Pretty Girls

“I’m just about the same distance away from the house as you are, Claire. Think about Lydia. Do you really want me to get bored waiting around for you?”

Claire closed the phone. She looked down at her arm. The rain had come in through the door. Her shirtsleeve was wet.

There were two more customers in the storefront. One woman. One man. Both young. Both dressed in jeans and hoodies. Neither of them had earbuds. Claire searched their faces. The woman looked away. The man smiled at her.

Claire had to get out of here. She sat back down at the computer. The files had finished uploading. She checked the link to make sure it worked. The monitor was turned away from the other patrons, but she felt a rush of heat as she made sure that the photograph of Johnny Jackson was on the server.

Should she leave it open on the monitor? Should she let Keith find out what he’d unwittingly been a part of?

Claire had already hurt enough ­people. She closed the photograph. She didn’t have time to wax eloquent in her email. She wrote out a few more lines, then pasted the Tor link underneath. She double-­checked the scheduled time for the emails to be sent out.

In two hours, anyone with Internet access would know the true story of Paul Scott and his accomplices. They would see it in the pictures of his uncle and father passing down the family’s bloodlust. They would see it in the almost one thousand email addresses that gave his customers’ true identities and locations. They would know it in their guts when they saw picture after picture of young girls who had been abducted from their families over the course of more than four decades. And they would understand how Carl Huckabee and Johnny Jackson had exploited their law enforcement careers to make sure that no one ever found out.

Until now.

Claire pulled the USB drive out of the computer. She made sure there were no copies left on the computer desktop. The drive went back into her purse. She waved to Keith as she left the store. The sky had opened up again, pouring rain down on her head. She was soaked by the time she got behind the wheel of Helen’s Ford.

Claire turned on the windshield wipers. She pulled out of the space. She waited until she was safely down Peachtree Street before she called her mother.

Helen’s voice sounded strained. “Yes?”

“I’m okay.” She was becoming just as adept at lying as Paul. “I need you to keep driving to Athens. I’m about twenty minutes ahead of you right now, so I need you to go slow. No more than the speed limit.”

“Am I going home?”

“No, don’t go home. Park at the Taco Stand downtown, then walk to Mrs. Flynn’s house. Leave the phone in the car. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.” Claire thought about the emails that were scheduled to go out. Her mother was on the list of recipients, which was the emotional equivalent of stabbing the woman in the heart. “I sent you an email. It should be there by the time you get to Mrs. Flynn’s. You can read it, but don’t click on the link. If you haven’t heard from me in three hours, I want you to take it to your friend who works at the Atlanta Journal—­the one who writes books.”

“She’s retired now.”

“She’ll still know ­people. It’s very important, Mom. You have to get her to click on the link, but don’t look at what she sees.”

Helen was obviously scared, but she didn’t say anything else but, “Claire.”

“Don’t trust Huckleberry. He lied to you about Julia.”

“I saw what was on the tape.” Helen paused before continuing. “That’s why I never wanted you to see it, because I saw it myself.”

Claire didn’t think she was capable of feeling any more pain. “How?”

“I was the one who found your father.” She stopped for a moment. The memory was clearly difficult. “He was in his chair. The TV was on. The remote control was in his hand. I wanted to see what he’d been looking at and—­”

She stopped again.

They both knew the last images that Sam Carroll had seen. Only Claire guessed that her husband had been the one to show it to him. Had that been the last straw that led her father to take his own life? Or had Paul helped him with that, too?

Helen said, “It was a long time ago, and the man who did it is dead.”

Claire opened her mouth to say otherwise, but her mother would know everything when she opened the email. “Does it help? Knowing he’s dead?”

Helen didn’t answer. She had always been against the death penalty, but something told Claire her mother had no problem with someone other than the government putting to death the man she believed had killed her daughter.

Claire said, “Just don’t go to Huckleberry, okay? You’ll understand later. I need you to trust me. He’s not a good man.”

“Sweetpea, I’ve been trusting you all day. I’m not going to stop now.”

Again, Claire thought about Dee. Helen was a grandmother. She deserved to know. But Claire knew it wasn’t just a matter of telling her mother. Helen would want details. She would want to meet Dee, talk to her, touch her, hold her. She would want to know why Claire was keeping them apart. And then she would start asking about Lydia.

“Honey?” Helen asked. “Is there something else?”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too.”

Claire flipped the phone closed. She tossed it onto the seat beside her. She grabbed the wheel with both hands. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and she gave herself one full minute to scream out the grief and despair that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to express at her father’s funeral.

“Okay,” she told herself. “Okay.”

The rage would help her. It would give her the strength she needed to do what she had to do. She was going to kill Paul for showing her father the tape of Julia. She was going to kill him for what he’d done to them all.

Rain pelted the windshield, almost blinding her, but she kept driving because the only thing she had on Paul was the element of surprise. Exactly how that surprise would play out was still a mystery. Claire had the gun. She had hollow-­point bullets that could tear a man in half.

She remembered that long-­ago day that she’d taken Paul shooting. The first thing the rangemaster had said was that you should never point a weapon at another person unless you were willing to pull the trigger.

Claire was more than willing to pull the trigger. She just didn’t know how she was going to find the opportunity to do it. There was a chance she could get to the Fuller house ahead of Paul. She could park her mother’s car in the stand of trees beside the house and walk on foot to the back door. There were several places she could lie in wait: in one of the bedrooms, in the hallway, in the garage.

Unless he was already there. Unless he was lying to her again and he’d been there this whole time.

She had assumed he had another house, but maybe the Fuller house was the only house Paul needed. Her husband liked for everything to stay the same. He was a slave to routine. He used the same bowl for breakfast, the same coffee cup. He would wear the same style black suit every day if Claire let him. He needed structure. He needed familiarity.

There was a chiming sound coming from the dashboard. Claire had no idea what the noise meant. She slowed her mother’s car. She couldn’t have the engine stall on her. She frantically searched for warning lights on the dashboard, but the only yellow light was the gas can over the fuel gage.

“No, no, no.” The Tesla never needed gas. Paul topped up the tank in Claire’s BMW every Saturday. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a gas station for anything but Diet Coke.

Claire checked the signs on the interstate. She was forty-­five minutes from Athens. Several exits went by before she saw a Hess sign.

She was coasting on fumes by the time she pulled into the gas station. The rain had let up, but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds and the air had turned bitter cold. Cl

aire took the last of Helen’s cash into the store. She had no idea how many gallons her mother’s Ford Focus took. She handed the guy behind the counter forty dollars and hoped for the best.

A young ­couple was standing by a beat-­up sedan when Claire got back to the car. She tried to ignore them as she gassed up the Ford. They were fighting about money. Claire and Paul had never fought about money because Paul always had it. Their early arguments were mostly because Paul was doing too much for her. There wasn’t one need she had that Paul did not meet. Her friends over the years had always said the same thing: Paul took care of everything.

The pump handle clicked.

“Shit.” Gas had spilled all over Claire’s hand. The smell was noxious. She popped the trunk, because Paul had put the same emergency supplies in Helen’s trunk that he’d put in all their cars. She dumped out the backpack and retrieved a packet of hand wipes. There were scissors, but Claire used her teeth to open the foil wrapper. She looked at the spilled contents in the trunk as she scrubbed the gas off her hand.