Pretty Girls

by Karin Slaughter

  “A lot.”

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Too many.”

  Lydia found enough strength to start walking. “I want to see.”

  Claire barred the door. “This is a crime scene. This is where Anna Kilpatrick died. We can’t go in there.”

  Lydia felt Claire’s hand on her arm. She didn’t remember walking down the hallway, moving toward the thing her sister was trying to keep her away from, but now she was close enough to smell the metallic tinge of coagulating blood.

  She asked the only question that mattered. “How far back do the VHS tapes go?”

  Claire shook her head again.

  Lydia felt her throat turn into barbed wire. She tried to push Claire aside, but Claire would not move. “Get out of my way.”

  “I can’t let you—­”

  Lydia grabbed her by the arm. Her grip was tighter than she meant it to be, but then her other hand flew up and suddenly, she was engaged in a full-­on struggle with her sister. They shoved each other back and forth up and down the hallway the same way they used to fight over a dress or a book or a boy.

  The three-­year difference in their ages had always worked to Lydia’s advantage, but this time it was an extra thirty pounds that helped her prevail. She pushed Claire so hard that she stumbled backward. Her tailbone hit the floor. Claire huffed as the breath was knocked out of her.

  Lydia stepped over her sister. Claire made one last grab for her leg, but it was too late.

  Lydia pushed open the garage door.

  Wooden shelves took up one section of a wall. Eight rows went from floor to ceiling, each approximately eight feet wide and a foot deep. VHS tapes were stacked tightly together. Their colored cardboard sleeves divided them into sections. A familiar number sequence was written by hand on the labels. Lydia already knew the code.

  The dates went back to the 1980s.

  She stepped down into the room. There was a tremor in her body, almost like she was standing too close to the edge of a cliff. Her toes tingled. Her hands shook. She was sweating again. Her bones vibrated beneath her skin. Her senses sharpened.

  The sound of Claire crying behind her. The odor of bleach cutting into the back of her nose. The taste of fear on her tongue. Her vision tunneling to the six VHS tapes given a place of prominence on the middle shelf.

  A green rubber band held together the green cardboard-­sleeved videotapes. The handwriting was angular and clear. The number sequence was easy to decipher now that Lydia knew the key.

  0-­1-­3-­9-­0-­9-­4-­1

  03-­04-­1991

  March 4, 1991

  CHAPTER 11

  Claire opened her mouth to tell Lydia not to touch anything, but the words never came out because there was no point anymore. She had known from the minute she saw the wall of videotapes that there was no turning back, just as she’d known that this had all been inevitable. Paul had been obsessed with Claire for a reason. He had been the perfect husband for a reason. He had manipulated their lives together for a reason.

  And all the while, Claire had refused to see what was right in front of her.

  Maybe that’s why she wasn’t feeling shocked. Or maybe she was incapable of feeling shocked anymore, because every time Claire thought she’d seen the worst of Paul, some new detail emerged and she was struck not just by the horror of his deeds, but by her own willful blindness.

  There was no telling what Lydia was feeling. She stood completely still in the middle of the cold garage. Her hand was reaching toward the six videotapes, but she had stopped just shy of touching them.

  Lydia said, “March 4th, 1991.”

  “I know.” Claire’s eyes had locked straight onto the labels the second she’d opened the door.

  “We have to watch it.”

  Again, Claire did not tell her not to. There were so many reasons to leave this place. There were so many reasons to stay.

  Red pill/blue pill.

  This was no longer a philosophical exercise. Did they want to know what had happened to Julia or not?

  Lydia obviously had her answer. She slowly became unstuck. She grabbed the stack of green VHS tapes with both hands. She turned around and waited for Claire to get out of her way.

  Claire followed her sister back into the den. She leaned against the wall as she watched Lydia load a tape into the ancient VCR. She had chosen the last tape in the series because that was the only one that mattered.

  There was no remote control for anything. Lydia pulled the button to turn on the TV. The tube popped on. The picture faded from black to snow. She twisted the volume dial to turn down the staticky noise. The console had two knobs—­one for VHF and one for UHF. Lydia tried channel three. She waited. She tried channel four.

  The screen went from snow to black.

  Lydia rested her thumb on the big orange PLAY button. She looked at Claire.

  Red pill? Blue pill? Do you really want to know?

  And then her father’s voice: There are some things you can’t unsee.

  Maybe it was Sam’s warning that haunted her most, because Claire had seen the other movies. She knew there was a script to the abuse that the girls endured, just as she knew what she would see on the last tape, the tape that Lydia was waiting to play on the VCR.

  Julia Carroll, nineteen years old, naked and chained to the wall. Bruises and burns riddling her body. Electrocution marks. Branded flesh. Skin ripped apart. Mouth open, screaming in terror as the masked man walked in with his machete.

  “Claire?” Lydia was asking for permission. Could they do this? Should they do this?

  Did they really have a choice?

  Claire nodded, and Lydia pressed PLAY.

  There was a white zigzag down the black screen. The image rolled too quickly to make out any details. Lydia flipped open an access panel and adjusted the tuner.

  The image snapped into frame.

  Lydia made a noise somewhere between a groan and a gasp.

  Julia was spread-­eagled against a wall, her arms and legs shackled apart. She was naked except for the silver and black bangles she always wore on her wrists. Her head was down. Her body was lax. The only thing holding her upright was the chains.

  Claire closed her eyes. She could hear Julia’s soft whimpers through the console TV’s single speaker. The place Julia had been held was different, not the staged basement but the inside of a barn. The slats were dark brown, obviously the back wall of a horse stall. Hay was on the floor. There were droppings of animal feces at her bare feet.

  Claire remembered the Amityville-­looking barn from the picture she had painted. She wondered if Paul had torn it down out of disgust or if, in his typical, efficient way of thinking, he’d found it more expedient to keep everything under one roof.

  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 bicep, an anchor with words Claire could not read but that 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 brok
en 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 beating so hard that Claire could feel it inside 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 fuckup.”

  “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. S
he 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.”