Pretty Girls

“Wouldn’t you want to know?”

“Absolutely not.” Claire was surprised by her decisiveness. She flashed back to the first time she’d sat in front of Paul’s computer.

Red pill/blue pill.

If she could go back, would she choose to live in ignorance? Adam might have eventually told her about the stolen money, but the movies and files would’ve probably remained hidden. Would Claire have gone through the storage area in the basement? Paul was the one with an emotional attachment to silly love notes and the ticket stubs from the first movie they’d ever seen. She had already decided that she couldn’t live in Paul’s dream house without Paul. Claire would’ve probably moved to a smaller house, maybe a condo downtown. She could easily imagine her alternate self calling a shredding ser­vice to destroy everything rather than pay to have it put into storage or moved.

Lydia asked, “Was Paul away on business trips a lot?”

She shook her head. “Only for a few days at a time, and he usually took me with him.” Claire figured she might as well say what they had both thought when they saw the swing set in the front yard. “If he had a kid, then he’s a really shitty father.”

Lydia said, “Watkinsville is less than fifteen minutes from a campus filled with coeds.” She waited for Claire to turn around. “What if there are more folders? More women?”

Claire’s mind went to an even darker place. “Is there a basement in that house?”

Lydia didn’t move for several seconds. Finally, she started typing on the iPad again. Claire knelt down beside her. Lydia pulled up the tax records for the Watkinsville address. She traced her finger down the descriptions as she read, “Single family home. Wood siding. Built in 1952. Forced air heating. City water. Septic system. No attic square feet. Basement square feet—­none.” She looked at Claire. “No basement.”

Claire slid back down to the floor. She stared out the windows. Sunlight bleached the already bleached room. “The masked man—­that’s not Paul. I know his body.”

“Is it Adam?”

The question hit Claire like a punch to the heart. Adam was around the same height as the masked man. He also had the same light coloring. As far as the rest, she didn’t know. Claire hadn’t been in love with Adam Quinn. She hadn’t spent hours lying beside him, touching and kissing his skin, memorizing his body. “We fucked three times. We never took off all of our clothes. It was always standing up.”

“How romantic.” Lydia put down the iPad. “You’re sure that’s Paul’s voice on the answering machine?”

Claire nodded, because Paul’s soft, southern drawl was unmistakable. “What should we do?” She amended, “I mean, what should I do?”

Lydia didn’t answer. She just stared out into the backyard the same way Claire had done before.

Claire joined her, absently watching a lone squirrel hop across the decking and drink saline water from the pool. Asking what to do next was a loaded question, because what it all boiled down to was whether or not Claire wanted to know more. This was past red pill/blue pill. This was skinning the proverbial onion.

They both jumped when the phone rang.

Claire checked the burner, but the screen was blank. Lydia said, “It’s not my cell.”

The phone rang a second time. Claire crawled toward the cordless handset on the table beside the couch. The phone rang again. She started to get that familiar sick feeling, even before she heard Fred Nolan’s voice.

“Claire,” he said. “Glad I caught you.”

His voice was as loud and clear as a church bell. Claire held the phone away from her ear so that Lydia could hear, too.

He said, “I think I’m going to take you up on that offer to talk to you and your lawyer.”

Claire’s eardrums filled with the pounding of her own heartbeat. “When?”

“How about today?”

“It’s Sunday.” She hadn’t realized what day it was until now. Almost a full week had passed since Paul had been murdered.

Nolan said, “I’m sure you’ve got enough money to pay the Colonel’s weekend rate.”

The Colonel. That was what they’d called Wynn Wallace, the lawyer who’d helped Claire get out of the assault charge. Paul had called him the Colonel because he was the same type of arrogant prick as Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men.

“Claire?”

How would Nolan know their private nickname? Had Paul used the Colonel to get out of the embezzlement charges, too?

“Hello?”

She looked at Lydia, who was shaking her head so hard that she was probably going to give herself whiplash.

Claire asked, “Where?”

Nolan gave her the address.

“I’ll be there in two hours.” Claire ended the call. She put the receiver back in the cradle. When she took her hand away, she saw that her palm had left a sweaty mark.

