Lydia shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t hear it.
“Every time I think I have her pinned down, she does something exciting.” He gave another surprised laugh. “Like, get this: I was sitting in a meeting one day, and I get this call on my cell phone, and the ID said it was from the Dunwoody police station. I thought it had to do with something else, so I go outside and I answer, and there’s this recorded message asking if I’ll accept a collect call from an inmate at the Dunwoody jail. Can you believe that?”
He waited, but surely he knew Lydia wouldn’t answer.
“It was Claire. She said, ‘Hi, what are you doing?’ She sounded completely normal, like she was calling to tell me to bring her home some ice cream. But the recording said she was an inmate in jail, so I told her, ‘The recording said you were in jail.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I was arrested about an hour ago.’ So I asked her, ‘What did you get arrested for?’ And do you know what she said?” Paul leaned forward again. He was clearly enjoying this. “She said, ‘I didn’t have enough money to pay the hookers and they called the police.’ ”
Paul’s laughter was filled with obvious delight. He actually slapped his knee.
He asked Lydia, “Can you believe that?”
Lydia had no problem believing the story, but she was chained up in an isolated cabin with a hood over her head, not talking to her brother-in-law at a barbecue. “What do you want from me?”
“How about this?” He jammed his foot between her legs so hard that her tailbone slammed into the concrete wall. “Do you think this is what I want?”
Lydia opened her mouth, but she didn’t let herself scream.
“Liddie?”
He started to grind in his foot, using the treads of his shoe to press her open.
His tone was still conversational. “Do you want me to tell you where Julia is?”
She forced her mouth closed as the treads cut deeper into her.
“Don’t you want to know where she is, Liddie? Don’t you want to find her body?”
She felt the skin sliding back and forth across her pubic bone.
“Tell me you want to hear what happened.”
She tried to mask her terror. “I know what happened.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know what happened after.”
His voice had changed again. He liked this. He liked seeing her squirm. He was absorbing her fear like a succubus. Lydia heard an echo of the last words Paul Scott had ever spoken to her: Tell me you want this.
Her whole body shuddered at the memory.
“Are you scared, Liddie?” Slowly, he removed his foot. She had a second of relief, but then his fingers brushed across her breasts.
Lydia tried to jerk away.
His touch got harder as he moved his fingers to her collarbone, then down her arm. He pressed his thumb against her bicep until she felt like the bone was going to snap.
“Please.” The word slipped out before she could stop it. She had seen the movies he liked to watch. She had seen his files filled with women he had raped. “Please don’t do this.”
“How about this?” Paul grabbed her breast.
Lydia screamed. His hand clamped down like a vise. And then he squeezed harder. And harder. His fingers gouged deep into the tissue. The pain was unbearable. She couldn’t stop screaming. “Please!” she begged. “Stop!”
He let go slowly, releasing one finger at a time.
Lydia gasped for air. Her breast throbbed from his fingers piercing the flesh.
“Did you like that?”
Lydia was going to black out. He had stopped, but she could still feel his hand twisting her breast. She was panting. She couldn’t catch her breath. The hood was too tight. It felt like there was something around her neck. Was his hand around her neck? Was he touching her? She turned her head left and right. She tried to wrench her body from the chair. The chain dug into her stomach. She lifted her hips off the seat.
Clicking.
She heard clicking.
A spring bending back and forth.
Was he bouncing the chair? Was he jerking himself off?
There was the sharp smell of urine. Had she wet herself? Lydia squirmed in the chair. The stench was overwhelming. She tightened herself against the chair. She pressed the back of her skull into the wall.
“Breathe,” Paul said. “Deep breaths.”
Click. Squeak. Click.
A spray bottle. She knew the sound. The tiny spring in the handle. The sucking noise as the pump pulled up liquid. The click as the handle released.
Paul said, “You’re going to want to keep breathing.”
The hood was getting wet. The thick cotton was getting heavy against her mouth and nose.
“I like to think of this as my own special form of waterboarding.”
Lydia sucked in great gulps of air. It was piss. He was spraying her with piss. She turned away her head. Paul followed her with the spray bottle. She turned the other way. He turned the bottle.
“Keep breathing,” he said.
Lydia opened her mouth. He adjusted the nozzle so the spray turned into a stream. The wet cotton molded to her lips. The hood became soaked. The material clogged her nostrils. Claustrophobia took over. She was going to suffocate. She inhaled a spray of liquid. She coughed and sucked in a mouthful of urine. Lydia gagged. Urine washed down her throat. She started to choke. He kept spraying, angling the stream no matter which way she turned her head. He was trying to drown her. She was going to drown in his urine.
“Lydia.”
Her lungs were paralyzed. Her heart strangled.
“Lydia.” Paul raised his voice. “I put the spray bottle down. Stop panicking.”
Lydia couldn’t stop panicking. There was no more air. She had forgotten what to do. Her body couldn’t remember how to draw breath.
Paul said, “Lydia.”
Lydia tried in vain to draw in more air. She saw flashes of light. Her lungs were going to explode.
“Breathe out,” he coached. “You’re only breathing in.”
She breathed in harder. He was lying. He was lying. He was lying.
“Lydia.”
She was going to die. She couldn’t work the muscles. Nothing was working. Everything had stopped, even the beats of her heart.
“Lydia.”
Explosions of light filled her eyes.
“Brace yourself.” Paul punched her so hard in the stomach that she felt the metal chair bend into the wall.
Her mouth opened. She huffed out a stream of warm, wet air.
Air. She had air. Her lungs filled. Her head filled. She was dizzy. Her stomach burned. She collapsed forward in the chair. The chain cut into her ribs. Her cheek hit her knee. Blood rushed into her face. Her heart was pounding. Her lungs were screaming.
The wet cotton hood hung down in front of her face. Piss-tainted air flowed into her open mouth and nose.
Paul said, “It’s weird how that happens, right?”
Lydia concentrated on pulling air into her lungs and pushing it back out. She had crumbled so easily. He had sprayed piss in her face and she had been ready to give up.
“You’re beating yourself up,” Paul guessed. “You’ve always thought you were the strong one, but you’re not, are you? That’s why you liked coke so much. It gives you this sense of euphoria, like you can do anything in the world. But without it, you’re completely powerless.”
Lydia squeezed tears out of her eyes. She had to be stronger. She couldn’t let him get into her head. He was too good at this. He knew exactly what he was doing to her. He hadn’t just been behind the camera zooming in.
He had participated.
Paul said, “Now, Julia, she was a real fighter.”
Lydia shook her head. She silently begged him not to do this
.
“You watched the tape. You saw how she fought back, even at the end.”
Lydia tensed her body. She pulled at the plastic ties.
“I watched you watching her die. Did you know that?” Paul sounded pleased with himself. “I gotta say, that was pretty meta.”
The zip ties were ripping into her skin. She could feel the plastic teeth sawing back and forth.
“My mom helped look for her,” Paul said. “Dad and I got a big kick out of her slipping on her boots every morning and trudging out into fields and checking streams and putting up flyers. Everybody was out looking for Julia Carroll, and Mom had no idea that she was hanging out in the barn.”
Lydia remembered searching fields and rivers. She remembered the way the town rallied around her family, only to turn their backs two weeks later.