Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes

  Contents

  Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes

  Author's Note

  An Excerpt from Pretty Girls

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  About the Author

  Also by Karin Slaughter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes

  Monday, March 4, 1991

  7:26 a.m.—­North Lumpkin Street, Athens, Georgia

  The morning mist laced through the downtown streets, spiderwebbing tiny, intricate patterns onto the sleeping bags lining the sidewalk outside the Georgia Theater. The doors wouldn’t open for at least another twelve hours, but the Phish devotees were determined to have front row seats. Two heavyset young men filled plastic lawn chairs by the chained front door. At their feet were beer cans, cigarette butts, and an empty sandwich bag that had likely contained a large amount of weed.

  Their eyes followed Julia Carroll as she walked down the street. She could feel their collective gaze clinging to her body as closely as the mist. She kept her head trained forward, her back straight, but then she wondered if she looked cold, haughty, and then she wondered with some annoyance why it mattered how she looked to these boys who were complete strangers.

  She never used to be this paranoid.

  Athens was a college town, anchored by the University of Georgia, which took up almost eight hundred acres of prime real estate and employed in some capacity over half of the county. Julia had grown up here. She was a student in the journalism program, a reporter for the campus newspaper. Her father was a professor at the college of veterinary sciences. At nineteen years old, she knew that alcohol and circumstance could turn nice-­looking boys into the kind of ­people you didn’t want to run into at seven-­thirty on a Monday morning.

  Or maybe she was being silly. Maybe this was like the time she was walking late at night in front of Old College and she heard footsteps behind her and saw a looming, speeding shadow and her heart flipped and she wanted to run but then the scary man had called out her name and it was only Ezekiel Mann from biology class.

  He had talked to her about his brother’s new car, then started quoting Monty Python lines, and Julia had picked up her pace so quickly that they were both jogging by the time they reached her dorm. Ezekiel had pressed his hand against the closed glass door as she’d signed herself into the building.

  “I’ll call you!” he’d practically yelled.

  She had smiled at him and thought, Oh, God, please don’t make me hurt your feelings, as she’d made her way toward the stairs.

  Julia was beautiful. She had known this since she was a child, but rather than embrace the gift, she had always seen it as a burden. ­People made assumptions about beautiful girls. They were the icy, backstabby bitches who always got their comeuppance in John Hughes movies. They were the trophies that no boy in school dared to claim. Everyone took her shyness for aloofness. Her mild anxiety for disapproval. That these assumptions had left her a near-­friendless virgin at the ripe age of nineteen went unremarked upon by everyone but her two younger sisters.

  College was supposed to be different. Sure, her dorm was less than a quarter mile from her family home, but this was Julia’s chance to reinvent herself, to be the person she had always wanted to be: strong, confident, happy, content (not a virgin). She squelched her natural propensity to sit reading in her room while the world passed outside her door. She joined the tennis club, the track club, and the wildlife club. She didn’t choose cliques. She spoke to everyone. She smiled at strangers. She went on dates with boys who were sweet if not terribly interesting, and whose desperate kisses reminded her of a lamprey eel burrowing its tongue into the side of a lake trout.

  But then Beatrice Oliver happened.

  Julia had followed the girl’s story on the telex at the Red & Black, UGA’s campus newspaper. Nineteen years old, the same as Julia. Blonde hair and blue eyes, the same as Julia. College student, the same as Julia.

  Beautiful.

  Five weeks ago, Beatrice Oliver had left her parents’ house around ten o’clock in the evening. She was on foot, walking to the store to get some ice cream for her father, who was suffering from a toothache. Julia wasn’t sure why that part of the story stuck out to her. It seemed suspect—­why would you want something cold on an aching tooth?—­but that was what both parents had told the police, so that detail was in the story.

  And the story was on the telex because Beatrice Oliver had never come home.

