bookkeeping downtown. Missing posters with Julia’s face were everywhere. The story was all over the newspaper. Even without that, people in Auburn knew. There were a lot of students from Athens. You were there. You saw it for yourself. We didn’t tell a soul, but everybody knew.”
“Then why did you believe him when he said he didn’t know?”
“Part of me didn’t. I just thought he was trying to be polite, because it was kind of like gossip.” She leaned the side of her head against the seat. “That’s the only instance I can think of when I didn’t believe him about anything.”
Lydia slowed the car as the GPS alerted her to an upcoming turn. Strangely, she got no pleasure from Claire finally seeing the problems that Lydia had spotted eighteen years before. Maybe Claire was right. Lydia had only seen the dark side of Paul because he had chosen to show it to her. If that moment in the car had never happened, it was just as likely that she would’ve tolerated him all these years as an annoying brother-in-law who for some reason made her sister happy.
And he had clearly made Claire happy. At least while he was alive. Knowing how the bastard worked, wooing Claire had probably been part of a long game that started before they even met. Lydia wouldn’t put it past him to have a thick file somewhere on Claire Carroll. Was he at Auburn because he knew that Claire would follow Lydia to the university? Was he only working in the math lab because he found out she was flunking trig?
Lydia could still remember the breathless way Claire had told her about the new guy she had just met in the lab. Paul had discovered the perfect way into Claire’s psyche—he hadn’t praised her good looks, which she’d been hearing about practically from infancy. He had praised her mind. And he had done it in such a way that it seemed like he was the only man on the planet who recognized she had more to offer than her face.
Lydia pulled the car over to the shoulder. She slid the gear into park. She turned to Claire and told her something that she should’ve told her all along. “I have a seventeen-year-old daughter.”
Claire looked surprised, but apparently not for the reason Lydia was thinking. “Why are you telling me that now?”
“You already knew.” Lydia wanted to kick herself for being so stupid, and then she wanted to throw up because the idea of Paul paying a stranger to follow her was so deeply unsettling. “Why didn’t you tell me Paul had a file on me?”
Claire looked away. “I was trying to protect you. I thought if you knew what Paul had done, you would—”
“Abandon you like you abandoned me?”
Claire took a deep breath and slowly let it go. “You’re right. Every time I say that you should stay out of this, I find a way to drag you back in because I want my big sister to make it all better.” She looked at Lydia. “I’m sorry. I know it sounds trite, but I really am.”
Lydia didn’t want another one of her apologies. “What else do you know about me?”
“Everything,” she said. “At least everything that we know about Paul’s other victims.”
Victim. If she hit that nerve any harder, Lydia was going to need a root canal.
She asked Claire, “Did you know about it?”
“Absolutely not. I didn’t know about any of them.”
“How long was he having me followed?”
“Almost from the moment we stopped talking to each other.”
Lydia saw her life flash before her eyes. Not the good things, but the shameful things. All the times she’d walked out of the grocery store with stolen food shoved down the front of her shirt because she couldn’t afford to buy anything. The time she’d switched tags on a jacket at the outlet store because she wanted Dee to have the cute one that all the popular girls were wearing. All the lies she’d told about the check being in the mail, the rent money being at work, loans that would soon be repaid.
How much had Paul seen? Pictures of Lydia with Rick? Dee on the basketball court? Had he laughed at Lydia struggling her way out of poverty while he sat in his lifeless air-conditioned mansion?
Claire said, “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I am profoundly sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you, but then you told me about your daughter, and it