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 biceps, an anchor with words Claire could not read but 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 broken 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.
Claire heard an anguished sob come from her own mouth. She covered her ears with her hands. She couldn’t stand the sound of Lydia’s keening. They were two rooms apart, but Claire could see everything that Lydia had seen: the machete swinging up, the blade coming down, the blood flowing, the convulsions, the rape.
Claire should go back inside. She should be there for Lydia. She should bear witness to the last few seconds of Julia’s life. She should do something other than sit uselessly on the back porch, but she could not force herself to move.
She could only look out at the vast, empty field and scream— for her murdered sister, her exiled sister, her fractured mother, her shattered father, her decimated family.
Claire was overcome with grief, but still she screamed. She fell to her knees. Something broke open inside her throat. Blood filled her mouth. She slammed her fists into the dry red clay and cursed Paul for everything he’d taken away from her: holding Lydia’s baby, maybe carrying her own, watching her parents grow old together, sharing her own life with the only sister she had left. She raged against her scam of a marriage—the eighteen years she’d wasted loving a sick, twisted madman who had tricked Claire into thinking she had everything she wanted when really, she had nothing at all.
Lydia’s arms wrapped around her. She was crying so hard that her words stuttered. “S-she was … s-so … s-scared …”
“I know.” Claire grabbed onto her sister. Why had she ever believed Paul? How had she ever let Lydia go? “It’s okay,” she lied. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“S-she was terrified.”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut, praying the images would leave.
“A-all alone. S-she was all alone.”
Claire rocked Lydia like a baby. They were both shaking so hard they could barely hold on. The devastation of what they’d been through opened like a blister.
“S-she knew what was coming and s-she couldn’t move and there was no one to—” Her words were cut off by a strangled cry. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
“I’m sorry,” Claire whispered. Her voice was hoarse. She could barely speak. Lydia was trembling uncontrollably. Her skin felt cold. Every breath rattled in her lungs. Her heart was pounding so hard that Claire could feel it against her own chest.
“My God,” Lydia cried. “My God.”
“I’m sorry.” This was all Claire’s fault. She should’ve never called Lydia. She had no right to bring her into this. She was selfish and cruel and deserved to be alone for the rest of her life. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Why?” Lydia asked. “Why did he choose her?”
Claire shook her head. There was no explanation. They would never know what it was about Julia on that night at that time that made her a target.
“She was so good. She was so fucking good.”
The refrain was achingly familiar. Sam and Helen had asked the same question over and over again: Why our daughter? Why our family?
“Why did it have to be her?”
“I don’t know.” Claire had questioned herself, too. Why Julia? Why not Claire, who sneaked away with boys and cheated off her friends in math class and flirted with the gym teacher so she wouldn’t have to do sprints?
Lydia shuddered, her body racked with grief. “It should’ve been me.”
“No.”
“I was such a fuck-up.”
“No.”
“It wouldn’t have hurt as much.”
“No, Liddie. Look at me.” Claire pressed her hands to either side of Lydia’s face. She had lost her father to this same kind of thinking. She wasn’t going to lose her sister again. “Look at me, Lydia. Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that again. Do you hear me?”
Lydia said nothing. She wouldn’t even look at her.
“You matter.” Claire tried to keep the absolute terror out of her voice. “I don’t want you to ever say that again, okay? You matter. You matter to Rick and to Dee and to Mom. And you matter to me.” Claire waited for an answer. “Okay?”
Lydia’s head was still trapped between Claire’s hands, but she managed a short nod.
“I love you,” Claire said, words she hadn’t even told her husband when he was dying in her arms. “You are my sister, and you are perfect, and I love you.”
Lydia held on to Claire’s hands.
“I love you,” Claire repeated. “Do you hear me?”
Lydia nodded again. “I love you, too.”
“Nothing is ever going to come between us again. All right?”
Again, Lydia nodded. Some of her color was coming back. Her breathing had slowed down.
Claire gripped both of Lydia’s hands in her own. They looked down at the ground because seeing the house and knowing its awful history was too much to bear.
Claire said, “Tell me what it was like when Dee was born.”
Lydia shook her head. She was too upset.
“Tell me,” Claire begged. The world was falling around them, but she had to know what else Paul had taken away from her. “Tell me what I missed.”
Lydia must have needed it, too—some light in this dark grave they had buried themselves inside. “She was tiny.” Her lips quivered with a faint smile. “Like a doll.”
Claire smiled because she wanted Lydia to keep smiling. She needed to think of something good right now, something that would take away the images of the other Julia in her head.
