“And dachshunds.”
They both made a sour face.
Claire said, “She liked that gross guy with the mullet. What was his name? Brent Lockhart?”
“Lockwood,” Lydia remembered. “Dad made him get a job at McDonald’s.”
“He smelled like grilled beef.”
Lydia laughed, because Julia the vegetarian had been appalled. “She broke up with him a week later.”
“She let him get to second base anyway.”
Lydia looked up. “She told you that?”
“I spied on them from the stairs.”
“You were always such a brat.”
“I didn’t tattle.”
“For once.”
They both looked back down at the locket. The gold had worn off the back. “I meant what I told you on the phone. I forgive you.”
Claire wiped rain out of her eyes. She didn’t look like she would ever forgive herself. “I sent out an email—”
“Tell me later.”
There were so many more important things to catch up on. Lydia wanted to watch Dee meet her crazy aunt. She wanted to hear Rick and Helen discussing the inherent evil of eBooks. She wanted to hold her daughter. She wanted to gather up her dogs and her cats and her family and be made whole again.
Claire said, “All Daddy ever wanted was to find her.”
“It’s time.”
Claire turned on the flashlight. The light reached down to the bottom of the well. The body had come to rest in a shallow pool of water. The skin had fallen off. No sunlight had bleached the bones.
The locket. The long blonde hair. The silver bangles.
Julia.
TWENTY-FOUR
Claire lay on Julia’s bed with her head propped up on Mr. Biggles, Julia’s favorite stuffed animal. The ancient, shaggy dog had barely survived their childhood. Jean Nate After Bath Splash suffused his stuffing. His legs had been dipped in Kool-Aid as payback for a purloined book. Part of his nose had been burned off in a stealthy bit of retribution for a stolen hat. In a fit of pique, someone had snipped the fur on his head down to the cotton batting.
Lydia didn’t look much better. Her singed hair was growing back, but six weeks out from their ordeal, her bruises were still a nasty black and yellow. The cuts and burns had only recently started to scab. The area around her fractured eye socket was still red and swollen. Her left arm would be in a sling for another two weeks, but she had become remarkably adept at doing almost everything with one hand, including folding Julia’s clothes.
They were in the house on Boulevard. Helen was making lunch in the kitchen. Claire was supposed to be helping Lydia pack Julia’s things, but she had easily fallen back into the old pattern of letting her older sister do everything.
“Look how tiny she was.” Lydia smoothed out a pair of Jordache jeans. She splayed her hand at the waist. Her thumb and pinky finger were only inches from the sides. “I used to borrow these.” She sounded astonished. “I thought I was so fat when she died.”
When she died.
That’s what they were saying now—not When Julia disappeared or When Julia went missing, because the DNA had confirmed what they had known in their hearts all along: Julia Carroll was dead.
Last week they had laid her to rest beside their father. The ceremony was small, just Claire, Helen, Lydia, and Grandma Ginny, who kept freaking Lydia out by telling her she was just as pretty as she remembered. They had taken Ginny home after the burial and met Dee and Rick at the Boulevard house. Christmas was only a week away. There were presents under the tree. They sat at the long dining-room table and ate fried chicken and drank iced tea and told long-forgotten stories about the departed—the way Sam used to hum every time he ate ice cream and how Julia had forgotten all the notes before her first piano recital. They heard stories about Dee, too, because they had missed seventeen years of her life and she was such an interesting and bubbly and smart and pretty young girl. She was clearly her own person, but she was so much like Julia that Claire still felt her heart skip a beat every time she saw her.
“Hey, lazybutt.” Lydia dumped a drawer full of socks on the bed beside Claire. “Make yourself useful.”
Claire sorted the socks with a deliberate slowness so that Lydia would get annoyed and take over. Julia had loved little-girl patterns with pink hearts and red lips and various breeds of dogs. Someone would get good use out of them. They were donating their sister’s clothes to the homeless shelter, the same shelter she had volunteered for the day Gerald Scott had decided to take her away from them.
And Paul, because the photograph in the barn proved he was an active participant in their sister’s murder.
Lydia had relayed all the other details that Paul had confessed to in the garage. They knew about their father’s staged suicide. They knew about the notebooks. The letters Helen had written to Lydia that were never delivered. Paul’s plans for Dee when she turned nineteen. At some point, Claire had chosen to pull a Helen and stopped asking questions because she did not want to know the answers. There was no difference between the blue pill and the red pill.
There were only degrees of suffering.
Paul had been a violent psychopath. He was a torturer. He was a murderer. His color-coded files had been investigated and he’d been proven to be a serial rapist. The files in the basement storage area had led the FBI to offshore accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars deposited from customers all around the world. Claire had guessed correctly about Paul’s franchising the system. There were other masked men in Germany, France, Egypt, Australia, Ireland, India, Turkey …
Past a certain point, more detailed knowledge about the volume of her husband’s sins could not make Claire’s burden feel any heavier.
“I think this is yours.” Lydia held up a white T-shirt with RELAX written in black letters across the front. The collar had been cut out Flashdance-style.
Claire said, “I used to wear that with the most amazing pair of rainbow-colored leg warmers.”
“Those were my leg warmers, you brat.”
Claire caught the shirt Lydia threw at her head. She held it up in front of her. It was a good shirt. She could probably still wear it.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
Claire shrugged. This was a common question. Everyone wanted to know what Claire was going to do. She was living with Helen at the moment, not least of all because her mother’s neighbors were much less likely to talk to the press, which is what everyone in Dunwoody who’d ever met Claire or even seen her cross a room was doing. The women on her tennis team sounded devastated for the cameras, yet they all somehow managed to get their hair and make-up professionally done before appearing on film. Even Allison Hendrickson had joined the fray, though no one had yet made the obvious joke about Claire’s violent propensity toward kneecaps.
At least no one had but Claire.
Lydia said, “That teaching job at the school sounds nice. You love art.”
“Wynn thinks I’ll be all right.” Claire rolled onto her back. She stared up at the Billy Idol poster taped on the ceiling above the bed.
“You’ll still need to get a job.”
“Maybe.” Paul’s assets had been frozen. The Dunwoody house had been seized. Wynn Wallace had explained that sorting out the ill-gotten gains from Paul’s legitimate business holdings would take years and likely consume millions in legal fees.