I should’ve mentioned the scalpel when I catalogued the items in my silverware drawer. It has been there for almost a year now—shiny metal with a surgically sharpened blade. I have seen how easily it slices open flesh and dreamed about how easily it would cut into mine.
I think what happened was this: Ben knew he had helped me climb out of that depression, and that it was time to let me go. Not because he wanted to end our contact, but because, if I kept visiting, he would be too tempted to destroy what he had worked so hard to build back up.
So, while the warden was right about my strange friend being a psychopath, he was wrong about Ben Carver’s lack of empathy. I have proof of it right here in my hands.
I don’t know how he managed to get a copy of You’re Only Old Once! while living on death row, but I do know that Ben was very resourceful. He had many fans on the outside. The guards gave him the respect of an old-timer. Even in prison, Ben could get almost anything he wanted. And he never wanted anything unless there was a good reason. The reason this time was to send me a message.
This is the inscription Ben wrote inside the book:
“First you must have the images. Then come the words.” —Robert James Waller.
Images.
I had seen that word before—at least six times before on my annual reading sojourn to the sheriff’s office. The word was connected to a deed and the deed was connected to an act and that act had been committed by a man and that man, I now understood, was connected to you.
You see, sweetheart?
Ben Carver knew something about you after all.
CHAPTER 10
Lydia stood in front of the Arch in downtown Athens. She looked down at her phone. She reloaded the search page to refresh the links. There were no new details in the Anna Kilpatrick case. That didn’t stop the news outlets from regurgitating the story. They were milking the press conference for every bit of emotion they could squeeze out. Eleanor’s heartbreaking outburst had busted the coverage wide open. MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC had all abandoned their Sunday-morning political recaps. CNN had brought in a shrink to discuss Eleanor and Bob Kilpatrick’s state of mind. The fact that the doctor had never met the dead girl’s parents or even worked on a case where a child was abducted and murdered did not mar his qualifications to speak as an expert on national television.
Lydia was more qualified to know their state of mind. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was dead. She had been tortured and branded and abandoned on the BeltLine, a joke of a recreational path that was more like a criminal hunting ground. At the moment, the Kilpatricks were probably looking for the most expedient way to join their only child.
They had likely suspected all along that Anna was dead, but there was thinking it might be true and then there was having actual confirmation. They had seen her body. They had borne witness to her degradation. Was knowing exactly what had happened better than whatever horrors they had spun in their imaginations?
Like the Carroll family, they were caught between two guns.
Lydia wiped sweat from her brow. The temperature had dropped overnight, but she felt hot, probably from shock or stress, or a combination of the two. She climbed the stone steps up to the iron Arch that had stood at the North Campus entrance since the Civil War. Her father had told them stories about toilet papering the Arch after football games. Julia had almost been arrested here during a protest against the first Gulf War. On the last night of her life, she had walked past the Arch with her friends on the way to the Manhattan.
And after the Manhattan, they had never seen her again.
Lydia wanted her daughter. She wanted to hold her in her arms and kiss her head the way Dee only let her do when she was sick or feeling sad. When Dee was a baby, she had loved being held. Lydia’s back constantly ached from carrying her around the kitchen while she cooked or resting her on her hip while she did laundry. When Rick came along, Dee would drape herself across them like a blanket, her feet in Rick’s lap and her head in Lydia’s. Rick and Lydia would look at each other and smile because they had such a perfect little girl between them. And Lydia would feel such relief because the only time she truly knew that Dee was safe was when she was close enough to count her daughter’s breaths.
She put her head in her hands. She closed her eyes. She gave into the images of Eleanor Kilpatrick that were burned into every fold of her brain. The way the mother had screamed with such damaged intensity. Her haunted expression. The X she had drawn over the left side of her abdomen.
Eleanor was obviously right-handed. She had to reach across her belly to draw the X. She hadn’t chosen that exact spot by coincidence.
Lydia looked across Broad Street. Claire was sitting outside the Starbucks where she’d left her. Her posture was ramrod straight as she stared into empty space. She had the dazed look of a catatonic. There was an unnerving stillness about her. She had always been so hard to read, but right now, she was impenetrable.
Lydia stood up. The thirty yards between them wasn’t going to help her magically divine Claire’s thoughts. She walked back across Broad, lingering at the median though there was no traffic. Georgia had beaten Auburn last night. The town was sleeping off the win. The sidewalks were sticky from spilled beer. Trash littered the streets.
Claire didn’t look up when Lydia sat down at the table, but she asked, “Does it look different?”
“It looks like an outdoor shopping mall,” she said, because the campus had turned from that of a quaint southern university into a sprawling corporate behemoth. “It’s almost suburban.”
“The only thing that’s really changed is the length of the khaki shorts.”
“Didn’t the Taco Stand used to be here?”
“You parked right in front of it.” Claire indicated the direction with a tilt of her head.
Lydia craned her neck. She saw more tables and chairs crisscrossing the sidewalk. No one was sitting outside because it was too cold. There was a woman standing with a broom and dustpan, but instead of sweeping up the debris left over from the night before, she was checking her phone.
