His anger spurred Claire on. “The police put it in one of those clear plastic evidence bags.” She tried to spot the holes in her story. “I used the spare at the house to drive the Tesla home. But I know the keytag is in evidence because they sent me a list for insurance. I had to forward it to Pia Lorite, our insurance agent.”
Claire held her breath and prayed that the story made sense. What was on the USB drive inside the keytag? Back in the garage, she had checked to make sure there were no movies. The only folder contained software. Or at least that’s what Paul had made it look like. He had always been exceptionally good with computers.
Paul asked, “Can you get it back?” His words were clipped. She could practically see him clenching and unclenching his fists, her usual sign that her words were hitting their mark. In all the years of their marriage, she had never been afraid that he would use those fists on her.
And now she was struck by the very real threat that he would use them on Lydia.
Claire said, “Promise me you won’t hurt Lydia. Please.”
“I need that keytag.” The underlying threat in his tone had a deadly stillness. “You have to get it for me.”
“Okay, but—” Claire started to babble. “The detective— Rayman. Don’t you know him? Somebody had to help you plan what happened in the alley. There were paramedics, police officers, detectives—”
“I know who was there.”
She knew that he did, because Paul had been right there in the alley alongside Claire. How long had he pretended to be dead? Five minutes at least, then the paramedics had put the blanket over him and that was the last Claire had seen of her husband.
She said, “Eric Rayman is the detective who’s in charge of the investigation. Can’t you call him?”
Paul didn’t answer, but she could feel his anger as if he was standing right in front of her.
She tried again. “Who helped you do this? Can’t you—”
“I want you to listen to me very carefully. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“There are cameras all over the house. Some you can find, some you’ll never see. Lydia’s cell phone is tapped. The phone you’re on right now is tapped. I’m going to call you on this landline every twenty minutes for the next two hours. That’s going to get me far enough away so that I know I’m safe, and it’s going to keep you there while I figure out what you’re going to do next.”
“Why, Paul?” She wasn’t just asking about what was happening right now. She was asking about everything that had come before. “Your father murdered my sister. I watched the tape. I know what he did to—” Her voice broke. She felt like her heart was breaking along with it. “I don’t—” Claire fought back the agony. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m so sorry.” Paul’s voice filled with emotion. “We can get through this. We’ll get through it.”
She closed her eyes. He was trying to soothe her. And the horrible part was that she wanted to be soothed. Claire could still recall what it had felt like in the den when she woke up and realized that Paul was alive. Her husband. Her champion. He was going to make all of this go away.
“I never killed any of them.” He sounded so vulnerable. “I promise you.”
Claire put her hand to her mouth so that she wouldn’t speak. She wanted to believe him. She so desperately needed to believe him.
“I didn’t even know what Dad was doing until after the car accident. I went into the barn and I found all of his … stuff.”
Claire bit her fist to keep from screaming. He was making it sound so logical.
“I was just a kid on my own. Tuition was due at the academy. I had college to think about. It was good money, Claire. All I had to do was make copies and send them out.”
Claire couldn’t breathe. She had spent that money. She had worn jewelry and clothes and shoes paid for by the blood and suffering of those poor girls.
“I promise you. It was only a means to an end.”
She couldn’t take this anymore. She was so close to her breaking point that she could practically feel herself bending.
“Claire?”
She said, “The movies on your computer weren’t old.”
“I know.” He was quiet for another moment, and she wondered if he was trying to think of a lie or already had one and was just pausing for effect. “I was a distributor. I never participated.”
Claire struggled with the urge to believe him, to hold on to this one piece of her husband’s humanity. “Who is the masked man?”
“He’s just a guy.”
Just a guy.
“You don’t have to worry about him.” Paul sounded like he was talking about an asshole from work. “You’re safe, Claire. You’re always safe.”
She ignored his comforts because her only other alternative was to believe him. “What’s on the USB drive?”
He went quiet again.
“Are you forgetting who gave you that Auburn keytag, Paul? I know there’s a USB drive inside the plastic disk, and I know you want it back because you put something on it for safekeeping.”
He kept silent.
“Why?” She couldn’t stop asking the question. “Why?”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“Is that some kind of stupid joke?”
“The plan had to be moved up. There were other things in play. I tried my best to keep you out of it. But what happened with that guy in the alley, the sentiment was real, Claire. You know I would lay down my life to protect you. Why do you think I’m still here? You’re everything to me.”
Claire shook her head. She was dizzy from all of his excuses.
He said, “The people who are into this stuff are not nice people. They’re powerful. They have a lot of money and influence.”
“Political influence.”
He made a surprised sound. “You were always so damn clever.”
Claire didn’t want to be clever anymore. She wanted to be in control. “It’s your turn to listen to me. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“If you hurt Lydia, I will hunt you down and burn you into the fucking ground. Do you understand me?”
“God, I love you like this.”
The phone clicked. He’d ended the call.
