“You should go,” Claire told her. “You shouldn’t get involved in this . . . this . . . I don’t even know what it is, Liddie, but it’s bad. It’s worse than you could ever imagine.”
“So I gathered.”
Claire spoke the only truth she was certain of. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”
“I don’t forgive you, but you’re still my sister.”
CHAPTER 8
Lydia had texted Rick that she would be home in an hour. She would make sure Claire was bathed and fed, and then she would stand over her sister while she called Helen to come take care of her. Lydia had filled in for her mother twenty-four years ago and she wasn’t going to do it again.
Especially with the FBI involved.
Just the thought of Fred Nolan made her nerves pulse with fear. The man obviously knew things about Paul that Claire did not know. Or maybe Claire knew them and she was just a very good actress. In which case, was Claire lying when she said she finally believed Lydia about Paul attacking her? If she wasn’t, then what changed her mind? If she was, then what was her motivation?
There was no figuring it out. All the sneakiness her sister had exhibited as a child had been honed to adult perfection, so that Claire could be standing right in front of an oncoming train and still insist that everything was going to be fine.
Actually, the more Lydia interacted with this adult Claire, the more she understood she hadn’t grown up to be a Mother. She had grown up to be their mother.
Lydia stared blankly around the kitchen. She had thought that cooking Claire something to eat would be the easy part, but as with the rest of the house, the kitchen was too sleek to be practical. All of the appliances were concealed behind shiny white laminate doors that looked so cheap they had to cost a million bucks. Even the cooktop blended in with the polished quartz countertop. The whole space was part kitchen showroom, part Jetsons. She couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually choose to live here.
Not that Claire was doing much living. The refrigerator was filled with unopened bottles of wine. The only food was a half carton of eggs that expired in two days. Lydia found a new loaf of bread in one of the pantries. There was also a coffee machine, which Lydia only recognized because there was a label on it that read COFFEE MACHINE, followed by what she assumed was the installation date.
The laminated set of directions beside the machine was clearly Paul’s handiwork. Lydia knew that her sister couldn’t be bothered doing something so tedious and stupid. She pressed various buttons until the machine whirred to life. She slid an espresso cup under the spout and watched it fill.
“You figured it out,” Claire said. She was dressed in a light blue button-down shirt and faded jeans. Her hair was slicked back to dry. For the first time, Lydia actually saw a woman who looked like her sister.
Lydia handed Claire the cup of coffee. “Drink this. It’ll help sober you up.”
Claire sat down at the counter. She blew on the steaming liquid to cool it. The counter stools were white leather and shiny chrome. The backs were low. They matched the couch and chairs in the family room that opened onto the kitchen. Wall-to-ceiling glass framed the backyard, where a pool that looked like it was carved from a giant slab of white marble served as a centerpiece for the barren landscape.
There was no part of this house that felt inviting. Paul’s cold, calculating hand could be seen behind every choice. The concrete on the entryway floor was polished to a dark mirror straight out of Snow White. The spiral stairs looked like a robot’s asshole. The endless white walls made Lydia feel like she was trapped inside a straitjacket. The sooner she was out of here the better.
Lydia found a frying pan in the drawer under the cooktop. She poured some oil in the pan and dropped in two slices of bread.
Claire asked, “Are you making me egg bread?”
Lydia fought a reflexive smile, because Claire sounded like she was thirteen again. Egg bread was Lydia’s way of getting out of whisking eggs. She just threw it all into a pan and cooked it until the shininess was gone.
Claire said, “I’m on parole because I assaulted somebody.”
Lydia almost dropped the carton of eggs.
“We’re not supposed to call it assault, but that’s what it was.” Claire rolled the espresso cup between her hands. “Allison Hendrickson. My doubles partner. We were warming up for a game. She was talking about how she felt like a Holocaust survivor after the Liberation because her last kid was going off to college and she was finally going to be free.”
Lydia cracked two eggs into the pan. She hated this bitch already.
“And then Allison started telling me about this friend of hers who had a daughter who went to college last year.” Claire put down the cup. “Smart girl, always made good grades. And then the girl gets to college and goes crazy—starts screwing around, missing classes, drinking too much, all the stupid things you hear about kids doing.”
