Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter Read Free Book Online Page B

know. As the sheriff might say, we don’t have anything farther.
    Here is something the sheriff does not know and that your mother refuses to believe: I remember looking at my watch that night. It was a few minutes later, closer to eleven, most likely the time you were taken.
    We were having a late dinner at Harry Bissett’s Grill on Broad Street, roughly five blocks away from the Manhattan. Your mother was downstairs using the restroom. The waiter offered to bring the check. I looked at my watch—that was when I noted the time. Your little sister was home studying with a friend, but she was old enough to put herself to bed, so I decided to order your mother’s favorite dessert.
    I remember watching her walk back up the stairs. I couldn’t stop smiling, because your mother was particularly beautiful that night. Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing a white cotton dress that curved around her hips. Her skin glowed. There was so much life in her eyes. When she smiled at me, I felt like an explosion had gone off inside my heart. I could not possibly love her more than I loved her in that moment: my wife, my friend, the woman who had given me such kind, thoughtful, beautiful children.
    She sat across from me at the table. I took both her hands in mine.
    “Why are you smiling?” she asked.
    I kissed the inside of her wrists and answered what I felt at that moment was the absolute truth. “Because everything is perfect.”
    This is what I know that I am:
    A fool.

THREE
    She had just buried her husband.
    Claire kept repeating the words in her head as if she were narrating a story rather than experiencing the event in her actual life.
    Claire Scott had just buried her husband .
    There was more, because the service had been long, with many moving parts that Claire recalled with her cold narrator’s eye.
    The casket was gunmetal gray with a blanket of white lilies covering the closed lid. The smell of wet earth was pungent as the machine lowered his body into the grave. Claire’s knees went weak. Her grandmother stroked her back. Her mother offered her arm. Claire shook her head. She thought of strong things: Iron. Steel. Paul. It was not until they were climbing into the back of the black limousine that Claire truly understood that she would never see her husband again .
    She was going home—back to their home, the home that they had shared. People would meet her there, parking their cars along the curving driveway and spilling into the street. They would make toasts. They would tell stories. In his will, Paul had requested a wake, though Claire had been too hung up on the derivation of the word to call it that. She asked herself: Wake as in, maybe Paul will wake up? Wake as in, the disturbed trail of water left behind a boat?
    Claire felt the second wake made the most sense. The calm had been disturbed. She was trapped in turbulent waters. Swimming against grief. Drowning in sympathy.
    There had been so many phone calls and cards and flower arrangements and notices of donations that had been made in Paul’s name. Architecture for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity. The American Cancer Society, though Paul had not died of cancer.
    Was there a charity for murder victims? Surely this was something Claire should’ve looked into. Was it too late? Four days had passed since that awful night. The funeral was over. People she hadn’t seen or heard from in years had already sent their respects. They kept telling her that she was in their thoughts, that Paul was a good man, that they were there for her.
    Claire nodded when they said this—at the police station, at the hospital, at the funeral home, at the graveside service—though she wasn’t quite sure where there was.
    “How are you holding up?” they asked. “How are you feeling?”
    Disembodied.
    That was the word that best described Claire’s feelings. She had looked up the definition on her iPad last night to make sure she had it right.
    Existing without or separated