Pretty Girls

by Karin Slaughter

  Dirt and rocks fell into the mouth of the well. Rain splattered against water. They both looked down into the endless darkness.

  “Dammit!” Claire’s voice echoed back up. “How deep do you think it is?”

  “We need a flashlight.”

  “There’s one in the car.”

  Lydia watched her sister sprint away in her bare feet. Her elbows were bent. She hurdled over a fallen tree. She was so intent on moving forward that she wasn’t stopping to look back at what she had left in her wake.

  Paul. She hadn’t just watched him die. She had taken in his death like a hummingbird drawing nectar.

  Maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe watching Paul die was the sustenance that Claire needed. Maybe Lydia shouldn’t worry about what they had done to Paul. She should be more concerned about what Paul had done to them.

  To their father. To their mother. To Claire. To Julia.

  Lydia looked down into the gaping blackness of the well. She tried to listen for the rain hitting the water at the bottom, but there were too many drops to follow the path of just one.

  She found a pebble on the ground. She dropped it into the well. She counted seconds. At four seconds, the pebble splashed into the water.

  How far could a rock travel in four seconds? Lydia reached down into the darkness. She ran her hand along the rough rocks, trying not to think about spiders. The rocks were uneven. Mortar was chipping away. If she was careful, maybe she could get a foothold. She leaned in farther. She swept her hand back and forth. The mortar felt dry. Her fingers brushed across a vine.

  Except it was too delicate to be a vine. It was thin. Metal. A bracelet? A necklace?

  Carefully, Lydia tried to pick the chain away from the wall. The resistance changed, and she guessed it was stuck on something. She couldn’t reach her other hand down to pull it away. She looked back over her shoulder. Claire was in the distance. The flashlight was on. She was running. Her feet were going to be cut up from the forest. She probably couldn’t feel it now because of the bitter cold.

  Lydia groaned as she leaned farther into the well. She let her fingers walk along the chain. She felt a solid metal piece, almost like a coin, stuck between the rocks in the wall. There was a shape to it, not round but maybe oval. She traced her thumb along the smooth edges. Carefully, Lydia pried out the coin, rocking it gently back and forth until it came loose from the crevice. She wound the chain around her fingers and pulled her arm out of the well.

  She looked down at the necklace in her hand. The gold locket was shaped like a heart and engraved with a cursive L. It was the sort of thing a boy would give you in the ninth grade because you let him kiss you and he thought that meant you were going steady.

  Lydia couldn’t remember the boy’s name, but she knew that Julia had stolen the locket from her jewelry box, and that she was wearing it the day she had disappeared.

  Claire said, “It’s your locket.”

  Lydia rolled the cheap chain between her fingers. She had thought it was so expensive. He’d probably paid five bucks for it at the Ben Franklin.

  Claire sat down. She turned off the flashlight. She was breathing hard because of the run. Lydia was breathing hard because of what they were about to do. Thick smoke rolled across the faint sunlight. The air was frigid. The condensation from their combined breaths mingled together over the locket.

  This was the moment. Twenty-­four years of searching, longing, knowing, not knowing, and all they could do was sit in the rain.

  Claire said, “Julia used to sing Bon Jovi in the shower. Do you remember that?”

  Lydia let herself smile. “ ‘Dead or Alive.’ ”

  “She always ate all the popcorn at the movies.”

  “She loved licorice.”

  “And dachshunds.”

  They both made a sour face.

  Claire said, “She liked that gross guy with the mullet. What was his name? Brent Lockhart?”

  “Lockwood,” Lydia remembered. “Dad made him get a job at McDonald’s.”

  “He smelled like grilled beef.”

  Lydia laughed, because Julia the vegetarian had been appalled. “She broke up with him a week later.”

  “She let him get to second base anyway.”

  Lydia looked up. “She told you that?”

  “I spied on them from the stairs.”

  “You were always such a brat.”

  “I didn’t tattle.”

  “For once.”

  They both looked back down at the locket. The gold had worn off the back. “I meant what I told you on the phone. I forgive you.”

  Claire wiped rain out of her eyes. She didn’t look like she would ever forgive herself. “I sent out an email—­”

  “Tell me later.”

  There were so many more important things to catch up on. Lydia wanted to watch Dee meet her crazy aunt. She wanted to hear Rick and Helen discussing the inherent evil of eBooks. She wanted to hold her daughter. She wanted to gather up her dogs and her cats and her family and be made whole again.

  Claire said, “All Daddy ever wanted was to find her.”

  “It’s time.”

  Claire turned on the flashlight. The light reached down to the bottom of the well. The body had come to rest in a shallow pool of water. The skin had fallen off. No sunlight had bleached the bones.

  The locket. The long blonde hair. The silver bangles.

  Julia.

  CHAPTER 24

  Claire lay on Julia’s bed with her head propped up on Mr. Biggles, Julia’s favorite stuffed animal. The ancient, shaggy dog had barely survived their childhood. Jean Naté After Bath Splash suffused his stuffing. His legs had been dipped in Kool-­Aid as payback for a purloined book. Part of his nose had been burned off in a stealthy bit of retribution for a stolen hat. In a fit of pique, someone had snipped the fur on his head down to the cotton batting.