  Julia was obsessed with the girl’s disappearance. She told herself it was because she wanted to cover the story for the Red & Black, but the truth was that it scared her to death to know that someone—­not just someone, but a girl her own age—­could walk out the door and never come back again. Julia wanted to know the details. She wanted to talk to the girl’s parents. She wanted to interview Beatrice Oliver’s friends or a cousin or a neighbor or a coworker or a boyfriend or another boyfriend or anyone who might offer an alternate explanation other than that a nineteen year-­old girl with her entire life ahead of her had just vanished into thin air.

  “We are looking at a likely abduction,” the detective in the first story had been quoted as saying. All of Beatrice’s personal belongings were accounted for, including her purse, the cash she kept in her sock drawer, and her car, which was still parked in the family’s driveway.

  The most chilling statement came from Beatrice Oliver’s mother: “The only reason my daughter has not come home is because someone is keeping her.”

  Keeping her.

  Julia shuddered at the thought of being kept—­from her family, from her life, from her freedom. In her childhood books, the bogeyman was always scraggly and dark and looming, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but clearly (if you looked carefully) still a wolf. She knew that real life wasn’t like those fairy tales. You couldn’t easily spot the telltale mustache and goatee that indicated the wolf was a Bad Man.

  Whoever had Beatrice Oliver could be a friend or a coworker or a neighbor or a boyfriend or another boyfriend—­all of the ­people that Julia wanted to interview face-­to-­face. Alone. With just a pad and pen. Talking to a man who might at that very moment be keeping Beatrice Oliver somewhere awful.

  Julia put her hand to her stomach to calm the churning. She checked behind her, left and right, her eyeballs feeling jittery in her head.

  She tried to logic down some of her anxiety. It was possible she was winding herself up for no reason. The Beatrice Oliver interviews might not even happen. Before Julia spoke to anyone, she would need to get the story assignment okayed, because a news journalist could legitimately ask questions but a features writer (Julia’s section) was just being nosy. Her biggest obstacle would be Greg Gianakos, the student editor in chief who thought he was the next Walter Cronkite and reminded Julia of what her father said about beagles: They love to hear the sound of their own voices.

  If she could get Greg on board, then Lionel Vance, Greg’s minion, would follow (even though he was sulking because she’d turned him down for a date). The final hurdle would be Mr. Hannah, the faculty advisor, who was very nice, but preferred story pitch meetings to play out like a Mexican cliff diving match on the Wide World of Sports.

  Julia silently practiced the pitch as she turned down the next empty street.

  Beatrice Oliver, a nineteen-­year-­old girl who lives with her parents. . .

  No, they would be making snoring noises before she finished the sentence.

  A missing girl!

  No. Lots of girls went missing. They usually showed up a few days later.

  A young girl was walking to the store
late at night when suddenly. . .

  Julia spun around.

  She’d heard a noise behind her. A scraping sound, like shoes scuffing the street. She scanned the area again, eyes picking out broken pieces of glass and old beer bottles and discarded newspapers, but there was nothing. At least nothing that she should be worried about.

  Slowly, carefully, she resumed her walk, still checking doorways and alleys, and crossing the street so she wouldn’t have to pass by a massive mound of trash.

  Paranoid.

  Reporters were supposed to look at events with a cold eye toward the facts, but since reading about Beatrice Oliver, Julia’s dreams had been filled with details that came not from fact, but from her own wild imagination. Beatrice was walking down the street. The night was dark. The moon was obscured. There was a chill in the air. She saw the glow of a lit cigarette, heard the soft patter of shoes on asphalt, and then tasted a nicotine-­stained hand clamping over her mouth, felt a razor-­sharp knife at her throat, smelled the acidic breath of a menacing stranger as he dragged her toward his car and locked her in the trunk, then drove her somewhere dark and dank where he could keep her.

  If Julia’s mother were not a librarian, she would probably blame Julia’s dark imaginings on the books she was reading. The Stranger Beside Me. Helter Skelter. The Silence of the Lambs. The Witching Hour. But her mother was a librarian, so she would probably shrug and tell her eldest daughter to not read stories that scared her.

