Pretty Girls (23 page)

At the time, Claire had found his collection awfully sweet, but now all she could think about was that there were dozens of boxes down there, and that three women a year for the last eighteen years would mean fifty-four more folders filled with fifty-four more unspeakable violations.

There was one file that Lydia would never see. Her sister was disturbed enough by the contents of the folders. If she found out that Paul had done the same to her, there would be no going back.

“Are you all right?” Lydia looked up from the report she was reading. “Do you want to go lie down?”

“I’m fine,” Claire said, but her eyelids felt heavy. Her body was so tired that her hands were trembling. She had read somewhere or heard somewhere that criminals always go to sleep after they confess their crimes. Concealing their bad acts took up so much energy that having the truth laid bare brought on a deep, sweet sleep.

Had she confessed to Lydia? Or had she just shared a burden?

Claire closed her eyes. Her breathing got deeper. She was awake—she could still hear Lydia greedily thumbing through pages—but she was also asleep, and in that sleep, she felt herself dipping into a dream. There was no narrative, just fragments of a typical day. She was at her desk paying bills. She was practicing the piano. She was in the kitchen trying to come up with a grocery list. She was making phone calls to raise money for the Christmas toy drive. She was studying the shoes in her closet, trying to put together an outfit to wear to lunch.

Through all of this, she could feel Paul’s presence in the house. They were very independent people. They’d always had their own interests, done their own things, but Claire always felt reassured when Paul was close by. Light bulbs would be changed. Faults would be cleared from the security system. The remote control would be deciphered. Trash would be taken out. Clothes would be folded. Batteries would be charged. Big spoons and little spoons would never mingle in the silverware drawer.

He was such a sturdy, capable man. She liked that he was taller than she was. She liked that she had to look up at him when they were dancing. She liked the way she felt when his arms were around her. He was so much stronger than Claire. Sometimes, he would pick her up. She would feel her feet lift off the ground. His chest felt so solid against hers. He would tease her about something silly, and she would laugh because she knew that he loved hearing her laugh, and then he would say, “Tell me you want this.”

Claire jerked awake. Her arms flew up as if to ward off a blow. Her throat felt scratchy. Her heart clicked against her ribs.

Morning sun streamed into her office. Lydia was gone. The plastic boxes were empty. The files were gone.

Claire lunged toward her desk. She opened the drawer. Lydia’s file was still hidden inside. Claire’s relief was so pronounced that she wanted to cry.

She touched her fingers to her cheek. She
was
crying. Her tear ducts were on constant standby for anything that would send them over. Instead of giving in to it, Claire shut the drawer. She wiped her eyes. She stood up. She straightened her shirt as she made her way to the kitchen.

She heard Lydia’s voice before she saw her. She was obviously talking on the phone.

“Because I want you to stay at Rick’s tonight.” Lydia paused. “Because I said so.” She paused again. “Sweetheart, I know you’re an adult, but adults are like vampires. The older ones are much more powerful.”

Claire smiled. She had known Lydia would be a good mother. She sounded just like Helen before Julia disappeared.

“All right. I love you, too.”

Claire stayed in the hallway long after Lydia had ended the call. She didn’t want her sister to have any fears about being overheard. If Claire was going to continue to lie about knowing every single detail of Lydia’s life, she could at least do a good job.

She smoothed down the back of her hair as she walked into the kitchen. “Hey.”

Lydia was sitting at the bar. She was wearing reading glasses, which would’ve been funny if Claire wasn’t a couple of years away from needing them herself. Paul’s files were scattered across the kitchen island. Lydia had Claire’s iPad in front of her. She took off the reading glasses as she asked, “Did you sleep all right?”

“I’m sorry.” Claire didn’t know what she was apologizing for; there were so many things to choose from. “I should’ve helped you go through all of this.”

“No, you should’ve gotten some sleep.” Lydia started to lean back in the chair, but she caught herself before she fell over the low back. “These are the stupidest chairs I’ve ever sat in.”

