Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 19

  She asked Lydia, “What’s it called?”

  “The Palmer Method.” Lydia was standing behind Claire. “He was supposed to be left-handed, but they made him use his right hand.”

  “They did that to me, too.”

  “They made you wear a mitten so you wouldn’t use your left hand. Mom was furious when she found out.”

  Claire sat down on the floor. She couldn’t stop touching the only pieces she had left of her father. Sam had handled this picture of a man who talked to another man who had a sister who maybe knew something about Julia. He had touched this matchbook from the Manhattan, the bar where Julia was last seen. He had written notes on this menu from the Grit, her favorite vegetarian restaurant. He had stared at this photograph of Julia leaning against her bike.

  Claire stared at the photograph, too. A gray houndstooth fedora was in the handlebar basket. Julia’s long blonde hair cascaded around her shoulders in a soft perm. She was wearing a man’s black suit jacket and white dress shirt with tons of silver and black bangles on her wrists and white lace gloves on her hands because it was the late 1980s and every girl they knew back then wanted to look like either Cyndi Lauper or Madonna.

  Claire said, “I want to tell myself that Paul kept all of this because one day, he thought I might want to see it.”

  Lydia lowered herself to the floor beside Claire. She pointed to the photo of Julia. “That’s my locket she’s wearing. It had a cursive L on the front.”

  They both knew that Julia was still wearing the gold locket when she disappeared. Claire said, “She was always stealing your things.”

  Lydia bumped her shoulder. “You were always stealing mine.”

  Claire was suddenly struck by a thought. “Did Paul have a file on me?”

  “No.”

  She studied her sister, wondering if Lydia was lying to her for the same reason that Claire was lying to Lydia.

  Lydia asked, “What about Dad’s journals?” Sam had started keeping a diary after Helen left because there was no one left to confide in. “They weren’t in Paul’s boxes.”

  “Maybe Mom has them?” Claire shrugged. She had felt so disconnected from her father at the time of his death that she hadn’t asked for any of his belongings. It was only later, when she thought of things like his glasses or his books or his collection of animal-themed ties, that she wished she’d been more present.

  She told Lydia, “I used to read his journals. Probably because he tried to hide them from me. Bonus points to Paul.” She leaned back against the wall. “The last section I read was about six months before he died. They were written like letters to Julia. Things that he remembered about her growing up. How we had all changed without her. He didn’t act like it, but he was pretty tuned in to our lives. He knew exactly what we were up to.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “He and Mom still got together. Even after she remarried.”

  Lydia nodded. “I know.”

  Claire saw another photo of Julia that she had forgotten about. She groaned as she got up on her knees to retrieve it. She’d torn her meniscus five years ago and it still felt like it was looking for any excuse to crack back open. “Are your knees as bad as mine?”

  “Not as bad as Allison Hendrickson’s.”

  “Fair point.” Claire looked down at the picture. Julia was sunning herself on the front lawn in a blue two-piece bathing suit. Her pink skin glistened with baby oil. Lydia was probably behind the camera. They never let Claire sunbathe with them. Or go out with them. Or breathe near them. “God, look at how red her skin is. She would’ve had all kinds of skin cancer.”

  “I had a spot removed last year.” Lydia pointed to the side of her nose.

  Claire was momentarily grateful for being left out. “I bet she would’ve had tons of kids.”

  “Future young Republicans.”

  Claire laughed. Julia had feigned a stomach-ache so she could stay home from school and watch the Iran–Contra hearings. “She would’ve home-schooled her kids to keep them from being brainwashed by the public education machine.”

  “And made them eat so much soy that their testicles never dropped.”

  Claire shuffled around some of her father’s notes. “Oh, no, she wouldn’t have boys. That’s giving in to the patriarchy.”

  “Do you think she would’ve vaccinated?”

  Claire barked a laugh, because even in 1991, Julia had doubted the veracity of the government-backed pharmaceutical industrial complex. “What’s this?” She picked up a stapled stack of papers from the Oconee County Superior Court.

  Lydia squinted at the document. “I found it in a separate folder. It’s a deed for a property in Watkinsville.”

  Paul had grown up in Watkinsville, which was just outside of Athens. Claire turned to the second page to find the name and address of the legal owner.

  “Buckminster Fuller,” Lydia said, because of course she’d already seen it. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “He was Paul’s favorite architect.” She handed Lydia the pages because she couldn’t look at them anymore. “Paul grew up on a farm in Watkinsville. He told me that everything was sold when his parents died.”

  Lydia stood up from the floor. She retrieved her reading glasses and Claire’s iPad from the kitchen island and sat back down beside her.

  Claire felt the building wave of nausea that always accompanied uncovering another one of Paul’s lies.

  Lydia slid on her glasses and started to type. Claire stared at the back of the white leather couch. She wanted to rip open the leather with her fingernails. She wanted to break the wood frame, find some matches, and burn down this entire fucking house.

  Not that it would burn. Paul had installed the most comprehensive residential fire-suppression system that the county building inspector had ever seen.

  Lydia said, “The online records only go back ten years, but Buckminster Fuller’s property taxes are up to date.”

