Lydia was too exhausted to cry out. She wanted him to get it over with—the punch, the jab, the slap, the electric cattle prod, the branding iron, the machete. She had seen what the masked man had done with the tools of his trade. She had seen what Paul’s father had done to Julia. She had experienced firsthand the type of torture Paul was capable of and she was certain that his role in the movies had been far from passive.
He was enjoying this. No matter what derogatory things he’d said, Paul was aroused by Lydia’s pain. She could feel the hard shaft of his prick when he leaned in close to gorge himself on her terror.
Lydia just prayed that she would be dead by the time he finally got around to raping her.
“New strategy.” Paul snatched the pill bottle off his leg. He placed it on the rolling table where he was keeping his tools. “I think you’re going to like this.”
Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
He stood in front of the metal shelves beside the computer. Her anxiety ramped back up, not because he was going to do something terrible and new but because he was going to mess up the order of the items on the shelves.
Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
They had to stay that way—in that exact order. No one could touch them.
Paul dragged over a step stool.
Lydia nearly cried with relief. They were safe. He was reaching up to the top shelf, past the equipment, past the floppy disks. He pulled down a stack of notebooks. He showed them to Lydia. Her relief dissipated.
Her father’s notebooks.
Paul said, “Your parents are quite the prolific letter-writers.” He sat down across from Lydia again. The notebooks were in his lap. A stack of letters she hadn’t noticed before were on top. He held up an envelope for Lydia to see.
Helen’s handwriting—precise and neat and so sorrowfully familiar.
“Poor, lonely Lydia. Your mother wrote you tons of letters over the years. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “Of course you didn’t know that. I told Helen I tried to get them to you, but you were homeless and living on the streets or you were in rehab but you checked yourself out before I could get to you.” He tossed the letters on the floor. “I actually felt bad every time Helen asked me if I’d heard back from you, because of course I had to tell her that you were still a fat, worthless junkie sucking cock for Oxy.”
His words had the opposite effect. Helen had written to her. There were dozens of letters in the pile. Her mother still cared. She hadn’t given up.
“Helen would’ve been a great grandmother to Dee.”
Dee. Lydia couldn’t even summon her face. She had lost all images of her daughter the second time Paul had electrocuted her with the cattle prod.
“I wonder if she’ll check out when Dee goes missing the same way she did after Julia was gone.” He looked up. “You wouldn’t remember this, but Claire was all alone after Julia.”
Lydia remembered it. She had been there.
“Every night, poor little Claire was all by herself in that big house on Boulevard listening to your worthless-piece-of-shit mother cry herself to sleep. No one cared if Claire cried herself to sleep, did they? You were too busy stuffing every hole in your body. That’s why she fell so hard for me, Liddie. Claire fell for me because none of you were there to keep her from falling.”
Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
“These.” Paul held up one of her father’s notebooks. “Your dad didn’t care about Claire either. All of his letters were to Julia. Claire read most of them, at least the ones he wrote before she went to college. Think about how that made her feel. Her mother was a borderline alcoholic who couldn’t get out of bed. Her father spent hours writing to his dead daughter when his living daughter was standing right in front of him.”
Lydia shook her head. It hadn’t been like that—at least not entirely. Helen had eventually pulled herself out of her depression. Sam had tried so hard with Claire. He had taken her shopping and to see movies and to visit museums.
“No wonder she didn’t want to go see him after he had the stroke.” Paul thumbed through the pages. “I made her go. I told her that she would regret it if she didn’t. And she listened to me, because she always listens to me. But the funny thing is, I really liked your dad. He reminded me of my own father.”
Lydia felt her jaw ratchet down so she wouldn’t scream at him.
“You never know with parents, do you? They can be selfish bastards. For instance, I thought Dad and I were close, but he took Julia without me.” Paul looked up from the notebooks. He obviously liked what he saw in Lydia’s surprised expression. “I gotta say, I was upset about that. I got home from Spring Break and there your big sister was in the barn. He hadn’t left much of her for me to enjoy.”
Lydia closed her eyes. Apple Macintosh. What came next? She couldn’t look at the shelves. She had to think of it on her own. Apple Macintosh.
He said, “Sam was smart. I mean, a lot smarter than any of us gave him credit for. He would’ve never found Julia’s body, I’m the only person left alive who knows where she is, but your father was on to me. He knew about my dad. He knew that I was somehow involved. Did you know that?”
Lydia had become anesthetized to surprises.
“Sam asked me over to his apartment. He thought he was going to trick me, but I did some reconnaissance before we were supposed to meet.” He held up her father’s notebooks like a trophy. “My advice: If you’re trying to trick somebody, don’t leave your playbook lying around.”
Lydia gripped the arms of the chair. “Shut the fuck up.”
Paul smiled. “There’s my little fighter.”
“What did you do to my father?”
“I think you know what I did.” Paul shuffled through the stack of notebooks. He checked the front pages. He was looking for something. “I arrived at his apartment at the requested hour. I poured us some drinks so we could talk like men. Your father liked doing that, didn’t he? Making sure we knew who the men were and who were the boys.”
Lydia could hear her father’s voice in his words.
“Sam drank his vodka. He called himself a social drinker, but we know he drank himself to sleep at night, don’t we? Just like Helen did while poor Claire was sitting alone in her room wondering why no one in her family noticed that she was still alive.”
Lydia swallowed. She tasted the sour burn of his piss.
“I guess the vodka masked the sleeping pills I ground up in his drink.”
Lydia wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to block him out. But she couldn’t.
“I watched his head dip.” Paul imitated her father falling into a stupor. “I tied him up with some sheets that I brought with me. They were torn into long strips. His hands were so limp when I tied him up that I was worried he’d died before the fun could start.”
Lydia felt every sense lock onto him.
Paul leaned back in the chair with his legs spread wide. Lydia forced herself not to look down because she knew exactly what he wanted her to see. “If you use strips of bed sheets to tie somebody up, then the marks don’t show when the coroner gets them. If you’re careful, I mean, because of course you have to fold the sheets properly, which I did because I had time with your father. I want you to hear that, Liddie: I had lots and lots of time with your father.”