  Lydia didn’t look much better. Her singed hair was growing back, but six weeks out from their ordeal, her bruises were still a nasty black and yellow. The cuts and burns had only recently started to scab. The area around her fractured eye socket was still red and swollen. Her left arm would be in a sling for another two weeks, but she had become remarkably adept at doing almost everything with one hand, including folding Julia’s clothes.

  They were in the house on Boulevard. Helen was making lunch in the kitchen. Claire was supposed to be helping Lydia pack Julia’s things, but she had easily fallen back into the old pattern of letting her older sister do everything.

  “Look how tiny she was.” Lydia smoothed out a pair of Jordache jeans. She splayed her hand at the waist. Her thumb and pinky finger were only inches from the sides. “I used to borrow these.” She sounded astonished. “I thought I was so fat when she died.”

  When she died.

  That’s what they were saying now—­not When Julia disappeared or When Julia went missing, because the DNA had confirmed what they had known in their hearts all along: Julia Carroll was dead.

  Last week they had laid her to rest beside their father. The ceremony was small, just Claire, Helen, Lydia, and Grandma Ginny, who kept freaking Lydia out by telling her she was just as pretty as she remembered. They had taken Ginny home after the burial and met Dee and Rick at the Boulevard house. They sat at the long dining-­room table and ate fried chicken and drank iced tea and told long-­forgotten stories about the departed—­the way Sam used to hum every time he ate ice cream and how Julia had forgotten all the notes before her first piano recital. They heard stories about Dee, too, because they had missed seventeen years of her life and she was such an interesting and bubbly and smart and pretty young girl. She was clearly her own person, but she was so much like Julia that Claire still felt her heart skip a beat every time she saw her.

  “Hey, lazybutt.” Lydia dumped a drawer full of socks on the bed beside Cla
ire. “Make yourself useful.”

  Claire sorted the socks with a deliberate slowness so that Lydia would get annoyed and take over. Julia had loved little-­girl patterns with pink hearts and red lips and various breeds of dogs. Someone would get good use out of them. They were donating their sister’s clothes to the homeless shelter, the same shelter she had volunteered for the day Gerald Scott had decided to take her away from them.

  And Paul, because the photograph taken in the barn proved he was an active participant in their sister’s murder.

  Lydia had relayed all the other details that Paul had confessed to in the garage. They knew about their father’s staged suicide. They knew about the notebooks. The letters Helen had written to Lydia that were never delivered. Paul’s plans for Dee when she turned nineteen. At some point, Claire had chosen to pull a Helen and stopped asking questions because she did not want to know the answers. There was no difference between the blue pill and the red pill.

  There were only degrees of suffering.

  Paul had been a violent psychopath. He was a torturer. He was a murderer. His color-­coded files had been investigated and he’d been proven to be a serial rapist. The files in the basement storage area had led the FBI to offshore accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars deposited from customers all around the world. Claire had guessed correctly about Paul’s franchising the system. There were other masked men in Germany, France, Egypt, Australia, Ireland, India, Turkey . . .

  Past a certain point, more detailed knowledge about the volume of her husband’s sins could not make Claire’s burden feel any heavier.

  “I think this is yours.” Lydia held up a white T-­shirt with RELAX written in black letters across the front. The collar had been cut out Flashdance-­style.

  Claire said, “I used to wear that with the most amazing pair of rainbow-­colored leg warmers.”

  “Those were my leg warmers, you brat.”

  Claire caught the shirt Lydia threw at her head. She held it up in front of her. It was a good shirt. She could probably still wear it.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

  Claire shrugged. This was a common question. Everyone wanted to know what Claire was going to do. She was living with Helen at the moment, not least of all because her mother’s neighbors were much less likely to talk to the press, which is what everyone in Dunwoody who’d ever met Claire or even seen her cross a room was doing. The women on her tennis team sounded devastated for the cameras, yet they all somehow managed to get their hair and makeup professionally done before appearing on film. Even Allison Hendrickson had joined the fray, though no one had yet made the obvious joke about Claire’s violent propensity toward kneecaps.

  At least no one had but Claire.

  Lydia said, “That teaching job at the school sounds nice. You love art.”

  “Wynn thinks I’ll be all right.” Claire rolled onto her back. She stared up at the Billy Idol poster taped on the ceiling above the bed.

  “You’ll still need to get a job.”

  “Maybe.” Paul’s assets had been frozen. The Dunwoody house had been seized. Wynn Wallace had explained that sorting out the ill-­gotten gains from Paul’s legitimate business holdings would take years and likely consume millions in legal fees.

  Of course, Paul had obviously considered that when he structured his estate.

  Claire told Lydia, “The life insurance policies were owned by an irrevocable trust that was set up through Quinn + Scott. There’s a clear paper trail. I can draw from it any time.”

  Lydia stared at her. “You can collect on Paul’s life insurance policies?”

  “Seems only fair. I’m the one who killed him.”

  “Claire,” Lydia warned, because Claire wasn’t supposed to joke about getting away with murder.

