Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 16

  Nolan held up his hands in surrender, but he didn’t give in. “It’s just curious, you know. Why is it that a guy worth all those Benjamins steals three mill from his own business?”

  Claire felt a sharp pain in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. The ground was moving again. She reached for the wall behind her. She had felt this same way yesterday when she’d fainted.

  Nolan said, “Well, I’ll let you ladies get back to enjoying your evening.” He stepped out onto the porch and looked up at the night sky. “Sure is a nice night.”

  Lydia slammed the door. She bolted the French lock. She covered her mouth with both hands. Her eyes were wide with fear. They both watched the video display as Fred Nolan shuffled his way down the stone steps and slowly made his way to the car.

  Claire looked away. She couldn’t watch anymore, but she couldn’t stop hearing him. The soft click of his car door opening, the loud bang of it being closed. The rumble of the car’s engine. The mechanical groan of the power steering as he turned around and drove back down the driveway.

  Lydia dropped her hands. She was breathing as hard as Claire. “What the fuck, Claire?” She stared at Claire with open shock. “What the fucking fuck?”

  Claire had lost the fuck two days ago. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Lydia was practically screaming. Her voice echoed off the polished concrete floors and bounced up the metal and glass spiral staircase. “How the fuck can’t you know, Claire?” She started pacing back and forth across the entryway. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of it.”

  Claire couldn’t believe it, either. The movies. Mayhew. Nolan. Paul’s collection of folders—the ones she knew about, the ones she couldn’t force herself to read. Whatever was going on with Adam Quinn. And now she had been told that Paul was a thief. Three million dollars? Nolan’s estimate of Paul’s net worth was off by several million. He’d only quoted what was in the bank. Paul didn’t believe in the stock market. The house was paid off. The cars were paid for. There was no reason for Paul to steal anything.

  She laughed at herself because that was all that she could do. “Why can I believe that Paul is a rapist but not a thief?”

  The question stopped Lydia cold. “You believe me.”

  “I should’ve believed you years ago.” Claire pushed herself away from the wall. She felt the guilt of dragging Lydia into this mess. She had no right to jeopardize her sister, especially after all that had happened. “I’m sorry I asked you to come here. You should go.”

  Instead of answering, Lydia looked down at the floor. Her purse was a brown leather bag the size of a feedsack. Claire wondered if Paul had a photo of her buying it. Some of the pictures had obviously been taken with a telephoto lens, but others were close enough to read the text on the coupons she always used at the grocery store.

  Lydia could never find out about Paul’s surveillance. Claire could at least do that for her sister. Lydia had a seventeen-year-old daughter whose school tuition Paul was anonymously paying. She had a boyfriend. She had a mortgage. She had a business with two employees she was responsible for. Knowing that Paul had been there every step of the way would destroy her.

  Claire said, “Pepper, really, you need to go. I never should’ve asked you to come here.”

  Lydia picked up her purse. She hefted the strap over her shoulder. She put her hand on the door but she didn’t open it. “When’s the last time you took a shower?”

  Claire shook her head. She hadn’t bathed since the morning of Paul’s funeral.

  “What about food? Have you been eating?”

  Claire shook her head again. “I just …” She didn’t know how to explain it. They had taken a cooking class a few months ago and Paul wasn’t half bad, but now, every time she thought about her husband in the kitchen holding a knife, all she could think about was the machete from the movies.

  “Claire?” Lydia had obviously asked her another question. Her purse was back on the floor. Her shoes were piled where she’d left them. “Go take a shower. I’ll cook you something to eat.”

  “You should go,” Claire told her. “You shouldn’t get involved in this … this … I don’t even know what it is, Liddie, but it’s bad. It’s worse than you could ever imagine.”

  “So I gathered.”

  Claire spoke the only truth she was certain of. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”

  “I don’t forgive you, but you’re still my sister.”

  EIGHT

  Lydia had texted Rick that she would be home in an hour. She would make sure Claire was bathed and fed, and then she would stand over her sister while she called Helen to come take care of her. Lydia had filled in for her mother twenty-four years ago and she wasn’t going to do it again.

  Especially with the FBI involved.

  Just the thought of Fred Nolan made her nerves pulse with fear. The man obviously knew things about Paul that Claire did not know. Or maybe Claire knew them and she was just a very good actress. In which case, was Claire lying when she said she finally believed Lydia about Paul attacking her? If she wasn’t, then what changed her mind? If she was, then what was her motivation?

  There was no figuring it out. All the sneakiness her sister had exhibited as a child had been honed to adult perfection, so that Claire could be standing right in front of an oncoming train and still insist that everything was going to be fine.

  Actually, the more Lydia interacted with this adult Claire, the more she understood she hadn’t grown up to be a Mother. She had grown up to be their mother.

  Lydia stared blankly around the kitchen. She had thought that cooking Claire something to eat would be the easy part, but as with the rest of the house, the kitchen was too sleek to be practical. All of the appliances were concealed behind shiny white laminate doors that looked so cheap they had to cost a million bucks. Even the cooktop blended in with the polished quartz countertop. The whole space was part kitchen showroom, part Jetsons. She couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually choose to live here.

