Pretty Girls

by Karin Slaughter

  Claire knew what her husband looked like when he neatly laid out his tools for a project. She knew the roll of his hand when he jerked himself off. She knew the three tiny moles under his left shoulder blade that she could feel when she lightly stroked his back with her fingers.

  Which is why she knew without a doubt that the masked man was Paul.

  Claire told him, “Send the pictures. I’ll let you know what we’re going to do when I’m ready.”

  “Claire—­”

  She slammed down the phone.

  vi.

  I am sorry my handwriting is so difficult to read, sweetheart. I’ve had a very minor stroke. I am okay now, so please don’t worry. It happened shortly after I finished my last letter. I went to sleep scheming my great plans and woke the next day to find that I could not get out of bed. I will admit only to you that I was frightened (though I am really okay now). I experienced a momentary blindness in my right eye. My arm and leg refused to move. Finally, after a great deal of struggling, I managed to rise. When I called your mother to wish her happy birthday, my speech was so unintelligible that she immediately called an ambulance.

  The doctor, who assured your mother that he was, in fact, old enough to shave, said that I had experienced a TIA, which of course further infuriated your mother (she has always been hostile to abbreviation). She coaxed him into speaking English, which is how we found out that a TIA, or ministroke, stands for Transient Ischemic Attacks.

  Attacks as in plural, your mother clarified with the poor man, which explained some of the weakness and dizziness I’ve been experiencing for the last week.

  Or month, between you and me, because now that I think back on my last visits with Ben Carver, I recall some odd exchanges that indicate there were times when my speech must have been unintelligible with him, too.

  So perhaps we have our answer as to why Ben Carver stopped my visits and wrote that inscription in the Dr. Seuss book. His mother suffered a massive stroke a few years ago. He must have been attuned to the signs.

  There is kindness in so many unexpected places.

  Can I tell you that I am the happiest I have been in a good, long while? That your sisters rushed to my side, that my family surrounded me, enveloped me, and that I was finally reminded of the life we all shared before we lost you? It was the first time in almost six years that we all gathered in a room and did not hurt for the lack of you.

  Not that we have forgotten you, sweetheart. We will never, ever forget you.

  Of course, your mother has used the TIA as an excuse to berate me for my continued tilting at windmills (her words). Though stress is a contributing factor to stroke, and though I have always had high blood pressure, I believe the fault rests firmly on my own shoulders for not getting enough sleep and exercise. I have been skipping my morning walks. I have been lying awake too late at night, unable to turn off my brain. As I have always told you girls, sleep and exercise are the two most important components to a healthy life. Shame on me for not taking my own good advice.

  I suppose you could call it a silver lining that your mother has been by the apartment every day since I got out of the hospital. She brings me food and helps me bathe. (I don’t really need help bathing, but who am I to stop a beautiful woman from washing me?) Every day, she says all of the things that she has been saying to me for almost six years: You are a fool. You are going to kill yourself. You have to give this up. You are the love of my life and I cannot watch you draw out your suicide any longer.

  As if I would ever choose to leave any of you by my own hand.

  I know instinctively that your mother does not want to hear what I’ve found out about Paul’s father. She would dismiss the theory as one of my harebrained and pointless pursuits, like chasing down the man who runs the Taco Stand or pushing Nancy Griggs so hard that her father threatened to file a restraining order. (She graduated summa cum laude, sweetheart. She has a good job, a thoughtful husband, and a flatulent cocker spaniel. Did I tell you that already?)

  So I keep my thoughts to myself and let your mother cook for me and bathe me, and she lets me hold her and we make love and I think of our lives together after I finally have proof that even Huckleberry will have to believe.

  I will win back your mother. I will be the father that Pepper needs me to be. I will convince Claire that she is worth more—­deserves more—­than the men she has long settled on. I will once again be an example to the women in my life—­make them know what a good husband and father can be, and make my girls look for that in the men they choose rather than these worthless pieces of flotsam that continually wash upon their lonely shores.

  This is what I will have when all of this is over: I will have my life back. I will have my good memories of you. I will have a job. I will take care of my family. I will take care of animals. I will have justice. I will know where you are. I will finally find you and hold you in my arms and gently lay you down in your final resting place.

  Because I know what it feels like to finally have a genuine thread to pull, and I know in my heart that I can pull that thread and unwind the whole story of your life after you were stolen from us.

  These are the threads that I am picking at: Gerald Scott was a Peeping Tom who looked at girls just like you. He took images of them. He must have stored all of these images away somewhere. If those images are still around and if I can gain access to them and if I find one of you, then that could be a solid lead that helps us understand what really happened that night in March that seems not so long ago.

  I am not sure whether or not Paul knows about his father’s Peeping Tom proclivities, but at the very least, I can use the information to get him away from your baby sister.

  I feel very strongly about this, sweetheart: Paul is not good for Claire. There is something rotting inside of him, and one day—­if not soon, then in five years, ten years, maybe even twenty—­that rot will eat its way to the outside and spread into everything he touches.

  Though you know that I love you, my life from this point forward is devoted to making sure this terrible, rotting devil never gets the chance to spread his evil to your two sisters.

  Do you remember Brent Lockwood? He was your very first “real” boyfriend. You were fifteen. The boys you liked before Brent were the innocuous, asexual types who could pass for any member of whatever boy band you were listening to at the moment. I would drive you on dates in the station wagon and make the boy sit in the back. I would glare at him in the rearview mirror. I would make monosyllabic grunts when he called me Dr. Carroll or expressed an interest in the veterinary arts.

  Brent was different. He was sixteen years old, half boy, half man. He had an Adam’s apple. He wore acid-­washed jeans and kept his hair high mulletted Daniel Boone–like in the back. He came to the house to ask permission to take you out on a date, because he had a car and he wanted to take you out in that car alone, and I would never let anyone do that until I looked him in the eyes and made certain that I had scared the ever-­loving shit out of him.

  I know you find this hard to believe, sweetheart, but I once was a sixteen-­year-­old boy. The only reason I wanted a car was so I could get girls alone inside of it. Which was a completely understandable, even laudable, goal to all the boys my age, but felt completely different when I was a man, and a father, and that girl was you.

  I told him to get a haircut and get a job, then come back and ask me again.

  A week later, he was back at my door. His mullet was lopped. He had just started working at McDonald’s.

  Your mother cackled like a witch and told me next time, I should be more specific.

  You spent hours in your room before that first date with Brent. When you finally opened your door, I smelled perfume and hairspray and all of these strange, womanly smells that I never expected to come from my own daughter. And you were beautiful. So beautiful. I scanned my eyes across your face looking for
disagreeable things—­too much mascara, too heavy eyeliner—­but there was nothing but a light brushing of color that brought out the pale blue of your eyes. I can’t remember what you were wearing or how you had styled your hair (this is your mother’s domain), but I do remember this breathless feeling in my chest, as if the alveoli inside my lungs were slowly collapsing, slowly depriving me of any oxygen, slowly depriving me of my little tomboy who climbed trees and ran after me when I went for my morning walks.

  I now know what it feels like to have a real stroke, even a mini one, but I was certain when I watched Brent Lockwood drive you away in his car that I was having a full-­on heart attack. I was so worried about this one boy, this first boy, that I never realized that there would be others. That some of them would make me long for Brent with his third-­hand Impala and the smell of French fries he left in his wake.

  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 doughnut 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 staggered some painful emotion in 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.

  CHAPTER 15

  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 backup. 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 key tag 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 after 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.