Please, Lydia thought. Please don’t say what I know you’re going to say.
Paul leaned forward. She could feel his breath against the hood. “I can’t wait to see what she tastes like.”
Lydia couldn’t stop the cry that came out of her mouth.
“You’re too easy, Liddie. You’ve always been too easy.” He kept pushing against her knees, then letting them go like they were playing a game. “I stayed at Auburn for you. I matched for grad school at MIT, but I stayed for you because I wanted to be with Julia Carroll’s sister.”
The band around the bottom of the hood soaked up Lydia’s tears.
“I watched you. God knows how long I watched you. But you were sloppy and drunk all the time. Your dorm room looked like a pigsty. You didn’t bathe. You were flunking out of your classes.” Paul sounded disgusted. “I was about to give up on you, but then Claire came to visit. Do you remember that? It was fall of ninety-six.”
Lydia remembered. Claire had visited the campus just after the Summer Olympics. Lydia was embarrassed because her sister was wearing a sweatshirt with Izzy, the stupid Atlanta mascot, on the front.
Paul said, “Claire practically glowed when she walked around the campus. She was so happy to be away from home.” His voice had changed again now that he was talking about Claire. “That’s when I knew that I could still have Julia Carroll’s sister.”
Lydia couldn’t contradict him, because they both knew that Claire had curled herself up into the palm of his hand.
Still, she tried, “She cheated on you.”
“I wouldn’t call it cheating.” He sounded unconcerned. “She fucked around. So what? I fucked around, too, but we always came back home to each other.”
Lydia knew Paul hadn’t just fucked around. She had seen the color-coded files. She had seen the murder room in the garage of the Fuller house. She knew that someone had sat behind the camera and zoomed in on the rapes and murders of countless young girls, just like she knew that that someone had to be Paul.
Was he going to finally cross the line into murderer? Was that why he had Lydia bound and hooded?
He said, “You know, the thing about Claire was that I couldn’t figure her out.” He laughed, like he was still surprised by the fact. “I never know what she’s really thinking. She never does the same thing twice. She’s impetuous. She has a hellacious temper. She can be crazy and passionate and funny. She’s made it obvious that she’s willing to try anything in bed, which takes all of the fun out of it, but sometimes holding back can be just as much of a game as letting go.”
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 biceps 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.