Pretty Girls (18 page)

After two years as an assistant, Lydia got promoted to head groomer. Almost a full year later, she was able to buy a reliable car and rent a one-bedroom apartment. Three years after that, she opened her own grooming business. At first, she would go to clients’ houses in a dilapidated Dodge van with red duct tape for taillights. Then she got a better van and turned it into a mobile grooming venture. Eight years ago, she opened her own storefront. She had two employees. She had a small mortgage on a small ranch house. She dated her next-door neighbor, a man named Rick Butler who looked like a younger, less sexy version of Sam Shepard. She had several dogs and a cat. Her daughter attended Westerly Academy on a scholarship arranged by an anonymous donor.

Well, not really anonymous anymore, because according to the paperwork Claire had found in Paul’s office, he’d been using a shell organization to foot the thirty grand a year for Julia “Dee” Delgado to attend Westerly Academy.

Claire had found Dee’s scholarship essay in the same set of files along with thirty other entries from students all over the metro area. Obviously, the contest was rigged, but Dee’s paper was remarkably cogent compared to the others. Her thesis dealt with how difficult the state of Georgia made life for convicted drug felons. They were denied food and housing assistance. They couldn’t vote. They faced employment discrimination. They were denied scholarship opportunities. They often had no family support system. Considering they had served their time, paid their fines, completed parole and paid taxes, didn’t they deserve the right to full citizenship like the rest of us?

The argument was compelling, even without the benefit of the photographs Claire had on her desk in front of her.

And thanks to the private detectives Paul had hired to track Lydia over the years, there were plenty of photographs for Claire to choose from.

A frazzled-looking Lydia carrying Dee in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. A clearly exhausted Lydia standing at the bus stop outside the vet’s office. Lydia walking a pack of dogs down a tree-lined street, her face relaxed for a brief moment in time. Climbing into the beat-up Dodge van with the red tape on the taillights. Behind the wheel of the Ford van with the mobile grooming equipment inside. Standing proudly in front of the new storefront. The photo was clearly taken on grand opening day. Lydia was using a giant pair of scissors to cut a yellow ribbon while her daughter and hippie boyfriend proudly looked on.

Dee Delgado. Claire put the pictures in order. Lydia’s child looked so much like Julia that it took Claire’s breath away.

Paul must have thought the same thing when he saw the photographs. He’d never met Julia, but Claire had three scrapbooks full of family photos. She wondered if it was worth putting them side by side and doing a comparison. And then she worried that she hadn’t opened the scrapbooks in years, and if she did so now, would she find something that told her Paul had looked at the scrapbooks, too?

She decided there was no way he hadn’t. Clearly, Paul was obsessed with Lydia. Every September for the past seventeen and a half years, he’d hired a private detective to check in on her. He’d used different agencies each time, but they had all delivered the same type of detailed reports, cataloging the minutiae of Lydia’s life. Credit reports. Background checks. Tax returns. Court orders. Parole reports. Court transcripts, though the legal side had dried up fifteen years ago. There was even a separate note detailing the names and types of animals she owned.

Claire had had absolutely no idea that he was doing this. She imagined that Lydia was likewise clueless, because she knew without a doubt that Lydia would die before she took one red cent from Paul.

The funny thing was that over the years, Paul had occasionally suggested that Claire try to get in touch with Lydia. He’d made noises about how he wished he had family left he could talk to. How Helen wasn’t getting any younger and it might be good for Claire to heal old wounds. Once, he’d even offered to try to look for her, but Claire had said no because she wanted to make it clear to Paul that she would never forgive her sister for lying about him.

“I will never let another person come between us,” Claire had assured him, her voice shaking with the righteous indignation she felt on behalf of her wrongly accused husband.

Had Paul manipulated Claire with Lydia the same way he’d manipulated her with the computer passwords and bank accounts? Claire had easy access to everything, so she felt compelled to look for nothing. Paul had been so very, very cunning, hiding all of his transgressions in plain sight.