  Or did being scared of these things, putting voice to her terrible fears, immunize Julia from danger?

  She wiped sweat from her brow. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel the tickling of her T-­shirt against her skin. She reached into her purse. Her Walkman was nestled inside the yellow scarf she had promised her sister she’d drop by the house. Her finger rested on the play button, but she didn’t press it. She just wanted to feel the cassette tape inside, to summon the scrawled handwriting of the boy who had made it for her.

  Robin Clark.

  Julia had met him two months ago. There had been notes passed back and forth, phone calls, pages, a few group dates where their eyes lingered and their hands touched, and then they’d finally been alone and he had kissed her so long and so well that the top of her head nearly exploded. She had brought him home once, not to meet her parents but to pick up her laundry. Her youngest sister had laughed about Robin being a girl’s name until Julia had punched her in the arm and made her stop. (For once, the little brat hadn’t tattled.)

  The mix tape had songs that Robin thought Julia would like, not songs he wanted her to like. So instead of Styx and Chicago and Metallica, there were Belinda Carlisle and Wilson Phillips and a little Beatles and James Taylor and lots of Madonna, because Robin thought that Madonna was just as awesome as Julia did.

  The tape was the first time in her life that a boy had seen her for who she was rather than who he wanted her to be. Julia had spent so many years pretending to like drum solos and screechy guitars and bootlegged copies of artists who had tragically died before they could prove to the world (and not just the boy who’d made the mix tape) how cool they were.

  Robin didn’t want Julia to pretend. He wanted her to be herself, and her women’s studies professor would’ve probably had a heart attack to learn that Julia, finally, wanted to be herself—­but only because she’d found a boy who wanted that, too.

  “Robin,” Julia whispered into the cool morning air, because she loved the way his name felt in her mouth. “Robin.”

  He was twenty-­two years old, rangy and tall, with ropy biceps from lifting heavy trays of bread at his father’s bakery. He had shaggy brown-­almost-­black Jon Bon Jovi hair and blue eyes like a husky dog and when he looked at Julia, she felt a deep stirring in a place that she didn’t quite have a name for.

  There had been a few boys before Robin. They were usually older like he was (though never as mature), the kind of guys who weren’t overly intimidated by the way Julia looked because they had cars and money in their pockets. Her father had warned Julia that these boys only wanted one thing. What he didn’t understand was that Julia wanted that one thing, too.

  Second base. That was as far as she’d ever gotten, unless there was a position for pleasant rubbing (short stop?) Brent Lockwood had been sixteen (almost seventeen) to Julia’s fifteen (closer to fourteen). He had asked her father for permission to take her out, and her father had told him to get a haircut, get a job, and get back to him.

  That Brent would return a few days later with a buzz cut and an apron from McDonald’s was news that had surprised her father, tickled her mother, and sent her sisters into howls of laughter. Julia had been outraged. Brent’s hair had been the best part of him. Henceforth, the odor of grilled meat dug into his cropped scalp like teeth. Julia was a vegetarian. Being around Brent was a wretchedly unfunny variation on Pavlov’s experiment.

  And still, she had tried (in the back of his car; on the living room couch), because Brent was handsome and everyone knew he’d been with a lot of girls and this was Julia’s chance to get it over with. She wanted so desperately to be the sophisticated girl everyone thought she was: the one who knew her way around a boy, the one who had experience, the jaded, beautiful girl who could wrap a man around her little finger.

  But Brent had been in love with her, and he’d wanted to be gentle, and to go slow, which—­combined with the greasy French-­fryness of his skin—­was excruciatingly boring.

