Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 20

  Lydia asked, “You’re going to give him the files?”

  “No. I’m not going downtown.” Claire stood up. “I’m going to Athens.”

  “What?” Lydia stood up, too. She followed Claire into the mudroom. “You just told Nolan you were—”

  “Fuck Nolan.” Claire picked up her purse. She slid her feet into her tennis shoes. She didn’t know why, but she had to see Lexie Fuller. She wasn’t going to talk to her or drop a bomb on her life, but Claire needed to see the other woman with her own two eyes.

  She said, “Listen, Lydia, I really appreciate—”

  “Shut up. I’m coming with you.” Lydia disappeared into the house.

  Claire checked the mailbox on the video keypad by the door. The Auburn USB drive was still there. It was 9:13 on a Sunday morning. Was it a good or bad thing that Adam Quinn was sleeping in? Or had he left the drive for someone else to pick up? Was Jacob Mayhew on his way? Would Fred Nolan consider Claire’s absence in two hours a form of willfully misleading a federal agent? Would she return home tonight to her own bed, or would she be spending the next few years of her life in prison?

  Lydia returned with her purse. She had her iPhone in one hand and the burner in the other. “I’m driving.”

  Claire didn’t argue because Lydia was older and she always got to drive. She opened the mudroom door and left it unlocked. At this point, Claire welcomed the burglars to return. She would’ve left cookies out for them if she’d had the time.

  Claire unplugged the Tesla. The keyfob was on the bench where she’d left it. She threw it into her purse and got into the car. Lydia climbed in behind the wheel. She reached down and adjusted the seat. She moved the mirrors. She frowned at the glowing seventeen-inch touchscreen that ran down the middle of the dashboard.

  “This is electric, right?” Lydia sounded annoyed. She’d always been angry around new things. “Athens is an hour away.”

  “Really? I’ve never noticed that the eleventy billion times I’ve driven this very same car to Mom’s house and back.” At least she had before the ankle monitor limited her movements. “Can we just go?”

  Lydia still looked annoyed. “Where does the key go?”

  “Tap the brake to turn it on.”

  Lydia tapped the brake. “Is it on? I can’t even hear it.”

  “Are you three hundred years old?” Claire demanded. “Jesus Christ, it’s still a car. Even Grandma Ginny could figure it out.”

  “That was really mean.” She put the gear in reverse. The video screen switched to the rear camera view. Lydia huffed in disgust as she inched back the car and turned it around.

  The gate was still open at the bottom of the driveway. Claire felt like ten years had passed since she sat in the back of the limousine with her mother and grandmother. She tried to remember how she’d felt. The purity of her grief had been such a luxury.

  There was another woman in Watkinsville who might be feeling those same pure emotions of grief. Paul had been gone for almost a week. She would’ve called hospitals and police stations and the highway patrol and whoever else would listen. And she would be told by everyone who did even the slightest bit of research that Buckminster Fuller, the father of the geodesic dome, had died in 1983.

  Claire wondered what story Paul had given the woman to explain his absences. Traveling salesman. Government agent. Roughneck working an oil rig. Pilot.

  Paul had trained for his pilot’s license in college. He was rated for light jets, which meant that whenever they hired a charter, he was always up in the cockpit talking tailwinds and altimeters with the pilots. Claire used to feel sorry for the poor men who were trying to keep the plane in the sky.

  Should she feel sorry for Lexie Fuller? And did she have a right to keep the other woman in the dark about Paul? Claire of all people knew the kind of hell that knowing the truth would rain down. Could she do that to another human being?

  Or maybe Lexie already knew about Claire. Maybe the young little bitch was completely fine with sharing another woman’s husband, with raising the man’s bastard child—or children— while he kept another wife.

  Claire closed her eyes. What an awful thing to say about the other woman. She was turning Lexie into a monster when Paul had likely fooled them both. Even if Lexie was complicit in polygamy, there was no way she knew about the dreadful shit that Paul was into.