“Was she an easy baby?”
Lydia wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“Did she sleep all the time?”
“God, no.”
Claire waited, willing Lydia to talk about anything but what they had seen on the television. “She was fussy?”
Lydia shrugged and shook her head at the same time. She was still thinking about their sister, still trapped in that deep, dark hole.
“What was she like?” Claire squeezed
Lydia’s hands. She worked to make her tone sound lighter. “Come on, Pepper. Tell me what my niece was like. Sugar and spice? Sweet and adorable like I was?”
Lydia laughed, but she was still shaking her head. “She cried all the time.”
Claire kept pushing. “Why did she cry?”
“I don’t know.” Lydia heaved a heavy sigh. “She was hot. She was cold. She was hungry. She was full.” She wiped her nose again. The cuff of her shirt was already wet with tears. “I thought I had raised you, but Mom did all the hard stuff.”
Claire knew it was childish, but she liked the idea of Helen doing all the hard stuff. “Tell me why.”
“Holding you and playing with you, that was easy. Changing your diaper and walking with you at night and all that other stuff—it’s hard to do by yourself.”
Claire brushed back Lydia’s hair. She should’ve been there. She should’ve brought her sister groceries and folded laundry and spelled her for as long as she was needed.
“She cried for the first two years.” Lydia used her fingers to wipe underneath her eyes. “And then she learned how to talk and she wouldn’t stop talking.” She laughed at a memory. “She sang to herself all the time. Not just when I was around. I would catch her singing on her own and I would feel so weird about it. Like, when you walk in on a cat and it’s purring and you feel bad because you thought it only purred for you.”
Claire laughed so that Lydia would keep going.
“And then she got older, and …” Lydia shook her head. “Having a teenager is like having a really, really shitty roommate. They eat all your food and steal your clothes and take money out of your purse and borrow your car without asking.” She put her hand over her heart. “But they soften you in ways you can’t imagine. It’s so unexpected. They just smooth out your hard lines. They make you into this better version of yourself that you never even knew was there.”
Claire nodded, because she could see from Lydia’s tender expression the change that Dee Delgado had brought.
Lydia grabbed Claire’s hands and held on tight. “What are we going to do?”
Claire was ready for the question. “We have to call the police.”
“Huckleberry?”
“Him, the state patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.” Now that Claire was talking it out, she saw a plan. “We’ll call everybody. Tell Homeland Security we saw someone making a bomb. Tell the FBI there’s a kidnapped girl inside the house. Call the EPA and say we saw a barrel of toxic waste. Tell the Secret Service that Lexie Fuller is planning to assassinate the President.”
“You think if we can get them all here at the same time, no one can cover up anything.”
“We should call the news outlets, too.”
“That’s good.” Lydia started nodding. “I can post something about it on the parents’ message board at Dee’s school. There’s a woman—Penelope Ward. She’s my Allison Hendrickson without the kneecapping. Her husband is running for Congress next year. They’re really connected, and she’s like a dog with a bone. She won’t let anyone drop this.”
Claire sat back on her heels. She knew the name Penelope Ward. Branch Ward was running against Congressman Johnny Jackson for his seat. Jackson was the same congressman who’d started Paul on his road to success. He was also the reason Jacob Mayhew had given Claire for his presence at the house the day of the burglary.
Mayhew had told her, “The Congressman asked me to handle this,” and Claire’s mind had wandered into kickbacks and fraud because she had assumed Jackson was covering his ass. Was there another reason? If Mayhew was involved, did that mean that Johnny Jackson was, too?
Lydia asked, “What?”
Claire didn’t share the revelation. They could let the various state agencies figure this out. Instead, she looked back up at the house. “I don’t want Julia’s tapes to be part of it.”
Lydia nodded again. “What are we going to tell Mom?”
“We have to tell her that we know Julia is dead.”
“And when she asks how we know?”
“She won’t ask.” Claire knew this for a fact. A long time ago, Helen had made a conscious decision to stop seeking out the truth. Toward the end of Sam’s life, she wouldn’t even let him mention Julia’s name.
Lydia asked, “Do you think it’s Paul’s father in the video?”
“Probably.” Claire stood up. She didn’t want to sit around trying to figure this out. She wanted to call in the people who could actually do something about it. “I’ll get the tapes with Julia.”
“I’ll help.”
“No.” Claire didn’t want to put Lydia through seeing any part of the video again. “Start making the phone calls. Use the landline so they can trace the number.” Claire walked over to the wall-mounted phone. She waited for Lydia to pick up the receiver. “We can put the Julia tapes in the front trunk of the Tesla. No one will think to check there.”
