Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  He doesn’t. He’s reading a newspaper. After a while—I am now on my third glass of wine and have scored a little bowl of bar snacks—he folds the paper, puts it neatly aside, and starts texting maniacally. He doesn’t turn. I swear to God: he never fucking turns. Something about his movements practically hypnotizes me: the way he sits, the way he lifts his hands to brush his hair back every now and then, the way he tilts a pint of beer to lips I can’t even see—it’s an impressive economy of movement, I think, analyzing him like an actor would (an actor who has drunk nearly a bottle of wine, granted). He’s only using the absolutely necessary muscles for each small action; his overall stillness isn’t disturbed. Finally he gets up, stuffs his phone in his pocket, leaves the paper behind, tosses money on the table, and walks out. He stands up with his back to me, turning ever so slightly sideways to give a polite wave in the direction of the bar, turns his back again, and strides out.

  Still, I know what I know.

  The man I’ve just seen is no other than Billy Pearson. He’s playing him. He is Zed.

  Lois

  I create a new file and title it Ideas for Conclusion. If Sean has indeed been hacking into my computer and spying on the developments of my sequel, I don’t think he will be able to resist that bait. I assume that he badly wants to know what happens to Gary: what course of action he chooses, and how it turns out. What he gets away with. If I have been using Sean as a template for Gary, has Sean been doing the reverse? It’s almost too appalling to contemplate.

  What the document really contains is one cryptic sentence: It’s over, Sean.

  Surely what he’s done is illegal. It must be; it’s like trespassing, or home invasion. But what more can I do? You have to call the police, Brad told me after the night on the footbridge. And tell them what, exactly? How much and starting when? No, thank you. I imagine he would have the same advice now, but only I can make sure that this ends well. I’ve made my move; now I wait for his.

  Hacker: Hyssop, hajib, hydrangea. Howadji. I’ve forgotten how much I like H words. Hapaxanthous, hygrophanous. Hwyl. (Yes, really. It’s Welsh.) Hymenopterous. Haecceity.

  Haecceity? I can see it clearly, but it’s just a collection of letters, with no sense attached. Zed wouldn’t approve. I type it into my computer, wondering whether such searches can be tracked. My computer is haunted: that’s what it feels like.

  Haecceity means thisness, hereness. Being present. Interesting. What reassures me is that I am here, and he is there. Whatever Sean wants from me, I am far enough away to be safe.

  In the meantime, I have come a long way. I’m in this beige-and-brown motel room for a reason. From my window I see the outskirts of a tiny town—gas stations and fast food—and, in the distance, mountains. In the other direction, I know, lie the woods. And that’s where I’m headed. Into the woods, deep in the woods. Like a fairy tale. Or a horror movie. I’m here, and so is Chloe. I breathe. I sip my bitter, cooling coffee. I plan. I turn my phone off.

  * * *

  In town I buy a notebook—just a plain ruled spiral affair, with a black cover. This is where Gary’s final moves will have to play out. I feel an odd thrill at the prospect of composing longhand, as if it might allow me somehow to claim kinship with my long-dead eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists. It’s like going back in time and attending a masked ball.

  Haecceity. Thisness. Here-and-nowness.

  Chloe

  What would Mandy do the morning after she had made the mistake of following a minibottle of whiskey with an entire bottle of wine?

  Mandy would eat breakfast. I don’t, usually, so this is a huge treat. Mandy is supposed to be pretty fit, but she should still look like a small-town cop—not the doughnut variety, but not like a walking clothes hanger, either. I’ve been advised to eat like a slightly more normal person. In the morning I order eggs and fruit and a whole slice of wheat toast in the same little pub where I drank the night before. (Maybe what Mandy would eat is a stack of pancakes and a couple slabs of bacon, but there are limits.) I go back to the bar each evening for one discreet nightcap and retire to my room. I have not seen Billy Pearson again—not in the bar, not in the main lodge, not on the grounds. It’s as if I imagined him, though I know I haven’t quite reached that level of crazy. He’s here somewhere.

  I picture him out in the woods—hunting, maybe?—which is ridiculous, but I can’t shake the image.