Claire said, “He never asked me for anything weird.”
Lydia turned back to her sister.
“I remember when I first saw the movie on his computer—just the beginning of it with the girl chained up—I had this strange feeling, almost like a betrayal, because I wanted to know why he didn’t bring it to me.” She watched a jogger slowly cross the street. “I thought, If that’s what he’s into, chaining people up and leather and blindfolds and that kind of thing, even though I’m not particularly into it, why didn’t he ask me to give it a try?” She looked at Lydia like she expected an answer.
Lydia could only shrug.
“I probably would’ve said yes.” Claire shook her head, as if to contradict herself. “I mean, if that’s what he really wanted, then I would’ve tried it, right? Because that’s what you do. And Paul knew that. He knew that I would’ve tried.”
Lydia shrugged again, but she had no idea.
“He never asked me to dress up like a maid or pretend to be a schoolgirl or whatever else it is you hear about. He never even asked for anal, and every man asks for anal eventually.”
Lydia glanced around, hoping no one could hear.
“She was younger than me,” Claire continued. “The first woman—when I saw her, I had this split-second thought that she was younger than me, and that hurt, because I’m not young anymore. That’s the one thing I couldn’t give him.”
Lydia sat back in her chair. There was nothing she could do but let Claire talk.
“I wasn’t in love with him when I married him. I mean, I loved him, but it wasn’t . . .” She waved the emotions away with her hand. “We were married for less than a year, and Christmas was coming up. Paul was working on his master’s and I was answering phones for a law office and I just thought, I??
?m out of here. Being married felt so pointless. So tedious. Mom and Dad were so full of life before Julia. They were such passionate, interesting people. Do you remember that? How they were before?”
Lydia smiled, because Claire had somehow unlocked the memories with that one question. Even decades into their marriage, Sam and Helen Carroll had acted like teenagers who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Claire said, “They went dancing and to parties and out to dinner and they had their own interests and they loved talking to each other all the time. Remember how we weren’t allowed to interrupt them? And we didn’t want to interrupt them, because they were so fascinating.” Claire smiled, too. “They read everything. They saw everything. People vied to spend time with them. They’d have a party and strangers would show up at the door because they’d heard the Carrolls were so much fun.”
Lydia felt it all come rushing back—Helen spraying cheese on celery stalks and Sam singeing his eyebrows off at the grill. Games of charades. Heated political debates. Lively discussions about books and art and movies.
Claire continued, “They were always kissing each other. Like, real kissing. And we’d say it was gross, but wasn’t it nice, Pepper? Didn’t you see them and think that’s what love was all about?”
Lydia nodded. She felt intoxicated by the long-forgotten memories.
“That first year with Paul, that’s what we didn’t have. At least, I didn’t think we had it.” Claire swallowed so hard that her throat moved. “So I rode my bike home from work that night thinking that I was just going to be honest and tell him it was over. Rip off the Band-Aid. Don’t wait for all the Christmas parties and New Years to come and go. Just say it.” She paused. Tears rolled down her face. “But I got home, and Paul was in bed. I thought he was taking a nap, but he was covered in sweat. I could hear him wheezing. His eyelids fluttered every time he blinked. I made him get up and I took him to the hospital. He’d had a cold for weeks, but it turned into walking pneumonia. He could’ve died. He almost did.” She wiped away her tears. “But here’s the thing: I was terrified. I couldn’t think about my life without him. Hours before, I was ready to leave him, but then I realized that I couldn’t.” She shook her head vehemently, as if someone had asked her to. “He was in the hospital for almost three weeks, and I never left his side. I read to him. I slept in the bed with him. I bathed him. I had always known that Paul needed me, but I never realized until I almost lost him that I really, really needed him.”
Claire stopped to take a shallow breath. “That’s when you fall in love with somebody. The lust and fucking like rabbits and letting your life fall to shit so you can be around him—that’s passion. It’s borderline obsession. And it always burns itself out. You know that, Liddie. That high never, ever lasts. But being in that hospital, taking care of him, I started to realize that what I had with Paul, what I thought I had, that was more than love. That was being in love. It was so tangible I could almost touch it with my hands. I could bite it with my teeth.”
Lydia would’ve never articulated it that same way, but she knew from Rick what her sister was talking about. There was so much of her self that was wrapped up in him: lover, companion, best friend, foil. All of this time she’d been focused on what it would feel like to lose Dee, but losing Rick would be devastating in so many different ways.
Claire said, “Paul knew how it felt for me to lose Julia. I told him everything. Everything. I didn’t hold back one detail. I can’t recall a time in my life when I’ve ever been that honest with a man. I laid it all out—what it was like when Mom turned into a ghost and Dad turned into Don Quixote. How much I needed you to help me get through the day.” She made sure that Lydia was looking at her. “You saved me, Pepper. You were the only thing I had to hold on to when the bottom dropped out.”
Lydia felt a lump in her throat. They had saved each other.