Lydia dialed 911. She told Claire, “Hurry. This isn’t going to take long.”
Claire walked into the den. Mercifully, the picture on the television was black. The videotapes were stacked on top of the console.
She called to Lydia, “Do you think we should drive back into town and wait?”
“No!”
Claire guessed her sister was right. The last time she’d left this to the police, Mayhew had managed her like a child. She pressed the EJECT button on the VCR. She rested her fingers on the cassette. She tried to summon into her brain an image of Julia that wasn’t taken from the movie.
It was too soon. All she could see was her sister in chains.
Claire would destroy the videos. Once they were safe, she would spool out all the tape and burn them in a metal trashcan.
She slid the cassette out of the machine. The handwriting on the label was similar to Paul’s but not exactly the same. Had Paul found the tape after his father died? Was that what had first sparked his interest? Julia disappeared almost a year before his parents’ car accident. Five years later, Paul was wooing Claire at Auburn. They were married less than two months after her father had killed himself. Claire could no longer cling to the idea of coincidences, which begged the question: Had Paul designed all of this from the moment he recognized Julia in his father’s videotape collection? Was that what had set him on the path toward Claire?
Absent a written explanation, Claire knew that she would never know the truth. Julia’s death had haunted her for the last twenty-four years. Now the mystery of what had really gone wrong with her husband would haunt her for the remaining decades.
She slid the tape back into the cardboard sleeve. She wrapped the rubber band around the stack of cassettes.
She smelled Paul’s aftershave.
The scent was faint. She put her nose to the tapes. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
“Claire,” Paul said.
She turned around.
Paul stood in the middle of the room. He was wearing a red UGA sweatshirt and black jeans. His head was shaved. His beard had grown in. He had on thick plastic glasses like the ones he’d worn back in college.
He said, “It’s me.”
Claire dropped the tapes. They clattered at her feet. Was this real? Was this happening?
“I’m sorry,” Paul said.
Then he drew back his fist and punched her in the face.
V
I must confess, sweetheart, that I have been neglecting my wall of clues. My “useless gallimaufry,” your mother called it on the one and only occasion she deigned to look at my work. I sagely agreed with her observation but of course I went running to the dictionary as soon as she was gone.
Gallimaufry: a hodgepodge; a confused jumble of various people or things; any absurd medley.
Oh, how I adore your mother.
These last ten months that I have been visiting Ben Carver at the prison, I have gone to bed many times without giving my gallimaufry a second glance. The collection has become so mundane that my mind has turned it into a piece o
f art, more a reminder that you are gone than a roadmap to getting you back.
It wasn’t until I read Ben’s inscription inside the Dr. Seuss book that I remembered a note from Huckleberry’s files. It’s been there from the beginning, or at least since I started my annual reading ritual on the anniversary of your birthday. Why is it that we always neglect the things that matter most? This is a universal question, because through the days and weeks and months and years after your disappearance, I understood that I did not cherish you enough. I never told you that I loved you enough. I never held you enough. I never listened to you enough.
You would likely tell me (as your mother has) that I could rectify this deficit with your sisters, but it is human nature to yearn for the things we cannot have.
Have I told you about Claire’s new young man, Paul? He certainly yearns for Claire, though she has made it clear that he can have her. The match is an uneven one. Claire is a vibrant, beautiful young woman. Paul is neither vibrant nor particularly attractive.
After meeting him, your mother and I had some fun at the boy’s expense. She called him Bartleby, after the well-known scrivener: “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.” I likened him more to some form of rat terrier: arrogant. Easily bored. Too smart for his own good. Partial to ugly sweaters. I opined that he is the kind of man who, absent the right kind of attention, can do great harm.
Is this last sentence revisionist thinking? Because I can clearly remember sharing your mother’s Bartleby appraisal the first time we met Paul: annoying and harmless and likely to soon be shown the door.
It is only now that I see the meeting in a more sinister light.
Claire brought him home during the Georgia–Auburn game. In the past, I have always felt slightly sorry for any man Claire brings home. You can see it in their eager eyes that they think this is something—meeting the girl’s parents, touring the town where she grew up, just around the corner is love, marriage, the baby carriage, etc. Sadly for these young men, the opposite tends to be true. For Claire, a trip to Athens typically heralds the end of a relationship. For your baby sister, this town is tainted. The streets are tainted. The house is tainted. Perhaps we—your mother and I—are tainted, too.
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