Pretty Girls

by Karin Slaughter

  “I’m just about the same distance away from the house as you are, Claire. Think about Lydia. Do you really want me to get bored waiting around for you?”

  Claire closed the phone. She looked down at her arm. The rain had come in through the door. Her shirtsleeve was wet.

  There were two more customers in the storefront. One woman. One man. Both young. Both dressed in jeans and hoodies. Neither of them had earbuds. Claire searched their faces. The woman looked away. The man smiled at her.

  Claire had to get out of here. She sat back down at the computer. The files had finished uploading. She checked the link to make sure it worked. The monitor was turned away from the other patrons, but she felt a rush of heat as she made sure that the photograph of Johnny Jackson was on the server.

  Should she leave it open on the monitor? Should she let Keith find out what he’d unwittingly been a part of?

  Claire had already hurt enough ­people. She closed the photograph. She didn’t have time to wax eloquent in her email. She wrote out a few more lines, then pasted the Tor link underneath. She double-­checked the scheduled time for the emails to be sent out.

  In two hours, anyone with Internet access would know the true story of Paul Scott and his accomplices. They would see it in the pictures of his uncle and father passing down the family’s bloodlust. They would see it in the almost one thousand email addresses that gave his customers’ true identities and locations. They would know it in their guts when they saw picture after picture of young girls who had been abducted from their families over the course of more than four decades. And they would understand how Carl Huckabee and Johnny Jackson had exploited their law enforcement careers to make sure that no one ever found out.

  Until now.

  Claire pulled the USB drive out of the computer. She made sure there were no copies left on the computer desktop. The drive went back into her purse. She waved to Keith as she left the store. The sky had opened up again, pouring rain down on her head. She was soaked by the time she got behind the wheel of Helen’s Ford.

  Claire turned on the windshield wipers. She pulled out of the space. She waited until she was safely down Peachtree Street before she called her mother.

  Helen’s voice sounded strained. “Yes?”

  “I’m okay.” She was becoming just as adept at lying as Paul. “I need you to keep driving to Athens. I’m about twenty minutes ahead of you right now, so I need you to go slow. No more than the speed limit.”

  “Am I going home?”

  “No, don’t go home. Park at the Taco Stand downtown, then walk to Mrs. Flynn’s house. Leave the phone in the car. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.” Claire thought about the emails that were scheduled to go out. Her mother was on the list of recipients, which was the emotional equivalent of stabbing the woman in the heart. “I sent you an email. It should be there by the time you get to Mrs. Flynn’s. You can read it, but don’t click on the link. If you haven’t heard from me in three hours, I want you to take it to your friend who works at the Atlanta Journal—­the one who writes books.”

  “She’s retired now.”

  “She’ll still know ­people. It’s very important, Mom. You have to get her to click on the link, but don’t look at what she sees.”

  Helen was obviously scared, but she didn’t say anything else but, “Claire.”

  “Don’t trust Huckleberry. He lied to you about Julia.”

  “I saw what was on the tape.” Helen paused before continuing. “That’s why I never wanted you to see it, because I saw it myself.”

  Claire didn’t think she was capable of feeling any more pain. “How?”

  “I was the one who found your father.” She stopped for a moment. The memory was clearly difficult. “He was in his chair. The TV was on. The remote control was in his hand. I wanted to see what he’d been looking at and—­”

  She stopped again.

  They both knew the last images that Sam Carroll had seen. Only Claire guessed that her husband had been the one to show it to him. Had that been the last straw that led her father to take his own life? Or had Paul helped him with that, too?

  Helen said, “It was a long time ago, and the man who did it is dead.”

  Claire opened her mouth to say otherwise, but her mother would know everything when she opened the email. “Does it help? Knowing he’s dead?”

  Helen didn’t answer. She had always been against the death penalty, but something told Claire her mother had no problem with someone other than the government putting to death the man she believed had killed her daughter.

  Claire said, “Just don’t go to Huckleberry, okay? You’ll understand later. I need you to trust me. He’s not a good man.”

  “Sweetpea, I’ve been trusting you all day. I’m not going to stop now.”

  Again, Claire thought about Dee. Helen was a grandmother. She deserved to know. But Claire knew it wasn’t just a matter of telling her mother. Helen would want details. She would want to meet Dee, talk to her, touch her, hold her. She would want to know why Claire was keeping them apart. And then she would start asking about Lydia.

  “Honey?” Helen asked. “Is there something else?”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Claire flipped the phone closed. She tossed it onto the seat beside her. She grabbed the wheel with both hands. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and she gave herself one full minute to scream out the grief and despair that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to express at her father’s funeral.

  “Okay,” she told herself. “Okay.”

  The rage would help her. It would give her the strength she needed to do what she had to do. She was going to kill Paul for showing her father the tape of Julia. She was going to kill him for what he’d done to them all.

  Rain pelted the windshield, almost blinding her, but she kept driving because the only thing she had on Paul was the element of surprise. Exactly how that surprise would play out was still a mystery. Claire had the gun. She had hollow-­point bullets that could tear a man in half.

