Pretty Girls: A Novel Read online

  At exactly 10:38 p.m., you told Nancy that you had a headache and were going to return to the dorm. She knows this was the time because she looked at her watch. She asked you to stay until eleven, at which point you could walk back to the dorm together. You told her you couldn’t wait that long, and to try to be quiet when she got in.

  The sheriff must have asked Nancy about your level of intoxication, because he writes in his notes that Nancy said you were not showing a high level of intoxication, but that you kept yawning and seemed unfocused.

  The last sentence in Nancy’s signed statement simply reads: After 10:38 p.m., I never saw her again.

  No one saw you after that. At least no one who didn’t mean you harm.

  Nancy’s last sentence is on the last page in your file. There is nothing more we know. As the sheriff might say, we don’t have anything farther.

  Here is something the sheriff does not know and that your mother refuses to believe: I remember looking at my watch that night. It was a few minutes later, closer to eleven, most likely the time you were taken.

  We were having a late dinner at Harry Bissett’s Grill on Broad Street, roughly five blocks away from the Manhattan. Your mother was downstairs using the restroom. The waiter offered to bring the check. I looked at my watch—that was when I noted the time. Your little sister was home studying with a friend, but she was old enough to put herself to bed, so I decided to order your mother’s favorite dessert.

  I remember watching her walk back up the stairs. I couldn’t stop smiling, because your mother was particularly beautiful that night. Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing a white cotton dress that curved around her hips. Her skin glowed. There was so much life in her eyes. When she smiled at me, I felt like an explosion had gone off inside my heart. I could not possibly love her more than I loved her in that moment: my wife, my friend, the woman who had given me such kind, thoughtful, beautiful children.

  She sat across from me at the table. I took both her hands in mine.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  I kissed the inside of her wrists and answered what I felt at that moment was the absolute truth. “Because everything is perfect.”

  This is what I know that I am:

  A fool.

  THREE

  She had just buried her husband.

  Claire kept repeating the words in her head as if she were narrating a story rather than experiencing the event in her actual life.

  Claire Scott had just buried her husband.

  There was more, because the service had been long, with many moving parts that Claire recalled with her cold narrator’s eye.

  The casket was gunmetal gray with a blanket of white lilies covering the closed lid. The smell of wet earth was pungent as the machine lowered his body into the grave. Claire’s knees went weak. Her grandmother stroked her back. Her mother offered her arm. Claire shook her head. She thought of strong things: Iron. Steel. Paul. It was not until they were climbing into the back of the black limousine that Claire truly understood that she would never see her husband again.

  She was going home—back to their home, the home that they had shared. People would meet her there, parking their cars along the curving driveway and spilling into the street. They would make toasts. They would tell stories. In his will, Paul had requested a wake, though Claire had been too hung up on the derivation of the word to call it that. She asked herself: Wake as in, maybe Paul will wake up? Wake as in, the disturbed trail of water left behind a boat?

  Claire felt the second wake made the most sense. The calm had been disturbed. She was trapped in turbulent waters. Swimming against grief. Drowning in sympathy.

  There had been so many phone calls and cards and flower arrangements and notices of donations that had been made in Paul’s name. Architecture for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity. The American Cancer Society, though Paul had not died of cancer.

  Was there a charity for murder victims? Surely this was something Claire should’ve looked into. Was it too late? Four days had passed since that awful night. The funeral was over. People she hadn’t seen or heard from in years had already sent their respects. They kept telling her that she was in their thoughts, that Paul was a good man, that they were there for her.

  Claire nodded when they said this—at the police station, at the hospital, at the funeral home, at the graveside service—though she wasn’t quite sure where there was.

  “How are you holding up?” they asked. “How are you feeling?”

  Disembodied.

  That was the word that best described Claire’s feelings. She had looked up the definition on her iPad last night to make sure she had it right.

  Existing without or separated from the body.

  Lacking any obvious physical source.

  Again, the second definition fit best, because Paul had been her physical source. He had given weight to her life, tied her down to the world when her natural inclination had always been to float above everything as if it were happening to someone else.

  She had felt this intense disembodiment for the last four days, really from the moment the Snake Man had told them to turn around. And then the police, the undertaker, asking if she wanted to see the body one last time and Claire blanching at the word “body” and sobbing like a child because she had spent every single second since they had taken Paul from her arms trying to remove the image of her lifeless, murdered husband from her mind.

  Claire Scott wanted to see her husband again.

  She did not want to see his body.

  She stared out the window. They were inching forward in dense Atlanta traffic. The funeral procession had been truncated two lights back. Only their limo stayed out ahead. This wasn’t like the country, where strangers respectfully pulled over to the side of the road to let mourners pass. They ignored the police officers riding ahead on their motorcycles. They ignored the yellow FUNERAL flags that people had stuck on their cars. They ignored everyone but Claire, who felt like the world was staring into the back of the car trying to catch a glimpse of her grief.

  She struggled to remember the last time she’d ridden in a stretch limousine. Certainly decades had passed since she rode in any type of car with both her mother and grandmother. That last limo ride must have been a trip to the airport with Paul. The car service had given them an upgrade from the usual sedan.

