Little Pretty Things (17 page)

Or you skulk around in the shadows, hoping he’ll drop you off all the way to your car door.

“So why ‘good riddance’?” I said.

“Well, I guess he did it, right? The police say he has an alibi, but what do they know?” She walked over to a cupboard, wedged a drawer open as far as it would go into the arm of a chair, and pulled out a crumpled envelope. She held it out to me. Inside was the photo of Maddy from the paper. The guy with her was as handsome as she’d promised. He was black, which I hadn’t expected. I wondered what the small minds of Midway would have to say about that. He was dressed well, in the style of catalogues that rarely made it into the mailboxes of anyone I’d ever met. Wealthy, of course. The ring had said all we needed to know about his net worth.

In the photo, his eyes were turned on Maddy with such open desire that I was embarrassed. Men had always looked at her that way. Maybe that’s what Coach meant when he said she’d been sexualized. Something that was done to her, that she couldn’t help.

I looked harder at the photo. Could he have done it? He would have needed a window of almost six hours to be in place. I needed twenty minutes, round-trip. Actually, I hardly needed any time at all, since she’d delivered herself right to my workplace and its sturdy railings. I sighed and handed the photo and envelope back to Gretchen.

“When was the wedding supposed to be?” I said.

“She never told me anything. Not about school or men or work or life.” She glanced at me, and I could suddenly see that her eyes were pink-rimmed. “It’s not like I didn’t try, you know. I tried. Young girl without a mother. Not like I was getting the grand sweepstakes prize when I married her dad and came here.” She swept her hand wide at the crowded room. “And then to get Miss Snotnose in the bargain. Oh, I tried with her. But she—well, with Madeleine, I could never win.”

Two of us, then. But then I thought of all those Southtown girls and the girls who’d prank-called this house. The girls who’d turned on us the first chance they had, after Courtney’s “blur” headline. A lot of us had been pitched against Maddy in one way or another. Had one of them wanted to win so badly as to hold a grudge for ten years?

Hadn’t I?

“You know what they’re saying?” she asked.

“‘They’ who?”

“She was going to put me in a home,” Gretchen said. “Found some paperwork or application in her stuff. I would have fought like a cat, you understand, if she’d tried that business.”

This seemed unlikely to me. Not the cat part. That part I believed. “Her stuff?”

“Her suitcase, from the motel. Mostly just clothes. She always liked the clothes. Some things never change.” Her eyes threatened to spill.

The suitcase had been gone by the time I’d been in the room. My palms hummed with the thought of more of her clothes, of more things that had once belonged to her. “Are Maddy’s yearbooks still here?” I said.

“It’s all here.” She waved her hand toward the ceiling. “The Madeleine Bell Museum, of course,” Gretchen said. “Memorialized, as she left it. He never let me pack it up. Couldn’t get rid of a thing.”

I’d forgotten about her dad. He kept falling away, like a chapter in a book I wanted to skip over. That puke-colored sweater was probably around here somewhere. I didn’t want to find it. The idea that he’d somehow used Maddy’s old room as a shrine to her youth gave my gut a wrench. “Sorry about—Mr.—” The courtesy got stuck in my throat. “Your husband. Was he sick a long time? I mean—did he suffer?”

Her eyes fluttered. “She didn’t come for the funeral. Can you imagine?”

A day earlier, I might not have been able to. I forged ahead. “They didn’t get along?”

“He . . . had trouble showing affection,” she said. “But he sure liked having a winner in the family.” She blinked toward the window and the long drive. “But that’s one thing I can say in her favor. She loved him.” Gretchen glanced at me and saw something on my face she didn’t like. “She did. Too much, you ask me. But she wouldn’t come here, not even for her daddy’s funeral.”

I kept forgetting that part, too. “Do you need help with the—uh. The arrangements?”

Gretchen looked bored with me. “He should do that. Vincent.”

“The fiancé? I assumed—”

“I’ll do my part,” Gretchen said. “No one will be able to say I didn’t do my part for that girl.”

“I meant only that they weren’t married yet,” I said. “And you’re the next of kin.”

She went quiet, gazing away from me and letting her hand fall to the neck of her nightgown. “That’s true,” she said. “I am.”