  Not that Claire was doing much living. The refrigerator was filled with unopened bottles of wine. The only food was a half-carton of eggs that expired in two days. Lydia found a new loaf of bread in one of the pantries. There was also a coffee machine, which Lydia only recognized because there was a label on it that said COFFEE MACHINE, followed by what she assumed was the installation date.

  The laminated set of directions beside the machine was clearly Paul’s handiwork. Lydia knew that her sister couldn’t be bothered doing something so tedious and stupid. She pressed various buttons until the machine whirred to life. She slid an espresso cup under the spout and watched it fill.

  “You figured it out,” Claire said. She was dressed in a light blue button-down shirt and faded jeans. Her hair was slicked back to dry. For the first time, Lydia actually saw a woman who looked like her sister.

  Lydia handed Claire the cup of coffee. “Drink this. It’ll help sober you up.”

  Claire sat down at the counter. She blew on the steaming liquid to cool it. The counter stools were white leather and shiny chrome. The backs were low. They matched the couch and chairs in the family room that opened onto the kitchen. Wall-to-ceiling glass framed the back yard, where a pool that looked like it was carved from a giant slab of white marble served as a centerpiece for the barren landscape.

  There was no part of this house that felt inviting. Paul’s cold, calculating hand could be seen behind every choice. The concrete on the entryway floor was polished to a dark mirror straight out of Snow White. The spiral stairs looked like a robot’s asshole. The endless white walls made Lydia feel like she was trapped inside a straitjacket. The sooner she was out of here the better.

  Lydia found a frying pan in the drawer under the cooktop. She poured some oil in the pan and dropped in two slices of bread.

  Claire asked, “Are you making me egg bread?”

  Lydia fought a reflexive smile, because Claire sounded like she was thirteen
again. Egg bread was Lydia’s way of getting out of whisking eggs. She just threw it all into a pan and cooked it until the shininess was gone.

  Claire said, “I’m on parole because I assaulted somebody.”

  Lydia almost dropped the carton of eggs.

  “We’re not supposed to call it assault, but that’s what it was.” Claire rolled the espresso cup between her hands. “Allison Hendrickson. My doubles partner. We were warming up for a game. She was talking about how she felt like a Holocaust survivor after the Liberation because her last kid was going off to college and she was finally going to be free.”

  Lydia cracked two eggs into the pan. She hated this bitch already.

  “And then Allison started telling me about this friend of hers who had a daughter who went to college last year.” Claire put down the cup. “Smart girl, always made good grades. And then the girl gets to college and goes crazy—starts screwing around, missing classes, drinking too much, all the stupid things you hear about kids doing.”

  Lydia used a spatula to stir the eggs around the bread. She was more than familiar with those stupid things.

  “One night, the girl went to a frat party. Somebody slipped a roofie into her drink. Fast-forward to the next day, she wakes up naked in the basement of the frat house. She’s battered and bruised, but she manages to find her way back to her dorm, where her roommate shows her a video that’s been posted on YouTube.”

  Lydia froze. Every nightmare she had about Dee going off to college involved some variation on this theme.

  “The guys at the frat house filmed everything. It was basically a gang rape. Allison went into great detail about it, because apparently, everyone on campus watched the film. And then she says to me, ‘Can you believe that?’ And I say no, but of course I can believe it, because people are horrible. And then Allison says, ‘That stupid girl, getting drunk like that around a bunch of frat boys. It was her own fault for going to the party.’”

  Claire looked as disgusted as Lydia felt. When Julia had first disappeared, people kept asking why she’d been at the bar, what she was doing out that late, and exactly how much alcohol she had consumed, because obviously, it was Julia’s own fault that she was abducted and most likely raped and murdered.

  Lydia asked, “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything at first. I was too angry. But I didn’t know I was angry, you know?”

  Lydia shook her head, because she always knew when she was angry.

  “I kept repeating Allison’s words back in my head, and the anger just built up and built up. I could feel the pressure of it in my chest, like a tea kettle coming to a boil.” Claire clasped together her hands. “Then the ball came over the net. It was clearly on her side, but I went for it. I remember pulling my arm across my body—I’ve still got a killer backhand—and I watched the racket cut through the air, and at the last minute, I took this tiny lunge forward and I smashed the edge of the racket into the side of her knee.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “She fell flat on her face. Broke her nose and two teeth. Blood was everywhere. I thought she was going to exsanguinate. I dislocated her knee, which is apparently very painful. She ended up needing two operations to get it back into place.” Claire looked remorseful, but she didn’t sound it. “I could’ve said it was a mistake. I can actually remember standing there on the court with all these excuses running through my head. Allison was writhing on the ground, screaming bloody murder, and I opened my mouth to say what a horrible accident, that I was an idiot, that I hadn’t been looking where I was going and it was all my fault and blah-blah-blah, but instead of apologizing, I said, ‘It’s your own fault for playing tennis.’”

  Lydia felt the shock of the act reverberate through the cold kitchen.