  “Dyadic Completion,” Paul would’ve told Claire. “The human brain tends to assume that, if there’s a victim, there has to be a villain.”

  Was that how Claire was thinking of herself now, as just another one of Paul’s victims?

  “Claire?” Lydia had relaxed her stranglehold on the steering wheel. “I think we need more information.”

  Just the thought made Claire cringe. “What do you mean?”

  “The county’s online records only go back ten years. Has Paul always owned the house?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “I just wonder if there were other Mrs. Fullers.”

  Claire stared at the road. The problem with being around Lydia was that she easily thought the worst of Paul. “You think he buried them in the back yard?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Claire leaned her head into her hand. She didn’t want Lydia here, but she couldn’t imagine doing this without her. She had forgotten how annoying it was to have a sister.

  Lydia signaled to merge onto the interstate. By way of an olive branch, she offered, “Dad always hated driving on Sundays.”

  Claire didn’t want to, but she smiled. When her father was teaching her to drive, he’d warned her that Sunday was the most dangerous day to be on the road. He’d said that people were tired and grumpy from sitting in church for hours in scratchy clothes, and that they drove like bats out of hell when they were finally released.

  Lydia asked, “What were you doing at the McDonald’s yesterday?”

  Claire told her the truth. “Wondering if it would be impolite to throw up in the bathroom without ordering something.”

  “I think they’re used to it.” Lydia accelerated into the fast lane. For someone who had complained so much about the car, she seemed to be enjoying the ride. “What do you think Nolan’s going to do when you don’t show up at his office?”

  “I guess it depends. If what he’s doing is legitimate, then he’ll put out an APB on me. If it’s not, then he’ll start calling me again, or go by the house.”

  “You left the garage door open. All he has to do is go inside and look at Paul’s laptop.”

  “Let him.” Claire couldn’t see the point of trying to hide the movies. She was the one who’d turned them over to the police in the first place. “The same rules apply. If Nolan is there legitimately, then he’ll have a search warrant. If he’s not, then he can take the hard drive and shove it up his ass.”

  “Maybe he’ll be there when Adam picks up the USB drive.”

  “Great. They can watch the movies and jerk off together.”

  Lydia didn’t laugh. “Can I ask you something?”

  Claire studied her sister. She wasn’t the type to ask for permission. “What?”

  “What do you do all day? Do you have a job or what?”

  Claire sensed a loaded question. Lydia probably assumed she sat around all day eating bon-bons and spending Paul’s money. To be fair, sometimes she did, but other times Claire felt she made up for it. “I volunteer a lot. The humane shelter. The food bank. The USO.” She might as well be making a list of all the things that were important to her father. “I was helping at the Innocence Project for a while, but a case came through with Ben Carver’s name on it.” Ben Carver had been one of two serial killers who had strung their father along. “I took French and German to travel on. I still play the piano. I cut the grass if it needs it and it’s not too hot. I used to play tennis three or four hours a day, but for some reason no one will play with me anymore.” She asked Lydia, “What about you?”

  “I work. I
go home. I go to sleep. I get up and work again.”

  Claire nodded as if she didn’t know otherwise. “You dating anybody?”

  “Not really.” Lydia darted around a slow-moving Mercedes. “Does Mom know you’ve talked to me?” She acted like the question was spontaneous, but the rawness in her voice gave her away.

  “I didn’t tell her,” Claire admitted. “But only because I was upset, and I knew if I called her she would hear it in my voice and get the truth out of me.”

  “What’s the truth?”

  “That you weren’t lying, and that the fact that you weren’t lying meant that Paul was, which means that my eighteen-year marriage was complete and utter bullshit and my husband was a psychopath.”

  Lydia tucked her chin into her neck, but for once, she kept her mouth closed.