  Claire thought about the painting in Paul’s office. His childhood home. She had spent hours getting the shadows and angles just right. He had cried when she’d given it to him for their anniversary.

  She told Lydia, “Paul said the guy who bought the property tore down the house so he could farm the land.”

  “Did you ever drive by to look at it?”

  “No.” Claire had asked several times. In the end, she had respected his need for privacy. “Paul said it was too painful.”

  Lydia went back to work on the iPad. This time, Claire made herself watch. Lydia pulled up Google Earth. She typed in the Watkinsville address. Acres of plowed fields showed on the screen. Lydia zoomed in closer. There was a small house on the property. Claire easily recognized Paul’s childhood home. The white wood siding ran up and down instead of across. The barn had been torn down, but there was a car in the driveway and a child’s swingset in the large patch of back yard that separated the house from the farmer’s field.

  Lydia said, “There’s no street view. The road doesn’t even have a name.” She asked, “Do you think he’s renting it out?”

  Claire put her head in her hands. She didn’t know anything anymore.

  “There’s a phone number.” Lydia got up again. She was reaching for her cell phone on the counter when Claire stopped her.

  “Use the burner phone. It’s by the chair in my office.”

  Lydia disappeared down the hallway. Claire stared out at the back yard. The windows were clouded with condensation. Mist was coming off the pool. She would need to have the heater turned down. They rarely used the pool in the winter anyway. Maybe she should have it covered. Or filled in with concrete. The marble coping was a bitch to keep clean. In the summer, the decking got so hot that you had to wear sandals or risk third-degree burns. Paul had designed the pool to be beautiful, not usable.

  If there was a better metaphor for their lives, Claire didn’t know what it was.

  She picked up the iPad. The satellite image of the Buckminster Fuller ho
mestead had been taken during the summer months. The field behind the house was lush with fruit vines. The small single-story house still had the same white wood siding that Claire had so carefully tried to render in Paul’s anniversary painting. Board-and-batten siding, he had told Claire it was called—large, vertical planks of wood with smaller strips to cover the seams. There were bright green asphalt shingles on the roof. The yard was neatly trimmed. The swingset at the rear of the lot looked sturdy and overbuilt, two things that Paul always strived for in residential construction.

  At least Claire knew that Paul hadn’t lied about the accident that killed his parents. He didn’t like to talk about it, but Claire had heard all of the details from her mother. Despite the 30,000 students attending the University of Georgia, Athens was still a small town, and the main library, like every library in America, was the center of the community. What Helen hadn’t read in the newspaper she’d gleaned from local gossip.

  The Scotts were driving home from a church function when a tractor-trailer hit a patch of ice and jackknifed across the Atlanta Highway. Paul’s father had been decapitated. His mother had lived for several seconds. At least that’s what bystanders reported. They had heard the woman screaming as the car was engulfed in flames.

  Paul was terrified of fire. It was the only thing Claire knew of that ever scared him. His burial instructions had specifically stated that he shouldn’t be cremated.

  “What is it?” Lydia asked. She had the burner phone in her hand.

  “I was just thinking about Paul’s burial instructions.” They hadn’t been laminated, but they were similar to all the other instructions Paul had made for Claire’s benefit. She had found the list inside a folder in her desk that was labeled: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

  He wanted to be buried in his family plot. He wanted a headstone that was similar in size and composition to the ones for his parents. He didn’t want make-up or hair gel or to be embalmed or to have his body placed on view like a mannequin because he deplored the artifice surrounding death. He wanted Claire to pick out a nice suit for him, and good shoes, though what did it matter if he wore shoes, good or otherwise, and how would she know if they had put them on him anyway?

  Paul’s last request on the list was the one that was most heartbreaking: He wanted to be buried with his wedding ring and Auburn class ring. Claire had been inconsolable, because she had wanted so badly to honor his wishes, but both rings had been taken by the Snake Man.

  “Claire?” Lydia was holding out the phone. She had already dialed in the number listed for Buckminster Fuller.

  Claire shook her head. “You do it.”

  Lydia turned on the speakerphone. The ringing sound filled the room, bouncing off the stark walls. Claire held her breath. She didn’t know what she was expecting until the phone was answered.

  There was a clicking sound like an old answering machine whirring to life. The recording was scratchy, but the voice was unmistakably Paul’s.

  He said, “You have reached the Fuller residence. If you’re looking for Buck …”

  Claire put her hand to her throat. She knew what was coming next because their own voicemail message followed the same script.

  A chirpy woman’s voice said, “… or Lexie!”

  Paul finished, “Please leave a message at the—”

  A long beep blared from the burner phone’s speaker.

  Lydia ended the call.

  “Lexie,” Claire nearly spat out the word. She sounded younger than Claire. And happier. And stupider, which should’ve been a consolation but Claire was too consumed with jealousy to care.

  Claire stood up. She started pacing.

  “Claire—”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “You can’t really be—”

  “Shut up.” Claire turned on her heel and walked back across the length of the room. She couldn’t believe this. And then she chastised herself for not believing it because, really, at this terrible point in her life, what difference did it make?

  Lydia pulled the iPad into her lap. She started typing again.

