Claire looked away. “I was trying to protect you. I thought if you knew what Paul had done, you would—”
“Abandon you like you abandoned me?”
Claire took a deep breath and slowly let it go. “You’re right. Every time I say that you should stay out of this, I find a way to drag you back in because I want my big sister to make it all better.” She looked at Lydia. “I’m sorry. I know it sounds trite, but I really am.”
Lydia didn’t want another one of her apologies. “What else do you know about me?”
“Everything,” she said. “At least everything that we know about Paul’s other victims.”
Victim. If she hit that nerve any harder, Lydia was going to need a root canal.
She asked Claire, “Did you know about it?”
“Absolutely not. I didn’t know about any of them.”
“How long was he having me followed?”
“Almost from the moment we stopped talking to each other.”
Lydia saw her life flash before her eyes. Not the good things, but the shameful things. All the times she’d walked out of the grocery store with stolen food shoved down the front of her shirt because she couldn’t afford to buy anything. The time she’d switched tags on a jacket at the outlet store because she wanted Dee to have the cute one that all the popular girls were wearing. All the lies she’d told about the check being in the mail, the rent money being at work, loans that would soon be repaid.
How much had Paul seen? Pictures of Lydia with Rick? Dee on the basketball court? Had he laughed at Lydia struggling her way out of poverty while he sat in his lifeless air-conditioned mansion?
Claire said, “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I am profoundly sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you, but then you told me about your daughter, and it felt wrong to pretend.”
Lydia shook her head. It wasn’t Claire’s fault, but she still wanted to blame her.
“She’s beautiful,” Claire said. “I wish Daddy was still around to meet her.”
Lydia felt a current of fear ripple through her body. She had been so focused on what it would feel like to lose her daughter that she had never considered what it would do to Dee if she lost her mother.
Lydia realized, “I really can’t do this.”
“I know.”
She didn’t think Claire could possibly understand. “It’s not just me. I have a family to think about.”
“You’re right. I honestly mean it this time. You should go.” Claire unbuckled her seat belt. “Take the car. I can call Mom. She’ll get me back to Atlanta.” She reached for the door handle.
“What are you doing?”
“This is the road Paul lived on. The Fuller house is around here somewhere.”
Lydia didn’t bother to hide her irritation. “You’re just going to walk down the street and hope to find it?”
“I seem to have a real knack for landing in shit.” Claire pulled on the handle. “Thank you, Liddie. I mean that.”
“Stop.” Lydia felt certain Claire was hiding something again. “What are you not telling me?”
Claire didn’t turn around. “I just want to see Lexie Fuller for myself. Lay eyes on her. That’s it.”
Lydia felt her eyes narrow. Her sister had the carefree air of someone who’d made up their mind to do something stupid. “Why?”
Claire shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Pepper. Go home to your family.”
Lydia grabbed her for real this time. “Tell me what you’re going to do.”
She turned to face Lydia. “I really am proud of you, you know. What you’ve done with your life, the way you’ve raised such a smart, talented daughter.”
Lydia brushed away the flattery. “You think Lexie Fuller is another one of his victims, don’t you?”
Claire shrugged. “We’re all his victims.”
“This is different.” Lydia tightened her grip on Claire’s arm. She felt a sudden flare of panic. “You think she’s locked inside the house, or chained to a wall, and you’re going to go in there all Lucy Liu and save her?”
“Of course not.” Claire looked out at the road. “Maybe she has information that will lead us to the masked man.”
Lydia’s flesh crawled. She hadn’t seen that part of the movie, but Claire’s description was terrifying. “Do you really want to meet that guy? He murdered a woman with a machete. And then he raped her. Jesus, Claire.”
“Maybe we’ve already met him.” Claire shrugged, like they were talking unlikely hypotheticals. “Or maybe Lexie Fuller knows who he is.”
“Or maybe the masked man is in that house with his next Anna Kilpatrick. Did you consider that possibility?” Lydia was so frustrated that she wanted to bang her head on the steering wheel. “We’re not superheroes, Claire. This is too dangerous. I’m not just thinking about my daughter. I’m thinking about you and me and what could happen to us if we keep digging up Paul’s secrets.”
Claire sat back in the seat. She stared down the long, straight road ahead of them. “I have to know.”
“Why?” Lydia demanded. “He’s dead. You know enough about him now to view that as divine justice. The rest of this we’ve been doing—it’s just asking for trouble.”
“There’s another video out there that shows Anna Kilpatrick being murdered.”
Lydia didn’t know what to say. Again, Claire was ten steps ahead of her.
Claire said, “That’s the whole point of the series, to ramp it up to a crescendo. The movies show a progression. The final step is murder, so there must be a last movie that shows Anna being killed.”
Lydia knew that she was right. Whoever abducted the girl wouldn’t get rid of her without having his fun first. “Okay, let’s say by some miracle we find the movie. What would it show us other than someone who might be Anna Kilpatrick being murdered?”
“Her face,” Claire said. “The last movie with the other woman showed her face. The camera actually zoomed in on it.”
“Zoomed in?”
Lydia felt like the inside of her mouth had turned into sandpaper. “Not auto-focus?”
“No, it zoomed into a tight frame so you just saw her from the waist up.”
“Someone else has to be working the camera to make it zoom.”
“I know,” Claire said, and Lydia could tell from her dark expression that her sister had been skirting around this possibility for a while.
“Lexie Fuller?” Lydia tried, because she knew that suggesting Paul as an active participant would be the thing that finally broke Claire in two. “Is that what you’re thinking, that Lexie was behind the camera?”
“I don’t know, but the movies follow the same script, so we can assume that the last Anna Kilpatrick movie zooms in on her face.”
Lydia chose her words carefully. “You really think if this Lexie person is behind the camera zooming in on a murder, she’s going to confess that she’s an accomplice and hand over the recording?”
“I feel like if I see her, look her in the eye, I’ll know whether or not she was involved.”
“Because you’re such a fucking great judge of character?”
Claire shrugged off the observation. “The masked man is out there somewhere. He’s probably looking for his next victim. If Lexie Fuller knows who he is, maybe she can help stop him.”
Lydia said, “Let me get this straight: You get Lexie Fuller to give you a copy of a movie that you think shows Anna Kilpatrick being murdered. Let’s set aside the fact that Lexie’s incriminating herself. Who would you give the movie to? Mayhew? Nolan?”
“I could put it on YouTube if someone would show me how.”
“They’d take it down in two seconds, and the FBI would arrest you for disseminating obscene material, and Nolan would testify against you at the trial.” Lydia thought of something far more horrible. “You think the masked man’s just going to let all that slide?”
Claire kept staring out at the road. Her chest rose and fell with each breath. She had that same look of focused intensity on her face that Lydia had seen back at the coffeehouse.