Lydia used a spatula to stir the eggs around the bread. She was more than familiar with those stupid things.
“One night, the girl went to a frat party. Somebody slipped a roofie into her drink. Fast-forward to the next day, she wakes up naked in the basement of the frat house. She’s battered and bruised, but she manages to find her way back to her dorm, where her roommate shows her a video that’s been posted on YouTube.”
Lydia froze. Every nightmare she had about Dee going off to college involved some variation on this theme.
“The guys at the frat house filmed everything. It was basically a gang rape. Allison went into great detail about it, because apparently, everyone on campus watched the film. And then she says to me, ‘Can you believe that?’ And I say no, but of course I can believe it, because people are horrible. And then Allison says, ‘That stupid girl, getting drunk like that around a bunch of frat boys. It was her own fault for going to the party.’ ”
Claire looked as disgusted as Lydia felt. When Julia had first disappeared, people kept asking why she’d been at the bar, what she was doing out that late, and exactly how much alcohol she had consumed, because obviously, it was Julia’s own fault that she was abducted and most likely raped and murdered.
Lydia asked, “What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything at first. I was too angry. But I didn’t know I was angry, you know?”
Lydia shook her head, because she always knew when she was angry.
“I kept repeating Allison’s words back in my head, and the anger just built up and built up. I could feel the pressure of it in my chest, like a teakettle coming to a boil.” Claire clasped together her hands. “Then the ball came over the net. It was clearly on her side, but I went for it. I remember pulling my arm across my body—I’ve still got a killer backhand—and I watched the racket cut through the air, and at the last minute, I took this tiny lunge forward and I smashed the edge of the racket into the side of her knee.”
“Holy shit.”
“She fell flat on her face. Broke her nose and two teeth. Blood was everywhere. I thought she was going to exsanguinate. I dislocated her knee, which is apparently very painful. She ended up needing two operations to get it back into place.” Claire looked remorseful, but she didn’t sound it. “I could’ve said it was a mistake. I can actually remember standing there on the court with all these excuses running through my head. Allison was writhing on the ground, screaming bloody murder, and I opened my mouth to say what a horrible accident, that I was an idiot, that I hadn’t been looking where I was going and it was all my fault and blah-blah-blah, but instead of apologizing, I said, ‘It’s your own fault for playing tennis.’ ”
Lydia felt the shock of the act reverberate through the cold kitchen.
“The way the other women looked at me . . .” Claire shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe it. “I’ve never had people look at me like that before. There wa
s this wave of revulsion. I could feel their disgust to my very core. And I’ve never told anyone this, not even Paul, but it felt so fucking good to be bad.” This, at least, Claire sounded sure of. “You know me, Liddie. I never let loose like that. I usually just hold it all in because what’s the point of letting it out, but something about that day made me just—” She held up her hands in surrender. “I was absolutely euphoric right up until I was arrested.”
Lydia had forgotten about the egg bread. She moved the frying pan off the eye. “I can’t believe they let you off with parole.”
“We bought our way out of it.” Claire shrugged the shrug of the extremely wealthy. “It took our lawyer a couple of months and a shit-ton of money to bring the Hendricksons around, but they finally told the prosecutor they were okay with parole and a lesser charge. I had to wear an ankle bracelet for six months. I have six more sessions with a court-appointed therapist. I’m on parole for another year.”
Lydia didn’t know what to say. Claire had never been much of a fighter. Lydia was the one who always got in trouble for giving Indian burns or holding Claire down and dangling spit into her eye.
Claire said, “Ironically, the monitoring bracelet was taken off the same day that Paul was killed.” She took the plate of egg bread. “Or is that just coincidence, not irony? Mother would know.”
Lydia had spotted the only coincidence that mattered. “When were you arrested?”
Claire’s tight smile made it clear that she hadn’t missed the connection. “The first week of March.”
Julia had gone missing on March 4, 1991.
“So, that’s why I’m on parole.” Claire picked up the bread with her hands and took a bite. She had told the story of her arrest as if she was relating a funny thing that had happened at the grocery store, but Lydia could see that she had tears in her eyes. She looked exhausted. More than that, she looked scared. There was something about Claire that was so vulnerable. They could just as well be sitting at the kitchen table at their parents’ house three decades ago.