“That’s probably why Paul had to drive us apart, don’t you think? He knew how important you were to me. More important than Mom, even, because I trusted you to be there no matter what.”
Lydia shook her head. There was no way to tell what had been in Paul’s mind.
“He knew from me what Anna Kilpatrick’s family was going through, and he watched those horrible movies despite that. Maybe because of it, because I think that he got off on knowing that Anna wasn’t the only one in pain. There were all these other layers of pain rippling through the family, through the community, and even to us—you, me, Mom, Grandma Ginny. He was constantly asking me about Anna Kilpatrick, or referring to the case, and gauging my reaction. He even brought it up the night he died.” She gave a dry laugh. “I thought he was asking because he cared about me, but now I can see that it was all part of his game. It’s the same kink as raping those women, then having them followed for so many years.”
Lydia didn’t disagree, but she asked, “Why do you think that?”
“Because it’s about control. He controlled me for years by making me think I had everything I wanted. He controlled you by isolating you away from the family. He controlled Mom by making her think he was the perfect son-in-law. He controlled those women in his files by knowing exactly where they were. Hell, he even controlled Grandma Ginny, because she would’ve been in a state nursing home without his money. For all her noble, impoverished-widow bullshit, she loves having a private apartment and weekly maid service. One way or another, we were all under his thumb.”
Lydia gripped her hands together on the table. Why had Claire never seen any of this when Paul was alive? Was he really that good at hiding his darker nature?
Claire said, “God only knows what this Lexie Fuller woman is going through. Maybe he never asked me to do anything weird because he was doing it with her.” She laughed again. “Actually, part of me hopes that he did, because that would mean that I wasn’t completely crazy, because he was so goddamn normal. I know you saw through him, but you were the only person in his entire life who thought that something was wrong with him. Even Dad was fooled. I told you I read his journals. The worst thing he ever said about Paul is that he loves me too much.”
Lydia doubted her father had paid much attention to Paul. Claire was just getting serious about him when Sam Carroll took his life. Lydia had always assumed the tragedy had escalated their relationship.
Claire told her, “Paul chose to show you that bad side of himself. He worked his ass off to keep it from everybody else, but he showed it to you because he knew that it would split us apart.”
“You let him play you.” Lydia didn’t realize how angry she still was until she said the words. Why did Claire just get to pick up where they left off? She was confiding in Lydia like the last eighteen years hadn’t happened, like she hadn’t been the sole reason Lydia had been shoved out into the cold. She told her sister, “You chose a boy over me.”
Claire held Lydia’s gaze. “You’re right. I did. And I don’t know that we’ll ever get past it, because it’s truly unforgivable.”
Lydia was the first one to look away. She had to remind herself who the real villain was. Paul had dedicated his life to manipulating people. Claire had been a naïve and vulnerable teenager when they’d met in college. Helen was still a mess. Sam was on the verge of suicide. Lydia was in and out of jail. Was it any wonder that Paul was able to sink his teeth into her?
And yet, Lydia still could not find within herself the ability to forgive.
Claire asked, “Do you think I should call Captain Mayhew?”
“For what?” Lydia couldn’t keep the alarm out of her voice. The abrupt change in subject slapped her like a cold wind. “He lied to you about the movies. He said they were fake.”
“Maybe he lied because he didn’t want me to leak them to the press?”
“No, he would’ve filed an injunction. Or arrested you for interfering with an active investigation. Or just told you to keep quiet.”
“I’m not going to take this to Agent Nolan,” Claire said. “Who else is left? Huckleberry?” She waved her hand in the general direction of the sheriff’s office. “He did a bang-up job with Julia. I’m sure he’d get right on top of this.”
Lydia felt like they were letting their imaginations get the best of them. “What do we actually know, Claire? That Paul watched the movies. That’s it.”
“The movies are real.”
“We think they’re real.” Lydia tried to play devil’s advocate again. “We think that girl looked like Anna Kilpatrick. We think that she was mutilated in the same way, based on what her mother said and did during a press conference. But are we one hundred percent certain? Or are we just talking ourselves into it?”
“Confirmation bias.” Claire scowled at her own words. “What’s the downside of calling Mayhew?”
“Because he lied to you about the movies. Because he’s supposed to be working the biggest case in the city right now and he stopped everything to go to your house and investigate an attempted burglary. Because he’s a cop and if you piss him off, he can make your life a living hell.”
“What is my life now?” Claire held out her hand. “Give me the burner phone.”
Lydia studied her sister. There was something different about her. She had stopped sounding like a confused bystander and started acting like the person in charge.
Lydia asked, “What are you going to say to him?”
“That he needs to be straight with me. That he needs to explain to me again why the movie isn’t real when, according to Eleanor Kilpatrick, her daughter was abused in the same way as the girl in the movie.”
“That’s a fantastic idea, Sweetpea.” Lydia layered on the sarcasm. “You believe that a high-ranking police officer might possibly be covering up a murder, or maybe is somehow involved in it, or filming it, or distributing images of it, or maybe all of the above, and you’re just going to call him up and say, ‘Hey, man, what’s the what up?’ ”