Lydia heard a whimper come from her mouth. She could handle the sickness, but the grief would kill her before Paul had his chance. Julia. Her innocent, tortured sister. There were six tapes in all, which meant Paul’s father had taken time with her. She had been all alone in that barn, waiting for him, dreading his return, up until the final seconds of her life.
Julia had actually looked at the camera as she was dying. She had stared straight into the lens, straight into Lydia’s heart, and mouthed the word Help.
Lydia squeezed her eyes shut. She let the feelings come uncensored. She should’ve been sweeter to Dee on the phone this morning. She should’ve called Rick to tell him that she loved him instead of texting him that she would explain everything later. And Claire. She should’ve told Claire that she forgave her, because Paul was not a human being. He was some kind of terrifying aberration who was capable of unspeakable deeds.
Lydia fought back another whimper. She couldn’t let herself lose it again. She had to be strong for what was coming next, because Paul had a plan. He always had a plan.
Lydia had a plan, too. She kept flexing her hands and moving her feet to make sure there was enough circulation in her body and clarity in her mind, because eventually, Paul would have to open the trunk again. Lydia was heavier than he was. Paul would have to cut the zip ties so she could climb out. That would be the only opportunity she would have to stop him.
She kept going over the steps in her mind: At first, she would act confused. This would buy her eyes time to adjust to the sunlight. Then, she would move slowly and pretend that she was in pain, which wouldn’t be a stretch. She would act like she needed help and Paul, impatiently, would push her or shove her or kick her and then Lydia would throw her weight into her shoulder and hit him as hard as she could in the neck.
She wouldn’t use her fist because the knuckles might glance off. She would stretch open her hand and use the webbing between her thumb and index finger, creating an arc that sliced nicely into the base of his Adam’s apple.
The thought of hearing his windpipe crack was the only thing that kept her going.
Lydia took several deep breaths and let them go. She worked her hands and feet. She pulled up her knees and stretched out her legs. She rolled her shoulders. Having a plan helped the panic die down to a splinter worrying the back of her brain.
The engine changed speed. Paul was taking an off-ramp. She could feel the car slowing. There was a flash of red light around the steel plates, then a yellow pulse as the turning signal was engaged.
Lydia rolled onto her back. She had gone over the plan so many times that she could practically feel Paul’s throat crunching under her hand. There was no telling how much time had passed since he’d put her in the trunk. She had tried to count the minutes from when he took the photo, but she kept losing count. Panic could do that. She knew that the most important thing to do while she waited was to keep her mind engaged with something other than worst-case scenarios.
She grasped for memories that didn’t involve Paul Scott. Or Dee and Rick, because thinking about her child and her lover right now in this dark, death trap of a space would lead her down a path of no return.
She had to go back several years for a memory that didn’t somehow involve Paul, because even in absence, he had been such a huge part of her life for such a long time. Lydia was twenty-two when Claire met Paul at the computer lab. Two months later, he’d managed to tear Lydia from her family. She had always blamed Paul for her darkest days of addiction, but well before meeting him, she was so deep into self-destruction that the only memories she had were bad ones.
October 1991.
Nirvana was playing at the 40 Watt Club in downtown Athens. Lydia sneaked out of the house. She climbed through her bedroom window, though no one would’ve noticed if she’d walked straight out the front door. She bummed a ride with her friend Leigh and she left behind all the misery and despair trapped inside the house on Boulevard.
Julia had been gone for over six months by then. It was too hard to be at home anymore. When her parents weren’t screaming at each other, they were so despondent that being around them made you feel like an interloper in their private tragedy. Claire had disappeared so far into herself that she could be in the same room with you for ten minutes before you noticed her standing there.
And Lydia had disappeared into pills and powder and grown men who had no business hanging around teenage girls.