  She remembered that long-­ago day that she’d taken Paul shooting. The first thing the rangemaster had said was that you should never point a weapon at another person unless you were willing to pull the trigger.

  Claire was more than willing to pull the trigger. She just didn’t know how she was going to find the opportunity to do it. There was a chance she could get to the Fuller house ahead of Paul. She could park her mother’s car in the stand of trees beside the house and walk on foot to the back door. There were several places she could lie in wait: in one of the bedrooms, in the hallway, in the garage.

  Unless he was already there. Unless he was lying to her again and he’d been there this whole time.

  She had assumed he had another house, but maybe the Fuller house was the only house Paul needed. Her husband liked for everything to stay the same. He was a slave to routine. He used the same bowl for breakfast, the same coffee cup. He would wear the same style black suit every day if Claire let him. He needed structure. He needed familiarity.

  There was a chiming sound coming from the dashboard. Claire had no idea what the noise meant. She slowed her mother’s car. She couldn’t have the engine stall on her. She frantically searched for warning lights on the dashboard, but the only yellow light was the gas can over the fuel gage.

  “No, no, no.” The Tesla never needed gas. Paul topped up the tank in Claire’s BMW every Saturday. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a gas station for anything but Diet Coke.

  Claire checked the signs on the interstate. She was forty-­five minutes from Athens. Several exits went by before she saw a Hess sign.

  She was coasting on fumes by the time she pulled into the gas station. The rain had let up, but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds and the air had turned bitter cold. Cl
aire took the last of Helen’s cash into the store. She had no idea how many gallons her mother’s Ford Focus took. She handed the guy behind the counter forty dollars and hoped for the best.

  A young ­couple was standing by a beat-­up sedan when Claire got back to the car. She tried to ignore them as she gassed up the Ford. They were fighting about money. Claire and Paul had never fought about money because Paul always had it. Their early arguments were mostly because Paul was doing too much for her. There wasn’t one need she had that Paul did not meet. Her friends over the years had always said the same thing: Paul took care of everything.

  The pump handle clicked.

  “Shit.” Gas had spilled all over Claire’s hand. The smell was noxious. She popped the trunk, because Paul had put the same emergency supplies in Helen’s trunk that he’d put in all their cars. She dumped out the backpack and retrieved a packet of hand wipes. There were scissors, but Claire used her teeth to open the foil wrapper. She looked at the spilled contents in the trunk as she scrubbed the gas off her hand.

  Early in their marriage, Paul had had a recurring nightmare. It was the only time Claire could think of that she’d actually seen her husband afraid.

  No, that was wrong. Paul hadn’t been afraid. He’d been terrified.

  The nightmare didn’t come often, maybe two or three times a year, but Paul would wake up screaming, his arms and legs clawing at the air, his mouth gasping for breath, because he’d dreamed that he was burning alive the same way his mother had burned alive in the car accident that had taken both his parents’ lives.

  Claire inventoried the contents of the trunk.

  Emergency flares. Waterproof matches. A four-­gallon gas can. A paperback to read while waiting for help.

  Paul really did take care of everything.

  Now it was Claire’s turn to take care of him.

  CHAPTER 22

  The rain had not yet touched Athens by the time Claire drove through downtown. Strong winds gusted down the streets. Students were bundled up in scarves and coats as they grabbed lunch between classes. Most of them were running to beat the coming storm. They could all see the darkness on the horizon: heavy, black clouds making their way over from Atlanta.

  Claire had called Helen to see how much time she had. Her mother was somewhere near Winder, around thirty minutes away. There had been an accident on 78 that bought an extra ten minutes. Fortunately, Helen had told Claire about it immediately, so when Paul called she could tell him truthfully why Lydia’s iPhone had stopped moving.

  She took the same route to Watkinsville that she and Lydia had taken the day before. Claire almost missed the turnoff to Paul’s road. She drove slowly, because it wasn’t just Jacob Mayhew and Harvey Falke she had to worry about. Carl Huckabee was still county sheriff. He would have deputies, though there was no telling which side of the law they were on.

  He was also intimately familiar with the goings-­on at the Fuller house.

  Claire knew better than to leave the car out in the open. She angled the Ford off the road and drove into the thick stand of trees. The wheels popped and protested against the rough terrain. The side-­view mirrors clapped inward. Metal squealed as pine bark scraped off the paint. She drove as far into the woods as she could go, then climbed out the window because she had trapped herself inside the car. She reached back in for the revolver.

  The gun felt heavier somehow. Deadlier.

  She left the open box of ammunition on the roof of the car. She picked up one bullet at a time and carefully slotted them into the cylinders.

  “For Julia,” she said on the first one. “For Daddy. For Mom. For Lydia.”

  Claire studied the last bullet in the palm of her hand. This one felt heaviest of all—­shiny brass with a menacing black tip that would flare out once it hit soft tissue.

  “For Paul,” she whispered, her voice sounding hoarse and desperate.

