“A lot.”
“How many is a lot?”
“Too many.”
Lydia found enough strength to start walking. “I want to see.”
Claire barred the door. “This is a crime scene. This is where Anna Kilpatrick died. We can’t go in there.”
Lydia felt Claire’s hand on her arm. She didn’t remember walking down the hallway, moving toward the thing her sister was trying to keep her away from, but now she was close enough to smell the metallic tinge of coagulating blood.
She asked the only question that mattered. “How far back do the VHS tapes go?”
Claire shook her head again.
Lydia felt her throat turn into barbed wire. She tried to push Claire aside, but Claire would not move. “Get out of my way.”
“I can’t let you—”
Lydia grabbed her by the arm. Her grip was tighter than she meant it to be, but then her other hand flew up and suddenly, she was engaged in a full-on struggle with her sister. They shoved each other back and forth up and down the hallway the same way they used to fight over a dress or a book or a boy.
The three-year difference in their ages had always worked to Lydia’s advantage, but this time it was an extra thirty pounds that helped her prevail. She pushed Claire so hard that she stumbled backward. Her tailbone hit the floor. Claire huffed as the breath was knocked out of her.
Lydia stepped over her sister. Claire made one last grab for her leg, but it was too late.
Lydia pushed open the garage door.
Wooden shelves took up one section of a wall. Eight rows went from floor to ceiling, each approximately eight feet wide and a foot deep. VHS tapes were stacked tightly together. Their colored cardboard sleeves divided them into sections. A familiar number sequence was written by hand on the labels. Lydia already knew the code.
The dates went back to the 1980s.
She stepped down into the room. There was a tremor in her body, almost like she was standing too close to the edge of a cliff. Her toes tingled. Her hands shook. She was sweating again. Her bones vibrated beneath her skin. Her senses sharpened.
The sound of Claire crying behind her. The odor of bleach cutting into the back of her nose. The taste of fear on her tongue. Her vision tunneling to the six VHS tapes given a place of prominence on the middle shelf.
A green rubber band held together the green cardboard-sleeved videotapes. The handwriting was angular and clear. The number sequence was easy to decipher now that Lydia knew the key.
0-1-3-9-0-9-4-1
03-04-1991
March 4, 1991
CHAPTER 11
Claire opened her mouth to tell Lydia not to touch anything, but the words never came out because there was no point anymore. She had known from the minute she saw the wall of videotapes that there was no turning back, just as she’d known that this had all been inevitable. Paul had been obsessed with Claire for a reason. He had been the perfect husband for a reason. He had manipulated their lives together for a reason.
And all the while, Claire had refused to see what was right in front of her.
Maybe that’s why she wasn’t feeling shocked. Or maybe she was incapable of feeling shocked anymore, because every time Claire thought she’d seen the worst of Paul, some new detail emerged and she was struck not just by the horror of his deeds, but by her own willful blindness.
There was no telling what Lydia was feeling. She stood completely still in the middle of the cold garage. Her hand was reaching toward the six videotapes, but she had stopped just shy of touching them.
Lydia said, “March 4th, 1991.”
“I know.” Claire’s eyes had locked straight onto the labels the second she’d opened the door.
“We have to watch it.”
Again, Claire did not tell her not to. There were so many reasons to leave this place. There were so many reasons to stay.
Red pill/blue pill.
This was no longer a philosophical exercise. Did they want to know what had happened to Julia or not?
Lydia obviously had her answer. She slowly became unstuck. She grabbed the stack of green VHS tapes with both hands. She turned around and waited for Claire to get out of her way.
Claire followed her sister back into the den. She leaned against the wall as she watched Lydia load a tape into the ancient VCR. She had chosen the last tape in the series because that was the only one that mattered.
There was no remote control for anything. Lydia pulled the button to turn on the TV. The tube popped on. The picture faded from black to snow. She twisted the volume dial to turn down the staticky noise. The console had two knobs—one for VHF and one for UHF. Lydia tried channel three. She waited. She tried channel four.
The screen went from snow to black.
Lydia rested her thumb on the big orange PLAY button. She looked at Claire.
Red pill? Blue pill? Do you really want to know?
And then her father’s voice: There are some things you can’t unsee.
Maybe it was Sam’s warning that haunted her most, because Claire had seen the other movies. She knew there was a script to the abuse that the girls endured, just as she knew what she would see on the last tape, the tape that Lydia was waiting to play on the VCR.
Julia Carroll, nineteen years old, naked and chained to the wall. Bruises and burns riddling her body. Electrocution marks. Branded flesh. Skin ripped apart. Mouth open, screaming in terror as the masked man walked in with his machete.
“Claire?” Lydia was asking for permission. Could they do this? Should they do this?
Did they really have a choice?
Claire nodded, and Lydia pressed PLAY.
There was a white zigzag down the black screen. The image rolled too quickly to make out any details. Lydia flipped open an access panel and adjusted the tuner.
The image snapped into frame.
Lydia made a noise somewhere between a groan and a gasp.
Julia was spread-eagled against a wall, her arms and legs shackled apart. She was naked except for the silver and black bangles she always wore on her wrists. Her head was down. Her body was lax. The only thing holding her upright was the chains.
Claire closed her eyes. She could hear Julia’s soft whimpers through the console TV’s single speaker. The place Julia had been held was different, not the staged basement but the inside of a barn. The slats were dark brown, obviously the back wall of a horse stall. Hay was on the floor. There were droppings of animal feces at her bare feet.
Claire remembered the Amityville-looking barn from the picture she had painted. She wondered if Paul had torn it down out of disgust or if, in his typical, efficient way of thinking, he’d found it more expedient to keep everything under one roof.
On the TV, her sister started to whimper.
Claire opened her eyes. The masked man had entered the frame. Claire had seen photos of Paul from 1991. He was tall and lanky with too-short hair and a painfully straight posture that had been drummed into him by the instructors at the military academy.
The masked man was tall, but not lanky. He was older, probably in his late forties. There was a pronounced curve to his shoulders. His belly was softer. He had a tattoo on his bicep, an anchor with words Claire could not read but that obviously signified that he’d been in the US Navy.
Paul’s father had been in the navy.
Slowly, deliberately, the masked man took one step, then another, toward Julia.
Claire told Lydia, “I’m going to go outside.”
Lydia nodded but didn’t look back.
“I can’t stay in here, but I’m not leaving you.”
“Okay.” Lydia was transfixed by the television. “Go.”
Claire pushed away from the wall and walked into the kitchen. She stepped over spilled cutlery and brok
en glass and kept walking until she was outside. The cold air pinched her skin. Her lungs flinched at the sudden chill.
Claire sat on the back steps. She hugged her arms to her body. She was shaking from the cold. Her teeth hurt. The tips of her ears burned. She had not seen the worst of the video, but she had seen enough, and she knew that her father was right. All of her happy memories of Julia—dancing with her to American Bandstand in front of the TV every Saturday, singing with her in the car as they drove to the library to pick up Helen, skipping along behind Sam and Lydia as they all went to the campus clinic to see a new batch of puppies—that was all gone.
Now, when she thought of Julia, the only image that came to mind was that of her sister spread against that rough-sawn wall in a stall where animals were kept.
Inside the house, Lydia called out a strangled cry.
The sound was piercing, like a sliver of glass slicing open Claire’s heart. She dropped her head into her hands. She felt hot, but her body would not stop trembling. Her heart shuddered inside her chest.
Lydia began to wail.