Pretty Girls

“I hadn’t planned on sounding like J.J. from Good Times, but that’s the gist.”

“Claire.”

She held out her hand for the phone.

Lydia knew her sister’s mind was set. She rummaged through her purse for the phone. The back of her hand hit the bottle of Percocet she’d taken from Claire’s desk.

Lydia had told herself she was keeping the pills from Claire, but she had a niggling suspicion that she was keeping them for herself.

“Did you bring it?”

“Yes, I brought it.” Lydia pulled out the phone and handed it to Claire. She snapped her purse closed.

Claire easily found Jacob Mayhew’s business card in her wallet. She dialed the number and pressed the phone to her ear.

Lydia’s body tensed. She counted rings that she could not hear. Her palms were sweaty. The sound of rushing blood pulsed into her ears. She hadn’t been inside a jailhouse in years, but she was still terrified of the police.

Claire shook her head. “Voice mail.”

Lydia exhaled a long breath as Claire ended the call.

“He’d probably just lie to me anyway.” Claire put the phone down on the table. “Other than you, I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

Lydia stared down at her hands. Her palms had left wet streaks on the cold, meshed metal. She didn’t want to be here. She shouldn’t be here. She should go back home to Dee. If they left now, Lydia could be back at the house in time to make her family a late breakfast.

“He was at school in March of ’ninety-­one.”

Lydia looked back up at her sister.

“Paul was living at Lyman Ward Academy when Julia went missing.”

Lydia didn’t realize the question had been in her mind until Claire had answered it. “Are you sure?”

“It’s just outside of Auburn. He took me to see the campus one day. I didn’t know why he wanted to go. He hated every minute he was there. But then we got to the school and I realized he wanted to show me off, which was fine, because I like being shown off, but it was a boarding school, and it was very small and very religious and incredibly strict.”

Lydia had made the drive from Auburn to Athens many times before. “Julia went missing at around eleven on a Monday night. It’s only three hours between here and Auburn.”

“Paul was fifteen years old. He didn’t have a license, let alone a car, and they checked on the boys two or three times a night. Most of them were there because their parents couldn’t control them.”

“Is that why Paul was there?”

“He told me that he won a scholarship.” Claire shrugged. “It kind of made sense. His father did a stint in the navy during Vietnam. Paul was planning on following in his footsteps, at least getting college paid for, until he read a book on architecture and changed his mind.”

Lydia didn’t buy it. “Paul was really smart. Maybe genius level smart. If he really wanted to be in the navy, he would’ve gone to NAPS or West Point Prep, not some ultrastrict, conservative boarding school in the middle of Asshole, Alabama.”

Claire closed her eyes for a moment. She nodded in agreement.

Lydia asked, “Are you sure he didn’t sneak out?”

“As sure as I can be,” Claire admitted. “He had perfect attendance the whole time. His picture was still in the trophy case by the headmaster’s office, so there’s no way he skipped class or got disciplined for being off-­campus, and spring break was a week later.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the shuttle launch. There was some kind of technical problem, so it didn’t go up. I’ve seen the pictures. He’s standing in front of a big banner with a date on it and you can see the empty launch pad in the distance, and I remember the date was during the second week of March because of—­”

“Julia.” Lydia looked back at the woman with the broom. She was scraping chairs across the sidewalk as she put together the tables.

Claire said, “That skeevy jackass who got Dad arrested still runs the place.”

Lydia could vividly recall Helen talking about Sam’s arrest in her librarian voice, a furious whisper that could freeze an open flame.

Claire said, “It’s weird, I miss Daddy more when I’m with you. I guess because you’re the only person I can really talk to who knew him.”

The door to the Starbucks opened. A group of kids tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Each carried a steaming cup of coffee. They were visibly hungover as they fumbled for their packs of cigarettes.

Lydia stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

The Tesla was parked in front of the Taco Stand. Lydia glanced through the restaurant’s front windows. The decor had been considerably updated. The chairs were padded. The tables looked clean. There were napkin dispensers on the tables instead of rolls of cheap paper towels.

Claire asked, “We’re still going to the house, right?”

“I guess.” Lydia didn’t know what else to do but keep moving forward.

