Claire tossed the pry bar onto the kitchen table. “This is so weird.”
Lydia knew what she meant. The kitchen looked like a brand-new late 1980s dream kitchen. The white tiled countertops were still in good shape, though the grout had yellowed with age. The two-toned cabinets had veneered walnut exteriors and white painted doors and drawers. The white refrigerator was still running. The matching gas stove looked brand-new. The laminate tile on the floor was a parquet pattern of red and brown bricks. There was no grime in the corners or crumbs of food lost under the toe kicks. In fact, there was very little dust on any of the surfaces. The kitchen felt clean. Despite the house being boarded up, there was no musty odor. If anything, it smelled of Pine-Sol.
Lydia said, “It feels like the Huxtables are about to walk in.”
Claire knocked the dish soap and the sponge into the sink like a bored cat. She opened cabinets. She pulled out drawers too far so that they dropped onto the floor. Silverware clanged. Grill utensils and tongs clattered. Her fingers were still bleeding. Every surface she touched was streaked red.
Lydia asked, “Do you want me to get the first aid kit out of the car?”
“I don’t want anything that was Paul’s.”
Claire walked into the next room, which was obviously the den. The plywood boards over the windows and front door blocked out any light. She turned on table lamps as she walked around the room. Lydia saw a large couch and a love seat, an easy chair and a television that was the old console kind, more like a piece of furniture. A top-loading VCR sat on a wooden shelf above the TV. The time was not flashing the way every VCR flashed in Lydia’s memory. There were VHS tapes stacked beside the player. Lydia scanned the titles. All the movies were from the 1980s. Batman. The Princess Bride. Blade Runner. Back to the Future.
There were tracks in the thick carpet under their feet where someone had recently vacuumed. Lydia ran her fingers through the light smattering of dust on the table behind the couch. If she had to guess, she would say the place hadn’t been cleaned in a week, which was around the same time Paul had died. “Did he come to Athens a lot?”
“Apparently.” Claire took out the videotapes and checked that the labels matched the boxes. “He worked long hours. He could easily drive here and back in a day without me ever finding out.”
“Can you check the GPS in his car?”
“Look.” Claire had found the answering machine on the table beside the couch. It was ancient, the kind that required two cassette tapes—one for the outgoing message and one for incoming calls. The red LED flashed that there were four messages. There was a tape beside the machine labeled MARIA. Claire popped open the cassette player. The outgoing cassette tape was labeled LEXIE.”
“Two different tapes,” Lydia said. “Do you think it’s a code? You call in and one says you’re safe and the other says you’re not?”
Instead of guessing, Claire pressed the PLAY button for received messages. The machine clicked and whirred to life. The first message was static, followed by heavy breathing. There was a short beep, then the second message played. More of the same, until the fourth message played. Lydia could hear a groan on the other end of the line. She remembered now that Claire had groaned when the message tape had finished.
Claire must’ve recognized the sound, too. She pressed the STOP button. She looked around the family room. “He kept everything the same,” she said, and Lydia knew she meant Paul. “His parents died in ’ninety-two. Sometime in January. I guarantee you this is exactly how they left it.”
“Why would Paul lie about keeping the house?”
Claire didn’t answer, likely because there was no answer. “There’s no Lexie Fuller, is there?”
Lydia shook her head. Maybe there had been a woman who pretended to be Lexie Fuller, but considering what Paul was into, there was no telling what had happened to her.
Claire looked around the room. “This feels bad.”
“The whole house feels bad.”
There were two hallways leading off the den. One went to the left toward what were probably the bedrooms. The other went to the right toward the garage. The door was closed at the end of the hall. There was no padlock, just a hollow-core door with a polished brass knob that required a key.
Claire went to the left, turning on all the lights as she stomped through the house with a determination that Lydia had never seen in her sister. This was the Claire who had kneecapped a woman on her tennis team and destroyed every item in her garage. She pulled open drawers and kicked over boxes and rifled bedroom closets. Bottles were toppled. Lamps were broken. She even upended a mattress. Everything she found indicated people were living here, but only if those people hadn’t aged since the first Bush lived in the White House.
