Pretty Girls

“I think you know what I did.” Paul shuffled through the stack of notebooks. He checked the front pages. He was looking for something. “I arrived at his apartment at the requested hour. I poured us some drinks so we could talk like men. Your father liked doing that, didn’t he? Making sure we knew who the men were and who were the boys.”

Lydia could hear her father’s voice in his words.

“Sam drank his vodka. He called himself a social drinker, but we know he drank himself to sleep at night, don’t we? Just like Helen did while poor Claire was sitting alone in her room wondering why no one in her family noticed that she was still alive.”

Lydia swallowed. She tasted the sour burn of his piss.

“I guess the vodka masked the sleeping pills I ground up in his drink.”

Lydia wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to block him out. But she couldn’t.

“I watched his head dip.” Paul imitated her father falling into a stupor. “I tied him up with some sheets that I brought with me. They were torn into long strips. His hands were so limp when I tied him up that I was worried he’d died before the fun could start.”

Lydia felt every sense lock on to him.

Paul leaned back in the chair with his legs spread wide. Lydia forced herself not to look down because she knew exactly what he wanted her to see. “If you use strips of bedsheets to tie somebody up, then the marks don’t show when the coroner gets them. If you’re careful, I mean, because of course you have to fold the sheets properly, which I did because I had time with your father. I want you to hear that, Liddie: I had lots and lots of time with your father.”

Lydia’s mind had gone haywire. It was too much. She couldn’t take in what he was saying.

“When Sam woke up, we watched the tape together. You know the tape I’m talking about? The tape with Julia?” Paul rubbed the sides of his face. His beard was growing in. “I wanted us to watch all of the tapes together, but I was worried the neighbors would hear his screams.” Paul added, “Not that Sam didn’t scream a lot at night anyway, but still.”

Lydia listened to the steady in and out of her own breathing. She rearranged his words in her head until they fell into digestible sentences. Paul had drugged her father. He had made her father watch his oldest daughter being brutally murdered.

“At the end, I debated whether or not to tell Sam where Dad and I had dumped Julia’s body. What’s the harm, right? We both knew he was going to die.” Paul shrugged. “Maybe I should’ve told him. It’s one of those questions you still ask yourself years later. I mean, Sam was so tortured, right? All he wanted to know was where she was, and I knew, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him.”

Lydia knew that she should rage against him. She should try to kill him. But she couldn’t move. Her lungs were wet with urine. Her stomach was filled. Her body was seized by pain. There were welts on her arms where he’d electrocuted her. The cut on her forehead had been opened. Her split lip had been torn in two. Her ribs were so bruised that she felt like the bones had turned into knives.

He said, “I used Nembutal. You know what that is, right? They use it to put animals out of their misery. And he was miserable, especially after he watched the tape.” Paul had found the notebook he was looking for. “Here you go.” He held up the page so Lydia could see. The bottom half was torn away. “Look familiar?”

Her father’s suicide note had been written on a torn-­off sheet of notebook paper. Lydia could still see his shaky words in her head:

To all of my beautiful girls—­I love you with every piece of my heart. Daddy

Paul said, “I think I chose a good line. Don’t you?” He put the notebook back in his lap. “I chose it for Claire, really, because I thought that the line was particularly true about her. All his beautiful girls. You were never really beautiful, Lydia. And Julia—­I told you I still visit her sometimes. She’s no longer beautiful. It’s been sad watching her decay over the years. The last time I checked in on her, she was just rotten bones with long strands of dirty blonde hair and those stupid bracelets she used to wear on her wrist. You remember those?”

Bangles. Julia had worn bangles on her left wrist and a big, black bow in her hair and she’d stolen Lydia’s saddle oxfords to complete the outfit because she’d said they looked better on her anyway.

Suddenly, Lydia had too much saliva in her mouth. She tried to swallow. Her throat spasmed. She coughed.

“Don’t you want to know where Julia is?” Paul asked. “It’s really the one thing that broke you all apart. Not her disappearance, not her probable death, but the never knowing. Where is Julia? Where is my sister? Where is my daughter? The not-­knowing completely destroyed every single one of you. Even Grandma Ginny, though the old bitch likes to act like the past is past.”

