I feel very strongly about this, sweetheart: Paul is not good for Claire. There is something rotting inside of him, and one day—if not soon, then in five years, ten years, maybe even twenty—that rot will eat its way to the outside and spread into everything he touches.
Though you know that I love you, my life from this point forward is devoted to making sure this terrible, rotting devil never gets the chance to spread his evil to your two sisters.
Do you remember Brent Lockwood? He was your very first “real” boyfriend. You were fifteen. The boys you liked before Brent were the innocuous, asexual types who could pass for any member of whatever boy band you were listening to at the moment. I would drive you on dates in the stationwagon and make the boy sit in the back. I would glare at him in the rear-view mirror. I would make monosyllabic grunts when he called me Dr. Carroll or expressed an interest in the veterinary arts.
Brent was different. He was sixteen years old, half boy, half man. He had an Adam’s apple. He wore acid-washed jeans and kept his hair high mulletted Daniel Boone-like in the back. He came to the house to ask permission to take you out on a date, because he had a car and he wanted to take you out in that car alone and I would never let anyone do that until I looked him in the eyes and made certain that I had scared the ever-loving shit out of him.
I know you find this hard to believe, sweetheart, but I once was a sixteen-year-old boy. The only reason I wanted a car was so I could get girls alone inside of it. Which was a completely understandable, even laudable, goal to all the boys my age, but felt completely different when I was a man, and a father, and that girl was you.
I told him to get a haircut and get a job, then come back and ask me again.
A week later, he was back at my door. His mullet was lopped. He had just started working at McDonald’s.
Your mother cackled like a witch and told me next time, I should be more specific.
You spent hours in your room before that first date with Brent. When you finally opened your door, I smelled perfume and hairspray and all of these strange, womanly smells that I never expected to come from my own daughter. And you were beautiful. So beautiful. I scanned my eyes across your face looking for disagreeable things—too much mascara, too-heavy eyeliner—but there was nothing but a light brushing of color that brought out the pale blue of your eyes. I can’t remember what you were wearing or how you had styled your hair (this is your mother’s domain) but I do remember this breathless feeling in my chest, as if the alveoli inside my lungs were slowly collapsing, slowly depriving me of any oxygen, slowly depriving me of my little tomboy who climbed trees and ran after me when I went for my morning walks.
I now know what it feels like to have a real stroke, even a mini one, but I was certain when I watched Brent Lockwood drive you away in his car that I was having a full-on heart attack. I was so worried about this one boy, this first boy, that I never realized that there would be others. That some of them would make me long for Brent with his third-hand Impala and the smell of French fries he left in his wake.
Why am I thinking about this boy now? Because he was the first? Because I thought he would be the last?
I am thinking about him because of Claire.
Paul called me on the telephone tonight. He was concerned about my health. He made the right kind of small talk. He said all of the right things. He sounded right in every way, though I know that everything about him is wrong.
He thinks of me as old-fashioned, and I let him think that because it serves my purpose. Your mother is the feisty one, the grumpy old hippie who keeps him on his toes. I am the fatherly type who smiles and winks and pretends that he is everything he makes himself out to be.
I told him the story of Brent Lockwood, the boy who asked permission to date my oldest, now missing, daughter.
As I expected, Paul immediately apologized for not asking me whether or not he could date Claire. He is nothing if not a good mimic of appropriate behaviors. Had we been in person rather than on the telephone, I am certain he would’ve dropped to bended knee as he asked for my permission. But he wasn’t, so it was his voice that conveyed the respect and feeling.
Conveyed.
As your mother has said, Paul could be a belt in a donut factory, he is so good at sticky, emotional conveyances.
On the phone call, I laughed, because Paul’s request to date your sister was very late in coming, and he laughed, too, because that was what was expected of him. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he alluded to a future request, one that would put his relationship with Claire on a more permanent footing, and I realized that though this stranger had been dating my daughter for only a few weeks, he was already thinking about marriage.
Marriage. That’s what he called it, though men like Paul do not marry women. They own them. They control them. They are voracious gluttons who devour every part of a woman, then clean their teeth with the bones.
I’m sorry, sweetheart. Since you were taken, I have gotten so much more leery than I used to be. I see conspiracies around corners. I know that darkness is everywhere. I trust no one but your mother.
So I cleared my throat a few times and inserted some pained emotion into my tone and told Paul that I could not in all good conscience see myself giving any man permission to marry either of my daughters, or to even attend their weddings, until I know what happened to my oldest child.
Like Pepper, and like you for that matter, Claire is as impulsive as she is stubborn. She is also my baby girl, and she would never, ever go against my wishes. There is one thing I know about both of your sisters: They would just as soon break my arms and legs as break my heart.
I know this truth like I know the sound of Claire’s laughter, the look she gets on her face when she is about to smile or cry or throw her arms around my shoulders and tell me that she loves me.
And Paul knows this, too.
After I told him about my dilemma, there was a long pause on his end of the telephone line. He is cunning, but he is young. One day, he will be a master manipulator, but two days from now when I get him alone, I will be the one asking questions, and I will not let Paul Scott leave my sight until he gives me all of the answers.
FIFTEEN
Claire clenched her hands around the steering wheel. Panic had almost closed her throat. She was sweating, though a cold rush of wind came in through the cracked sunroof. She looked down at Lydia’s phone on the seat beside her. The screen had faded to black. So far, Paul had sent three pictures of Lydia. Each one showed her from a different angle. Each photo brought Claire some amount of relief because there was no further damage to Lydia’s face. Claire didn’t trust Paul, but she trusted her own eyes. He wasn’t hurting her sister.
At least not yet.
She forced her thoughts not to go to that dark place that they were so desperately drawn toward. Claire could find no location or time stamp on the photos. She had a tenuous hold on the belief that Paul was stopping his car every twenty minutes and taking the photographs, because the alternative was to believe that he had taken all the photos at the same time and that Lydia was already dead.
She had to think of a way out of this. Paul would already be strategizing. He was always five steps ahead of everyone else. Maybe he already had a solution. Maybe he was already implementing that solution.
He would have another house. Her husband always bought a back-up. A two-hour drive from Athens could put him in the Carolinas or on the coast or close to one of the Alabama border towns. He would have another house in another name with another murder room with another set of shelves for his sick movie collection.