The only question now was how many more transgressions was she going to find? Claire stared at the two heavy file boxes she’d carried down from Paul’s office. They were made of a milky white plastic. The outside of each box was labeled. PERSONAL-1 and PERSONAL-2.

Claire couldn’t bring herself to go through the second box. The first had contained enough hell to end her day on. The file folders inside were color-coded. The tabs were neatly labeled with women’s names. Claire had zeroed in on Lydia’s for obvious reasons, but she had closed the box on the dozens of other files that had dozens of other women’s names because she had already glimpsed quite enough of Paul’s personal shit. She could not force herself to go looking for more.

Instead, she opened the flip phone by the overturned Percocet bottle. Claire had bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone, which she knew was called a burner phone. At least if you could believe
Law & Order
.

Lydia’s cell phone number was in Paul’s reports. Claire had sent her a text from the burner. There was no message, just the Dunwoody address. Claire had wanted to leave it up to chance. Would Lydia dismiss the address as a scam, something along the lines of a deposed Nigerian president seeking her bank details? Or would she dismiss it when she realized it had come from Claire?

Claire deserved to be ignored. Her sister had told her that a man had tried to rape her and Claire’s response had been to believe the man.

And yet, Lydia had texted back almost immediately:
I’m on my way
.

Since the robbery, Claire had been leaving the security gate open. She had secretly hoped the burglars would come back and kill her. Or maybe not kill her, because that would be cruel to Helen. Perhaps they could just beat her senseless so she could go into a coma and wake up a year from now when all of the dominos had stopped falling.

Here was the first domino: It was easy to say that a person who watched films of rape was not necessarily interested in real-life rape, but what if there was an instance in that person’s past when someone had accused him of trying to commit that very crime?

Second domino: What if that long-ago attempted rape accusation was true?

Third domino: Statistically, rapists didn’t just rape once. If they got away with it, they generally kept raping. Even if they didn’t get away with it, the recidivism rate was so high that they might as well put a revolving door on every prison.

How did Claire know this statistic? Because she’d volunteered at a rape crisis hotline a handful of years ago, which would have been a hilarious bit of irony if someone had told her this story at a party.

Which brought her to the fourth domino: What was really inside the Pandora’s boxes labeled PERSONAL-1 and PERSONAL-2? Any thinking person could guess that the files with women’s names were exactly like the file with Lydia’s name: surveillance reports, photographs, detailed lists of the comings and goings of women that Paul had targeted.

Fifth domino: If Paul had really tried to rape Lydia, what had he really done to the other women?

Thank God she had never had children with him. The thought made her head spin. Actually, the whole room was spinning. The wine and pills were not playing well with each other. Claire was feeling that familiar, overwhelming sickness again.

She closed her eyes. In her mind, she made a list, because writing things down felt too dangerous.

Jacob Mayhew: Was he lying about the authenticity of the movies? In keeping with his mantle of the hardboiled detective, was he the type of man who would lie to a woman in order to protect her delicate feelings?

Adam Quinn: What files did he really want? Was he as good as Paul had been at hiding his true nature, even when he was having sex with her?

Fred Nolan: Why was this creepy asshole really at the house the day of the funeral? Was it because of the movies or did he have something worse waiting for Claire around the corner?

Paul Scott: Rapist? Sadist? Husband? Friend? Lover? Liar? Claire had been married to him for almost half of her life but she had no idea who he really was.

She opened her eyes. She looked down at the spilled Percocet and contemplated taking another. Claire didn’t understand the appeal of being drugged. She had thought the purpose was to make you numb, but if anything, she was feeling everything much too intensely. She couldn’t shut down her brain. She felt shaky. Her tongue was too thick for her mouth. Maybe she was doing it wrong. Maybe the two Valium she’d taken an hour ago were counteracting the effects. Maybe she needed more Percocet. Claire took her iPad out of her desk drawer. Surely she could find some kind of instructional video posted by a helpful drug addict on YouTube.

The burner phone vibrated. Claire read Lydia’s message:
I’m here
.

She pressed her palms on the desktop and pushed herself up. Or at least she tried to. The muscles in her arms wouldn’t respond. Claire forced her legs to stand and nearly fell over when the entire room made a quarter-turn to the left.

