Pretty Girls: A Novel Read online

  “Anyway,” he tucked his hands into his pockets, “I wanted you to know that I talked to Detective Rayman about your husband’s case.”

  She had to clear her throat a few times before she forced out, “What?”

  “Detective Rayman with the Atlanta Police? You spoke to him the night your husband was murdered?”

  She held her breath, trying to calm it. “Yes.”

  “I want you to know that we looked at all possible connections, and there doesn’t seem to be one between what happened to your husband and what happened today.”

  Claire nodded. She felt a sharp jab of pain in her jaw from clenching her teeth.

  Nolan let his eyes slowly take another tour of the office. “Your husband was a tidy guy.”

  Claire didn’t respond.

  “Kind of a control freak?”

  She shrugged, though Paul had never tried to control her. Except when he jammed her face into that brick wall in the alley.

  Nolan indicated the digital lock on the door. “That’s some pretty serious security.”

  She echoed the words that Paul had often told her. “Doesn’t really matter if you don’t set the alarm.”

  Nolan smiled his deeply unsettling smile. He wasn’t standing over her, but he might as well have been. “We’ll need to send a crew up here anyway.”

  She felt her heart stop. The computer. The files. The movie. “That’s not necessary.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Claire tried to think of a good excuse to contradict him. “Did the security cameras show the men breaking into the garage?”

  “You can never be too sure.”

  She summoned a weak copy of her mother’s librarian voice. “I would think sixteen cameras would make you as sure as possible.”

  Nolan shrugged. He was smiling at her again.

  “Not to mention half a million dollars’ worth of automobiles that are still parked in the garage.”

  He kept smiling, and Claire realized that she was talking too much. Her hands were sweating. She gripped the arms of the chair.

  Nolan asked, “Something up here you don’t want us to see?”

  Claire forced herself not to look at the computer. Instead, she looked at his lips and tried not to think about the red, wet lips behind the zippered mask.

  He said, “I’m curious, Mrs. Scott, did your husband say anything to you before he was murdered?”

  She remembered the alley, the rough texture of the brick, the burn of skin being scraped from her cheek. Was Paul suddenly into that kind of thing? Was that why he had this movie on his computer?

  “Mrs. Scott?” Nolan mistook her silence for embarrassment. “Don’t worry. Detective Rayman told me why you and your husband were in the alley. No judgment here. I’m just curious about what your husband said.”

  She cleared her throat again. “He promised me he wasn’t going to die.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I already told all of this to Detective Rayman.”

  “Yeah, but that was a few days ago. Sometimes it takes some perspective to jog your memory.” He pressed a little harder. “Sleep usually does it. I’ve dealt with a lot of victims of violent crime. There’s this adrenalin rush that gets them through the hard parts, and then they have to tell their story to old gumshoes like me, and then they go home and they’re alone and they start to crash because the adrenalin’s gone and there’s no forward momentum and they fall into a heavy sleep and then suddenly they wake up in a sweat because they remembered something.”

  Claire swallowed again. He was perfectly describing her first night alone, but the only revelation that had come when she’d woken up with the sheets soaked in sweat was that Paul was not there to comfort her.

  Comfort.

  How could the man who looked at such vile filth possibly be the same gentle man who had comforted her for eighteen years?

  “So,” Nolan said, “did you remember anything? Doesn’t have to seem useful. Just a stray comment he might have made, something unusual that he did. Before or after the attack. Anything you can think of. Maybe not even something he said, but his demeanor.”

  Claire’s hand went to her thigh. She could almost feel the missing streaks of skin where Paul had raked his fingers up her leg. He’d never marked her like that before. Had he wanted to? Had he been fighting the impulse all those years?

  “General demeanor,” Nolan prompted. “Anything he said.”

  “He was shocked. We were both shocked.” Claire clasped her hands together on the desk so that she wouldn’t start wringing them. “It’s called Masters of the Universe Complex.” She sounded like Paul, and in fact the phrase had come from her husband. “It’s where people think that status and money insulate them against tragedy.”

