Pretty Girls

“Mrs. Scott, do you mind my asking why the alarm wasn’t on?” This was from Mayhew. He had taken out a notebook and pen. His shoulders were hunched, as if someone had asked him to mimic a character from a Raymond Chandler novel.

Claire said, “I always leave the alarm off for the caterers. The gate was closed.”

His mustache twitched. “The caterers have the front gate code?”

“And a key to the main house.”

“Anyone else have a key?”

The question struck her as odd, or maybe she was annoyed by the way Fred Nolan was still breathing down her neck. “Why would the burglars break the glass in the door if they had a key?”

Mayhew looked up from his notebook. “It’s just a routine question. We’ll need to talk to anybody who had access to the house.”

Claire felt a tickling sensation at the base of her throat. She was starting to feel overwhelmed again. This was the sort of thing Paul would know. She tried, “The housecleaners, our handyman, Paul’s assistant, his partner, my mother. I can look for names and numbers.”

“Your mom,” Nolan said. “She’s quite the pistol.”

Claire pressed the code into the keypad beside the four-­bay garage. The heavy wooden door slid silently up its tracks. She watched the men’s eyes take in the diamond-­plate wainscoting and matching storage cabinets. The floor was a racetrack-­white and black rubber tile. There was a bracket for everything—­hand tools, extension cords, tennis rackets, golf clubs, basketballs, sunglasses, shoes. Paul’s custom workbench took up one side of the room. He had a charging station, a minifridge, a flat-­panel TV and an air conditioner for hot summer days.

Then, of course, there was Claire’s BMW and Paul’s Porsche Carrera and Tesla Model S.

“Holy shit.” Nolan’s tone was reverential. Claire had seen men get harder over Paul’s garage than they ever got over a woman.

“It’s through here.” Claire entered the four-­digit code into another keypad and led them downstairs to the basement. She had loved that Paul loved his garage. He spent hours in here working on his models. Claire had teased him that the only reason he constructed them at home instead of at work was because here, he got to clean up after himself.

“Kind of a neat freak,” Nolan said, as if reading her mind.

“I got lucky,” Claire told him. Paul’s mild obsessive compulsive disorder had never stopped their lives or made him do odd things like touch a doorknob twelve times. Actually, his compulsions manifested themselves in acts that any wife could appreciate: putting down the toilet seat, folding all the clothes, cleaning up the kitchen every night.

At the bottom of the stairs, Claire entered another four-­digit code into the keypad on the door. The lock clicked open.

Mayhew said, “Never seen a basement under a garage like this.”

Nolan said, “Kind of Silence of the Lambs-­y.”

Claire flipped on the lights, and the small, concrete room came into stark relief. Paul had designed the space to double as a tornado shelter. Metal shelves held food and supplies. There was a small TV, a weather radio, a ­couple of camping cots, and plenty of junk food, because Claire had told Paul that in the event of the apocalypse, she was going to need lots of chocolate and Cheetos.

She was glad she still had on her coat. The temperature was kept low because of all the computers. Everything was controlled from inside this room, not just the security cameras but also all the audiovisual systems, the automation for the blinds and fixtures and whatever else made the house run like magic. There were banks of components with flashing lights and a small desk with four flat-­screen monitors mounted on articulating stands.

Nolan asked, “Does your husband secretly work for the NSA?”

“Yes.” Claire was tired of his questions, which were made even more grating by his flat, midwestern accent. The most expedient thing would be to just give them what they wanted so they would go away.

She opened a desk drawer and found the laminated checklist that explained how to work the security cameras. Paul had tried to walk her through the steps, but Claire’s eyes had glazed over and she’d worried she was going to have a seizure.

She tapped the computer keyboard and entered the access code to the system.

“Lots of passwords to remember.” Nolan was leaning over her shoulder to look at the screen.

Claire slid away from the annoying man. She handed Mayhew the directions. “You’ll have to take it from here.”

Nolan asked, “Are all of your houses like this?”

“We only have one house.”

“ ‘Only.’ ” Nolan laughed.

Claire had reached her limit. “My husband is dead and now my house has been broken into. Is there something you find funny about this situation?”

