Pretty Girls Read online

  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 backseat. “See you tonight.”

  “I need to go in.”

  Dee looked horrified by the prospect. “Mom, you said—­”

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  Dee got out of the car. “You pee all the time.”

  “Thank you for that.” Between thirty-­two hours of labor and the looming specter of menopause, Lydia was lucky her bladder wasn’t hanging between her knees like a cow’s udder.

  She turned around to retrieve her purse from the backseat. Lydia stayed there, making sure Dee went into the building. And then she heard the click of the driver’s-­side door opening. Instinctively, Lydia swung around with her fists up, screaming, “No!”

  “Lydia!” Penelope Ward had her arms over her head. “It’s me!”

  Lydia wondered if it was too late to punch her.

  Penelope said, “Gosh, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I’m fine,” Lydia lied. Her heart was down by her bladder. “I was just dropping off Dee. I can’t talk right now. I have a funeral to go to.”

  “Oh, no. Whose?”

  Lydia hadn’t thought that far ahead. “A friend. An old teacher. Miss Clavel.” She was really talking too much. “That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.”

  “Okay, but a quick word.” Penelope was still blocking the open door. “Remember how I told you about the International Festival?”

  Lydia bumped the gear into reverse. “Just send me whatever recipe you want and I’ll—­”

  “Super! You’ll have it by three o’clock today.” Penelope was good about setting her own deadlines. “But, listen, are you still in touch with the band?”

  Lydia edged her foot toward the gas.

  “It jogged my memory when you said you grew up in Athens. I went to UGA.”

  Lydia should’ve guessed by the pastel sweater sets and blowjobby pucker to her lips.

  “I saw you perform a zillion times. Liddie and the Spoons, right? God, those were the days. Whatever happened to those gals? Probably ended up married with a ton of kids, am I right?”

  “Yep.” If you mean incarcerated, divorced four times, and keeping a punch card in her wallet from the Women’s Health Center so she can get her tenth abortion for free. “We’re all just a bunch of old ladies.”

  “So”—­Penelope was still blocking the door—­“you’ll ask them, right? What a kick Dee would get out of seeing her mom onstage.”

  “Oh, she’d be thrilled. I’ll email you about it, okay?” Lydia had to get out of here with or without the minivan door intact. She eased her foot off the brake. Penelope walked alongside her. “Need to go now.” Lydia motioned for her to get out of the way. “Need to close the door.” She tapped her foot on the gas.

  Finally, Penelope stepped back so she wouldn’t get knocked down. “I look forward to receiving your email!”

  Lydia hit the gas so hard that the minivan lurched. God, this really was her day to have her shitty past dredged up and thrown like a pile of steaming cow manure at her feet. She’d love to get Penelope Ward and the band together. They would eat her alive. Literally. The last time the Spoons had been in the same room together, two of them had ended up in the hospital with severe bite marks.

  Was that the first time Lydia had been arrested? It was definitely the first time her father had bailed her out of jail. Sam Carroll had been equal parts mortified and heartbroken. Of course, at that point in his life, there were very few pieces of his heart left that were big enough to shatter. Julia had been gone for five years by then. Her father had had five years of sleepless nights. Five years of suspended grief. Five years of filling his head with all the terrible things that might have been done to his eldest daughter.

  “Daddy.” Lydia sighed. She wished that he had lived long enough to see Lydia straightened out. She really wished that he’d met Dee. He would’ve loved her dry sense of humor. And maybe knowing Dee, holding his granddaughter in his arms, would’ve kept his poor, broken heart beating a few more years.

  Lydia stopped at a red light. There was a McDonald’s on the right. Lydia still needed to go to the bathroom, but she knew if she went inside, she’d order everything on the menu. She stared at the light until it turned. Her foot went to the gas.

  Fifteen more minutes passed before she pulled into the Magnolia Hills Memorial Gardens. She’d told Penelope Ward that she was going to a funeral, but she felt more like she was going to a birthday party. Her birthday party. The Lydia who didn’t have to worry about Paul Scott anymore was officially four days old.

  She should’ve brought a hat.

  The rain picked up as soon as Lydia stepped out of the van. She popped open the back and found an umbrella that would open. The hem of her dress wicked up rainwater. She scanned the cemetery, which was gardenlike and hilly with lots of magnolias, just as advertised. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her purse. Lydia loved the Internet. She could Google Earth the Mothers’ houses, look up how much they’d paid for their idiotic designer outfits, and more important to today’s task, print out a map leading to Paul Scott’s gravesite.

  The walk was longer than she had anticipated, and of course the rain got worse the farther she got from her van. After ten minutes of following what turned out to be a very inaccurate map, Lydia realized she was lost. She took out her phone and Googled the information again. Then she tried to map her location. The flashing blue dot said she needed to go to the north. Lydia turned north. She walked a few feet and the blue dot indicated she needed to go south.