“And of course everything that’s here is yours to do with as you wish.” I was thinking of that yearbook, but also watching Gretchen’s wheels turning. If there was money involved, could she have mustered the strength to kill Maddy? Or hired one of her boyfriends from the bar?

“Not that anyone would want any of that garbage,” she said.

“Could I take a look? Maybe there’s a memento . . .”

“Help yourself.” She picked up a TV remote idly, palming it as she kept watch out the front window. “It’s probably all going to the bin. That’s to do as I wish, only I wish I’d done it years ago.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The second I walked into Maddy’s room, I knew I would steal something.

The door creaked as it opened. Beyond lay the bedroom not of a woman gone for ten years, but a teenaged girl who might return any moment and kick me out. The window, covered with only a gauzy curtain, let in a light bright enough to fade the old, yellow wallpaper on the opposite wall. Books and papers were stacked near an outdated computer, the desk chair casually pulled back. The bed was made, but badly. I hoped someone had at some point washed or changed the sheets, but I wouldn’t have made any bets. In the closet, her clothes—clothes I’d probably remember—would be hanging there.

The room was a shrine, as Gretchen had promised, but also a showcase. On the far wall, a series of shelves displayed every trophy and award Maddy had ever won. Tourney ribbons in every color, medallions hanging. Trophies up to two feet tall, their silver-plated runners leaping off the pinpoint tops, one foot kicked behind. Some tournaments went to the trouble of making sure that women’s awards had silver women runners, silver ponytails flying, but some didn’t bother. One of the running figures with no ponytail, dull with age and dust, had come loose from his award and lay at the feet of the others. On his side like that, he looked miserable and embarrassed, reminding me not of a triumphant runner hitting the finish-line tape, but Maddy, fetal on the edge of that hotel-room bed so long ago.

I turned and surveyed the room. If nothing had been moved since Maddy had gone to college, the yearbooks had to be here. But the only books stacked in the low, small case under the trophy display were old textbooks. When I opened the bedside dresser drawer, dust kicked up, making me sneeze. It was empty.

I went to the window and hooked one of the sheers to the side. The long drive curved into view and then out again, behind a stand of trees between the house and the road. Wind blew the tops of the trees in a synchronized dance. I knew it would rain later, because the leaves were tipped upside down, showing their white bellies. I knew this, as well as I knew that Maddy had bought a yearbook, even when I hadn’t. Even when she would abandon everything inside of it within the year.

I knew she’d bought the yearbook, because of the scene.

She’d wrangled her copy away from the yearbook staff that morning, long before most of the senior class had heard they were in the building. We huddled over it in the cafeteria before homeroom, trying to keep it to ourselves.

We already knew that spring sports got the short shrift so the yearbook made its print deadline. But our senior pictures, alongside quotes or song lyrics we’d chosen, would be on full display. Our last yearbook, our last chance to put our mark on this place. But our senior pictures were old by then, taken almost a year ahead. Our hair was different. Our senior quotes seemed distant, chosen by someone else. Our favorite song lyrics made us laugh. We didn’t even remember liking that song.

“Wait,” I said, when Maddy flipped through the page with my photo too fast. “What idiot thing did I say?”

Too late. She tore through the class pages and clubs to the sports, the skinny-legged junior-varsity teams giving way to varsity football and wrestling. The boys, with their thin chests thrown out. Then basketball. Then cheerleaders. Maddy ripped the page, turning it.

“Slow down,” I pleaded. I wanted to take the pages one spread at a time, really give the cheerleaders a sneer, and take a two-student poll between us on who in our class looked better since their class pictures were taken and who looked worse.

The track team turned into view. I held out my hand to stop the pages, but I shouldn’t have bothered. This is what Maddy was racing to see: more skinny legs, pale, and some of us clutching our elbows against the cool breeze that day. Maddy stood in the back row, her neck stretched long. I stood at Fitz’s elbow, hunched and miserable.

She made a noise and let the book fall into my hands.