“Whoa.” Nolan held up his hands like she’d tried to scratch out his eyes. “No offense, lady.”

Mayhew’s mustache twitched again. “Hard to offend someone if you keep your fucking mouth shut.”

Claire gave Nolan a look before turning away from him. She knew how to shut down a man. He didn’t leave, but he took a few steps back to let her know the message had been received.

She watched the monitors as Mayhew followed Paul’s checklist. The views were split so that each screen showed four different aspects from sixteen different cameras. Every entrance, every bank of windows, the pool area, and several sections of the driveway were monitored. Claire could see that the caterers were in the motor court turning around their truck. Helen’s silver Ford was parked on the other side of the garage. She was talking to one of the detectives outside the mudroom door. Her hands were on her hips. Claire was glad there was no sound.

Mayhew flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Okay. We’ve got a basic time frame for the break-­in based on when the caterers called 911.” He pecked at some keys and Helen disappeared from the monitor. The catering van went from making a sharp turn to pulling into the motor court. Mayhew skipped back the footage until he found what he wanted. Three individuals at the bottom of the driveway. They were far enough away to be indistinct, just dark, menacing blurs making their way toward the house.

Claire felt every hair on the back of her neck rise up. This was actually something that had taken place at her home.

She noted the time on the video. While the burglars were passing the parking pad in front of the house, Claire had been standing by the small, nondenominational chapel in the cemetery wondering why she hadn’t died in that alley with her husband.

“Here we go,” Mayhew said.

Claire felt a sharp pain in her chest as the blurs turned into men. Seeing it made it real, something she had to deal with. It was just as she had been told: three African American males in ski masks and gloves jogged up the driveway. They were all dressed in black, from their tight T-­shirts to their sneakers. Their heads scanned left and right in a coordinated pattern. One of them held a crowbar in his hand. Another had a gun.

Nolan said, “Looks pretty professional to me.”

Mayhew agreed. “This ain’t their first rodeo.”

Claire studied the men walking so confidently toward her mudroom door. Paul had ordered all the doors and windows from Belgium. They were solid mahogany with four-­point locks that were easily bypassed when a crowbar smashed the leaded glass and one of the burglars stuck his arm through the window and turned the thumb latch.

Her mouth went dry. She felt tears come into her eyes. This was her mudroom. This was her door, the same door she used countless times every day. The same door Paul came through when he got home from work.

Used to come through.

She said, “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

Claire walked up the stairs. She wiped her eyes. Her mouth opened. She forced herself to draw in breath, to let it go, to fight the hysteria living in the pit of her stom

ach.

Paul’s stairs. Paul’s workbench. Paul’s cars.

She went through the garage. She kept going to the stairs in the back and climbed them as quickly as her heels would allow. She didn’t realize where she was going until she found herself standing in the middle of Paul’s office.

There was the couch he napped on. There was the chair he sat in to read or watch TV. There was the painting she’d given him for their third wedding anniversary. There was his drafting table. There was his desk, which he’d designed so that no cords were hanging down. The blotter was pristine. The out-­box held neatly stacked papers with Paul’s angular handwriting. There was his computer. There was his pencil set. There was a framed photograph of Claire from more years ago than she could count. Paul had taken it with a Nikon that had belonged to his mother.

Claire picked up the picture. They were at a football game. Paul’s jacket was wrapped around her shoulders. She could recall thinking how warm it felt, how reassuring. The camera had captured her laughing, mouth open, head tilted back. Ecstatically, irrevocably happy.

They’d both gone to Auburn University in Alabama, Paul because it had one of the top architectural programs in the country, Claire because it was far enough away from home to be meaningful. That she ended up with a boy who had grown up less than twenty miles from her childhood home was just further proof that no matter how far you ran, you always ended up back where you started.

Paul had been a breath of fresh air compared to the other boys Claire dated in college. He was so sure of himself, so sure of what he wanted to do and where he was going. His undergrad had been paid by a full-­ride scholarship, and graduate school was taken care of by the money he inherited when his parents died. Between a small life insurance policy, proceeds from the sale of the farm, and the out-­of-­court settlement from the trucking company that had owned the eighteen-­wheeler that killed the Scotts, there was more than enough money for tuition and living expenses.