  “Do you think that’s true?” Nolan asked. “Seems like you’ve seen more tragedy than most.”

  “That’s a keen bit of detective work on your part.” Claire forced herself to stay in the present. “Are you a detective? Because when I met you in the driveway, you didn’t give your title or show me your credentials.”

  “You’re right.”

  He didn’t volunteer the information, so she said, “I’d like to see your identification.”

  Nolan was apparently unflappable. He reached into his coat pocket as he walked toward her. His wallet was a cheap bifold. Instead of a detective’s shield, there were two laminated cards behind plastic sleeves. Everything on the top card was in gold ink—the words Federal Bureau of Investigation, the blind Lady Justice, and the bald eagle. The bottom card was in blue ink and showed Fred Nolan’s color photograph, his name, and revealed that he was a special agent from the Atlanta field office on West Peachtree.

  The FBI. What was the FBI doing here?

  She thought about the file on Paul’s computer. Had the FBI tracked the download? Was Fred Nolan here because Paul had stumbled across something he shouldn’t have? What Claire had seen could not be real. It was a made-up movie designed to appeal to a sick fetish.

  A sick fetish that, apparently, her husband had either stumbled across by mistake or kept hidden from her for the last eighteen years.

  “Satisfied?” Nolan was still holding out his wallet. He was still smiling. He was still acting like this was a casual conversation.

  Claire looked at the credentials again. Nolan had fewer gray hairs in the photograph. “Does the FBI routinely investigate foiled burglaries?”

  “I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that nothing’s routine.” He flipped the wallet closed. “The gang who robbed your house crossed county lines. We’re helping coordinate between the police forces.”

  “Isn’t that the job of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation?”

  “You’re certainly up on your law enforcement hierarchy.”

  Claire had to put a stop to this before she gave everything away. “It’s just occurred to me that you never answer my questions, Agent Nolan, so maybe I should stop answering yours.”

  Nolan chuckled. “I forgot you’ve had experience with the justice system.”

  “I’d like you to leave now.”

  “Sure.” He indicated the door. “Open or closed?”

  When she didn’t answer, he closed the door behind him anyway.

  Claire ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  FOUR

  Lydia tried to concentrate on the road as she drove her daughter to an away game. She had lasted twenty-four hours before the full impact of Paul Scott’s death hit her. The hangover from her ensuing breakdown was breathtakingly awful. All day, she’d felt weepy and exhausted. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat. The coffee she’d gulped down to stave off the headache had made her fidgety. She hated the feeling of being punch-drunk and she hated it even more that her first thought when she opened her eyes this morning was that a bump of coke would even her out.

  She wasn’t going to give up seventeen and a half years of sobriety for that asshole. She would throw herself off a bri
dge before she did something so stupid.

  But that didn’t stop her from hating herself for even thinking of using. And it didn’t stop her from crying like a baby last night.

  She had wept in Rick’s arms for over an hour. He’d been so sweet to her, stroking her hair and telling her that she had every right to be upset. Instead of making her talk it out or driving her to a meeting, he’d put on John Coltrane and fried some chicken. The chicken was good. The company was better. They had started arguing about which was the best Coltrane solo, “Crescent” or “Blue in Green,” and right in the middle of it Dee came out of her room and gave Lydia the greatest gift a teenage daughter can ever give her mother: She had agreed with her.

  The cordiality had been short-lived.

  Dee was currently slumped in the minivan’s passenger seat in what Lydia thought of as her Phone Posture (automobile). Her sneakers were on the dashboard. Her elbows and forearms were flat to the seat like a kangaroo’s feet. She held her iPhone two inches from her nose. The seatbelt would probably decapitate her if they were in an accident.

  “OMG!” Dee would text as they waited for the ambulance. “Decapd in car ax!”