Paul’s boyhood room was a mixture of train sets and heavy metal posters. He’d slept in a twin bed with a dark red quilt neatly draped across the footboard. Every drawer in the bureau was hand-labeled. UNDERWEAR & SOCKS. T-SHIRTS & SHORTS. GYM CLOTHES. As with the den, there was very little dust in the room. The carpet was striped from a recent vacuuming. Even the ceiling fan blades were wiped clean.
The same neatness could be found in the tiny spare bedroom, which had a sewing machine in front of the boarded-up window that overlooked the front yard. There was a McCall sewing pattern laid out on a small folding table. Squares of fabric were beside it, ready to be cut.
The master bedroom was filled with a king-size bed that had a blue satin quilt. The ghosts of Paul’s parents permeated the space. The crocheted doily on the back of a wooden rocking chair. The well-worn, steel-toed boots lined up beside one-inch pumps in the tiny closet. There were two bedside tables. One had a hunting magazine in the drawer. The other contained a plastic case for a diaphragm. The paintings on the wall were the sort of thing you got at a flea market or a starving artist sale: pastorals with lots of trees and a too-blue sky looking down on an unreal tableau of grazing sheep and a contented sheepdog. Again, there were vacuum tracks in the blue shag carpet.
Lydia echoed Claire’s earlier observation. “It’s like he was keeping a shrine to his childhood.”
Claire went into the bathroom, which was as small and tidy as the other rooms. The flowered shower curtain was already pulled back. A bar of green soap was in the soap dish. Head & Shoulders shampoo was on a hanging rack underneath the showerhead. A used towel had been left to dry over the towel bar. The two shag rugs on the floor were neatly aligned, separated by the same amount of space all around.
She opened the medicine cabinet. She pulled out all of the items and tossed them onto the floor. Sure deodorant. Close-Up toothpaste. She held up a prescription bottle.
“Amitriptyline,” Claire read. “It was prescribed for Paul’s father.”
“It’s an older antidepressant.” Lydia was intimately familiar with popular drugs from the late twentieth century. “Pre-Prozac.”
“You’ll be surprised to hear that Paul never mentioned anything about depression.” Claire threw the bottle over her shoulder. “Are you ready to go into the garage?”
Lydia realized she’d been putting it off, too. She tried, “We could still leave.”
“Sure we could.” Claire brushed past Lydia and headed back toward the den. S
he went into the kitchen. When she returned, she was gripping the pry bar in her hands. She walked down the narrow hallway toward the garage. The distance was around fifteen feet, but Lydia felt like everything was moving in slow motion. The pry bar arced over Claire’s head. It hung in the air for a few moments before coming down on the brass knob. The door opened into the garage.
Claire reached in and felt for the light switch. Fluorescents sputtered on.
She dropped the pry bar.
Lydia couldn’t move. She was ten feet away, but she could still clearly see the wall opposite the doorway—the empty chains bolted to a concrete-block wall, the edge of a dirty mattress, discarded fast-food bags on the floor, photographer’s spotlights, a camera on a tripod. The ceiling had been altered so it looked like the room was in a basement. Wires hung down. Plumbing pipes went to nowhere. Chains dangled onto the concrete floor. And there was blood.
Lots of blood.
Claire stepped back into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her. The knob was broken off. She had to wrap her fingers around the spindle. She kept her back to the door, blocking the way, keeping Lydia out of the garage.
A body, Lydia thought. Another victim. Another dead girl.
Claire spoke in a low, controlled tone. “I want you to give me your phone. I’m going to use the camera to document the room while you go to the road and use the burner phone to call the FBI. Not Nolan. Call the number in Washington, DC.”
“What did you see?”
Claire shook her head once. Her color was off. She looked ill.
“Claire?”
She shook her head again.
“Is there a body?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
She kept shaking her head.
“I’m not fucking around. Tell me what’s in there.” Claire tightened her grip on the door. “Video cassettes. VHS.”
Lydia tasted bile in her mouth. VHS. Not DVDs. Not digital files. VHS tapes. “How many?”