“They look good,” Claire said, because that was all that had ever mattered to Paul. She went to the video screen on the kitchen wall. The flashing time read 6:03. She pulled up the mailbox camera. Adam hadn’t been by yet. Claire didn’t know what to make of that, because she still didn’t know which files Adam was after.

She told Lydia, “The USB drive is still in the mailbox.”

“You have a camera in your mailbox?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

Lydia gave a sour look. “What was the name of the woman you saw on the news?”

Claire shook her head. She didn’t understand.

“In the garage, you said that you recognized a woman’s name from one of the files because you had seen her on the news. I looked them all up on your iPad. Only two had news items.”

Claire spitballed an explanation. “She was in Atlanta.”

“Leslie Lewis?” Lydia pushed an open file folder across the counter so that Claire could see the woman’s photograph. She was blonde and pretty and wearing thick black glasses. “I found a story about her in the
Atlanta Journal
archives. She was staying in a hotel during Dragon Con. She thought she was opening her door for room service, but a guy pushed his way in and raped her.”

Claire looked away from the woman’s photo. Quinn + Scott’s downtown offices were near the convention site. Last year, Paul had sent her pictures of drunken people dressed like Darth Vader and the Green Lantern clogging the street.

Lydia slid over another file: another pretty, young blonde. “Pam Clayton. There was a story in the
Patch
. She was jogging near Stone Mountain Park. The attacker dragged her into the woods. It was after seven, but it was August so it was still light out.”

Paul’s tennis team occasionally had games in the park.

“Look at the dates on the files. He hired the detectives to follow them on the anniversaries of their rapes.”

Claire took her word for it. She didn’t want to read any more details. “Did the attacker say anything to either of them?”

“If he did, it wasn’t in the articles. We need the police reports.”

Claire wondered why Paul hadn’t asked the private detectives to track down the reports. Lydia’s file contained her arrest records and all the ancillary paperwork. Maybe Paul figured it was a bad idea to tip his hand by asking all of these different detectives to check up on all of these women who had been raped. Or maybe he didn’t need the reports because he already knew exactly what had happened to them.

Or maybe he was getting the reports from Captain Jacob Mayhew.

“Claire?”

She shook her head, but now that she had the thought in her mind, she couldn’t get rid of it. Why hadn’t she studied Mayhew’s expression while he watched the movies? Then again, what good would it do? Hadn’t she learned enough about Paul’s duplicity to realize that her judgment could not be trusted?

“Claire?” Lydia waited for her attention. “Did you notice something about the women?”

Claire shook her head again.

“They all look like you.”

Claire didn’t point out that that meant they looked like Lydia, too. “So, what now? We’re holding these women’s lives in our hands. We don’t know if we can trust Mayhew. Even if we did, he didn’t take the movies seriously. Why would he investigate the files?”

Lydia shrugged. “We can call Nolan.”

Claire couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “Better these women than us, you mean?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, but now that you—”

“They’ve already been raped. You want to sic that asshole on them, too?”

Lydia shrugged. “Maybe it’ll give them some peace knowing that the man who attacked them isn’t around anymore.”

“That’s a bullshit excuse.” Claire was adamant. “We know firsthand what Nolan is like. He probably won’t even believe them. Or worse, he’ll flirt with them like he flirts with me. There’s a reason most women don’t go to the cops when they’re raped.”

“What are you going to do, write them a check?”

Claire walked into the family room before she said something she would regret. Writing some checks didn’t sound like a bad idea. Paul had attacked these women. The least she could do was pay for therapy or whatever else they needed.

Lydia said, “If Paul had actually raped me, and I found out that every September for almost eighteen years, he’d been stalking me, taking pictures of me, I would want to grab a gun and kill him.”

Claire stared at the Rothko over the fireplace. “What would you do if you found out that he was already dead and there was nothing you could do about it?”

“I would still want to know.”

Claire felt no temptation to reveal the truth. Lydia had always blustered about how tough she was, but there was a reason she was already numbing herself with drugs at the age of sixteen.

Claire said, “I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but it makes me glad to know he’s dead. And to know how he died, even though it must have been rotten for you.”