  And as far as she knew, Claire had certainly gotten away with it. Not to brag—­because Lydia wouldn’t let her do that, either—­but if Claire had learned one thing from her previous sojourn into the criminal justice system, it was that you didn’t have to talk to the police unless you wanted to. Claire had sat in an interrogation room and remained silent until Wynn Wallace had arrived at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s regional office and helped her come up with a legally sound defense for arson and murder.

  Good thing, because apparently, committing a felony in the act of a murder generally meant you ended up on death row.

  Claire had ended up in the passenger’s seat of Wynn Wallace’s Mercedes.

  Paul had started the fire. Claire had shot him in self-­defense.

  Lydia was the only witness, but she’d told the investigators that she’d blacked out, so she had no idea what happened.

  Between the rain and the firefighters who soaked the smoldering embers of the Fuller house, there wasn’t a lot of pesky evidence to poke holes in the story. Not that anyone was paying close attention to Claire’s crimes by then. Her timed email with the Tor link was already making the rounds. The Red & Black had picked it up first, then the Atlanta Journal, then the blogs, then the national news station. So much for her fears that most ­people were far too smart to click an anonymously sent link.

  Her biggest regret was that she had included Huckleberry in the email list, because according to witnesses, Sheriff Carl Huckabee had been sitting at his computer reading Claire’s email when he grabbed his chest and died of a massive heart attack.

  He was eighty-­one years old. He lived in a nice house that was paid off. He’d seen his children and grandchildren grow up. He’d spent summers fishing and winters at the beach and pretty much enjoyed all of his other twisted hobbies with absolutely no impediments.

  If you asked Claire, Huckleberry was the one who’d really gotten away with murder.

  “Hey.” Lydia threw a sock at Claire to get her attention. “Have you given any more thought about seeing a real therapist?”

  “ ‘With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee?’ ”

  “More like ‘Kid Fears.’ ”

  Claire laughed. They had been listening to Indigo Girls on one of the hundreds of mix tapes Julia had kept in a shoe box under her bed. “I’ll think about it,” she told Lydia, because she knew that the Twelve Step program was important to her sister. It was also the only reason Lydia was able to stand there folding Julia’s clothes instead of curling into a ball in the corner.

  But as Claire had told her court-­appointed therapist during their last mandated session, her quick temper had ended up leading them to Julia. Maybe one day, maybe with a real therapist, Claire would work on her anger issues. God knew there was plenty enough to work on, but for right now, she wasn’t inclined to get rid of the very thing that had saved them all.

  Who the hell would?

  Lydia said, “Did you see the news?”

  “Which news?” Claire asked, because there was so much that they could barely keep up with it.

  “Mayhew and that other detective were denied bail.”

  “Falke,” Claire provided. She didn’t know why they were still holding Harvey Falke. He was absolutely a bad cop, but he was just as clueless as Adam Quinn had been about Paul’s illegal business. At least that’s what Fred Nolan had told Claire after the Big Boys came down from Washington and interrogated both men for three weeks.

  Could she believe Fred Nolan? Could Claire ever believe another man for as long as she lived? Rick was nice. Lydia had finally asked him to move in with her. He was taking care of her. He was helping her heal.

  And yet.

  How many times had Claire done the same thing for Paul? Not that she thought Rick was a bad man, but she’d thought Paul was a good man, too.

  At least she was certain on which side of the line Jacob Mayhew fell. His house had been raided. The FBI had searched his computers and found links to almost all the movies that Paul had ever created, plus many of
the international ones.

  Claire had guessed correctly about the scale of the operation. Between Mayhew’s computer, the contents of the USB drive, and the VHS tapes from the garage, the FBI and Interpol were working to identify hundreds of victims who had hundreds of families all over the world who might one day find their way back to peace.

  The Kilpatricks. The O’Malleys. The Van Dykes. The Deichmanns. The Abdullahs. The Kapadias. Claire always repeated aloud each of their names from each of the news stories, because she knew what it was like all those years ago when ­people had opened their newspapers and skipped over Julia Carroll’s name.

  Congressman Johnny Jackson’s name was not one that anyone could avoid. His involvement in the snuff porn ring was still the lead story in every newspaper, Web page, news report, and magazine. Nolan had confided that there was some kind of plea deal being worked out to keep the congressman off death row. The US Department of Justice and Interpol needed Johnny Jackson to corroborate the details of Paul’s business in various courts of law around the world, and Johnny Jackson did not want to be strapped to a gurney while a prison doctor jammed a needle into his arm.

  Claire was sorely disappointed that she would not be able to sit in the viewing room and witness every single flinch and whimper and sob as Johnny Jackson was put to death by the Great State of Georgia.

  She knew what it was like to watch a bad person die, to feel their panic swell to crescendo, to watch the dawning in their eyes when they realized that they were completely powerless. To know that the last words they would ever hear were the ones you said to their face: that you saw through them, that you knew everything about them, that you were disgusted, that you did not love them, that you would never, ever forget. That you would never, ever forgive. That you would be fine. That you would be happy. That you would survive.