  Lydia thought about all those times her own mother had told her to stand up straight, stop slouching, hold the book away from her face, moisturize, wear a bra to bed, always suck in her stomach, and never hitchhike, and she wanted to slap herself for not following every single stupid piece of advice that had ever come out of the woman’s mouth.

  Too late for that now.

  Rain started to spit onto the windshield. Lydia turned on the wipers. The rubber part of the blades skittered across the glass. Rick had told her last week to come by the station and get the wiper blades changed. He’d said the weather was looking bad, and Lydia had laughed because no one could predict the weather.

  Metal scraped glass as the shredded rubber flopped in the wind.

  Dee groaned. “Why didn’t you get Rick to change those?”

  “He said he was too busy.”

  Dee gave her a sideways glance.

  Lydia turned up the radio, which is how she used to fix strange car noises before she dated a mechanic. She shifted in the seat, trying to get comfortable. The seatbelt insistently pushed against her gut. The plump rolls of fat reminded her of a popped can of biscuits. This morning, Rick had gently suggested that she might want to go to a meeting. Lydia had agreed this was a good idea, but she’d ended up going to Waffle House instead.

  She’d told herself that she wasn’t ready to share what she was feeling because she hadn’t had time to process Paul Scott’s death. And then she reminded herself that one of her more unsung talents was that she was really, really good at denial. Maintaining a three-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit took a certain level of self-delusion. Then there was the short-sighted conviction that she was never to blame for the consequences of her own actions.

  The addict’s credo: It’s always somebody else’s fault.

  For a while, Paul Scott had been that fault for Lydia. Her touchstone. Her mantra. “If only Paul hadn’t …” prefixed every excuse.

  And then Dee had come along and Lydia had righted her life and she’d met Rick and Paul Scott had gotten shoved into the back of her mind the same way she had pushed back all the awful things that had happened during what she thought of as The Bad Years. Like the many times she’d found herself in county lock-up. Or the time she’d woken up with two skeevy guys in a Motel 8 and convinced herself that trading sex for drugs wasn’t the same as doing it for money.

  At the Waffle House this morning, she’d almost ignored Rick’s call on her cell phone.

  He had asked, “You feel like using?”

  “No,” she’d told him, because by then, the desire had been stifled by a tall stack of waffles. “I feel like I want to dig up Paul’s body and kill him all over again.”

  The last time Lydia had seen Paul Scott, she was practically crawling out of her skin from withdrawal. They were in his stupid Miata that he cleaned every weekend with cloth diapers and a toothbrush. It was dark outside, almost midnight. Hall and Oates were playing on the radio. “Private Eyes.” Paul was singing along. His voice was terrible, but then any noise had felt like an ice pick in her ear. He seemed to sense her discomfort. He smiled at Lydia. He leaned over and turned down the radio. And then he put his hand on her knee.

  “Mom?”

  Lydia looked over at her daughter. She feigned a double-take. “I’m sorry. Are you Dee? I didn’t recognize you without a phone in front of your face.”

  Dee rolled her eyes. “You’re not coming to my game because we suck, right, not because you’re still mad about the permission slip?”

  Lydia felt awful that her daughter could even think such a thing. “Honey, it’s all about your poor performance. You’re just too painful to watch.”

  “Okay, as long as you’re sure.”

  “Positive. You are terrible.”

  “Question answered,” Dee said. “But since we’re being brutally honest, I have something else to tell you.”

  Lydia couldn’t handle one more piece of bad news. She stared at the road thinking, pregnant, failing biology, gambling debts, meth habit, genital warts.

  Dee said, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.”

  Lydia felt her heart seize. Doctors had money. They had job security. They had 401(k)s and health insurance. “You don’t have to decide anything right now.”

  “But, I kind of do because of the undergrad of it all.” Dee slid her phone into her pocket. This was serious. “I don’t want you to freak out or anything—”

  Lydia started to freak out. Sheep herder, farmer, actress, exotic dancer.

