Claire laughed so that Lydia would keep going.
“And then she got older, and …” Lydia shook her head. “Having a teenager is like having a really, really shitty roommate. They eat all your food and steal your clothes and take money out of your purse and borrow your car without asking.” She put her hand over her heart. “But they soften you in ways you can’t imagine. It’s so unexpected. They just smooth out your hard lines. They make you into this better version of yourself that you never even knew was there.”
Claire nodded, because she could see from Lydia’s tender expression the change that Dee Delgado had brought.
Lydia grabbed Claire’s hands and held on tight. “What are we going to do?”
Claire was ready for the question. “We have to call the police.”
“Huckleberry?”
“Him, the state patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.” Now that Claire was talking it out, she saw a plan. “We’ll call everybody. Tell Homeland Security we saw someone making a bomb. Tell the FBI there’s a kidnapped girl inside the house. Call the EPA and say we saw a barrel of toxic waste. Tell the Secret Service that Lexie Fuller is planning to assassinate the President.”
“You think if we can get them all here at the same time, no one can cover up anything.”
“We should call the news outlets, too.”
“That’s good.” Lydia started nodding. “I can post something about it on the parents’ message board at Dee’s school. There’s a woman—Penelope Ward. She’s my Allison Hendrickson without the kneecapping. Her husband is running for Congress next year. They’re really connected, and she’s like a dog with a bone. She won’t let anyone drop this.”
Claire sat back on her heels. She knew the name Penelope Ward. Branch Ward was running against Congressman Johnny Jackson for his seat. Jackson was the same congressman who’d started Paul on his road to success. He was also the reason Jacob Mayhew had given Claire for his presence at the house the day of the burglary.
Mayhew had told her, “The Congressman asked me to handle this,” and Claire’s mind had wandered into kickbacks and fraud because she had assumed Jackson was covering his ass. Was there another reason? If Mayhew was involved, did that mean that Johnny Jackson was, too?
Lydia asked, “What?”
Claire didn’t share the revelation. They could let the various state agencies figure this out. Instead, she looked back up at the house. “I don’t want Julia’s tapes to be part of it.”
Lydia nodded again. “What are we going to tell Mom?”
“We have to tell her that we know Julia is dead.”
“And when she asks how we know?”
“She won’t ask.” Claire knew this for a fact. A long time ago, Helen had made a conscious decision to stop seeking out the truth. Toward the end of Sam’s life, she wouldn’t even let him mention Julia’s name.
Lydia asked, “Do you think it’s Paul’s father in the video?”
“Probably.” Claire stood up. She didn’t want to sit around trying to figure this out. She wanted to call in the people who could actually do something about it. “I’ll get the tapes with Julia.”
“I’ll help.”
“No.” Claire didn’t want to put Lydia through seeing any part of the video again. “Start making the phone calls. Use the landline so they can trace the number.” Claire walked over to the wall-mounted phone. She waited for Lydia to pick up the receiver. “We can put the Julia tapes in the front trunk of the Tesla. No one will think to check there.”
Lydia dialed 911. She told Claire, “Hurry. This isn’t going to take long.”
Claire walked into the den. Mercifully, the picture on the television was black. The videotapes were stacked on top of the console.
She called to Lydia, “Do you think we should drive back into town and wait?”
“No!”
Claire guessed her sister was right. The last time she’d left this to the police, Mayhew had managed her like a child. She pressed the EJECT button on the VCR. She rested her fingers on the cassette. She tried to summon into her brain an image of Julia that wasn’t taken from the movie.
It was too soon. All she could see was her sister in chains.
Claire would destroy the videos. Once they were safe, she would spool out all the tape and burn them in a metal trashcan.
She slid the cassette out of the machine. The handwriting on the label was similar to Paul’s but not exactly the same. Had Paul found the tape after his father died? Was that what had first sparked his interest? Julia disappeared almost a year before his parents’ car accident. Five years later, Paul was wooing Claire at Auburn. They were married less than two months after her father had killed himself. Claire could no longer cling to the idea of coincidences, which begged the question: Had Paul designed all of this from the moment he recognized Julia in his father’s videotape collection? Was that what had set him on the path toward Claire?
Absent a written explanation, Claire knew that she would never know the truth. Julia’s death had haunted her for the last twenty-four years. Now the mystery of what had really gone wrong with her husband would haunt her for the remaining decades.
She slid the tape back into the cardboard sleeve. She wrapped the rubber band around the stack of cassettes.
She smelled Paul’s aftershave.
The scent was faint. She put her nose to the tapes. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
“Claire,” Paul said.
She turned around.
Paul stood in the middle of the room. He was wearing a red UGA sweatshirt and black jeans. His head was shaved. His beard had grown in. He had on thick plastic glasses like the ones he’d worn back in college.
He said, “It’s me.”
Claire dropped the tapes. They clattered at her feet. Was this real? Was this happening?
“I’m sorry,” Paul said.
Then he drew back his fist and punched her in the face.
V
I must confess, sweetheart, that I have been neglecting my wall of clues. My “useless gallimaufry,” your mother called it on the one and only occasion she deigned to look at my work. I sagely agreed with her observation but of course I went running to the dictionary as soon as she was gone.
Gallimaufry: a hodgepodge; a confused jumble of various people or things; any absurd medley.
Oh, how I adore your mother.
These last ten months that I have been visiting Ben Carver at the prison, I have gone to bed many times without giving my gallimaufry a second glance. The collection has become so mundane that my mind has turned it into a piece of art, more a reminder that you are gone than a roadmap to getting you back.
It wasn’t until I read Ben’s inscription inside the Dr. Seuss book that I remembered a note from Huckleberry’s files. It’s been there from the beginning, or at least since I started my annual reading ritual on the anniversary of your birthday. Why is it that we always neglect the things that matter most? This is a universal question, because through the days and weeks and months and years after your disappearance, I understood that I did not cherish you enough. I never told you that I loved you enough. I never held you enough. I never listened to you enough.