Why am I thinking about this boy now? Because he was the first? Because I thought he would be the last?
I am thinking about him because of Claire.
Paul called me on the telephone tonight. He was concerned about my health. He made the right kind of small talk. He said all of the right things. He sounded right in every way, though I know that everything about him is wrong.
He thinks of me as old-fashioned, and I let him think that because it serves my purpose. Your mother is the feisty one, the grumpy old hippie who keeps him on his toes. I am the fatherly type who smiles and winks and pretends that he is everything he makes himself out to be.
I told him the story of Brent Lockwood, the boy who asked permission to date my oldest, now missing, daughter.
As I expected, Paul immediately apologized for not asking me whether or not he could date Claire. He is nothing if not a good mimic of appropriate behaviors. Had we been in person rather than on the telephone, I am certain he would’ve dropped to bended knee as he asked for my permission. But he wasn’t, so it was his voice that conveyed the respect and feeling.
Conveyed.
As your mother has said, Paul could be a belt in a donut factory, he is so good at sticky, emotional conveyances.
On the phone call, I laughed, because Paul’s request to date your sister was very late in coming, and he laughed, too, because that was what was expected of him. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he alluded to a future request, one that would put his relationship with Claire on a more permanent footing, and I realized that though this stranger had been dating my daughter for only a few weeks, he was already thinking about marriage.
Marriage. That’s what he called it, though men like Paul do not marry women. They own them. They control them. They are voracious gluttons who devour every part of a woman, then clean their teeth with the bones.
I’m sorry, sweetheart. Since you were taken, I have gotten so much more leery than I used to be. I see conspiracies around corners. I know that darkness is everywhere. I trust no one but your mother.
So I cleared my throat a few times and inserted some pained emotion into my tone and told Paul that I could not in all good conscience see myself giving any man permission to marry either of my daughters, or to even attend their weddings, until I know what happened to my oldest child.
Like Pepper, and like you for that matter, Claire is as impulsive as she is stubborn. She is also my baby girl, and she would never, ever go against my wishes. There is one thing I know about both of your sisters: They would just as soon break my arms and legs as break my heart.
I know this truth like I know the sound of Claire’s laughter, the look she gets on her face when she is about to smile or cry or throw her arms around my shoulders and tell me that she loves me.
And Paul knows this, too.
After I told him about my dilemma, there was a long pause on his end of the telephone line. He is cunning, but he is young. One day, he will be a master manipulator, but two days from now when I get him alone, I will be the one asking questions, and I will not let Paul Scott leave my sight until he gives me all of the answers.
FIFTEEN
Claire clenched her hands around the steering wheel. Panic had almost closed her throat. She was sweating, though a cold rush of wind came in through the cracked sunroof. She looked down at Lydia’s phone on the seat beside her. The screen had faded to black. So far, Paul had sent three pictures of Lydia. Each one showed her from a different angle. Each photo brought Claire some amount of relief because there was no further damage to Lydia’s face. Claire didn’t trust Paul, but she trusted her own eyes. He wasn’t hurting her sister.
At least not yet.
She forced her thoughts not to go to that dark place that they were so desperately drawn toward. Claire could find no location or time stamp on the photos. She had a tenuous hold on the belief that Paul was stopping his car every twenty minutes and taking the photographs, because the alternative was to believe that he had taken all the photos at the same time and that Lydia was already dead.
She had to think of a way out of this. Paul would already be strategizing. He was always five steps ahead of everyone else. Maybe he already had a solution. Maybe he was already implementing that solution.
He would have another house. Her husband always bought a back-up. A two-hour drive from Athens could put him in the Carolinas or on the coast or close to one of the Alabama border towns. He would have another house in another name with another murder room with another set of shelves for his sick movie collection.
Claire felt sweat roll down her back. She opened the sunroof a few inches more. It was just after four in the afternoon. The sun was dipping into the horizon. She couldn’t think about Paul or what he might be doing to her sister. He had always told her that winners only competed with themselves. Claire had one more hour to figure out how she was going to get the USB drive back from Adam, how she was going to deliver it to Paul, and how in the hell she was going to save her sister in the process.
So far, she had nothing but fear and the nauseating sensation that the hour would pass and she would be just as helpless as when she’d first left the Fuller house. The same problems that had plagued her before were on an endless loop that took up every conscious thought. Her mother: persistently unavailable. Huckleberry: worthless. Jacob Mayhew: probably working for the Congressman. Fred Nolan: ditto, or maybe he had his own agenda. Congressman Johnny Jackson: Paul’s secret uncle. Powerful and connected, and duplicitous enough to stand with the Kilpatrick family during press conferences as if he had no idea what had happened to their precious child. Adam Quinn: possible friend or foe.
The masked man: Paul.
Paul.
She couldn’t believe it. No, that wasn’t right. Claire had seen her husband in front of that girl with her own eyes. The problem was that she couldn’t feel it.
She forced all the disturbing things she knew about Paul to the forefront of her mind. She knew there was more. There had to be more. Like Paul’s color-coded collection of rape files, there had to be countless more movies documenting the girls he abducted, the girls he kept, the girls he tortured for his own pleasure and for the pleasure of countless other despicable, disgusting viewers.