The doorbell rang. Claire shoved all of Lydia’s photos and reports into her desk drawer. She took a sip of wine, then decided to take the glass with her.

Walking came with its own challenges. The wide-open spaces of the kitchen and family room presented few obstacles, but she felt like she was inside a pinball machine as she bumped against the walls in the main hallway. She finally had to take off her heels, which she’d only left on because they always took off their shoes inside the house. All of the rugs were white. The floor was bleached oak. The walls were white. Even some of the paintings were muted whites. She wasn’t living in a house. She was occupying a sanitarium.

The handles on the front doors telescoped out of her reach. She could see the outline of Lydia’s body through the frosted glass. Claire spilled her wine as she grabbed at the door handle. She felt her lips smiling, though none of this was particularly funny.

Lydia knocked on the glass.

“I’m right here.” Claire finally pulled open the door.

“Jesus Christ.” Lydia leaned in to look at Claire’s eyes. “Your pupils are the size of dimes.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Claire said, because surely a dime was larger than her entire eyeball. Or was it closer to a quarter?

Lydia came into the house without being asked. She dropped her purse by the front door. She kicked off her shoes. She looked around the entrance foyer. “What is this place?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said, because it didn’t feel like home anymore. “Did you have an affair with Paul?”

Lydia’s mouth dropped open in surprise.

“Just tell me,” Claire said, because she knew from Paul’s reports that Lydia had had a child and that Paul was paying for the girl’s education. An affair that produced a love child was so much more palatable than all the other terrible explanations for why Paul would insert himself into her sister’s life.

Lydia still had her mouth open.

“Did you?”

“Absolutely not.” Lydia looked worried. “What did you take?”

“Nembutal and Ambien with a vodka back.”

“That’s not funny.” Lydia snatched away the glass of wine. She looked for somewhere to put it in the stark entryway and settled on the floor. “Why did you ask me that about Paul?”

Claire kept the answer to herself.

“Was he cheating on you?”

Claire hadn’t framed the optics through that lens. Was it cheating to rape someone? Because, to be clear, that’s the direction in which all the dominos were falling. If Paul had truly tried to rape Lydia, then he had probably tried and succeeded with someone else, and if he had gotten away with it once, then he had probably tried again.

And hired a private detective to follow them around for the rest of their lives so that he could still exert control over them from his lair over the garage.

But was that cheating? Claire knew from her training at the crisis center that rape was about power. Paul certainly liked controlling things. So, was raping women the equivalent of turning all the cans in the pantry label-out or loading the dishwasher with mechanical precision?

“Claire?” Lydia snapped her fingers very loudly. “Look at me.”

Claire tried her best to look at her sister. She’d always thought that Lydia was the prettiest of all of them. Her face was fuller, but she’d aged more gracefully than Claire would’ve thought. She had laugh lines around her eyes. She had a beautiful, accomplished daughter. She had a boyfriend who was a recovering heroin addict who listened to talk radio while he worked on an old truck in his driveway.

Why did Paul need to know that? Why did he need to know anything about Lydia at all? Was it stalking if you hired someone else to do it? And wasn’t watching someone without their knowledge another form of rape?

Lydia asked, “Claire, what did you take?” Her voice softened. She rubbed Claire’s arms. “Sweetpea, tell me what you took.”

“Valium.” Claire suddenly wanted to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her Sweetpea. “Some Percocet.”

“How many?”

Claire shook her head because it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. “We had a cat named Mr. Sandwich.”

Lydia was understandably perplexed. “Okay.”

“We called him Hammy, like ham in a sandwich. He was always between us. On the couch. In the bed. He only purred when we were both petting him.”

Lydia tilted her head to the side like she was trying to understand a crazy person.

“Cats know people.” Claire was sure her sister understood this. They had grown up surrounded by animals. None of them could walk through a parking lot without attracting a stray. “If Paul had been a bad person, Hammy would’ve known.” Claire knew she was offering a weak defense, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Isn’t that what you hear, that bad people hate animals?”