Lydia had adored Julia. Her sister was cool and hip and outspoken and she covered for Lydia when Lydia wanted to stay out after curfew, but now she was dead. Lydia knew it like she knew the sun would come up the next day. She had accepted Julia’s death before anyone else in her family had. She knew that her big sister would never be back, and she used it as an excuse to drink more, snort more, screw more, eat more, more, more, more. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, which was why the day after the Nirvana concert, Lydia was clueless when people started arguing about whether the performance was awesome or dog shit.
The band had been drunk off its ass. They were all out of tune. Cobain had started a mini-riot when he’d ripped down the movie screen hanging over the stage. The audience went nuts. They rushed the stage. Eventually, the band piled their instruments on top of the destroyed drum set and walked out.
Lydia had no memory of any of this. She had been so high during the concert that she wasn’t even sure she’d made it to the club. The next morning, she’d woken up in the Alley, which was blocks from the 40 Watt, which made no sense until she stood up and felt the wet stickiness between her legs.
She had bruises on her thighs. She felt raw inside. There was a cut on the back of her neck. She had skin under her fingernails. Someone else’s skin. Her lips were tender. Her jaw was tender. Everything was tender until she found a guy packing some equipment into the back of a van and he gave her a bump and she gave him a hand job and she crawled back home in time to get yelled at by her parents—not for being out all night, but for not being home in time to walk Claire to school.
Claire was fourteen years old. She could walk herself to school. The building was so close to the Boulevard house that you could hear the bells ringing for class changes.
But back then, all of her parents’ anger seemed tied up in Lydia’s failure to take care of her last remaining sister. She was setting a bad example for Claire. She wasn’t spending enough time with Claire. She should try to do more things with Claire.
Which made Lydia feel guilty, and when she wasn’t feeling guilty, she was feeling resentful.
Maybe that’s why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn’t resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.
Which is exactly what she had done eighteen years ago when Lydia had told her about Paul. Instead of confronting the truth, Claire had taken the easy route and made herself disappear from Lydia’s life. She had changed her phone number. She had refused to respond to any of Lydia’s letters. She had even moved apartments in order to erase Lydia from her life.
Maybe that was why Lydia hadn’t been able to forgive her.
Because, really, nothing had changed in the last eighteen years. For all of Claire’s tough talk—her seemingly sincere apologies and blunt confessions—she was still keeping one foot out the door. The only reason Claire had reached out to Lydia last night was because she had started to unravel Paul’s lies and couldn’t handle it on her own. She had said it herself this morning—she wanted her big sister to make it all better.
What would Claire do now? With Lydia gone, there was no one else to call. Helen couldn’t
be relied on. Huckabee was useless. Adam Quinn was probably in this thing right alongside Paul. Claire couldn’t turn to the police because there was no telling who else was involved. She could turn to herself, but what would she find? A kept woman who was incapable of keeping herself.
The car slowed again. Lydia could feel the terrain turn from asphalt to gravel. She splayed her hands to keep from being jolted around the trunk. A large pothole slammed her into the sheet metal. The cut in her forehead opened. Lydia blinked away the blood.
She struggled with the bad thoughts that were pinging around her brain. And then she stopped struggling, because what was the point? This was no longer a matter of an unhealed rift between her and Claire. This was life and death.
Lydia’s life.
Lydia’s possible death.
The brakes squeaked as the car rolled to a stop. The engine idled.
She braced herself, waiting for the trunk to open. No one knew where she was. No one even knew she was missing. If she left this all to Claire, Lydia knew that she would never make it out alive.
It had been like this all of their lives—before Paul, even before Julia.
Claire made a choice, and Lydia was the one who paid for it.
CHAPTER 14
Claire listened to the click as Paul hung up the phone. She put the receiver back on the hook. She went outside and sat on the back porch. There was a notebook and a pen beside her leg, but she had given up listing questions when Paul had made it clear that he wasn’t going to answer any of them. Every time he called, he waited to hear her voice, then he disconnected the line, and the timer reset for another twenty minutes until he called again.