Little Pretty Things (16 page)

But I knew what she meant. How was I? How was this business with the dead friend coming along?

“Distracting,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t saying what I meant, either. Working at the school all day should have been distracting, but it hadn’t been. Any distance I’d had from my friendship with Maddy was gone. I felt as though I’d spent the day with her.

“How long do you think the Mid-Night will be closed?” she said.

“They haven’t said, have they? Maybe Billy’s heard.”

“But what do you think? Should I—should we get new jobs? We can get by for a little while, you know,” she said. “A
little
little while—oh. Of course you know what I mean.”

My mother’s social-security check wouldn’t keep us out of trouble for even a little while. Lu knew that. I’d already wondered how long the check from the school district for today’s subbing would take. “I don’t know. I might have to look for something else if we don’t reopen this week.”

A vision of the Luxe in downtown Indianapolis came to me, and me in my grubby Mid-Night uniform, hands and knees, scrubbing the curved stairs leading up to the mezzanine. I’d only been there once, but it had made an impression, and not just because of the drama. But I didn’t want to work there. I could barely imagine attending the reunion there.

“That place they’re building across the road from the motel,” Lu said. “I heard it was an old folks’ place. They’ll need cleaners, right?”

It was still under construction. “Not for months, though.”

“The real problem is I don’t want to work anywhere else.” Without looking, I could hear the smile in her voice. “Isn’t that funny? Working for Billy, that idiot, and all those strange ones who leave us their underwear and dirty stuff and wipe things on the walls. And the long hours sometimes. Now all this. Your friend.”

“It’s a crappy place, but we’ve gotten used to the crap.”

“We’re selling ourselves cheap, huh,” she said. “But I don’t know what else anyone would pay me to do. Clean houses, maybe. Ride around in one of the little yellow cars with my very own bucket.”

We’d both known people who’d worked a cleaning service. Long hours, hardly a break all day. It was no way to live and certainly no way to get ahead. I wouldn’t have called cleaning for a service a step down from cleaning at the Mid-Night, but I’d never wanted to resort to it. To me, it seemed like a dead end, like something I would never get away from. A cold finger of dread ran up my spine. Had it only been a day since I’d studied my maid’s uniform in the mirror, making plans to ditch it forever? But slipping into a yellow polyester golf shirt every morning to clean up after my wealthier neighbors wasn’t what I’d had in mind. At least at the motel, it was strangers you cleaned up after.

“Have you checked the want ads?” I said. “We could stop and get a paper.”

“Have you ever looked for a job that way?” Lu made a sound of disgust. The stoplight at the town park snagged us, and I had a chance to glance her way. She looked tired for not having worked that day. “It’s no good,” she said. “And I’m not sure either of us has the time it takes. But there’s not much else to do. Carlos is asking for more hours at work, but he might not get any.”

“I could get called in to sub again. If Fitz is really sick—”

“I don’t think he is,” she said.

“Coach said—”

“No, I mean—isn’t that him?” She pointed out the window. Fitz, wearing a Midway High sweatshirt, stood in the park with his hands shoved into his pockets. He watched a pair of young women as they passed. He turned beyond them, as though waiting for someone. “Looks healthy to me,” Lu said.

“I guess he’ll be back tomorrow, then,” I said, but I was watching not Fitz but Teeny, across the street. She stalked the edge of the grass at the curb, looking for all the world like a squirrel about to dart into traffic. And then Fitz was racing to her rescue, holding back traffic to let her cross. Taking care of everyone.

The car behind me laid on the horn. The light had changed.

“Maybe one of the other teachers will wake up with a headache,” Lu said brightly as I hit the gas.

“Maybe,” I said. “But they could get someone better for science or math. The only thing I can actually teach is phys ed.” Something welled up in me. I swallowed hard. “Lu, I might be good at it.”

“Don’t be so surprised. You’re good at lots of things.”

Lots of things? The only thing that came to mind was palming something shiny out of the guest rooms without being caught. “I’m putting you in charge of writing my résumé,” I said.

I pulled up in front of Lu’s house. The porch light was on again, even though it hadn’t yet turned dark. I imagined that this was my house and that inside, a pot of something spicy bubbled, waiting for me to put my signature touch on it. That the man inside cared enough about where I was every minute of the day to flick the switch, just in case. I’d always meant to leave town, but sometimes all I wanted was nothing more than the best it had to offer.

“Why don’t you come in and stay for dinner?” Lu said.

“Thanks, but I have some things to do.”

“Like what? You’re unemployed, remember? Come on.”

“I want to do some thinking.” I’d shared all my ideas about the murder with Courtney and been turned away, but that wouldn’t stop me. I couldn’t help feeling there was something I could do, if only I thought it through more clearly. “I don’t understand why she came all this way just to die. And at the
Mid-Night
.”

I’d turned my head, but I could still feel Lu’s eyes on me. “It’s not your job to figure it out,” she said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Which is more stupid—to try and figure out who did it, or wait until the police decide it was me?”

“But it wasn’t you.”

Her voice was small. I looked at her. “Jesus, Lu. Say it like you mean it.”

“No, I do. I do mean it. Everyone knows it wasn’t you. They’ll find whoever did this, and then it will be all over. But don’t give them a reason to pay attention to you. Keep out of it.”

“Yeah,” I said, with no intention of staying out of it.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe I’ll come over tomorrow,” I said. But now Lu’s uncertainty had transferred to me, and even I could hear it.

Lu opened the door without looking at me, got out, and crossed the yard. Before she’d reached the porch, the front door swung open and a flurry of brown limbs and pigtails emerged. The kids met her in the yard and drew her inside.

As I drove away, I had to wonder if I agreed with Lu. Would they find who killed Maddy? And if not, could they overlook the convenience of that follow-up story Courtney wanted to write?