Lydia felt herself start to slip back into that in-­between space. There was no use listening to him anymore. She already knew everything she needed to know. Dee and Rick loved her. Helen had not given up. Lydia had forgiven Claire. Two days ago, she would’ve panicked if someone had told her that she had a finite amount of time to settle all of her affairs, but when she got down to it, her family was really the only thing that mattered.

“I visit Julia sometimes.” Paul was studying her face to gauge his words. “If you had a dying wish, wouldn’t it be to know where Julia is?”

Apple Macintosh, dot-­matrix printer, five-­inch floppy discs, duping machine, disc burner.

“I’m going to read you some selections from your father’s journals, and then I’m going to waterboard you again in . . .” He looked at his watch. “Twenty-­two minutes. All right?”

Apple Macintosh, dot-­matrix printer, five-­inch floppy discs, duping machine, disc burner.

Paul rested the notebook in his lap on top of the others. He started reading aloud, “ ‘I remember the first time your mother and I walked you through the snow. We wrapped you up like a precious gift. The scarf was wound so many times around your head that all we could see was your little pink nose.’ ”

His voice. Paul had known her father. He had spent hours with him—­even up to his last hours—­and he knew how to read Sam’s words with the same soft cadence that her father had always used.

“ ‘We were taking you to see your Grandma Ginny. Your mother, of course, was not pleased with this particular errand.’ ”

“Yes,” Lydia said.

Paul looked up from the page. “Yes what?”

“Give me the Percocet.”

“Sure.” Paul dropped the notebooks on the floor. He unscrewed the top from the spray bottle. “But first you have to earn it.”

CHAPTER 19

Claire sat on the toilet with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She had cried herself out. There was nothing left inside of her. Even her heart labored to beat in her chest. The slow thumps were almost painful. Every time she felt the pulse, her brain silently said the word: Lydia.

Lydia.

Lydia.

Her sister had given up. Claire could hear it in Lydia’s voice, which had no tone except the tone of complete and utter surrender. What terrible thing had Paul done that made Lydia believe that she was already dead?

Thinking about the answer to that question would only drive Claire deeper into despair.

She rested her head against the cold wall. Her eyes closed. She was punch-­drunk with exhaustion. The God’s honest truth was that Claire desperately wanted to give up, too. She felt the desire wit

h every fiber of her being. Her mouth was dry. Her vision was blurred. There was a high-­pitched tone ringing in both of her ears. Had she slept inside the interrogation room? Could she count being knocked out by Paul as resting?

All that Claire knew was that she had been awake for almost twenty-­four hours. The last time she’d eaten was when Lydia made her egg bread yesterday morning. She had two and a half hours before she was supposed to go to the bank in Hapeville—­for what? Adam had the USB drive. He was the one Claire should be talking to. The Quinn + Scott offices were ten blocks away. Adam would be there in a few hours for his presentation. Claire should be waiting in front of the office doors, not sitting on the toilet in the Hyatt. If her Hapeville lie had been designed to buy more time, then she’d bought herself another useless four or five hours.

She still didn’t know what she was going to do. Her mind was refusing to run around in the familiar circles. Mayhew. Nolan. The congressman. The gun.

What the hell was she going to do with the gun? All the certainty from before had drained away. Claire could not rekindle the steely resolve she’d felt when she first held Lydia’s revolver. Could she really shoot Paul? A better question might be could she shoot him and actually hit him. She wasn’t Annie Oakley. She would have to be close enough to hit him, but not so close that Paul could take the gun away.

And she would have to throw it at his head because she didn’t have any fucking bullets.

The bathroom door opened. Instinctively, Claire pulled up her feet and rested her heels on the toilet bowl. She heard the light tread of soft-­soled shoes on the porcelain floor tiles. Harvey? Claire assumed such a large man would have a more lumbering tread. A stall door was pushed open, then another, then another, until Claire’s locked door rattled.

Claire recognized the shoes. Brown Easy Spirit loafers for walking through the stacks. Light tan pants that wouldn’t show dust from old magazines and paperbacks.