  The last bullet would be for her husband, who had died a long time ago, back when he was a boy and his father had taken him out to the barn for the first time. Back when he’d told Claire that he’d had a happy childhood. Back when he’d stood in front of the justice of the peace and sworn to love and cherish her for the rest of his life. Back when he’d so convincingly held on to her hand as he pretended to die in the alley.

  No pretending this time.

  Claire clicked the cylinder into place. She tested the gun, holding the barrel straight out in front of her, curling her finger around the trigger. She practiced pulling back the hammer with her thumb.

  This was the plan: She was going to pour gasoline around the Fuller house—­just the bedrooms, the front porch and under the bathroom, because she was betting that Paul was keeping Lydia in the garage and she wanted to stay as far away from her sister as possible. Then she was going to light the gasoline. Then Paul would smell the smoke or hear the flames. He would be terrified, because fire was the only thing that ever really scared him. As soon as he ran out of the house, Claire would be waiting with the gun in her hands and she would shoot him five times, one for each of them.

  Then she would run into the house and save Lydia.

  The plan was risky and most likely crazy. Claire was aware of both of these things. She also knew that she was literally playing with fire, but there was nothing else she could think of that would get Paul out of the house, taken unaware, long enough for her to act.

  And she knew it had to happen quickly, because she wasn’t sure that she could pull the trigger if she gave herself too long to think about it.

  Claire was not her husband. She could not so casually take another human life, even if that life had been drained of its humanity.

  She tucked the gun into the front of her jeans. The barrel wasn’t long, but the cylinder dug into her hip bone. She moved it to the center, just along the zip, but that was worse. She finally shifted the weapon to the small of her back. The granny panties her mother had bought bunched up around the cylinder. The barrel went down the crack of her ass, which was mildly unpleasant, but none of her pockets were deep enough, and she knew that she would be screwed if Paul saw the gun.

  She opened the trunk. She unzipped the backpack and searched for the Mylar emergency blanket. The packet the blanket came in was small, but when she unfolded it, she saw it was the size of a large cape. The waterproof matches were on top of the flares, which were all on top of a thick paperback.

  The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  As Helen might say, poets weren’t the only unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Claire wrapped her stash in the foil blanket. She opened the four boxes of water.

  Her shirt was still damp from running through the rain. Still, she doused herself with water. The chill struck her immediately, but she made sure she covered her head, back, and every inch of her shirtsleeves down to the buttoned cuffs. She poured the rest of the water on the legs of her jeans.

  She grabbed the blanket and the four-­gallon gas can.

  Gas sloshed around inside the large plastic can as she lugged it through the forest. A permanent mist of rain seemed to be trapped under the tree canopy. She heard a distant rumble of thunder, which seemed appropriate, given the task she’d laid out. Claire squinted ahead. The sky was getting darker by the minute, but she could make out a powder-­blue Cadillac parked behind a row of trees.

  Claire put down the gas can and blanket. She drew the revolver. She cocked the hammer. She approached the car carefully in case Paul or one of his cronies was inside.

  Empty.

  She uncocked the gun. She tucked it into the back of her jeans. Habituation. The gun didn’t feel so strange anymore.

  She pressed her hand to the hood of the car. The engine was cold. Paul had probably been staying at the Fuller house from the moment Claire left.

  Why would he go anywhere else? He had the sheriff to protect him.


  She retrieved the blanket and gas can and continued her walk toward the house. The brush was thick. Claire felt a moment of panic where she wondered if she’d gotten off course, but then she saw the green roof of the house. She walked in a crouch. The windows were still boarded up with weathered plywood. Claire stayed low anyway, because she knew that there was a slit in the den windows that showed the driveway, so it followed that there would be others.

  The overgrown backyard hadn’t had time to absorb the slow, sloppy rain. Claire heard dry grass crackle under her feet. The swing set groaned as a strong wind swept through the open field where the Amityville barn had been. Claire kept clear of the area. She used her feet to press down a patch of tall grass to create a staging area for the blanket and its contents.

  She studied the back of the house. The plywood board she and Lydia had pried off the kitchen door was leaning up against the side of the house. They had left it on the ground where they’d dropped it. She assumed Paul had neatly leaned up the board beside the door. He had probably straightened up inside the house as well. Or maybe he’d left the silverware strewn across the floor as a sort of alarm so that he would know if someone tried to enter the house.

  Claire was more worried about getting Paul out of the house than her going in.

  She bent down to the gas can and took the cap off the flexible spout. She started to the left of the small back porch off the kitchen, dripping gasoline down the slats of wooden siding that covered the exterior of the house. Claire worked carefully so that the gas got into the seams between the boards. She raised up the can every time she passed a window, soaking the plywood as much as she could without making too much noise.

  Claire’s heart was pounding so loudly when she walked up the front porch steps that she was afraid the noise would give her away. She kept her eyes on the garage. She tried not to think about Paul in there with Lydia. The roll-­up metal door was still padlocked from the outside. The hasp was secure. His murder room. Lydia was locked inside his murder room.