Would it ever be over? Would things go back to normal?

I drove down Lu’s street and across town toward my house, noticing that the streets seemed narrow and the houses, shabby. The sidewalks were cracked, with little tufts of grass poking through. On my street, the same neighbor’s curtain flicked back to check who came and went. I imagined a cleaning-service car pulling up to Mrs. Schneider’s house, and me hopping out in a yellow shirt, carrying a bucket up the walk.

In a matter of seconds I would pull into our drive, the same drive, and walk through the same door, and my mother would have slept or not slept, would say or not say the same things she always did. The evening stretched out before me, the same chores, the same shallow conversation, the same everything until there was nothing to do but retire to my childhood bedroom. And then the rote review of my secret treasures, sad little pieces of trash that they were.

The same life. The only thing that had changed was the shame I suddenly felt about who I was. Who I would always be. And the rage rising in my chest, into my throat, until I thought I would have to scream.

At our driveway, I didn’t turn in. I held tight to the steering wheel and kept going.

When I drove up the long gravel drive to Maddy’s old house, Gretchen already stood framed, arms crossed, in the open doorway. I’d always thought you couldn’t surprise someone with one of these mile-long, farmhouse driveways. Since the night Maddy died, Gretchen must have received a number of unwelcome visits. She seemed prepared for whatever bad news I brought.

She shaded her eyes, but I knew she’d have recognized me already. I’d seen her a couple of weeks ago coming into the bar, though we had less than a nodding acquaintance now. Neither of us talked to Maddy anymore. What else did we have in common? That was our unspoken truce.

Gretchen leaned over the porch railing, exposing a wide expanse of cleavage in the loose neck of her nightgown. I opened the car door.

“You didn’t bring me a damn casserole, did you?” Her voice was deep and growling. “In my whole life, I’ve never seen so many dishes cooked with smashed potato chips on top.”

“I don’t cook much,” I said. Maybe I should have brought her something. I knew what Gretchen Beetner-Bell liked best: aged scotch, cigarettes, other women’s husbands. But the Mid-Night supplied her with a steady stream of all those. Lu and I kept track of how far from her car the men dropped her off the next morning.

“You know what they say? You don’t cook, you don’t eat.” She winked. “But I have not found that to be the case.”

Her laugh was a horse whinny dragged across the gravel under my feet. She dangled a foot over the porch’s edge. Her toes were painted a terrible shade of purple, almost gray against her skin. It reminded me of Maddy’s dead face above the belt. I forced myself to look away.

“I’m sorry about Maddy,” I said.

“Why? Did you do it?”

“No.” I thought for a second. “Did you?”

“You’re about as subtle as they were, all ‘where was I at such-and-such a time,’ all ‘how do I spend my time all by myself in this big house.’ It wasn’t
polite
.”

“They have to establish who could have done it. Who was, you know, alone and unaccounted for.”

“Well, I was pretty well accounted for, sweet pea.”

“Will his wife let him say so?”

The laugh again, dredged from deep in her gut. Then the laugh became a cough. “You’re a smart one,” she said.

Twice in the last hour I’d been called smart, but that’s not how I felt.

“I was down at the boats, if you must know,” Gretchen said. The casinos, docked down on the Ohio River, skirted strict Indiana gambling laws by docking offshore. They were fantastically popular with the Mid-Night’s bar crowd. “Figured I’d try my luck on the slots, but they let me down like everyone else ever has. Not so smart, myself.”

“Well, whoever killed Maddy was smart,” I said. “So far he’s gotten away with it.”

Gretchen’s face went thoughtful. “Why do you think it’s a he?”

“Because you’d have to be strong to—” I struggled to find the most
polite
term.

“To string her up like he done?” Gretchen said.

“Do you think it could be a woman?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “But it was the girls that never seemed to get along with Madeleine. Her dad told me I was imagining it, but I was the one who answered the phone. Back then, you know, prank calls just before and after those big races. And she only ever had
boy
friends, not lady friends, not good ones.” She glanced at me. “You might as well come on in.”

I’d only been over once—Gretchen’s comment about Maddy not having any good girlfriends stung—but I remembered the place well enough. It seemed smaller, but it wasn’t only that I was bigger. In the ensuing years it had been stuffed from the porch door to as far as the eye could see with mismatched couches, flea-market armchairs, and antique tables and hutches. All of it was crowded together so that none of the drawers could ever open, and the pieces had been stacked with newspapers, magazines, grocery bags, piles of old mail, and collections of strange things that Gretchen seemed to want close at hand, including a bouquet of fly swatters and an array of TV remotes. But who was I to judge someone’s collection of anything?

At the foot of one chair lay the morning edition of the
Midway Gazette
. On the front, a teenaged Maddy waved from the top pedestal at some race, and then, smaller, smiled at the camera in a more recent photo.

I reached for the paper and studied it.
Chicago woman found dead at local motel
. Billy would be having a fit. He didn’t like people using the word
motel
in relation to the Mid-Night. The words that bothered me were
Chicago woman
. It nagged—was she really? Didn’t she still belong to us? Couldn’t we claim her this one last time? I studied the recent photo, then the old one. The news was out. It was real.

“Where’d they get the photos?”

“Ones we had here. That one I pulled from an old box. That other one she sent last year for Christmas.” She looked over my shoulder. “They cut out the boyfriend. Good riddance.”

My heart leapt. Here it was, an open door. The fiancé made for a good suspect, surely. “You didn’t like him?”

“You don’t think she ever brought him here?” she said. “I never met him, or none of the men she kept with over the years. Her dad never saw a thing wrong with it, but you and I, just us girls, don’t believe that for a second. You have a boyfriend, you show him
off
.”