Was Adam Quinn one of his customers? Was he an active participant? As Lydia had said, it wasn’t like Claire was the best judge of character. She had been with Adam because she was bored, not because she wanted to get to know him. Her husband’s best friend had been a constant in their lives. In retrospect she understood that Paul had kept him at a distance. Adam was there, but he wasn’t inside the circle.
The circle had only ever contained Paul and Claire.
Which was why Claire had never given Adam much thought until that night at the Christmas party. He’d been very drunk. He’d made a pass and she’d wanted to find out how far he would take it. He was good, or maybe just different from Paul, which was all that she had been looking for. He could be awkwardly charming. He liked golf and collected old train cars and smelled of a woodsy, not-unpleasant aftershave.
That was the extent of her knowledge.
Adam had told her that he had an important presentation on Monday, which meant that he’d be in the office first thing tomorrow morning. The presentation would take place at the Quinn + Scott downtown offices, where they had a custom-built screening room with theater seating and young girls in tight dresses who served drinks and light snacks.
Adam would have the USB drive on him. The files were too big to email. If he needed the files for work, then he would have to take them to the offices to load them for the presentation. If he needed the keytag because it had incriminating evidence, he would be a fool to keep it anywhere but on his person.
Claire let her thoughts drift back to the latter possibility. Paul could have another circle that encompassed Adam. They’d been best friends for over two decades, well before Claire entered the picture. If Paul had found his father’s movies aft
er his parents’ accident, surely he would have gone to Adam to talk about it. Had they hatched a plan then to keep the business going? Had they both watched the films together and realized that they weren’t repulsed by, but attracted to, the violent images?
In which case, Adam would’ve already told Paul that he had the USB drive. Claire didn’t know what his silence meant. A falling-out? An attempted coup?
“Think,” Claire chided herself. “You have to think.”
She couldn’t think. She could barely function.
Claire picked up Lydia’s phone. Lydia didn’t have a passcode, or maybe Paul had helpfully bypassed it for Claire. She clicked the button and the most recent photograph came up on the screen. Lydia in the trunk, terrified. Her lips were white. What did that mean? Was she getting enough air? Was Paul suffocating her?
Don’t abandon me, Sweetpea. Please don’t abandon me again.
Claire put down the phone. She wasn’t going to abandon Lydia. Not this time. Not ever again.
Maybe Claire was tackling this from the wrong end. She couldn’t think of her own strategy, so the better thing to do was to guess what Paul was planning. Claire was good at predicting Paul’s behavior, at least where Christmas presents and surprise trips were concerned.
His first goal was to get back the USB drive. It would cost him nothing to wait. He was keeping Lydia somewhere. She was his leverage over Claire. He wouldn’t kill her until he was absolutely certain that he had the drive in his hands.
The thought brought Claire some relief, but she knew full well that there were other things that Paul could do with Lydia.
She wasn’t going to think about that.
Paul still had feelings for Claire—at least inasmuch as he was capable of feeling anything. He had put the pillow under her head. He’d slid her wedding ring back on her finger. He had taken off her shoes. He had charged the Tesla. All of these things had taken time, which meant that Paul placed importance on them. Instead of rushing Lydia out the door, he had risked exposure by taking care of Claire.
Which meant she had a slight advantage.
Claire groaned. She could hear Lydia’s voice in her head: So fucking what?
The car’s GPS told her to make a right turn up ahead. Claire didn’t dwell on the relief she felt from having someone else tell her what to do, even if it was the onboard computer. Back in Athens, she had been overwhelmed with bad choices. She couldn’t go home to her mother, who would only fret and take to her bed. She couldn’t go to the police because there was no telling who was in cahoots with Paul. She couldn’t go to the Dunwoody house because Nolan was probably looking for her. The only place she could go to was Lydia’s.
She was halfway to the house when she realized there was something at Lydia’s that could possibly—maybe—help her.
Claire slowed the Tesla as she took in her surroundings. She had been thoughtlessly following the GPS commands. She hadn’t realized until now that she was inside the caverns of an older suburban neighborhood. The houses lacked the uniformity of a new subdivision. There were shotgun-style cottages, Dutch colonials, and the brick ranch where Lydia lived.
Claire didn’t need the GPS to tell her that she’d reached her sister’s home. She recognized the house from the photographs in Paul’s files. The yellow numbers on the side of the mailbox were faded, obviously rendered by a child’s hand. Claire pictured Lydia standing in the yard watching her young daughter carefully paint the address onto the side.
Lydia’s van was parked in the driveway. According to Paul’s detectives, Rick had lived next door to Lydia for almost ten years. Claire recognized the garden gnomes by his front door. Rick’s truck was parked outside the Dunwoody house, but he had a second car, an old Camaro, parked in front of his garage.
She scanned both houses as she slowly drove by. Lydia’s home was dark, but Rick had a few lights on. It was late afternoon on a Sunday. Claire imagined a man like Rick Butler would be watching football or reading a well-worn copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dee was probably at a friend’s. According to the women in Claire’s tennis team, teenagers were incapable of turning off lights when they left a room.