  “For fucksakes,” Lydia mumbled, but then her eye caught a headstone two rows over.

  SCOTT.

  Paul had grown up just outside of Athens, but his father’s ­people were from Atlanta. His parents were buried alongside Scotts going back several generations. He had once told Lydia that Scotts had even fought on both sides of the Civil War.

  So he came by his duplicity honestly.

  Paul’s grave had a tiny marker that looked more like a stake you’d use to label a vegetable garden. SUGAR SNAP PEAS. CABBAGE. SADISTIC PRICK.

  Lydia supposed his headstone had been ordered. Something large and garish made of the finest marble and phallic shaped because being dead didn’t stop you from being a dick.

  Last night while Lydia was watching TV with Rick, she had zoned out, picturing herself standing by Paul’s grave. She hadn’t anticipated the rain, so in her mind, the sun was happily shining in the sky and bluebirds sat on her shoulder. Likewise, she had never considered the freshly dug red Georgia clay would be covered by AstroTurf. The fake grass was the kind of thing you saw at a putt-­putt course or on the balcony of a cheap motel. Pau
l would’ve hated it, which is why she couldn’t help smiling.

  “Okay,” Lydia said, because she hadn’t come here to smile. She took a deep breath and slowly let it go. She pressed her hand to her chest to still her heart. And then she started talking.

  “You were wrong,” she told Paul, because he had been a pedantic asshole who thought he was right about everything. “You said I would be dead in a gutter by now. You said I was worthless. You said that no one would believe me because I didn’t matter.”

  Lydia looked up at the dark sky. Drops of rain tapped insistently against the umbrella.

  “And I believed you for so many years because I thought I’d done something wrong.”

  Thought, she repeated silently, because she knew that no one could punish her as viciously as she punished herself.

  “I didn’t lie. I didn’t make it up. But I let myself think that you did it because I asked for it. That I’d sent you the wrong signals. That you only attacked me because you thought I wanted it.” Lydia wiped tears from her eyes. She had never in her life wanted anything less than Paul’s advances. “And then I finally realized that what you did wasn’t my fault. That you were just a cold, psychotic motherfucker, and you found the perfect way to push me out of my own family.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “And you know what? Fuck you, Paul. Fuck you and your stupid piece-­of-­shit Miata and your goddamn graduate degree and your blood money from your parents’ car accident and look who’s standing here now, asshole. Look who got gutted in an alley like a pig and look who’s dancing on your fucking grave!”

  Lydia was practically breathless from finally getting it all out. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She felt hollow, but not from her outburst. There had to be something else. For so many years, she’d dreamed of confronting Paul, taking him down, beating him with her fists or kicking him with her feet or stabbing him with a rusty knife. Words were not enough. There had to be something more to do than just scream at his grave. She looked out at the cemetery, as if an idea would strike her like lightning. Rain was coming down so hard that the air had taken on a white haze. The ground was saturated.

  Lydia dropped her umbrella.

  The ground could probably be wetter.

  Her bladder was still full. Nothing would give her greater pleasure than pissing on Paul’s grave. She yanked back the green carpet. She hiked up her dress and bent over so she could pull down her underwear.

  And then she stopped because she wasn’t alone.

  Lydia noticed the shoes first. Black Louboutins, approximately five thousand dollars. Sheer hose, though who the hell wore panty hose anymore? Black dress, probably Armani or Gaultier, at least another six grand. There were no rings on the woman’s elegant fingers nor a tasteful tennis bracelet on her birdlike wrists. Her shoulders were square and her posture was ramrod straight, which told Lydia that Helen’s admonitions had been followed by at least one of her daughters.

  “Well.” Claire crossed her arms low on her waist. “This is awkward.”

  “It certainly is.” Lydia hadn’t seen her baby sister in eighteen years, though in her wildest imagination, she had never dreamed that Claire would turn into a Mother.

  “Here.” Claire snapped open her two-­thousand-­dollar Prada clutch and pulled out a handful of Kleenex. She tossed the tissues in Lydia’s general direction.

  There was no graceful way to do this. Lydia’s underwear was down around her knees. “Do you mind turning around?”

  “Of course. Where are my manners?” Claire turned around. The black dress was tailored to her perfect figure. Her shoulder blades stuck out like cut glass. Her arms were toned little sticks. She probably jogged with her trainer every morning and played tennis every afternoon and then bathed in rosewater milked from a magic unicorn before her husband came home every night.

  Not that Paul Scott was ever coming home again.

  Lydia pulled up her underwear as she stood. She blew her nose into the tissue, then dropped it on Paul’s grave. She kicked the AstroTurf back in place like a cat in a litter box.

  “This was fun.” Lydia grabbed her umbrella and made to leave. “Let’s never do it again.”