  “Are we going to the prom?” Paul had asked.

  They had been on their way to Munich for an architectural conference. Paul had booked them into the Kempinski. For six blissful days, Claire swam laps in the pool, had massages and facials, ordered room service, and shopped alongside wealthy Middle Eastern wives whose husbands were in Germany for healthcare. Paul would join her in the evenings for dinners and late-night strolls along the Maximilianstrasse.

  If she thought about it hard enough, she could remember what it felt like to hold his hand as they passed the darkened windows of all the closed shops.

  She would never hold his hand again. She would never roll over in bed and rest her head on his chest. She would never see him come down for breakfast wearing those God-awful velour shorts she hated. She would never spend her Saturdays on the couch with him, reading while he watched football games, or go to another corporate dinner party or wine tasting or golf tournament, and even if she did, what would be the point if Paul wasn’t there to laugh with her about it?

  Claire opened her mouth for air. She felt as though she was suffocating in the closed limo. She rolled down the window and took great gulps of cold air.

  “We’ll be there soon,” her mother said. She was sitting across from Claire. Her hand was wrapped around the liquor decanters in the side console because the sound of the rattling glass was the proverbial fingernails on a blackboard.

  Her grandmother, Ginny, buttoned up her coat, but said nothing about the cold.

  Claire rolled up the window. She was sweating. Her lungs felt shaky. She couldn’t think beyond the next few hours. There were goin
g to be over one hundred people at the house. Paul’s partner at the firm, Adam Quinn, had turned the guest list for the wake into a corporate event for Quinn + Scott. A US Congressman; several captains of industry and their trophy wives; a handful of hedge fund managers, bankers, restaurateurs and real estate developers, and countless blowhards Claire had never met before and, frankly, had never wanted to, would soon be tracking through the house.

  Their house.

  They lived in Dunwoody, a suburb just outside of Atlanta. The lot had a gentle slope; at its crest had been a small cottage with a tire swing in the back yard that the bulldozers had razed the first day of construction. Paul had designed their home from the ground up. He knew where every nail and screw was. He could tell you where every single wire led and what it was supposed to control.

  Claire’s contribution to the infrastructure had been to give Paul a label maker because he loved labeling things. He’d been like Harold with his purple crayon. The modem said MODEM, the router said ROUTER. The cut-off for the water supply had a giant, labeled tag. Every appliance had a label telling the date it had been installed. There were laminated checklists for everything, from winterizing the outdoor spigots to troubleshooting the a/v system, which more closely resembled a NASA control board.

  Managing the house was arguably a part-time job. Every January, Paul gave Claire a list of contractors so she could set up the annual appointments for maintenance on the generator, the geothermal units, the garage doors, the copper gutters, the composite roof, the irrigation system, the well for the irrigation system, the outdoor lighting, the elevator, the gym equipment, the pool equipment, and the security system.

  And those were just the tasks she could recite off the top of her head. January was less than two months away. Who was she supposed to call? Claire always threw away the list after the last workman left. Did Paul have the file somewhere? Would she even know how to find it?

  Her hands started shaking. Tears filled her eyes. She was overwhelmed by all the things she did not know she needed to do.

  Her mother asked, “Claire?”

  Claire wiped away her tears. She tried to logic down the panic. January was next year. The wake was right now. Claire didn’t have to be told how to throw a get-together. The caterers would’ve arrived an hour ago. The wine and liquor had been delivered this morning. As Claire had gotten dressed for the funeral, the gardeners were already out in the yard with their leaf blowers. The pool had been cleaned yesterday evening while the tables and chairs were being unloaded. There were two bartenders and six servers. Black-eyed pea cakes with shrimp. Zucchini and corn fritters. Coriander-spiced beef fritters. Burgundy beet risotto tarts. Lemon-spiced chicken with dilled cucumbers. Pigs in a blanket with mustard, which Claire always threw in as a joke but was invariably the first thing the caterers ran out of because everyone loved tiny hotdogs.

  Her empty stomach soured at the thought of all that food. She stared blankly at the liquor decanters in the limo. Her mother’s hand rested lightly on the stoppers. Her yellow sapphire ring was a gift from her second husband, an affable man who had quietly died of a heart attack two days after retiring from his dental practice. Helen Reid was sixty-two years old, but she looked closer to Claire’s age than her own. Helen claimed her good skin came from being a librarian for forty years, which had kept her out of the sun. The fact that they were often mistaken for sisters had been the bane of Claire’s younger existence.

  “Did you want a drink?” Helen asked.

  Claire’s mouth formed a reflexive no, but she said, “Yes.”

  Helen pulled out the Scotch. “Ginny?”

  Claire’s grandmother smiled. “No thank you, dear.”

  Helen poured a generous double. Claire’s hand shook as she took the glass. She’d taken a Valium this morning, and when that hadn’t seemed to work, she’d taken some Tramadol left over from a root canal. She probably shouldn’t put alcohol on top of the pills, but Claire probably shouldn’t have done a lot of things this week.