  On the fourth day it rains. It starts the night before and by morning shows no sign of stopping. It’s misty and gray and colder, and the rain beats down like radio static you can’t turn off. I eat breakfast in my room, read for an hour, and head to the fitness center. (Because there are, of course, treadmills, not to mention a full gym.) Mandy has been running every day, doing weight training (which I, Chloe, hate more than most things, but it seems like a police sort of thing to do, so I’m trying it), and going to yoga and Pilates classes. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot else to do, after all. I also read a lot; there’s a great collection of left-behind pulp fiction in the main inn, and I’m working my way through the romantic thrillers and mysteries. There’s some serious stuff, too, but I haven’t been in the mood. I justify it by telling myself this is what Mandy would read in her spare time, to escape from the world of actual crime and dull, stupid police work. (Screw you, Mandy says in my head. She doesn’t say fuck much. She’s no prude, but gratuitous vulgarity isn’t exactly her thing, either. I read Dickens and—and classic detective novels. I try to soothe her: Of course you do. But you might like these, really. Try one! Like I’m offering her candy, or drugs. She’ll come around.)

  Today I’ve been on the treadmill for almost half an hour and am seriously dying for a walking break (I don’t like running much more than I like lifting weights) when a familiar tall, dark not-quite-stranger strolls in and hops up on the treadmill next to mine. Which seems a little too neighborly, if you ask me, since the machines that are not next to me are unoccupied. But I’m also curious. And caught off guard, which leaves me with an awkward-teenager feeling that I haven’t had for years—which, in fact, I hardly ever felt even when I was a teenager. So maybe it’s Mandy’s influence. He gives me a polite nod and has begun to set his machine when he turns his gaze sharply back my way, like he’s just figured something out. I’m looking straight ahead, of course, not wanting to get caught checking him out. So he doesn’t catch my eye. Instead he starts running, picking up speed swiftly, cranking his music up so loud I can hear it through my own headphones. Ridiculously, I find myself embarrassed to switch into walk mode, so I keep running even though by now I really do want to die. I even step up my pace a little. You ass, I tell myself, who the hell are you trying to impress? But it doesn’t help.

  I finally quit when my legs are so weak that I think I might actually fall off the stupid treadmill. I don’t mess around with a cool-down period, just turn the thing off, balance my feet on the sides, and wait for the belt to stop.

  Surprisingly, he stops too.

  “Hey there,” he says as I mop the sweat from my face. “You’re Chloe Savage, aren’t you? The lady police detective?”

  “Police detective,” I say, pulling my headphones from my ears. “She’s no lady.” (Although, I think, she actually is sort of a lady.) I smile a little lewdly to take any possible obnoxiously feminist sting out of my smart-assed words. At the same time, I think: Poor Mandy would hear that shit all the time. No wonder she’s a little uptight.

  “Right, of course not. Hence her crush on the kidnapper?” He twinkles his eyes at me.

  Nice trick, I think, glad that my face is no doubt so purple from exhaustion that a little girlish blush is unlikely to make much difference.

  Don’t get the wrong idea. Billy Pearson, as everyone knows, has a gorgeous wife (not in the business, miraculously) and an insanely cute kid. He is not hitting on me, and I am not developing a crush on him. Whatever heart I have is still hanging out with the English prof back in California, strangely enough. It really is.<
br />
  But the fact that Mandy is drawn to the kidnapper—not to say obsessed with him—is fucking with my head a little. As is the fact that Billy Pearson looks so much like the real kidnapper that I keep blinking to clear my vision and make sure I’m seeing straight.

  Or at least I think he does. Can I really trust my memory? I was twelve, and I was traumatized. Maybe I’m just pouring Zed into this guy’s shell, this actor with a slight physical resemblance to him—this actor who is looking at me like he can read my fucking mind, which annoys the hell out of me.

  “Did you just get here?” I ask casually, like I couldn’t care less. Like I didn’t see him in the bar almost a week ago.

  “Nope. Usually I run outside, but the rain…” He grimaces charmingly and gestures toward the streaky, spattered windows. “There are great trails out in the woods, you know. Miles of them. I hate treadmills—running and running and getting nowhere.” How original. Another disarming smile, like he has a whole arsenal of expressions guaranteed to win you over. Which I find off-putting, though Mandy is kind of taken in. “No offense, of course, if that’s your thing.”

