to think about the dark joke Claire had made about finding more Mrs. Fullers buried in the overgrown back yard.
Claire was still trying to work the board away from the window. She’d managed to get her fingers between the plywood and the trim around the door. Her skin had broken open. Lydia saw streaks of blood on the weathered wood.
“Move.” Lydia waited for her to get out of the way and jammed the flat end of the bar into the crack. The rotting wood came away like a banana peel. Claire grabbed the edge and yanked the board clean off the house.
The door was the same as every kitchen door Lydia had ever seen. Glass at the top, a thin panel of wood at the bottom. She tried the doorknob. Locked.
“Stand back.” Claire grabbed the pry bar and busted out the glass. She racked the bar around the frame to make sure all the shards were gone, then stuck her hand inside the door and opened the lock.
Lydia knew it was a bit late, but she still asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Claire kicked open the door. She walked into the kitchen. She turned on the lights. The fluorescent bulbs flickered to life.
The house felt empty, but Lydia still called, “Hello?” She waited a few seconds, then repeated, “Hello?”
Even without an answer, the house felt like it was ready to scream out its secrets.
Claire tossed the pry bar onto the kitchen table. “This is so weird.”
Lydia knew what she meant. The kitchen looked like a brand-new late-1980s dream kitchen. The white tiled countertops were still in good shape, though the grout had yellowed with age. The two-toned cabinets had veneered walnut exteriors and white-painted doors and drawers. The white refrigerator was still running. The matching gas stove looked brand-new. The laminate tile on the floor was a parquet pattern of fake red and brown bricks. There was no grime in the corners or crumbs of food lost under the toekicks. In fact, there was very little dust on any of the surfaces. The kitchen felt clean. Despite the house being boarded up, there was no musty odor. If anything, it smelled of Pine-Sol.
Lydia said, “It feels like the Huxtables are about to walk in.”
Claire knocked the dish soap and the sponge into the sink like a bored cat. She opened cabinets. She pulled out drawers too far so that they dropped onto the floor. Silverware clanged. Grill utensils and tongs clattered. Her fingers were still bleeding. Every surface she touched was streaked red.
Lydia asked, “Do you want me to get the first-aid kit out of the car?”
“I don’t want anything that was Paul’s.”
Claire walked into the next room, which was obviously the den. The plywood boards over the windows and front door blocked out any light. She turned on table lamps as she walked around the room. Lydia saw a large couch and a love seat, an easy chair and a television that was the old console kind, more like a piece of furniture. A top-loading VCR sat on a wooden shelf above the TV. The time was not flashing the way every VCR flashed in Lydia’s memory. There were VHS tapes stacked beside the player. Lydia scanned the titles. All the movies were from the eighties. Batman. The Princess Bride. Blade Runner. Back to the Future.
There were tracks in the thick carpet under their feet where someone had recently vacuumed. Lydia ran her fingers through the light smattering of dust on the table behind the couch. If she had to guess, she would say the place hadn’t been cleaned in a week, which was around the same time Paul had died. “Did he come to Athens a lot?”
“Apparently.” Claire took out the videotapes and checked that the labels matched the boxes. “He worked long hours. He could easily drive here and back in a day without me ever finding out.”
“Can you check the GPS in his car?”
“Look.” Claire had found the answering machine on the table beside the couch. It was ancient, the kind that required two cassette tapes—one for the outgoing message and one for incoming calls. The red LED flashed that there were four messages. There was a tape beside the machine labeled MARIA. Claire popped open the cassette player. The outgoing cassette tape was labeled LEXIE.
“Two different tapes,” Lydia said. “Do you think it’s a code? You call in and one says you’re safe and the other says you’re not?”
Instead of guessing, Claire