  “The way the other women looked at me …” Claire shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe it. “I’ve never had people look at me like that before. There was this wave of revulsion. I could feel their disgust to my very core. And I’ve never told anyone this, not even Paul, but it felt so fucking good to be bad.” This, at least, Claire sounded sure of. “You know me, Liddie. I never let loose like that. I usually just hold it all in because what’s the point of letting it out, but something about that day made me just—” She held up her hands in surrender. “I was absolutely euphoric right up until I was arrested.”

  Lydia had forgotten about the egg bread. She moved the frying pan off the eye. “I can’t believe they let you off with parole.”

  “We bought our way out of it.” Claire shrugged the shrug of the extremely wealthy. “It took our lawyer a couple of months and a shit-ton of money to bring the Hendricksons around, but they finally told the prosecutor they were okay with parole and a lesser charge. I had to wear an ankle bracelet for six months. I have six more sessions with a court-appointed therapist. I’m on parole for another year.”

  Lydia didn’t know what to say. Claire had never been much of a fighter. Lydia was the one who always got in trouble for giving Indian burns or holding Claire down and dangling spit into her eye.

  Claire said, “Ironically, the monitoring bracelet was taken off the same day that Paul was killed.” She took the plate of egg bread. “Or is that just coincidence, not irony? Mother would know.”

  Lydia had spotted the only coincidence that mattered. “When were you arrested?”

  Claire’s tight smile made it clear that she hadn’t missed the connection. “The first week of March.”

  Julia had gone missing on March 4, 1991.

  “So, that’s why I’m on parole.” Claire picked up the bread with her hands and took a bite. She had told the story of her arrest as if she was relating a funny thing that had happened at the grocery store, but Lydia could see that she had tears in her eyes. She looked exhausted. More than that, she looked scared. There was something about Claire that was so vulnerable. They could just as well be sitting at the kitchen table at their parents’ house three decades ago.

  Claire asked, “Do you remember the way Julia used to dance?”

  Lydia was surprised by how clearly the memories came back. Julia had loved dancing. She would hear the faintest trace of music and throw herself completely into it. “Too bad she had such shitty taste in music.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Really, Menudo?”

  Claire gave a surprised laugh, as if she had forgotten all about her crush on the boy band. “She was just so joyful. She loved so many things.”

  “Joyful,” Lydia repeated, relishing the lightness of the word.

  When Julia had first disappeared, everyone talked about how tragic it was that something bad had happened to such a good girl. Then the sheriff had floated his theory that Julia had just walked away—joined a hippie commune or run off with a guy— and the tone had changed from sympathetic to accusatory. Julia Carroll was no longer the selfless girl who volunteered at the animal shelter and worked at the soup kitchen. She was the strident political activist who’d been jailed at a protest. The pushy reporter who alienated the entire staff of the school newspaper. The radical feminist who demanded the university hire more women. The drunk. The pothead. The whore.

  It wasn’t enough for Julia to be taken away from the family. All the good things about her had to be taken away, too.

  Lydia told Claire, “I lied about where I was the night she disappeared. I was passed out in the Alley.”

  Claire looked surprised. The Alley was a seedy passageway that connected the Georgia Bar to the Roadhouse, two Athens dives that catered to underage townies. Lydia had told the sheriff she was practicing with the band in Leigh Dean’s garage the night Julia went missing, when in actuality, she’d been just a stone’s throw away from her sister.

  Instead of pointing out the proximity, Claire told her, “I said I was studying with Bonnie Flynn, but actually, we were making out.”

  Lydia choked on a laugh. She had forgotten how good Claire was at tossing out shocking statements. “And?”


  “I liked her brother better.” Claire picked up a piece of egg between her thumb and finger, but she didn’t eat it. “I saw you on the road this afternoon. I was parked in front of the McDonald’s. You were stopped at the light.”

  Lydia felt the hair on her neck go up. She remembered stopping at a red light by the McDonald’s on the way to the cemetery. She’d had no idea that someone was watching her. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I know. I followed you for about twenty minutes. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t surprised when you ended up at the cemetery. It seemed fitting—a bookend. Paul split us apart. Why wouldn’t he bring us back together?” She pushed away the plate. “Not that I think you’ll ever forgive me. And you shouldn’t, because I was never going to forgive you.”

  Lydia wasn’t sure forgiveness was in her wheelhouse. “What made you believe me after all this time?”

  Claire didn’t answer. She was staring at the half-finished food on her plate. “I loved him. I know you don’t want to believe that, but I really, truly, giddy, heartbreaking, longing, achingly loved him.”

  Lydia said nothing.

  “I’m so angry with myself, because it was all right in front of me and I never thought to question it.”

  Lydia got the distinct feeling that the conversation had shifted to something else. She asked a question that had been fermenting in the back of her mind. “If Paul’s business partner settled out of court, why is the FBI still bothering you? There’s no criminal case. It’s over.”

  Claire’s jaw worked. She was gritting her teeth.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “This is the part that’s dangerous.” She paused. “Or maybe not. I don’t know. But it’s almost midnight. I’m sure you want to go home. I had no right to ask you over in the first place.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “Because I’m selfish, and because you are the only person left in my life who was ever capable of making anything better.”

  Lydia knew that Paul had been the other person. She didn’t appreciate the association. “What did he do to you, Claire?”