  “Running in any form isn’t exactly my thing.”

  “But you do it anyway,” he remarks cheerfully—and also, I think, kind of ambiguously: What’s that supposed to mean? Is it good or bad?

  “Also,” he says, leaning over a little as though he’s telling me a secret, “I’ve been hunting.”

  Hunting? Did he really just say that? “Hunting?” I repeat skeptically, remembering my imagined scenarios. “Seriously?” But he didn’t hunt, the kidnapper. You would have expected him to, but he didn’t. You’ve guessed wrong.

  “Seriously. Well, I didn’t actually shoot anything. But I carried a gun, and I wore the whole hunting get-up, and I looked for animals to shoot. I even aimed at them: I just didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “Because you didn’t want to, or because you couldn’t?” I don’t know him well enough to ask him probing questions or adopt such a mocking, familiar tone. (I think that’s how it would be described in one of the novels I’ve been reading.) I feel almost embarrassed by my rudeness. Embarrassment is not usually a problem for me.

  He doesn’t seem to mind. “It was never part of the plan. I mean, what the hell would I do with a dead rabbit? No, I was just trying to get into the guy’s head. The kidnapper. I’m having sort of a tough time with him.”

  His surprising willingness to confide in me—because that’s what it seems like he’s doing—loosens some key link between me and sanity. In fact, that chain must have been weaker than I ever guessed, because what I blurt is this: “Well, you look a lot like him!”

  I am immediately appalled. Since when are you such an idiot? I ask myself in horror. Mandy joins in: Do you really have to tell everybody everything? You’ll never find out anything that way, you know. Some things are best kept to yourself.

  Meanwhile, I try to recover. “I mean—what I imagine—”

  “I know,” Billy interrupts, “I’ve actually been doing some research. You know this script is based on a novel that’s based on a true story, don’t you? I mean really loosely based. It was a real case back in the nineties. I’ve seen some photos of the guy: school pictures, Boy Scouts, stuff like that. We have the same coloring and build, pretty much. But I’m trying to get a better sense of what the hell he was thinking. I mean, I don’t think he was just nuts. Sure, that was part of it, but I feel like he must have wanted something, something that made sense, at least to him. He wasn’t a stupid guy. And he never did hurt the girls, as far as anyone knows. If you believe what the girls said, anyway. It’s just such a mystery.” He scratches his handsome head, then smiles, a big self-deprecating grin that, finally, charms me in spite of myself. “So yeah, I’m going all method and shit.”

  How many people could say that and not sound like complete assholes? My guard is up, I tell myself.

  We agree to meet for dinner.

  Lois

  It’s hard to believe that this is the landscape in which they have chosen to cinematically reconstruct our summer in the cabin. Everything is on a different scale here: the mountains are grander, the clouds are stacked higher in the sky, the woods to the east look like they go on forever. So far I haven’t ventured much beyond my motel. I’ve established a routine that involves breakfast and an early dinner at my diner, a long afternoon walk along the quiet, windy highway, and many hours in my room, scribbling in my notebook, which is already almost full. The day divides so neatly, so willingly, so gracefully; it’s like coaxing a well-creased map to refold along the old lines, reducing a floppy, unwieldy square to a slim, tuckable rectangle. I find this quiet sense of order bracing.

  I seldom look at my phone. When I do, I delete Sean’s texts unread. I should be curious about his response to my computer-file decoy, but for now I prefer not to think about him. He’s thousands of miles away. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a car. I don’t think he has the kind of friends who might loan him a car or money for an expensive plane ticket. He’s still drifting around town in his trench coat, no doubt, surly but essentially harmless. Even his threat to disclose my secrets seems less powerful from a distance; what would it matter, really, if everyone knew my past? Or that I am Lucy Ledger, of whom they probably haven’t heard? This is how I think by day. At night I dream of the woods: my woods, the woods I half remember. They are a looming, peripheral presence; I was almost never in them, really, just surrounded by them. Pine, spruce, maple … but the pine dominates, and it’s the pine that becomes loquacious when the wind rises. I remember the shadows cast by trees on the walls of the lodge, the squeak of a branch as its tips brushed against our bedroom window. Its fingers, rather: I understand why branches are called limbs, active extensions of living bodies, with wills of their own, things to say. In my dreams the trees are alive, the sun never shines, and Zed is far more sinister, more threatening, than he ever seemed in reality. I awake disturbed and also guilty, as if I have betrayed us by imagining such malevolence.