  Claire kept pacing from one side of the room to the other. She was well aware that her anger was misdirected, but she had proven on more than one occasion that her anger was fairly uncontrollable.

  Lydia said, “I’m not finding a Lexie Fuller, Alex Fuller, Alexander Fuller … Nothing in the county records.” She kept typing. “I’ll try in Madison, Oglethorpe—”

  “No.” Claire pressed her hand against the wall, wishing she could push down the house. “What if we find her? Then what?”

  “We tell her that her husband’s dead.”

  “Why do you keep wanting to dump my problems onto other people?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Claire knew she was right, but she didn’t care. “So, I knock on this Lexie’s door and introduce myself, and if she doesn’t tell me to fuck off, which is what I would do in her shoes, I tell her, ‘Oh, by the way, in addition to Paul being a polygamist, he’s a thief and probably a rapist and absolutely a stalker and he got off on watching women being tortured and murdered’?” She pushed away from the wall and started pacing again. “Trust me. She doesn’t want to know.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “Absolutely not.” Claire was surprised by her decisiveness. She flashed back to the first time she’d sat in front of Paul’s computer.

  Red pill/blue pill.

  If she could go back, would she choose to live in ignorance? Adam might have eventually told her about the stolen money, but the movies and files would’ve probably remained hidden. Would Claire have gone through the storage area in the basement? Paul was the one with an emotional attachment to silly love notes and the ticket stubs from the first movie they’d ever seen. She had already decided that she couldn’t live in Paul’s dream house without Paul. Claire would’ve probably moved to a smaller house, maybe a condo downtown. She could easily imagine her alternate self calling a shredding service to destroy everything rather than pay to have it put into storage or moved.

  Lydia asked, “Was Paul away on business trips a lot?”

  She shook her head. “Only for a few days at a time, and he usually took me with him.” Claire figured she might as well say what they had both thought when they saw the swingset in the front yard. “If he had a kid, then he’s a really shitty father.”

  Lydia said, “Watkinsville is less than fifteen minutes from a campus filled with coeds.” She waited for Claire to turn around. “What if there are more folders? More women?”

  Claire’s mind went to an even darker place. “Is there a basement in that house?”

  Lydia didn’t move for several seconds. Finally, she started typing on the iPad again. Claire knelt down beside her. Lydia pulled up the tax records for the Watkinsville address. She traced her finger down the descriptions as she read, “Single family home. Wood siding. Built in 1952. Forced air heating. City water. Septic system. No attic square feet. Basement square feet—none.” She looked at Claire. “No basement.”

  Claire slid back down to the floor. She stared out the windows. Sunlight bleached the already-bleached room. “The masked man—that’s not Paul. I know his body.”

  “Is it Adam?”

  The question hit Claire like a punch to the heart. Adam was around the same height as the masked man. He also had the same light coloring. As far as the rest, she didn’t know. Claire hadn’t been in love with Adam Quinn. She hadn’t spent hours lying beside him, touching and kissing his skin, memorizing his body. “We fucked three times. We never took off all of our clothes. It was always standing up.”

  “How romantic.” Lydia put down the iPad. “You’re sure that’s Paul’s voice on the answering machine?”

  Claire nodded, because Paul’s soft, southern drawl was unmistakable. “What should we do?” She amended, “I mean, what should I do?”

  Lydia didn’t answer. She just stared out into the back yard the same way Claire had done before. />
  Claire joined her, absently watching a lone squirrel hop across the decking and drink saline water from the pool. Asking what to do next was a loaded question, because what it all boiled down to was whether or not Claire wanted to know more. This was past red pill/blue pill. This was skinning the proverbial onion.

  They both jumped when the phone rang.

  Claire checked the burner, but the screen was blank.

  Lydia said, “It’s not my cell.”

  The phone rang a second time. Claire crawled toward the cordless handset on the table beside the couch. The phone rang again. She started to get that familiar sick feeling, even before she heard Fred Nolan’s voice.

  “Claire,” he said. “Glad I caught you.”

  His voice was as loud and clear as a church bell. Claire held the phone away from her ear so that Lydia could hear, too.

  He said, “I think I’m going to take you up on that offer to talk to you and your lawyer.”

  Claire’s eardrums filled with the pounding of her own heartbeat. “When?”

  “How about today?”

  “It’s Sunday.” She hadn’t realized what day it was until now. Almost a full week had passed since Paul had been murdered.

  Nolan said, “I’m sure you’ve got enough money to pay the Colonel’s weekend rate.”

  The Colonel. That was what they’d called Wynn Wallace, the lawyer who’d helped Claire get out of the assault charge. Paul had called him the Colonel because he was the same type of arrogant prick as Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men.

  “Claire?”

  How would Nolan know their private nickname? Had Paul used the Colonel to get out of the embezzlement charges, too?

  “Hello?”

  She looked at Lydia, who was shaking her head so hard that she was probably going to give herself whiplash.

  Claire asked, “Where?”

  Nolan gave her the address.

  “I’ll be there in two hours.” Claire ended the call. She put the receiver back in the cradle. When she took her hand away, she saw that her palm had left a sweaty mark.