  Robin Clark was not boring on any level. He smelled really nice, like pine with a not unpleasing bready undertone from the bakery. His skin was beautifully tan from hiking and biking all year round. He looked into Julia’s eyes when she talked to him. He didn’t try to solve her problems; he just listened. He laughed at her jokes, even the bad ones (especially the bad ones). He could be dreamy, too. He wanted to be an artist. He already was an artist (the bakery job was temporary). Julia had seen some of his work. The gentle slope of a deer’s neck as it dipped its mouth toward a mountain spring. The crazy reds and oranges of a sunrise. His hand gently wrapped around the curve of Julia’s hip.

  He had sketched this image on a napkin before making a move. He’d shown it to Julia over a cup of tea in the student center and told her that the drawing showed what he wanted to do. Her knees shook when it was time to stand. Her palms were sweaty. She had been so giddy with anticipation that by the time he actually put his hand at her waist, his fingers felt electrified against her skin.

  “I’m going to kiss you,” he had whispered into her ear right before he did.

  Julia pulled her hand away from the Walkman. The homeless shelter van where she volunteered was parked at the intersection of Hull and Washington, an area of town that for unknown reasons was called Hot Corner. ­People were already lined up for breakfast. There were at least thirty of them, mostly men, a few women. They shuffled along in line, heads down, hands in their pockets. Everything about them said that they hated taking charity, but they needed charity, and so they were resigned to standing in line at the crack of dawn so they could have at least one hot meal.

  “Good morning,” Candice Bender called. She was handing out tinfoil containers with scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, and toast. The large coffee urn at the mouth of the open van doors was self-­serve.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Julia wasn’t late, but she had the nervous habit of starting conversations with some kind of apology. She grabbed a stack of blankets from the van and took in the line of ­people. Someone was missing. “Where’s Mona No-­Name?”

  Candice shrugged.

  Julia stepped back to get a closer look at the line. Her fear rose exponentially as she checked each face.

  “Don’t see her?” Candice asked.

  Julia shook her head. She had done this long enough to know that ­people moved on, but she could not hold back the sinister thoughts that came seeping in.

  Mona was young, j
ust a few months older than Julia. Compared to the others, she took better care of herself, bathed more, wore nicer clothes, because she wasn’t wasting all of her money on drugs. She’d been thrown out of the foster system on her eighteenth birthday and ended up doing the things some girls had to do in order to survive. When Julia had asked for her last name, Mona had defiantly declared, “Bitch, I ain’t got no name.”

  “Mona No-­Name it is,” Julia had said, because she had been in a bad mood and slightly hung over from an impromptu evening of picklebacks and cheese crackers. (To her great shame, the moniker had stuck.)

  “Mo-­No wasn’t here last night,” one of the women said as she took a clean blanket.

  Julia asked, “When did you see her last?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  They didn’t look out for each other, the women. There was competition. There was gossip. What passed for a social scene reminded Julia of high school because they created the same roles: the whore, the teacher’s pet, the good girl, the bitch, the nerd. Mona was the bitch because she was pretty—­she still had all of her teeth, she wore makeup, she didn’t look homeless. Delilah was the whore because she was older and more experienced. And also because she really was a whore.

  Currently, there was a total of eight women in the group, and unlike with Beatrice Oliver, who had been abducted on a trip to get ice cream for her father, Julia knew that the dark things her mind conjured about the homeless women’s lives were more than likely correct. Prostitution. Drugs. Hunger. Sickness. Fear. Loneliness, because most homeless ­people, Julia had discovered, were incredibly, achingly, heartbreakingly lonely.

  “I seen Mona go into the woods,” Delilah said. “Say about ten, eleven last night, just before the rain come.”

  Julia nodded to let her know she’d heard.

  Delilah was scary because she was unpredictable; given to screaming, crying, humming incessantly, or laughing so loudly that your ears rang like a bell. She was an addict, and had been on the streets for longer than Julia had been volunteering at the shelter. Delilah kept pictures of her grown children in her pocket and carried a kit of syringes she used only on herself. In the last four years, Julia had graduated high school, gotten into college, finished her freshman year with honors, and was promoted to editor of the features section at the Red & Black.