Lydia asked, “You’re going to give him the files?”

“No. I’m not going downtown.” Claire stood up. “I’m going to Athens.”

“What?” Lydia stood up, too. She followed Claire into the mudroom. “You just told Nolan you were—­”

“Fuck Nolan.” Claire picked up her purse. She slid her feet into her tennis shoes. She didn’t know why, but she had to see Lexie Fuller. She wasn’t going to talk to her or drop a bomb on her life, but Claire needed to see the other woman with her own two eyes.

She said, “Listen, Lydia, I really appreciate—­”

“Shut up. I’m coming with you.” Lydia disappeared into the house.

Claire checked the mailbox on the video keypad by the door. The Auburn USB drive was still there. It was 9:13 on a Sunday morning. Was it a good or bad thing that Adam Quinn was sleeping in? Or had he left the drive for someone else to pick up? Was Jacob Mayhew on his way? Would Fred Nolan consider Claire’s absence in two hours a form of willfully misleading a federal agent? Would she return home tonight to her own bed, or would she be spending the next few years of her life in prison?

Lydia returned with her purse. She had her iPhone in one hand and the burner in the other. “I’m driving.”

Claire didn’t argue because Lydia was older and she always got to drive. She opened the mudroom door and left it unlocked. At this point, Claire welcomed the burglars to return. She would’ve left cookies out for them if she’d had the time.

Claire unplugged the Tesla. The key fob was on the bench where she’d left it. She threw it into her purse and got into the car. Lydia climbed in behind the wheel. She reached down and adjusted the seat. She moved the mirrors. She frowned at the glowing seventeen-­inch touch screen that ran down the middle of the dashboard.

“This is electric, right?” Lydia sounded annoyed. She’d always been angry around new things. “Athens is an hour away.”

“Really? I’ve never noticed that the eleventy billion times I’ve driven this very same car to Mom’s house and back.” At least she had before the ankle monitor limited her movements. “Can we just go?”

Lydia still looked annoyed. “Where does the key go?”

“Tap the brake to turn it on.”

Lydia tapped the brake. “Is it on? I can’t even hear it.”

“Are you three hundred years old?” Claire demanded. “Jesus Christ, it’s still a car. Even Grandma Ginny could figure it out.”

“That was really mean.” She put the gear in reverse. The video screen switched to the rear camera view. Lydia huffed in disgust as she inched back the car and turned it around.

The gate was still open at the bottom of the driveway. Claire felt like ten years had passed since she had sat in the back of the limousine with her mother and grandmother. She tried to remember how she’d felt. The purity of her grief had been such a luxury.

There was another woman in Watkinsville who might be feeling those same pure emotions o

f grief. Paul had been gone for almost a week. She would’ve called hospitals and police stations and the highway patrol and whoever else would listen. And she would be told by everyone who did even the slightest bit of research that Buckminster Fuller, the father of the geodesic dome, had died in 1983.

Claire wondered what story Paul had given the woman to explain his absences. Traveling salesman. Government agent. Roughneck working an oil rig. Pilot.

Paul had trained for his pilot’s license in college. He was rated for light jets, which meant that whenever they hired a charter, he was always up in the cockpit talking tailwinds and altimeters with the pilots. Claire used to feel sorry for the poor men who were trying to keep the plane in the sky.

Should she feel sorry for Lexie Fuller? And did she have a right to keep the other woman in the dark about Paul? Claire of all ­people knew the kind of hell that knowing the truth would rain down. Could she do that to another human being?

Or maybe Lexie already knew about Claire. Maybe the young little bitch was completely fine with sharing another woman’s husband, with raising the man’s bastard child—­or children—­while he kept another wife.

Claire closed her eyes. What an awful thing to say about the other woman. She was turning Lexie into a monster when Paul had likely fooled them both. Even if Lexie was complicit in polygamy, there was no way she knew about the dreadful shit that Paul was into.

“Dyadic completion,” Paul would’ve told Claire. “The human brain tends to assume that, if there’s a victim, there has to be a villain.”

Was that how Claire was thinking of herself now, as just another one of Paul’s victims?