Pretty Girls: A Novel Read online

Rick yelled, “Go, Delgado!”

  Dee obviously saw the looming shadows of three giant girls behind her. There was no one to pass to. She blindly heaved the ball toward the basket, only to watch it bounce off the backboard and drop into the empty bleachers on the other side of the gym.

  Lydia felt Rick’s pinky finger stroke her pinky finger.

  He asked, “How did she get so amazing?”

  “Wheaties.” Lydia could barely get the word out. Her heart always swelled when she saw how much Rick loved her daughter. She could forgive the ponytail for that alone. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch lately.” She amended, “I mean, for the last decade.”

  “I’m sure you were bitchy before that.”

  “I was a lot more fun.”

  He raised his eyebrow. They had met at a Twelve Step meeting thirteen years ago. Neither one of them had been a lot of fun.

  “I was thinner,” she tried.

  “Sure, that’s what matters.” Rick kept his eyes on the game. “What’s gotten into you, babe? Every time I open my mouth lately, you howl like a scalded dog.”

  “Aren’t you glad we’re not living together?”

  “We gonna have that fight again?”

  She almost started to. The words, “but why do we need to live together when we live right next door to each other?” were right on the tip of her tongue.

  The effort didn’t go unnoticed. “Nice to see you can keep your mouth shut when you really want to.” He whistled as Dee tried for three points. The ball missed, but he still gave her a thumbs-up when she glanced his way.

  Lydia was tempted to tell him that Dee wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about his approval if they lived together, but decided to save it for the next time they were yelling at each other.

  Rick sighed as the opposing team got the ball. “Oh Lord, here we go.”

  The dinner-plate girl was blocking Dee. She didn’t even have the decency to raise her arms.

  Rick sat back against the bleachers. His boots rested on the seat in front of him. There were oil stains on the cracked brown leather. His jeans had grease spots. He smelled faintly of engine exhaust. He had kind eyes. He loved her daughter. He loved animals. Even squirrels. He had read every book Danielle Steele had ever written because he got hooked in rehab. He didn’t mind that most of Lydia’s clothes were covered in dog hair or that her only regret about their sex life was that she couldn’t do it wearing a burqa.

  She asked, “What do I need to do?”

  “Tell me what’s going on in that crazy head of yours.”

  “I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.”

  He thought it over for a moment. “All right. Just don’t mess up my face.”

  Lydia stared at the scoreboard. 10–0. She blinked. 12–0. “I just …” She didn’t know how to say what she needed to say. “It’s just history coming back on me.”

  “That sounds like a country music song.” He looked her in the eye. “Anna Kilpatrick.”

  Lydia chewed her lip. He wasn’t asking a question. He was giving an answer. He’d seen all the clippings she’d kept on Anna Kilpatrick’s disappearance, the way Lydia’s eyes filled with tears whenever the girl’s parents were on the news.

  He said, “I heard the police found a new clue.”

  “All they can do now is hope they find the body.”

  “She might be alive.”

  “Optimism is a sliver of glass in your heart.”

  “That from another song?”

  “From my father.”

  He smiled at her. She loved the way the lines around his eyes crinkled. “Babe, I know I asked you to stay away from the news, but I think you should know something.”

  Rick wasn’t smiling anymore. She felt her heart lurch in her chest.

  “Is she dead?” Lydia put her hand to her throat. “Did they find Anna?”

  “No, I would’ve told you right off. You know that.”

  She did know that, but her heart was still racing.

  “I saw it in the crime blotter this morning.” Rick was visibly reluctant, but he pushed on. “It happened three days ago. Paul Scott, architect, married to Claire Scott. They were downtown. Got robbed. Paul took the wrong end of a knife. Died before they got him to the hospital. Funeral’s tomorrow.”

  The Mothers erupted into another round of cheering and clapping. Dee had somehow managed to get the ball again. Lydia watched her daughter sprint down the court. Dinner-Plate Hands snatched away the ball. Dee didn’t give up. She chased after the girl. She was fearless. She was fearless in every aspect of her life. And why wouldn’t she be? No one had ever slapped her down. Life hadn’t had a chance to hurt her. She had never lost anyone. She had never known the sorrow of having someone taken away.

  Rick asked, “You gonna say something?”

  Lydia had a lot to say, but she wasn’t going to let Rick see that side of her; that angry, brutal side that she’d anesthetized with coke and when the coke was too much, pushed down with food.

  “Liddie?”

  She shook her head. Tears streamed down her face. “I just hope he suffered.”

  II

  It’s your birthday today, the fourth birthday that has passed without you. As usual, I set aside some time to go through our family photos and let all of the memories wash over me. I only allow myself this pleasure once a year, because doling out these precious memories is what gets me through the countless, endless days without you.

  My favorite photograph is from your first birthday. Your mother and I were far more excited than you were, though you were generally a happy baby. To you, this birthday was just another day. Nothing remarkable except the cake, which you immediately destroyed with your fists. There were only two of us on the guest list. Your mother said it was silly to publicly mark an event that you would never remember. I readily agreed, because I was selfish, and because I was never happier than when I had my girls all to myself.