Claire turned down the next road, a short dead end with a rundown-looking cottage at the end. She parked and got out of the car. She put Lydia’s phone in her back pocket because she was owed another photo in nine minutes. As usual, Paul was being punctual. Or he had programmed the phone to send out the pictures ahead of time.
She opened the trunk of the car. She tossed her purse into the back because this was that kind of neighborhood. She found a collapsible snow shovel inside the emergency backpack that Paul had ordered for all of their cars, including Helen’s. The shovel snapped open with a metallic clang. Claire waited for a porch light to snap on or a neighbor to call out, but nothing happened.
She scanned the area to get her bearings. Lydia’s home was four doors over. Rick’s was five. There were no fences in the back yards save for Lydia’s. A long stand of trees separated the yards from the houses behind them. It was four thirty in the afternoon. The sun was already going down. Claire easily made her way through the treeline. No one was looking out their back doors, though she wasn’t sure whether or not they could see her even if they did. The sky was overcast. It was probably going to rain again. Claire could taste the moisture in the air.
She grabbed the chain-link fence with the idea of bolting herself over, but the metal rod bent beneath her hands. The chain link bent along with it. Claire put her weight into it until the fence was low enough for her to step over. She took in her surroundings. Lydia’s back yard was huge. She must have paid a fortune for the fence to keep the dogs enclosed.
Claire would repair the fence when her sister was back home with her family.
The back of Lydia’s home was better kept than the others. The gutters were cleaned. The white trim was freshly painted. Claire imagined Rick took care of these things because the house next door, the house she knew to be his, showed the same obvious signs of care.
Claire liked the idea of her sister living here. Despite the dire circumstances, she felt the happiness that flowed between the houses. She felt the mark of a family, grateful for each other and their place in the world. Lydia had created more than a home. She had created peace.
Peace that Claire had all but destroyed.
The lights were on in what had to be the kitchen. Claire walked toward the large back deck. There were tables and chairs and a stainless-steel grill that was covered in a black canvas cloth.
Claire froze when she saw the floodlights. The motion sensors hung down like testicles. She looked up at the sky. It was getting darker by the minute. She took a tentative step forward, then another. She braced herself with every movement, but the floodlights did not come on as she climbed the steps.
She looked at the kitchen through a large window over the sink. Papers covered the table. A bag of old tennis shoes was in one of the chairs. Notes were pinned to the refrigerator with colorful magnets. Dishes were stacked in the sink. Paul would call it borderline hoarding, but Claire felt the warmth of a lived-in space.
There was no window in the back door. There were two deadbolt locks. A large dog door was cut into the bottom. Claire quietly lifted a heavy Adirondack chair and blocked the dog door. Paul’s detective report stated that Lydia had two Labs, but that information had been recorded two months ago. Claire couldn’t imagine Lydia keeping an overly territorial breed like a shepherd or a pitbull, but any dog’s barking might alert Rick, and he would want to know what the hell a strange woman was doing on his girlfriend’s back deck with a collapsible shovel.
Claire hefted the shovel in her hands. It was aluminum, but sturdy. She checked Rick’s house for signs of life before walking back down the stairs. The ground was damp as she crawled under the deck. She had to keep her head and shoulders bent so she wouldn’t scrape the joists overhead. Claire shuddered as she broke through a spiderweb. She hated spiders. She shuddered again
, then she chided herself for being squeamish when her sister’s life was at stake.
The area beneath the deck was predictably dark. There was a flashlight in the Tesla, but Claire didn’t want to go back. She had to keep moving forward. Momentum was the only thing that was keeping her from collapsing into the fear and grief that bubbled under every surface she touched.
She scooted as far as she could go under the back steps. Narrow slats of light cut through the open risers. She ran her bare hand along the tight space below the bottom tread. The dirt had an indentation. This had to be the spot. Claire angled the shovel into the cramped space and picked out a spoonful of dirt.
She worked slowly, quietly, as she moved more dirt out from underneath the step. Finally, she was able to get the tip of the shovel deeper into the ground. She felt the clink of metal on metal. Claire dropped the shovel and used her hands. She tried not to think about spiders and snakes or anything else that might be hiding in the soil. Her fingers found the edge of a plastic bag. Claire let herself experience the momentary elation of actually completing a task. She yanked out the bag. Dirt flew up around her. She coughed, then sneezed, then coughed again.
The gun was in her hands.
Back in the car, Lydia had told her the weapon was buried under the stairs, but now Claire realized that she hadn’t really believed that she would find it. The thought of her sister owning a gun was shocking. What was Lydia doing with such an awful thing?
What was Claire going to do with it?
Claire tested the weight of the revolver. She could feel the cold metal through the plastic Ziploc bag.
She hated guns. Paul knew this, which meant that he would not be expecting Claire to pull one out of her purse and shoot him in the face.
That was the plan.
She felt it snap into her head like a slide loading into a projector.
The plan had been there all along, propelling her toward Lydia’s home, all the while niggling in the back of her brain while she let herself get wrapped up in the horrors of what her husband had done.
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