“What?” I studied the pages hungrily. They’d included another photo of her, something staged, where Coach had her by the shoulder, giving her a pre-run pep talk. She looked amazing, bright-eyed and fierce. I’d have given anything to be in her place. What was she complaining about? She was the star, forever, the one no one would ever forget. A split second behind her in every race, I was an afterthought, only appearing in the team picture. The book trembling in my grip, I couldn’t help but hope that I would yet show them, that somehow I would pull out a win over Maddy at state, only a couple of weeks away. What if I trained harder? What if I put myself on a strict diet and cut a few pounds before sectionals? Lighter, swifter. I imagined holding my own against Maddy, imagined the sharp cut of her chin turning toward me as I passed her. I would never see it, but maybe someone would take a photo as I broke the finish tape before her. Just once.

And then I turned to my senior picture and read the silly captions the yearbook staff had added for each of us.

Third wheel on the track team bus
.

“So what?” I said. “So stupid, anyway. It should be a bicycle, not the team bus. Buses have a lot more wheels than three.” Maddy stiffened and wrenched the book away to see for herself. By then, she was the one trembling, pale with anger. “What the hell?” she said. She tore to her own photo, holding the open book away from me. Her lips moved as she read, and then she quietly shut the book and threw it across the room. It landed flat, and sounded like a gunshot. A couple of girls screamed, their chairs scraping and knocking over. Chaos reigned until a teacher or the vice principal or someone came to see what the fuss was, and Maddy got pulled in for a chat, the retrieved book under her arm.

“You’re not buying one of them,” she called to me as she was led away. “No way. Promise me.”

And I promised. I was ashamed of what the book said for myself, and for whatever Maddy had seen when she turned to her own photo. I was ashamed, maybe for the first time, of how people viewed me. Third wheel, tagalong. I wasn’t even a person to them. I didn’t matter.

The promise was an easy one to keep. Maddy was the only one who mattered to me. I hadn’t needed to remember anyone else. And then the state tournament went on without us, and I didn’t want to remember her, either.

Now I held my wrist to my nose and smelled the spice-cookie perfume. I wanted to remember now. I wanted to remember more than anything.

I searched under the bed, inside the closet I hadn’t wanted to open, in any drawer or cubby that presented itself. Everything I touched or moved riled up dust until I had a low burn in the back of my throat. No yearbook. Nothing personal, really—just the trophies and ribbons and accolades that should have been packaged up and stored away a decade ago. I went to the award display again, noticing that for all the dust in the room, the awards had collected an even thicker layer. There was a thin umbilical of web draped between two silver ponytails. The little silver runner separated from his trophy lay on his side, stretching toward me.

She hadn’t cared about them enough to take them.

I checked the inscriptions. Her highest placings were here, all the big races I could think to look for. After all that time put in, all those laps run, all those mornings when we’d rather have been sleeping in instead of dozing on a bumpy school bus to the next tournament. All those jeers from people who didn’t know the first thing about us. All those times she’d showed them what she, what
we
, were made of. And she’d left the trophies behind. Just like Beck had said. For whatever reason, she’d been done with this life.

Looking at the trophies, I suffered all over again. I wanted them. I wanted them all. My hands began to tingle.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I jumped.

Gretchen stood in the door, her hip thrown out against the jamb.

“You were right,” I said. “It looks . . . the same.”

“It’s a big house. I guess we had room for a museum,” she said, looking around. “Should have packed it up and sent it to her at her fancy place in Chicago, just to have it gone.”

“Did she take anything when she came last? Maybe any books?” My hands were pins and needles. I could barely pay attention to what I was saying.

Gretchen’s eyes sharpened. “When she came last? When do you think that was? She never came here again, not after she left for her snooty school. He was always wanting to visit her there. Even promised not to bring me, if you can believe that. Promised her not to bring his wife, to leave me here, alone. What do you think of that?”

I thought Gretchen had every right to want to pitch everything in the room into a bin and set it alight. I thought that perhaps Courtney had heard this story, because the telling of it certainly inspired me to think of Maddy as a brat. I thought that Gretchen had plenty of things to do with nights she might be left alone. And I thought that maybe I’d broken into a sweat. “What about that night? Did she come here?”

“What night? The night she was killed?” Gretchen scoffed herself into a laugh and then laughed herself into a cough. After a long while, after I had tracked a drop of sweat running down the full length of my back, she took up again, her voice shredded and hoarse. “You think she’d come here, after all this time? To see me? And do what? Call me Mommy?” Another ragged breath. “You done here?”