  Sometimes Gary is there, too: or at least I think he is. Hiding in a closet or a bathroom, lurking in the woods. He looks a lot like Sean.

  Dream: Dulcimer, desiccate. Denouement. Too easy. Daguerreotype, deleterious, doppelgänger. Debauchee, décolletage, deshabille. Is there a theme emerging? Dacoity. Dacquoise, which is a cake. Let them eat cake, have your cake and eat it too. Is that what I’m trying to do on some level? No, no theme. You can make meaning out of anything. Random scraps. Dystopic. Enough! Dashiki. Better. But the words won’t stop. Dactylomegaly, which involves having exceptionally large fingers or toes, though you could figure that out without being at all familiar with the word. Dactyl + megaly: all the clues you need. The best D word of them all: dziggetai. A Mongolian wild ass, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

  Double entendre: deliquesce, dressage, dreidel, dirndl. I am stuck, it would seem, on the D words. Drunken, drama, depression, desperation, doom, dwindle, dire. Far too easy. Doggerel. Better.

  You’re getting close, aren’t you? I think I am.

  Chloe

  Charming Billy calls my room the next morning and invites me to go for a drive. “Have you gone to check out the set yet?” he asks, and something in my stomach lurches.

  “No,” I admit. “Is it finished?”

  “I hear they’re putting the finishing touches on the cabin. I’d love to see it before it’s completely overrun with people and equipment, just to get a feel for it. Wouldn’t you? I mean, I know your relationship to it isn’t as intense as mine, but I think it could be useful for you. Come on, it’ll be more fun if you come with me.”

  My feelings are violently mixed. Yes, I want to see it. Of course I do. Also it scares the hell out of me. On top of that, I’m weirded out by Billy’s habit of saying me and you when he means the kidnapper and the police detective. I find myself thinking, Your relationship to it isn’t as intense as mine? Are you high? And then biting my tongue, which I don’t trust
anymore after yesterday’s moronic slip.

  In any case, fun isn’t exactly the word I would use to describe my expectations. But I agree to go. What else am I here for, anyway? Why did I make such a point of arriving early? Why put this off? Part of me hopes that this hunting lodge bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one I remember; that it’s a Hollywood, fairy-tale idea of a hunting lodge, all picturesque, not a real one. And some irrational part of me, I realize, expects (and hopes?) to pull up to an exact replica of the cabin where I spent the summer of my twelfth year.

  * * *

  Billy has rented a Range Rover, which makes me wonder if he isn’t a little bit of an asshole after all.

  Here’s the story with Billy: He is without a doubt the name in this movie—the only one, really; they got the rest of us cheap. He isn’t quite A-list, but he’s close. He could be, eventually, if he makes some smart choices. He hasn’t done much serious stuff—mostly rom-coms and some pretty tame action pics. Whether he can really open a big film remains uncertain; most often he’s the best friend, the ex-boyfriend, the brother. This has worked well for him, as he usually manages to steal the show. He oozes charisma and likability on the screen (as, I must admit, he does in person).

  Obviously that makes him an interesting choice to play a psycho-kidnapper; you won’t be able to help sympathizing with him. I’m actually surprised they have the guts to play it that way. Even in Lois’s book, he’s a pretty ambiguous figure—compelling and genuine, sometimes charming, sometimes sinister. If charming Billy can capture that, he’ll go a long way toward proving he’s the real thing. I assume that’s his plan. All method and shit. Please.

  Riding in the passenger seat beside him, I’m struck again by his slightly freakish resemblance to Zed. He’s wearing jeans and an untucked T-shirt, his face a little stubbly, his hair just outgrowing its pretty-boy neatness. He’s intent on the road, which is winding and narrow, and he isn’t talking, which is rare. If I close my eyes I could almost be twelve again, driving across the country, maybe somewhere in the woods of Pennsylvania. Full of—what?—hope? Excitement? Yeah—but fear, too. A kind of fear that’s mixed with pleasure, though; like fear of the dark, or ghosts, or roller coasters. A thrilling kind of fear.