“Rotten,” Claire repeated, thinking the word was borderline insulting.
Rotten
was being late for a movie or losing a great parking space. Watching your husband get stabbed and bleed to death in front of your own eyes was fucking excruciating. “No. I won’t do it.”

“Fine.” Lydia started grabbing folders and stacking them together. She was clearly angry, but Claire wasn’t going to back down. She knew what it was like to be the focus of Fred Nolan’s interest. She couldn’t unleash that on Paul’s victims. There was already enough guilt on her conscience without throwing these poor women into the lion’s den.

She walked farther into the family room. The sunlight was blinding. Claire closed her eyes for a moment and let the heat from the sun warm her face. And then she turned away because it seemed wrong to enjoy something so basic considering all of the misery they had uncovered.

Her gaze traveled to the area behind one of the couches. Lydia had spread out some paperwork on the floor. Instead of more private detective reports, Claire was surprised to recognize her father’s handiwork.

Sam Carroll had devoted an entire wall in his apartment to tracking down leads about Julia. There were photographs and note-cards and torn sheets of paper with phone numbers and names scribbled across them. In all, the entire collection took up around five by ten feet of space. He’d lost his deposit for the apartment because of all the holes the thumbtacks had left in the Sheetrock.

She asked Lydia, “You kept Dad’s wall?”

“No, it was in the second file box.”

Of course it was.

Claire knelt down. The wall had defined her father for so many years. His desperation still emanated from every scrap of paper. Vet school had taught him to be a meticulous note-taker. He had recorded everything he’d read or heard or witnessed, combined police reports and statements, until the case was as imprinted on his brain as the structure of a dog’s digestive system or the signs of feline leukemia.

She picked up a sheet of notebook paper that had her father’s handwriting on it. In the last two weeks of his life, Sam Carroll had developed a slight palsy after a minor stroke. His suicide note had been barely legible. Claire had forgotten what his original penmanship looked like.

She asked Lydia, “What’s it called?”

“The Palmer Method.” Lydia was standing behind Claire. “He was supposed to be left-handed, but they made him use his right hand.”

“They did that to me, too.”

“They made you wear a mitten so you wouldn’t use your left hand. Mom was furious when she found out.”

Claire sat down on the floor. She couldn’t stop touching the only pieces she had left of her father. Sam had handled this picture of a man who talked to another man who had a sister who maybe knew something about Julia. He had touched this matchbook from the Manhattan, the bar where Julia was last seen. He had written notes on this menu from the Grit, her favorite vegetarian restaurant. He had stared at this photograph of Julia leaning against her bike.

Claire stared at the photograph, too. A gray houndstooth fedora was in the handlebar basket. Julia’s long blonde hair cascaded around her shoulders in a soft perm. She was wearing a man’s black suit jacket and white dress shirt with tons of silver and black bangles on her wrists and white lace gloves on her hands because it was the late 1980s and every girl they knew back then wanted to look like either Cyndi Lauper or Madonna.

Claire said, “I want to tell myself that Paul kept all of this because one day, he thought I might want to see it.”

Lydia lowered herself to the floor beside Claire. She pointed to the photo of Julia. “That’s my locket she’s wearing. It had a cursive L on the front.”

They both knew that Julia was still wearing the gold locket when she disappeared. Claire said, “She was always stealing your things.”

Lydia bumped her shoulder. “You were always stealing mine.”

Claire was suddenly struck by a thought. “Did Paul have a file on me?”

“No.”

She studied her sister, wondering if Lydia was lying to her for the same reason that Claire was lying to Lydia.

Lydia asked, “What about Dad’s journals?” Sam had started keeping a diary after Helen left because there was no one left to confide in. “They weren’t in Paul’s boxes.”

“Maybe Mom has them?” Claire shrugged. She had felt so disconnected from her father at the time of his death that she hadn’t asked for any of his belongings. It was only later, when she thought of things like his glasses or his books or his collection of animal-themed ties, that she wished she’d been more present.