THIRTEEN
Lydia stared into the darkness of the trunk as she listened to the hum of wheels on the road. She had already run through all the things you were supposed to do if you ever got locked inside a trunk. Obviously, Paul had run through them, too. There were steel plates bolted to the back of the taillights so Lydia couldn’t punch them open and stick out her hand to wave down passing motorists. The emergency release latch had been disabled. There was another thick, steel plate between the trunk and the back seat so she couldn’t kick her way to freedom. She was pretty sure the area was insulated for sound, too. She couldn’t imagine Paul had padded the trunk for her comfort.
Which meant that he had designed this car specifically to hold a prisoner.
Lydia could hear Paul in the front of the car talking on the phone. There were only a few words she could make out, and they were all useless—yes, no, okay. Paul’s tone was brisk, so Lydia assumed he wasn’t talking to Claire. His voice was different when he talked to her sister. It made Lydia ill to think about how different it was, because Claire had been right: Paul made a conscious choice when he showed his dark side.
She had seen it on full display when he’d opened the trunk to take Lydia’s picture. She had watched him turn the darkness on and off like a light bulb. One minute, he was telling Claire to go check Lydia’s phone and the next, his face was so frightening that Lydia was afraid she was going to lose control of her bladder.
He had reached into the trunk and grabbed her face so hard that she felt the bones crushing. “Give me a reason to do to you what my dad did to Julia.”
Lydia had been shaking so hard when he closed the trunk that her teeth were chattering.
She rolled onto her
back to relieve some of the pressure in her shoulder. Her arms and legs were zip-tied, but she could still move if she was careful. The blood from the cut in her forehead had dried. Her swollen eye was leaking tears. The drumming in her head had subsided to an occasional dull thud.
Paul had hit her with something heavy and solid back at the Fuller house. Lydia wasn’t sure what he’d used, but it had pounded into her head like a sledgehammer. She hadn’t even heard him coming. One moment, she was standing in the kitchen with her mouth open to give the 911 operator her name, and the next, stars were bursting in front of her eyes. Literally. Lydia had felt like a cartoon character. She tottered back and forth. She tried to brace herself on the kitchen table. And then Paul had punched her again, then again, until she was unconscious on the floor.
Lydia had managed to shout, “No,” before she blacked out. Obviously, that wasn’t enough to warn Claire. Or maybe she’d gotten the warning but didn’t know what to do. Lydia couldn’t imagine her baby sister having the wherewithal to fight off Paul. Then again, she couldn’t imagine her baby sister kneecapping her tennis partner.
She guessed that Claire was asking herself the same questions that were running through Lydia’s mind: Why had Paul faked his death? Why had he taken Lydia? What did he want from them?
She didn’t want to dwell on that last question, because Paul Scott was clearly obsessed with the Carroll sisters. His father had kidnapped and brutally murdered one of them. He had married another. And now he had Lydia in the trunk of his car, a trunk that had obviously been prepared well ahead of time.
Was he really going to do the same thing to Lydia that had been done to Julia? Was he going to murder her and rape her while she died?
Julia. Her vibrant big sister. Her best friend. Screaming as the machete cut through her neck and shoulder. Writhing as Paul’s father ripped her apart.
Bile burned up into Lydia’s mouth. She turned her head and spit as more came up. The smell was noxious in the confined space. She moved closer to the back of the trunk to get away from it. Her stomach felt hollow. She could not clear the image of Julia from her mind.
Lydia heard a whimper come from her mouth. She could handle the sickness, but the grief would kill her before Paul had his chance. Julia. Her innocent, tortured sister. There were six tapes in all, which meant Paul’s father had taken time with her. She had been all alone in that barn, waiting for him, dreading his return, up until the final seconds of her life.
Julia had actually looked at the camera as she was dying. She had stared straight into the lens, straight into Lydia’s heart, and mouthed the word Help.
Lydia squeezed her eyes shut. She let the feelings come uncensored. She should’ve been sweeter to Dee on the phone this morning. She should’ve called Rick to tell him that she loved him instead of texting him that she would explain everything later. And Claire. She should’ve told Claire that she forgave her, because Paul was not a human being. He was some kind of terrifying aberration who was capable of unspeakable deeds.
Lydia fought back another whimper. She couldn’t let herself lose it again. She had to be strong for what was coming next, because Paul had a plan. He always had a plan.
Lydia had a plan, too. She kept flexing her hands and moving her feet to make sure there was enough circulation in her body and clarity in her mind because eventually, Paul would have to open the trunk again. Lydia was heavier than he was. Paul would have to cut the zip ties so she could climb out. That would be the only opportunity she would have to stop him.
She kept going over the steps in her mind: At first, she would act confused. This would buy her eyes time to adjust to the sunlight. Then, she would move slowly and pretend that she was in pain, which wouldn’t be a stretch. She would act like she needed help and Paul, impatiently, would push her or shove her or kick her and then Lydia would throw her weight into her shoulder and hit him as hard as she could in the neck.