  I timed myself as the memories ebbed and flowed. Two hours. No more. No less. Then I carefully placed the pictures back into the box, closed the lid, and put them on the shelf for next year.

  Next, as is my routine, I walked to the sheriff’s office. He stopped returning my calls long ago. I could see the dread in his eyes when he saw me through the glass partition.

  I am his challenger. I am his failure. I am his pathetic pain in the ass who won’t accept the truth that his daughter walked away.

  Our first birthday without you, I went to the sheriff’s office and calmly requested to read all of the files pertaining to your case. He refused. I threatened to call the newspaper. He told me to go ahead. I went to the payphone in the lobby. I slotted in a quarter. He came over and hung up the phone and told me to follow him back into the squad room.

  We performed this same kabuki theater year after year until finally, this year, he gave up without a fight. A deputy led me back to a small interrogation room where they had laid out copies of all the files pertaining to your investigation. He offered me a glass of water, but I pointed to my lunch box and thermos and told him I was fine.

  There is no clear narrative to a police report. Your file has no beginning, middle, and end. There are summaries of witness statements (most of their names unhelpfully blacked out), handwritten notes from detectives that use a language I have yet to master, statements that have proven to be false and others suspected to be false (again, blacked out) statements that have proven to be true (everybody lies to some degree when questioned by the police) and interview notes with a paltry list of suspects (yes, their names are all blacked out like the others).

  Two different types of maps have been taped together, one showing downtown and the other showing the campus, so that your last known footsteps can be traced across town.

  There are also photographs: your dorm room with favorite clothes unaccounted for, toiletries mysteriously gone, textbooks abandoned, reports half finished, a missing bicycle (though it was later found).

  The first sheet of p
aper in your file is the same sheet of paper I saw on the first anniversary of your birthday, then the second, the third, and now the fourth.

  CASE PENDING UNTIL FARTHER LEADS.

  Your mother would’ve used a red pen to correct the word to FURTHER, but I take craven pleasure in knowing that from the very first page, they are wrong.

  This is what the weather was like on Monday, March 4, 1991:

  The high was 51 degrees. The low was 37. The skies were cloudless. There was no precipitation. The dew point was 34 degrees. Winds came out of the northwest at sixteen miles per hour. There were twelve hours and twenty-three minutes of visible daylight.

  These were some of the items in the news that week:

  The murder trial of Pamela Smart began.

  Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  A United Airlines flight went down near Colorado Springs.

  President Bush declared the Iraq War was over.

  You disappeared.

  Here are the sheriff’s explanations for why he thinks you left us:

  You were angry with us because we wouldn’t let you live off campus.

  You were furious that we would not let you drive to Atlanta for a concert.

  You had been arguing with your sister about the provenance of a straw hat.

  You had stopped speaking to your grandmother because she had implied that you were gaining weight.

  The sheriff has no children of his own. He does not understand that these high states of emotion are simply a by-product of being a nineteen-year-old young woman. These disagreements were such minor storms in our family ecosystem that at the start of the investigation, we failed to mention even one of them.

  Which, to his thinking, meant that we were trying to hide something.

  In fairness, you were no stranger to the police. You had been arrested twice before. The first time, you were caught in a secure lab at the university protesting the research of genetically modified organisms. The second time, you were caught smoking pot in the back of Wuxtry, the record store where your friend Sally worked.

  Here are the so-called clues the sheriff cites to support his runaway theory:

  Your toothbrush and hairbrush were gone (or maybe you’d accidentally left them in the communal shower).

  A small leather satchel was missing from your roommate’s closet (or maybe she’d let a friend use it for Spring Break).

  Some of your clothes seemed to be missing (or borrowed without your permission).

  Most damningly, you had left an unfinished love letter on your desk—Kiss you in Paris … hold your hand in Rome …

  Here, said the sheriff, was proof that you were planning to leave.

  Here, said your sister, was proof that you were writing a music review of Madonna’s “Justify my Love.”

  There was a boy, though any father of a teenage girl can tell you there is always a boy. He had ruffled hair and rolled his own cigarettes and talked about his feelings far too much for my comfort. You were interested in him, which meant you weren’t really dating yet. There were notes being passed back and forth. Records of late-night phone calls. Soulful mix tapes delivered. You were both so young. This was the beginning of something that might lead to everything or nothing at all.

  To answer the obvious question, the boy was camping with his family when you were taken. He had an airtight alibi. A park ranger had seen him with the family. The man had stopped by their campsite to warn them that a coyote had been sighted in the area. He sat with the family by the fire and discussed football with the father because the boy was not a fan.

  The park ranger’s contribution to the case did not stop there. He offered the sheriff a possible explanation, an explanation the sheriff later presented as fact.

  That same week, the ranger had come across a band of stragglers camping in the woods. They had been moving around the state for a while. They dressed in dark clothing. They cooked their meals on an open fire. They walked down country roads with their hands clasped behind their backs and their heads down. Drugs were involved, because with these sorts of characters, drugs are always involved.

  Some called them a cult. Others said they were homeless. Many said they were runaways. Most called them a nuisance. You, my sweet girl, were heard by many of your friends sympathetically referring to them as free spirits, which is why the sheriff assumed that, lacking any other leads, you had simply run off to join them.

