“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too.”
Claire flipped the phone closed. She tossed it onto the seat beside her. She grabbed the wheel with both hands. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and she gave herself one full minute to let out the grief and despair that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to express at her father’s funeral.
“Okay,” she told herself. “Okay.”
The grief would help her. It would give her the strength she needed to do what she had to do. She was going to kill Paul for showing her father the tape of Julia. She was going to kill him for what he’d done to them all.
Rain pelted the windshield, almost blinding her, but she kept driving because the only thing she had on Paul was the element of surprise. Exactly how that surprise would play out was still a mystery. Claire had the gun. She had hollow-point bullets that could tear a man in half.
She remembered that long-ago day that she’d taken Paul shooting. The first thing the rangemaster had said was that you should never point a weapon at another person unless you were willing to pull the trigger.
Claire was more than willing to pull the trigger. She just didn’t know how she was going to find the opportunity to do it. There was a chance she could get to the Fuller house ahead of Paul. She could park her mother’s car in the stand of trees beside the house and walk on foot to the back door. There were several places she could lie in wait: in one of the bedrooms, in the hallway, in the garage.
Unless he was already there. Unless he was lying to her again and he’d been there this whole time.
She had assumed he had another house, but maybe the Fuller house was the only house Paul needed. Her husband liked for everything to stay the same. He was a slave to routine. He used the same bowl for breakfast, the same coffee cup. He would wear the same style black suit every day if Claire let him. He needed structure. He needed familiarity.
There was a chiming sound coming from the dashboard. Claire had no idea what the noise meant. She slowed her mother’s car. She couldn’t have the engine stall on her. She frantically searched for warning lights on the dashboard, but the only yellow light was the gas can over the fuel gauge.
“No, no, no.” The Tesla never needed gas. Paul topped up the tank in Claire’s BMW every Saturday. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a gas station for anything but Diet Coke.
Claire checked the signs on the interstate. She was forty-five minutes from Athens. Several exits went by before she saw a Hess sign.
She was coasting on fumes by the time she pulled into the gas station. The rain had let up, but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds and the air had turned bitter cold. Claire took the last of Helen’s cash into the store. She had no idea how many gallons her mother’s Ford Focus took. She handed the guy behind the counter forty dollars and hoped for the best.
A young couple was standing by a beat-up sedan when Claire got back to the car. She tried to ignore them as she gassed up the Ford. They were fighting about money. Claire and Paul had never fought about money because Paul always had it. Their early arguments were mostly because Paul was doing too much for her. There wasn’t one need she had that Paul did not meet. Her friends over the years had always said the same thing: Paul took care of everything.
The pump handle clicked.
“Shit.” Gas had spilled all over Claire’s hand. The smell was noxious. She popped the trunk, because Paul had put the same emergency supplies in Helen’s trunk that he’d put in all their cars. She dumped out the backpack and retrieved a packet of hand wipes. There were scissors, but Claire used her teeth to open the foil wrapper. She looked at the spilled contents in the trunk as she scrubbed the gas off her hand.
Early in their marriage, Paul had had a recurring nightmare. It was the only time Claire could think of that she’d actually seen her husband afraid.
No, that was wrong. Paul hadn’t been afraid. He’d been terrified.
The nightmare didn’t come often, maybe two or three times a year, but Paul would wake up screaming, his arms and legs clawing at the air, his mouth gasping for breath, because he’d dreamed that he was burning alive the same way his mother had burned alive in the car accident that had taken both his parents’ lives.
Claire inventoried the contents of the trunk.
Emergency flares. A paperback. A book of waterproof matches. A four-gallon gas can. A paperback to read while waiting for help.
Paul really did take care of everything.
Now it was Claire’s turn to take care of him.
TWENTY-TWO
The rain had not yet touched Athens by the time Claire drove through downtown. Strong winds gusted down the streets. Students were bundled up in scarves and coats as they grabbed lunch between classes. Most of them were running to beat the coming storm. They could all see the darkness on the horizon: heavy black clouds making their way over from Atlanta.
Claire had called Helen to see how much time she had. Her mother was somewhere near Winder, around thirty minutes away. There had been an accident on 75 that bought an extra ten minutes. Fortunately, Helen had told Claire about it immediately, so when Paul called she could tell him truthfully why Lydia’s iPhone had stopped moving.
She took the same route to Watkinsville that she and Lydia had taken the day before. Claire almost missed the turn-off to Paul’s road. She drove slowly, because it wasn’t just Jacob Mayhew and Harvey Falke she had to worry about. Carl Huckabee was still county sheriff. He would have deputies, though there was no telling which side of the law they were on.
He was also intimately familiar with the goings-on at the Fuller house.
Claire knew better than to leave the car out in the open. She angled the Ford off the road and drove into the thick stand of trees. The wheels popped and protested against the rough terrain. The side-view mirrors clapped inward. Metal squealed as pine bark scraped off the paint. She drove as far into the woods as she could go, then climbed out the window because she had trapped herself inside the car. She reached back in for the revolver.
The gun felt heavier somehow. Deadlier.
She left the open box of ammunition on the roof of the car. She picked up one bullet at a time and carefully slotted them into the cylinders.
“For Julia,” she said on the first one. “For Daddy. For Mom. For Lydia.”
Claire studied the last bullet in the palm of her hand. This one felt heaviest of all—shiny brass with a menacing black tip that would flare out once it hit soft tissue.
“For Paul,” she whispered, her voice sounding hoarse and desperate.
The last bullet would be for her husband, who had died a long time ago, back when he was a boy and his father had taken him out to the barn for the first time. Back when he’d told Claire that he’d had a happy childhood. Back when he’d stood in front of the justice of the peace and sworn to love and cherish her for the rest of his life. Back when he’d so convincingly held on to her hand as he pretended to die in the alley.
No pretending this time.
Claire clicked the cylinder into place. She tested the gun, holding the barrel straight out in front of her, curling her finger around the trigger. She practiced pulling back the hammer with her thumb.
This was the plan: She was going to pour gasoline around the Fuller house—just the bedrooms, the front porch, and under the bathroom, because she was betting that Paul was keeping Lydia in the garage and she wanted to stay as far away from her sister as possible. Then she was going to light the gasoline. Then Paul would smell the smoke or hear the flames. He would be terrified, because fire was the only thing that ever really scared him. As soon as he ran out of the house, Claire would be waiting with the gun in her hands and she would shoot him five times, one for each of them.