Claire patted her hand to her purse until she felt the hard outline of Lydia’s revolver. At least she’d done one thing right. Buying bullets for the gun had been easy. There was a gun store down the street that had sold her a box of hollow-point ammunition, no questions asked.
The Office Shop offered printing services as well as hourly computer rental. She had been too wrapped up in her own fear to flirt with the geeky boy behind the counter, so she’d bribed him with two hundred and fifty dollars of Helen’s cash instead. She had explained her problem in loose terms—she wanted to put something on YouTube, but it was photographs, not movies, and there were a lot of them, along with some spreadsheets, and she needed all of it to work properly because someone was going to try to take them down.
The boy had stopped her there. She didn’t want YouTube, she wanted something like Dropbox, and then Claire had shifted her purse on her shoulder and he had seen the box of ammo and the gun and told her that it was going to be an extra hundred dollars and she wanted something called Tor.
Tor. Claire had a vague recollection of reading about the illegal file-sharing site in Time magazine. It had something to do with the dark web, which meant it was uncataloged and untraceable. Maybe Paul was using Tor to distribute his movies. Instead of emailing large files, he could send out a complicated website link that no one else could find unless they put in the exact combination of letters and numbers.
She had their email addresses. Should she send Paul’s customers his spreadsheets and photographs?
“It’s ready.” The geeky boy stood in front of Claire with his hands clasped in front of his pleated slacks. “Just jack in the thumbdrive and drag everything you want onto the page and it’ll be uploaded.”
Claire read his nametag. “Thank you, Keith.”
He smiled at her before trouncing back to the counter.
Claire pushed herself up. She sat in the chair in front of the computer, occasionally glancing at the entrance and the exit as she followed the boy’s instructions. The store was cold inside, but she was sweating. Her hands weren’t shaking, but she felt a vibration in her body, like a tuning fork had touched her bones. She checked the doors again as Paul’s files started to upload. She had put the JPEGs at the top so that the first click would open the image of Johnny Jackson. The trick would be making someone want to click.
Claire went to the mail program that Keith had set up for her. She had a new email address that came with the ability to schedule the exact time and date that emails were sent out.
She started to type.
My name is Claire Carroll Scott. Julia Carroll and Lydia Delgado were my sisters.
Claire felt sick from the betrayal. Lydia was alive. She had to be alive.
She hit the backspace key until the last sentence was deleted.
I have posted proof that Congressman Johnny Jackson has participated in pornographic films.
Claire stared at the words. This wasn’t entirely true because it was more than porn. It was abduction, rape, and murder, but she was worried that listing all of that out would dissuade people from clicking on the link. She was sending this to every media outlet and government agency who listed a contact address on their website. Most likely, the accounts were monitored by young interns who hadn’t any idea who Johnny Jackson was or who had grown up around email and therefore knew not to click anonymous links, especially ones that connected to Tor.
Claire opened a new browser window. She found Penelope Ward’s email on the Westerly Academy PTO page. Lydia’s nemesis looked just as candy-apple fake as Claire would’ve guessed. The Branch Ward for Congress Exploratory Committee listed the address [email protected]. The site indicated the group was a PAC, which meant they would be looking for any dirt on their opponent that they could find.
The burner phone rang.
Claire headed into the stock room and opened the back door. Rain was still pouring down. The wind had picked up, sending a cold jet of air into the small space. She hoped the background noise was enough to convince Paul that she was driving the Tesla up I-75.
She flipped open the phone. “Paul?”
“Do you have the keytag?”
“Yes. Let me talk to Lydia.”
He was silent. She could feel his relief. “Did you look at what’s on it?”
“Sure, I used the computer at the bank.” Claire funneled all of her anger into the sarcastic response. “Let me speak to Lydia. Now.”
He went through the usual steps. She heard the speakerphone turn on.
Claire said, “Lydia?” She waited. “Lydia?”
She heard a loud, desperate moan.
Paul said, “I don’t think she feels like talking.”
Claire leaned her head back against the wall. She looked up at the ceiling as she tried to keep her tears from falling. He had really hurt Lydia. Claire had held on to a shred of hope that he hadn’t, the same way she’d held on to a shred of hope about Julia for so many years. Her face burned with shame.
“Claire?”
“I want to meet at the mall. Phipps Plaza. How long do you need?”
“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “Why don’t we meet at Lydia’s house?”
Claire stopped fighting her tears. “Did you take Dee?”
“I haven’t taken her yet, but I know you went to Lydia’s house to warn her redneck boyfriend. He took Dee to a fishing shack off Lake Burton. Haven’t you figured out by now that I know everything?”
He didn’t know about the gun. He didn’t know about the Office Shop.
He said, “Drive back to Watkinsville. I’ll meet you at my parents’ house.”
Claire felt her stomach drop. She had seen what Paul did to prisoners inside the Fuller house.
“Still there?”
Claire forced herself to speak. “There’s a lot of traffic. It’ll probably take me a couple of hours.”
“It shouldn’t take more than ninety minutes.”
“I know you’ve been tracking me with my phone. Watch the blue dot. It’ll take however long it takes.”
“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 u
p 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 let 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 grief 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 gauge.
“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. Claire 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. A paperback. A book of 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.
TWENTY-TWO
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 cl
asses. 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 75 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 turn-off 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.
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