bedroom apartment. Three years after that, she opened her own grooming business. At first, she would go to clients’ houses in a dilapidated Dodge van with red duct tape for taillights. Then she got a better van and turned it into a mobile grooming venture. Eight years ago, she opened her own storefront. She had two employees. She had a small mortgage on a small ranch house. She dated her next-door neighbor, a man named Rick Butler who looked like a younger, less sexy version of Sam Shepard. She had several dogs and a cat. Her daughter attended Westerly Academy on a scholarship arranged by an anonymous donor.
Well, not really anonymous anymore, because according to the paperwork Claire had found in Paul’s office, he’d been using a shell organization to foot the thirty grand a year for Julia “Dee” Delgado to attend Westerly Academy.
Claire had found Dee’s scholarship essay in the same set of files along with thirty other entries from students all over the metro area. Obviously, the contest was rigged, but Dee’s paper was remarkably cogent compared to the others. Her thesis dealt with how difficult the state of Georgia made life for convicted drug felons. They were denied food and housing assistance. They couldn’t vote. They faced employment discrimination. They were denied scholarship opportunities. They often had no family support system. Considering they had served their time, paid their fines, completed parole and paid taxes, didn’t they deserve the right to full citizenship like the rest of us?
The argument was compelling, even without the benefit of the photographs Claire had on her desk in front of her.
And thanks to the private detectives Paul had hired to track Lydia over the years, there were plenty of photographs for Claire to choose from.
A frazzled-looking Lydia carrying Dee in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. A clearly exhausted Lydia standing at the bus stop outside the vet’s office. Lydia walking a pack of dogs down a tree-lined street, her face relaxed for a brief moment in time. Climbing into the beat-up Dodge van with the red tape on the taillights. Behind the wheel of the Ford van with the mobile grooming equipment inside. Standing proudly in front of the new storefront. The photo was clearly taken on grand opening day. Lydia was using a giant pair of scissors to cut a yellow ribbon while her daughter and hippie boyfriend proudly looked on.
Dee Delgado. Claire put the pictures in order. Lydia’s child looked so much like Julia that it took Claire’s breath away.
Paul must have thought the same thing when he saw the photographs. He’d never met Julia, but Claire had three scrapbooks full of family photos. She wondered if it was worth putting them side by side and doing a comparison. And then she worried that she hadn’t opened the scrapbooks in years, and if she did so now, would she find something that told her Paul had looked at the scrapbooks, too?
She decided there was no way he hadn’t. Clearly, Paul was obsessed with Lydia. Every September for the past seventeen and a half years, he’d hired a private detective to check in on her. He’d used different agencies each time, but they had all delivered the same type of detailed reports, cataloguing the minutiae of Lydia’s life. Credit reports. Background checks. Tax returns. Court orders. Parole reports. Court transcripts, though the legal side had dried up fifteen years ago. There was even a separate note detailing the names and types of animals she owned.
Claire had had absolutely no idea that he was doing this. She imagined that Lydia was likewise clueless, because she knew without a doubt that Lydia would die before she took one red cent from Paul.
The funny thing was that over the years, Paul had occasionally suggested that Claire try to get in touch with Lydia. He’d made noises about how he wished he had family left he could talk to. How Helen wasn’t getting any younger and it might be good for Claire to heal old wounds. Once, he’d even offered to try to look for her, but Claire had said no because she wanted to make it clear to Paul that she would never forgive her sister for lying about him.
“I will never let another person come between us,” Claire had assured him, her voice shaking with the righteous indignation she felt on behalf of her wrongly accused husband.
Had Paul manipulated Claire with Lydia the same way he’d manipulated her with the computer passwords and bank accounts? Claire had easy access to everything, so she felt compelled to look for nothing. Paul had been so very, very cunning, hiding all of his transgressions in plain sight.
The only question now was how many more transgressions was she going to find? Claire stared at the two heavy file boxes she’d carried down from Paul’s office. They were made of a milky white plastic. The outside of each box was labeled. PERSONAL-1 and PERSONAL-2 .
Claire couldn’t bring herself to go through the second box. The first had contained enough hell to end her day on. The file folders inside were color-coded. The tabs were neatly labeled with women’s names. Claire had zeroed in on Lydia’s for obvious reasons, but she had closed the box on the dozens of other files that had dozens of other women’s names because she had already glimpsed quite enough of Paul’s personal shit. She could not force herself to go looking for more.
Instead, she opened the flip phone by the overturned Percocet bottle. Claire had bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone, which she knew was called a burner phone. At least if you could believe Law & Order.
Lydia’s cell phone number was in Paul’s reports. Claire had sent her a text from the burner. There was no message, just the Dunwoody address. Claire had wanted to leave it up to chance. Would Lydia dismiss the address as a scam, something along the lines of a deposed Nigerian president seeking her bank details? Or would she dismiss it when she realized it had come from Claire?
Claire deserved to be ignored. Her sister had told her that a man had tried to rape her and Claire’s response had been to believe the man.
And yet, Lydia had texted back almost immediately: I’m on my way.
Since the robbery, Claire had been leaving the security gate open. She had secretly hoped the burglars would come back and kill her. Or maybe not kill her, because that would be cruel to Helen. Pe
rhaps they could just beat her senseless so she could go into a coma and wake up a year from now when all of the dominoes had stopped falling.
Here was the first domino: It was easy to say that a person who watched films of rape was not necessarily interested in real-life rape, but what if there was an instance in that person’s past when someone had accused him of trying to commit that very crime?
Second domino: What if that long-ago attempted rape accusation was true?
Third domino: Statistically, rapists didn’t just rape once. If they got away with it, they generally kept raping. Even if they didn’t get away with it, the recidivism rate was so high that they might as well put a revolving door on every prison.
How did Claire know this statistic? Because she’d volunteered at a rape crisis hotline a handful of years ago, which would have been a hilarious bit of irony if someone had told her this story at a party.
Which brought her to the fourth domino: What was really inside the Pandora’s boxes labeled PERSONAL-1 and PERSONAL-2? Any thinking person could guess that the files with women’s names were exactly like the file with Lydia’s name: surveillance reports, photographs, detailed lists of the comings and goings of women that Paul had targeted.
Fifth domino: If Paul had really tried to rape Lydia, what had he really done to the other women?
Thank God she had never had children with him. The thought made her head spin. Actually, the whole room was spinning. The wine and pills were not playing well with each other. Claire was feeling that familiar, overwhelming sickness again.
She closed her eyes. In her mind, she made a list, because writing things down felt too dangerous.
Jacob Mayhew: Was he lying about the authenticity of the movies? In keeping with his mantle of the hard-boiled detective, was he the type of man who would lie to a woman in order to protect her delicate feelings?