  Claire realized, “I haven’t apologized to you for what I did.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she tried, but the two words seemed so small compared with the enormity of what she’d taken away. “I should’ve believed you.” Claire knew that wasn’t quite right, either. She couldn’t imagine a scenario at that point in their lives where she might have trusted Lydia. “Even if I didn’t believe you, I should’ve never let you go.”

  Lydia had her head turned away. She sniffed.

  Claire looked down at her sister’s hand. She didn’t know whether or not to touch her. “I’m sorry, Pepper. I abandoned you. I made Mom abandon you.”

  “You couldn’t make Mom do anything she didn’t want to do.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” For the first time, Claire considered the full implications of what she had actually done. She hadn’t just cut Lydia out of her own life. She had excised her from what was left of her family. “Mom was terrified of losing another child. I knew that and I worked it in my favor because I was so angry at you. I forced her into a Sophie’s choice.” Claire thought this might be the only situation where that phrase was even mildly applicable. “I was wrong. I’m so profoundly sorry for what I did to you. To our family.”

  “Well,” Lydia wiped away tears, “I was pretty messed up back then. Everything you said was true. I stole from all of you. I lied all of the time.”

  “But you never lied about something like that, and I should’ve seen it.” Claire laughed at the gross understatement. “Obviously, I didn’t see a lot of things.”

  Lydia’s throat worked as she fought back more tears.

  Claire didn’t know what else to say. That she was proud of her sister for getting clean and pulling herself up from dire poverty? That her daughter was beautiful and accomplished and clearly amazing? That her boyfriend obviously worshipped her? Everything she knew about Lydia’s life had come from Paul’s private detectives.

  Which meant that even though Claire had bared the dark, rotted soul of her marriage, Lydia still didn’t trust her with the truth about her own life.

  “So.” Lydia was obviously ready to change the subject. She waved her hand at the touchscreen. “Does this thing have a radio?”

  “It can play any song you want.” Claire touched the media icon. “Just say out loud what you want to hear and it’ll find it on the Internet and play it.”

  “No way.”

  “Welcome to the one percent.” Claire split the display. She felt like the eager young kid at the Tesla dealership as she swiped through the different screens. “You can read your email, see how much battery power you have left, go on the Internet.”

  Claire stopped. When she’d touched the Internet icon, the system reloaded the last page Paul had looked at. Feedly.com was a news aggregator that operated along the same lines as Google alerts, but with news stories.

  Paul had entered only one name into the search engine.

  Lydia asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Pull over.”

  “Why?”

  “Pull over.”

  Lydia gave a heavy sigh, but she still did as Claire ordered. The rumble strips roared inside the car as they coasted to a stop on the side of the interstate.

  Lydia asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Paul set an alert for any news on Anna Kilpatrick. The last one came in two minutes ago.”

  Lydia grabbed her purse and pulled out her glasses. “What are you waiting for?”

  Claire tapped her finger on the most recent alert, a link from Channel 2, an Atlanta ABC affiliate.

  The top of the home page showed a black box for streaming video. The red banner read: “LIVE! Breaking News in the Anna Kilpatrick Case.” A spinning circle indicated the video was buffering. Claire turned up the sound. They both waited, eyes focused on the screen.

  The Tesla shook as a brown UPS truck drove by.

  Lydia said, “This is taking forever.”

  Finally, the video loaded, but there wasn’t much to see. Captain Mayhew was standing behind a podium. Congressman Johnny Jackson, never one to miss a media opportunity, was standing behind him, slightly to the right so that he’d still be in the camera frame. They were both looking at a closed door off to the side. There were flashes of light from the cameras and shuffling sounds as the reporters grew impatient.

  A voiceover explained, “We’ve been told that the parents arrived in the building five minutes ago.” The reporter did a recap of the Kilpatrick disappearance, going back to the police finding the girl’s car in the parking lot of Lenox mall.