She got behind the wheel of the Tesla again. She tapped the brake to start the engine. Rick would enjoy hearing details about the car. The touch screen. The way the steering wheel vibrated if you crossed the yellow line. She would use the information to soften him up, because when Lydia told him what she and Claire had been up to, he was going to justifiably have a fucking fit.

“Go back up the Atlanta Highway.” Claire entered the Fuller address into the touch screen. “I remember dancing to ‘Love Shack’ with Julia at one of Mom and Dad’s Christmas parties. Do you remember? It was three months before she went missing.”

Lydia nodded, though her mind was still on Rick. Unfortunately, they didn’t have one of those relationships where they hid things from each other. They laid it all out, no matter the consequences. He would probably stop speaking to her. He might even see her crazy road trip as the final straw.

“This is the way Julia went.” Claire pointed through the Arch toward the Hill Community, where Julia had lived during her freshman year. “The dorms are air-­conditioned now. Mom says they’ve got free cable and Wi-­Fi, a gym and a coffee bar.”

Lydia cleared her throat. She had gone from thinking that Rick was going to be mad at her to being mad at Rick for telling her what to do, which was crazy because none of the conversations had actually taken place anywhere but inside her own head.

Claire said, “The Manhattan’s still over there. It’s completely different now.”

“Does Mom still walk the path on the anniversary?”

“I think so. We don’t talk about it much.”

Lydia chewed the tip of her tongue. She wanted to ask if Helen and Claire ever talked about her, but she was too afraid of the answer.

Claire said, “I wonder what’s wrong with her.”

“With Mom?”

“With Lexie Fuller.” Claire twisted in her seat to face Lydia. “Paul obviously chose me because of Julia. I was so vulnerable after she disappeared. He was drawn to my tragedy. Don’t you see it?”

Lydia hadn’t seen it until now.

“When we first met, Paul pretended he didn’t know about Julia, but of course he knew. His parents lived fifteen minutes away from where she disappeared. The farm wasn’t self-­supporting. His father did seasonal work with the campus grounds crew. His mother did bookkeeping downtown. Missing posters with Julia’s face were everywhere. The story was all over the newspaper. Even without that, ­people in Auburn knew. There were a lot of students from Athens. You were there. You saw it for yourself. We didn’t tell a soul, but everybody knew.”

“Then why did you believe him when he said he didn’t know?”

“Part of me didn’t. I just thought he was trying to be polite, because it was kind of like gossip.” She leaned the side of her head against the seat. “That’s the only instance I ca

n think of when I didn’t believe him about anything.”

Lydia slowed the car as the GPS alerted her to an upcoming turn. Strangely, she got no pleasure from Claire finally seeing the problems that Lydia had spotted eighteen years before. Maybe Claire was right. Lydia had only seen the dark side of Paul because he had chosen to show it to her. If that moment in the car had never happened, it was just as likely that she would’ve tolerated him all these years as an annoying brother-­in-­law who for some reason made her sister happy.

And he had clearly made Claire happy. At least while he was alive. Knowing how the bastard worked, wooing Claire had probably been part of a long game that started before they even met. Lydia wouldn’t put it past him to have a thick file somewhere on Claire Carroll. Was he at Auburn because he knew that Claire would follow Lydia to the university? Was he only working in the computer lab because he found out she was flunking trig?

Lydia could still remember the breathless way Claire had told her about the new guy she had just met in the lab. Paul had discovered the perfect way into Claire’s psyche—­he hadn’t praised her good looks, which she’d been hearing about practically from infancy. He had praised her mind. And he had done it in such a way that it seemed like he was the only man on the planet who recognized she had more to offer than her face.

Lydia pulled the car over to the shoulder. She slid the gear into park. She turned to Claire and told her something that she should’ve told her all along. “I have a seventeen-­year-­old daughter.”

Claire looked surprised, but apparently not for the reason Lydia was thinking. “Why are you telling me that now?”

“You already knew.” Lydia wanted to kick herself for being so stupid, and then she wanted to throw up because the idea of Paul paying a stranger to follow her was so deeply unsettling. “Why didn’t you tell me Paul had a file on me?”