  You volunteered at the homeless shelter and you drank alcohol even though you were underage and you were caught smoking pot, so it only made sense.

  By the time the runaway theory became cemented in the sheriff’s mind, the group of stragglers, the cult, the free spirits— whatever they were called—had moved on. They were eventually located in North Carolina, too stoned and too disbanded to say who had been among them.

  “She looks very familiar,” one of the few remaining original members had written in his statement. “But we all have eyes and noses and teeth, so doesn’t that mean that everybody looks familiar?”

  This is why we know you were abducted:

  You were mad at your mother, but you still came home the day before and talked to her in the kitchen while you did your laundry.

  You were furious with your sister, but you still let her borrow your yellow scarf.

  You despised your grandmother, but you still left a card to be mailed the following week for her birthday.

  While it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you would run into the woods and join a group of aimless, wandering vagabonds, it is completely impossible that you would ever do so without telling us first.

  This is what we know you did on the day you were taken:

  At 7:30 on the morning of Monday, March 4, you joined some friends from the homeless shelter and went to Hot Corner to pass out food and blankets. At 9:48 a.m., Carleen Loper, the desk monitor at Lipscomb Hall, was on duty and recorded your return to the dorm. Your roommate, Nancy Griggs, left for the pottery lab at 10:15 a.m. She said you were tired and had gone back to bed. Your English professor remembers you from his noon workshop. He offered you some editorial suggestions on your Spenser paper. He recalls a lively discussion. (He was later ruled out as a suspect because that evening, he was teaching a class on the other side of campus.)

  Around 1:00 p.m., you went to the Tate Student Center where you ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a salad that you shared with Veronica Voorhees.

  The next part is less specific, but based on interviews, the sheriff managed to put together a likely list of your activities. At some point, you dropped by the Red & Black offices to deliver your story on UGA’s attempt to privatize meal services. You returned to the student center and played a game of pool with a boy named Ezekiel Mann. You sat on the tweed couches in the lounge with another boy named David Conford. He told you that he’d heard Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM, would be at the Manhattan Cafe that night. Friends in the vicinity claim that Conford asked you to go with him, but he insists that he did not ask you out on a date.

  “We were just friends,” he said in his statement. The deputy who interviewed him made a note that the boy had obviously wanted to be more. (Witnesses place both Mann and Conford in the student center later that evening.)

  On or around 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, you left the Tate. You walked home, leaving your bike outside the student center, likely because it was getting colder and you didn’t want to freeze going down Baxter Hill. (Two weeks later, your bike was found chained to the rack outside the center.)

  According to the desk monitor, by 5:00 p.m., you were back in your dorm room. Your roommate Nancy recalls your excitement when you told her that Michael Stipe was going to be at the Manhattan. You both decided you would get a group together and go later that night. You were all underage, but you knew John MacCallister, a townie who worked the front door, from high school. Nancy made several calls to friends. A meeting time of 9:30 p.m. was arranged.

&nbs
p; Since your psych professor had scheduled an exam before Spring Break, you and Nancy went to the North library to study. Around 8:30 p.m., you were both seen at the Taco Stand, a restaurant catty-corner from the black iron arch that stands at the main campus entrance. You took the food back to Lipscomb Hall. You entered through the back door, which was propped open, so the night desk monitor, a woman named Beth Tindall, did not record your entry.

  Upstairs, both you and Nancy showered and dressed for the evening. You were wearing saddle loafers, black jeans, a man’s white button-up shirt, and an embroidered silver and gold vest. You had silver bangles on your wrist and a locket that belonged to your sister around your neck.

  Later, Nancy could not recall whether or not you brought back from the communal showers the wire basket you kept your toiletries in (they were not found in your dorm room). Nancy mentions in one of her statements that abandoned items in the bathrooms were generally either stolen or thrown away.

  At 9:30 p.m., you met your friends at the Manhattan Cafe, where you were told that the Michael Stipe rumor was false. Someone mentioned that the band was touring in Asia. Someone else said they were in California.

  There was an overall sense of disappointment, but it was agreed that you all might as well stay for drinks. It was Monday night. Everyone but you had classes the next day, a fact that later worked to your disadvantage, because Nancy assumed you had gone home to finish your laundry and we assumed that you were at school.

  The first round was Pabst Blue Ribbon, which the Manhattan served for a dollar each. At some point later, you were seen holding a Moscow Mule, a cocktail that sold for four dollars fifty and featured vodka, Blenheim ginger ale, and lime. Nancy Griggs indicated that a man must have purchased the drink because all the girls had a habit of asking for the expensive cocktail whenever a man was paying.

  A song you liked came on the jukebox. You started dancing. Someone said the song was by C+C Music Factory. Others said it was Lisa Lisa. Regardless, your enthusiasm was contagious. Soon, what little floor space there was in the club was taken up with dancers.

  That night, there was no particular boy you seemed to favor. All of your friends told the sheriff that you danced because you loved dancing, not because you were trying to attract men. (So, you weren’t an evil temptress, though the sheriff tried his best to make that part of your story.)