  Claire could remember doing press conferences with her family. Back then, there were really only three news stations, so the conferences were held in the small front lobby of the sheriff’s station. Claire and Lydia were told to look devastated, but not too devastated. Helen had worried that Julia’s abductor would see her last two daughters and want to take them, too. The sheriff had told them to address their comments to Julia, because he adamantly believed she was out there in some rundown hotel laughing at her parents making fools of themselves on the evening news.

  Lydia said, “Here they come.”

  On the screen, the side door opened. Anna Kilpatrick’s parents made their way up to the stage and stood on Mayhew’s left. He nodded at them as if to say, We’ll get through this. They did not nod back. They both looked like death-row inmates awaiting execution.

  Lydia said, “They found the body.”

  Claire shushed her, but seconds later, Mayhew confirmed her guess.

  He said, “The remains of a young woman were found at approximately four a.m. this morning on a jogging trail off the BeltLine.”

  The BeltLine ran through Midtown. Claire had some friends who jokingly referred to it as the Rape Line because of the large number of sexual assaults that happened on the trail.

  Mayhew continued, “The Dekalb County crime lab was able to identify the remains based on photographs and fingerprints. The Kilpatricks confirmed the findings an hour ago.”

  Claire asked, “They let them see the body?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to?”

  Claire wasn’t so sure anymore.

  Mayhew said, “At this moment, we have no additional leads. We would ask that anyone who recognizes the man from this sketch please call the hotline.” He held up the police sketch of the man who’d been seen near Anna’s car. “The Kilpatricks would like to thank everyone who helped search for—”

  Claire muted the sound, because she knew what was coming next. The reporters would ask questions. Mayhew would not give them answers. She watched Mayhew gesture to Bob Kilpatrick, Anna’s father. The man had the same weepy, broken expression that she had seen countless times on her father’s face.

  Lydia had seen it, too. “He reminds me of Dad.”

  Claire forced herself to look away from Eleanor Kilpatrick. The woman was clinging to her husband like they were lost at sea. And they were lost—even if they made it back to land, they would always be on unsteady ground.

  Lydia held Claire’s hand. She felt the comfort of her sister’s touch spread through her like warm water. They sat in the car, lis
tening to trucks whir by. Would Claire want to see Julia’s body? It would be different after all these years. There would just be bones, but the bones would mean so much because they would have something to bury, some place to leave their grief.

  “What’s happening?” Lydia was not posing an existential question. She was pointing to the touchscreen. Eleanor Kilpatrick had pushed Mayhew out of the way. She gripped the microphone in her hand.

  Claire turned up the volume.

  Eleanor Kilpatrick’s angry voice screeched from the speakers: “—was branded like a Goddamn animal!”

  The feed was cut. The Channel 2 news anchor came on-screen. “We’d like to apologize to our viewers for the language you just heard.”

  “Find the uncensored feed,” Lydia ordered. “Find it!”

  “I’m looking.” Claire had already pulled up the search page. The newsfeed had updated again. There were a dozen more sites carrying the press conference. Claire picked the sketchiest one. The rainbow wheel in the center of the screen started to spin.

  Lydia said, “Try another one.”

  “Give it time.” Claire gripped her hands together so she wouldn’t grab the screen. She was about to give up when the page finally loaded.

  Mayhew was frozen, the microphone in front of him. Jackson stared straight ahead like a good soldier. Claire pressed the PLAY button. He said, “The remains of a young woman—”

  “It’s at the beginning.” Lydia had obviously been paying attention. She scrubbed her finger along the bottom of the video until it got to Eleanor Kilpatrick’s outburst.

  “This is bullshit!” the woman screamed.

  Johnny Jackson skillfully stepped out of the frame, leaving the damage control to Jacob Mayhew.

  “Mrs. Kilpatrick.” Mayhew covered the mic with his hand.

  “No!” Eleanor Kilpatrick tried to push away his hand. She was a small woman. She couldn’t move him, so she turned to the reporters and yelled, “My daughter was cut up!”

  They responded with a strobe of flashing lights.

  Mayhew repeated, “Mrs. Kilpatrick.”