She wouldn’t use her fist because the knuckles might glance off. She would stretch open her hand and use the webbing between her thumb and index finger, creating an arc that sliced nicely into the base of his Adam’s apple.
The thought of hearing his windpipe crack was the only thing that kept her going.
Lydia took several deep breaths and let them go. She worked her hands and feet. She pulled up her knees and stretched out her legs. She rolled her shoulders. Having a plan helped the panic die down to a splinter worrying the back of her brain.
The engine changed speed. Paul was taking an off-ramp. She could feel the car slowing. There was a flash of red light around the steel plates, then a yellow pulse as the turning signal was engaged.
Lydia rolled onto her back. She had gone over the plan so many times that she could practically feel Paul’s throat crunching under her hand. There was no telling how much time had passed since he’d put her in the trunk. She had tried to count the minutes from when he took the photo, but she kept losing count. Panic could do that. She knew that the most important thing to do while she waited was to keep her mind engaged with something other than worst-case scenarios.
She grasped for memories that didn’t involve Paul Scott. Or Dee and Rick, because thinking about her child and her lover right now in this dark deathtrap of a space would lead her down a path of no return.
She had to go back several years for a memory that didn’t somehow involve Paul, because even in absence, he had been such a huge part of her life for such a long time. Lydia was twenty-one when Claire met Paul at the math lab. Two months later, he’d managed to tear Lydia from her family. She had always blamed Paul for her darkest days of addiction, but well before meeting him, she was so deep into self-destruction that the only memories she had were bad ones.
October, 1991.
Nirvana were playing at the 40 Watt Club in downtown Athens. Lydia sneaked out of the house. She climbed through her bedroom window, though no one would’ve noticed if she’d walked straight out the front door. She bummed a ride with her friend Leigh and she left behind all the misery and despair trapped inside the house on Boulevard.
Julia had been gone for over six months by then. It was too hard to be at home anymore. When her parents weren’t screaming at each other, they were so despondent that being around them made you feel like an interloper in their private tragedy. Claire had disappeared so far into herself that she could be in the same room with you for ten minutes before you noticed her standing there.
And Lydia had disappeared into pills and powder and grown men who had no business hanging around teenage girls.
Lydia had adored Julia. Her sister was cool and hip and outspoken and she covered for Lydia when Lydia wanted to stay out after curfew, but now she was dead. Lydia knew it like she knew the sun would come up the next day. She had accepted Julia’s death before anyone else in her family had. She knew that her big sister would never be back, and she used it as an excuse to drink more, snort more, screw more, eat more, more, more, more. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, which was why the day after the Nirvana concert, Lydia was clueless when people started arguing about whether the performance was awesome or dog shit.
The band had been drunk off its ass. They were all out of tune. Cobain had started a mini-riot when he’d ripped down the movie screen hanging over the stage. The audience went nuts. They rushed the stage. Eventually, the band piled their instruments on top of the destroyed drum set and walked out.
Lydia had no memory of any of this. She had been so high during the time of the concert that she wasn’t even sure she’d made it to the club. The next morning, she’d woken up in the Alley, which was blocks from the 40 Watt, which made no sense until she stood up and felt the wet stickiness between her legs.
She had bruises on her thighs. She felt raw inside. There was a cut on the back of her neck. She had skin under her fingernails. Someone else’s skin. Her lips were tender. Her jaw was tender. Everything was tender until she found a guy packing some equipment into the back of a van and he gave
her a bump and she gave him a handjob and she crawled back home in time to get yelled at by her parents—not for being out all night, but for not being home in time to walk Claire to school.
Claire was fourteen years old. She could walk herself to school. The building was so close to the Boulevard house that you could hear the bells ringing for class changes. But back then, all of her parents’ anger seemed tied up in Lydia’s failure to take care of her last remaining sister. She was setting a bad example for Claire. She wasn’t spending enough time with Claire. She should try to do more things with Claire.
Which made Lydia feel guilty, and when she wasn’t feeling guilty, she was feeling resentful.
Maybe that’s why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn’t resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.
Which is exactly what she had done eighteen years ago when Lydia had told her about Paul. Instead of confronting the truth, Claire had taken the easy route and made herself disappear from Lydia’s life. She had changed her phone number. She had refused to respond to any of Lydia’s letters. She had even moved apartments in order to erase Lydia from her life.
Maybe that was why Lydia hadn’t been able to forgive her.
Because, really, nothing had changed in the last eighteen years. For all of Claire’s tough talk—her seemingly sincere apologies and blunt confessions—she was still keeping one foot out the door. The only reason Claire had reached out to Lydia last night was because she had started to unravel Paul’s lies and couldn’t handle it on her own. She had said it herself this morning—she wanted her big sister to make it all better.
What would Claire do now? With Lydia gone, there was no one else to call. Helen couldn’t be relied on. Huckabee was useless. Adam Quinn was probably in this thing right alongside Paul. Claire couldn’t turn to the police because there was no telling who else was involved. She could turn to herself, but what would she find? A kept woman who was incapable of keeping herself.
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