  She threw back the drink. Her mind flashed up the image of Paul throwing back his Scotch in the restaurant four nights ago. She gagged as the liquid hit her stomach and burned back up her throat.

  “Goodness.” Ginny patted Claire’s back. “Are you okay, dear?”

  Claire winced as she swallowed. She felt a sharp pain in her cheek. There was a small rash of scraped skin where her face had grazed the brick wall in the alley. Everyone assumed the injury had happened during the robbery, not before.

  Ginny said, “When you were a little girl, I used to give you Scotch and sugar for your cough. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She smiled at Claire with genuine affection, which was something Claire could not quite get used to. Last year, the old woman had been diagnosed with something called pleasant dementia, which meant that she had forgotten all the perceived slights and neurotic obsessions that had made her such a nasty bitch for the first eight decades of her life. The transformation had made everyone wary. They were constantly waiting for the old Ginny to rise up phoenix-like and burn them all anew.

  Helen told Claire, “That was nice that your tennis team showed up.”

  “It was.” Claire had been shocked that they’d made an appearance. The last time she’d seen them, she was being shoved into the back of a police car.

  “They were dressed so impeccably,” Ginny said. “You have such lovely friends.”

  “Thank you,” Claire said, though she wasn’t sure whether they had attended Paul’s funeral because they were still her friends or because they couldn’t pass up a juicy social event. Their behavior at the cemetery had offered no clues as to which was the truth. They had kissed Claire’s cheek and hugged her and told her how sorry they were, and then they had all wandered off while Claire was greeting other mourners. She couldn’t hear them, but she knew what they were doing: picking apart what everyone was wearing, gossiping about who was sleeping with whom and who had found out and how much the divorce would cost.

  Claire had found herself having an almost out-of-body experience where she floated like a ghost over their heads and heard them whispering, “I heard Paul was drinking. Why were they in that alley? What did they think would happen in that part of town?” Someone, invariably, would make the old joke, “What do you call a woman in a black tennis dress? A Dunwoody widow.”

  Claire had been friends with these types of mean girls all of her life. She was pretty enough to be the leader, but she’d never been able to engender the type of fearless loyalty it took to marshal a pack of she-wolves. Instead, she was the quiet girl who laughed at all the jokes, straggled behind them at the mall, sat on the hump in the backseat of the car, and never, ever—ever—let them know that she was secretly fucking their boyfriends.

  Ginny asked, “Which one were you charged with assaulting?”

  Claire shook her head to clear it. “She wasn’t there. And it wasn’t assault, it was disorderly conduct. That’s an important legal distinction.”

  Ginny smiled pleasantly. “Well, I’m sure she’ll send a card. Everyone loved Paul.”

  Claire exchanged a look with her mother.

  Ginny had hated Paul. And she had hated Claire with Paul even more. Ginny had been a young widow when she raised Claire’s father on a paltry income from a secretarial job. She wore her struggles like a badge of honor. Claire’s designer clothes and jewelry and the big houses and the pricey cars and the luxury vacations had come as a personal affront to a woman who had survived the Great Depression, a world war, the death of a husband, the loss of two children, and countless other hardships.

  Claire could vividly recall the time she’d worn red Louboutins to visit her grandmother.

  “Red shoes are for toddlers and whores,” Ginny had quipped.

  Later, when Claire had told Paul about the exchange, he’d joked, “Is it creepy that I’m fine with either?”

  Claire put her empty glass back in the console. She stared out the win
dow. She felt so out of time and place that she momentarily didn’t recognize the scenery. And then she realized that they were almost home.

  Home.

  The word didn’t seem to fit anymore. What was home without Paul? That first night when she got in from the police station, the house seemed suddenly too big, too empty, for just one person.

  Paul had wanted more. He had talked about children on their second date and third date and countless dates thereafter. He had told Claire about his parents, how wonderful they were, how he had been devastated when they’d died. Paul was sixteen when the Scotts were killed in a car accident during a freak ice storm. He was an only child. The only relative he’d had left was an uncle who passed away while Paul was in high school.

  Her husband had made it clear that he wanted a big family. He wanted lots and lots of kids to inoculate himself against loss and Claire had tried and tried with him until finally she had agreed to go see a fertility expert who had informed Claire that she couldn’t have children because she had an IUD and was taking birth control pills.

  Of course, Claire hadn’t shared that information with Paul. She had told her husband that the doctor had diagnosed her with something called an “inhospitable womb,” which was true because what was more inhospitable than a pipe cleaner stuck up your uterus?

  “Almost there,” Helen said. She reached over and touched Claire’s knee. “We’ll get through this, sweetheart.”

  Claire grabbed her mother’s hand. They both had tears in their eyes. They both looked away without acknowledging them.

  “It’s good you have a grave to visit.” Ginny stared out the window with a pleasant smile on her face. There was no telling where her mind was. “When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief. It wasn’t immediate, of course, but I had somewhere to go, and every time I visited the cemetery, I felt like when I got back into my car, a tiny little bit of grief was gone.”