  “I was thinking I want to be a veterinarian.”

  Lydia burst into tears.

  “Deedus Christ,” Dee mumbled.

  Lydia looked out the side window. She had been fighting tears off and on all day, but this time she wasn’t upset. “My dad was a vet. I wanted to be a vet, but …” She let her voice trail off, because that’s what you did when you were reminding your daughter that a felony drug conviction prevented you from being licensed in any state. “I’m proud of you, Dee. You’ll be a great vet. You’re so good with animals.”

  “Thanks.” Dee waited for Lydia to blow her nose. “Also, when I go to college, I want to start using my real name.”

  Lydia had been expecting this, but she still felt sad. Dee was making a new start. She wanted a new name to go with it. She told her, “I went by the name ‘Pepper’ until I changed high schools.”

  “Pepper?” Dee laughed. “Like Salt-N-Pepa?”

  “I wish. My dad said it came from my grandmother. The first time she looked after me, she said, ‘That child has hell and pepper in her hair.’” Lydia saw this required further explanation. “I was a handful when I was a kid.”

  “Wow, you’ve really changed a lot.”

  Lydia poked her in the ribs. “Julia’s the one who started calling me Pepper.”

  “Your sister?” Dee’s head had turtled down her neck. Her voice sounded tentative.

  “It’s okay to talk about her.” Lydia willed her lips to turn up into a smile, because talking about Julia was always hard. “Is there anything you want to know?”

  Dee obviously wanted to know more than Lydia could tell her, but she asked, “Do you think you’ll ever find her?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. It was a long time ago.” Lydia rested her head in her hand. “We didn’t really have DNA back then, or twenty-four-hour news cycles, or the Internet. One of the things they never found was her pager.”

  “What’s a pager?”

  “It’s like text messaging, but you can only leave a phone number.”

  “That sounds stupid.”

  “Well.” Maybe it sounded stupid to someone who could hold a tiny computer with access to the entire world’s knowledge in her hand. “You look like her. Did you know that?”

  “Julia was beautiful.” Dee sounded
dubious. “Like, really beautiful.”

  “You’re really beautiful too, sweetheart.”

  “Whatever.” Dee took out her phone, ending the conversation. She slowly sunk back into the Posture (automobile).

  Lydia watched the wipers valiantly battle the rain. She was crying again, but not the humiliating, sobby cries that she’d been struggling against all morning. First Paul Scott and now Julia. Today was apparently her day to be overwhelmed by old memories. Though, admittedly, Julia was never far from Lydia’s mind.

  Twenty-four years ago, Julia Carroll had been a nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Georgia. She was studying journalism, because in 1991 there was still such a thing as having a career as a journalist. Julia had gone to a bar with a group of friends. No one remembered a particular man paying closer attention to her than the others, but there must have been at least one, because that night at the bar was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Julia Carroll again.

  Ever. They’d never even found her body.

  This was why Lydia had raised a child who could change a flat tire in three minutes and who knew that you never, ever let an abductor take you to a second location: because Lydia had witnessed firsthand what can happen to teenage girls who are raised to think that the worst thing that can happen to them is they don’t get asked to the prom.

  “Mom, you missed the turn.”

  Lydia tapped the brakes. She checked the mirrors and backed up. A car swerved around her, horn blaring.

  Dee’s thumbs blurred across the bottom of her phone. “You’re gonna end up killing yourself in a car accident and I’m gonna be an orphan.”

  Lydia had only herself to blame for this kind of hyperbole.

  She drove around the school and pulled into a parking space in the back. Instead of the Valhalla that was the Westerly Intramural Sporting Complex, the gym behind Booker T. Washington High School in downtown Atlanta was a 1920s red-brick structure that more closely resembled the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

  Lydia scanned the parking lot, because that’s what she always did before she unlocked the doors.

  “I’ll get a ride home from Bella.” Dee grabbed her gym bag off the back seat. “See you tonight.”