  Claire spun around. “Don’t you dare slink off.”

  “Slink?” The word was like a match to kindling. “You think I’m slinking away from you?”

  “I literally stopped you from pissing on my husband’s grave.”

  Lydia couldn’t talk in italics anymore. “You’d better be glad I didn’t take a shit.”

  “God, you’re so crass.”

  “And you’re a fucking bitch.” Lydia turned on her heel and headed toward the van.

  “Don’t walk away from me.”

  Lydia cut between the graves because she knew Claire’s heels would sink into the wet grass.

  “Come back here.” Claire was keeping up. She had taken off her shoes. “Lydia. God dammit, stop.”

  “What?” Lydia swung around so fast that the umbrella swiped Claire’s head. “What do you want from me, Claire? You made your choice—­you and Mom both. You can’t just expect me to forgive you now that he’s dead. It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Forgive me?” Claire was so outraged that her voice trilled. “You think I’m the one who needs forgiveness?”

  “I told you that your husband tried to rape me and your response was that I needed to get the fuck out of your house before you called the police.”

  “Mom didn’t believe you either.”

  “Mom didn’t believe you either,” Lydia mocked. “Mom thought you were still a virgin in the eighth grade.”

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.”

  “I know you chose a guy you’d been screwing for two seconds over your own sister.”

  “Was this before or after you stole all the cash from my wallet? Or from under my mattress? Or from my jewelry box? Or lied to me about ‘borrowing’ my car? Or told me you didn’t pawn Daddy’s stethoscope, but then Mom got a call from the pawnshop because they recognized his name?” Claire wiped rain out of her eyes. “I know it was before you stole my credit card and ran up thirteen grand in debt. How was Amsterdam, Lydia? Did you enjoy all the coffee shops?”

  “I did, actually.” Lydia still had the little canal house souvenir the KLM stewardess had given her in first class. “How did you enjoy knowing you turned your back on the last sister you have left?”

  Claire’s mouth snapped into a thin line. Her eyes took on a heated gleam.

  “God, you look just like Mom when you do that.”

  “Shut up.”

  “That’s mature.” Lydia could hear the immaturity in her own voice. “This is idiotic. We’re having the same argument we had eighteen years ago, except this time we’re doing it in the rain.”

  Claire looked down at the ground. For the first time, she seemed uncertain of herself. “You lied to me all the time about everything.”

  “You think I’d lie about that?”

  “You were stoned out of your mind when he drove you home.”

  “Is that what Paul told you? Because he picked me up from jail. You’re not usually stoned in jail. That’s kind of a no-­no.”

  “I’ve been to jail, Lydia. ­People who want to get high find a way to get high.”

  Lydia snorted a laugh. Her Goody-­Two-­shoes baby sister had been to jail like Lydia had been to the moon.

  Claire said, “He wasn’t even attracted to you.”

  Lydia studied her face. This was an old line of reasoning, but she was saying it with less conviction. “You’re doubting him.”

  “No, I’m not.” Claire pushed her wet hair back off her face. “You’re just hearing what you want to hear. Like you always do.”

  Claire was lying. Lydia could feel it in her bones. She was standing there getting soaked in the rain and lying. “Did Paul
hurt you? Is that what this is about? You couldn’t say it when he was alive, but now—­”

  “He never hurt me. He was a good husband. A good man. He took care of me. He made me feel safe. He loved me.”

  Lydia didn’t respond. Instead, she let the silence build. She still didn’t believe her sister. Claire was just as easy to read now as when she was a little kid. Something was really bothering her, and that something obviously had to do with Paul. Her eyebrows were doing a weird zig, the same way Helen’s did when she was upset.

  They hadn’t spoken in nearly two decades, but Lydia knew that confronting Claire always made her dig in her heels deeper. She tried a diversion. “Are you following this Anna Kilpatrick thing?”

  Claire snorted, as if the answer was obvious. “Of course I am. Mom is, too.”

  “Mom is?” Lydia was genuinely surprised. “She told you that?”

  “No, but I know she’s following it.” Claire took a deep breath, then let it go. She looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped. “She’s not heartless, Lydia. She had her own way of dealing with it.” She left the rest of the sentence unsaid. Dad had his own way of dealing with it, too.

  Lydia busied herself with closing her umbrella. Its canopy was white with various breeds of dogs jumping in circles around the ferrule. Her father had carried something similar back when he could still hold down his job teaching vet students at UGA.

  Claire said, “I’m Mom’s age now.”

  Lydia looked up at her sister.

  “Thirty-­eight. The same age Mom was when Julia went missing. And Julia would be—­”

  “Forty-­three.” Every year, Lydia marked Julia’s birthday. And Helen’s. And Claire’s. And the day that Julia had disappeared.