Little Pretty Things (31 page)

At the end of the hall, I paused and listened. My blood was pounding in my ears so that I couldn’t locate a footstep or a breath.

Pressed against the wall, I wasn’t sure I could do what I needed to do. Maddy. I had to keep reminding myself how hard she fought.

I took a step and leaned around the corner into view and pivoted directly into my mother.

We both recoiled, screaming.

“Juliet, what on
earth
?”

“I thought—” I didn’t know what I’d thought. That Maddy’s killer had come for me? How likely was that? I lowered the trophy. But then I’d thought she was still asleep, in her room. The parameters we’d been living by were breached. “I guess I’m a little punchy,” I said.

“No one blames you.” She took in the trophy. “Your life changed this week.”

This conversation alone provided the evidence. Not to mention that my mother had just arrived from some sort of errand. She wore an old jacket. A raincoat, but thankfully with no belt.

“Where were you?”

She slipped out of the coat and opened the closet door. “My expertise as a widow has finally been put to use.”

The trophy slid from my fingers to the floor with a thump. “What?”

“Arrangements for Maddy.” She hung up the coat and closed the door. “Gretchen isn’t any help, and that young man . . . well, he’s paying for everything, but he shouldn’t be bothered with decisions. And Fitz didn’t show up. With how quickly this has had to come together, you’d think—but we all do what we can, I suppose. I know that better than anyone. Thank goodness for Shelly—oh, and before I forget, she sent that home for you.”

She gestured to a thick envelope lying on the couch. I’d forgotten to tell Shelly I didn’t need the copy of our yearbook.

“She told me to tell you—six sharp.
Sharp
. She made me say it back to her, just like that.”

“Six . . . oh, no,” I said, fighting a rushing dread. “What day is today?”

“Sweetheart, it’s Saturday,” she said. “Six sharp tonight.”

Crap. I had no idea how I would be able to face Shelly and the rest of them. I didn’t have the right clothes, the right makeup. I didn’t have a date. Too late I realized they’d all be married. Paired up to dance, all of them laughing, talking about their jobs without shame. I didn’t even have a shameful job anymore. I was freelancing in shame, unpaid. They’d have kids, houses, minivans, vacation snapshots, bills paid. And I had nothing.

I reached for the trophy at my feet. The silver runner at the top was tarnished, dusty. Second place, regionals. It had all mattered so much, once.

I had pulled into Gretchen’s long driveway before I realized I couldn’t remember why I’d come. Then I turned a corner in the drive and saw a passel of police cruisers parked all around the house. A cop held up his hand and gestured me forward and to roll down the window. It didn’t roll down, so I cracked the door.

“Whoa,” he said, hand to his gun. “What’s your business here?”

“I’m a . . . friend. What’s happened?”

“Not at liberty. How do you know the homeowner?”

I was grateful he hadn’t said “the deceased.”

“Everyone knows everyone here, Gary,” Courtney said, walking up behind the other officer. It was true. I hadn’t known his name until now, but I’d seen Gary policing the parking lot of the Mid-Night before. Sometimes he policed the bar, too, with a beer in front of him.

Gary wandered off. I got out and looked around. “Is Gretchen OK?” I asked Courtney.

“Shaken up. He didn’t tell you? A break-in—or at least she says so. I can’t tell that anything is missing in that place.”

“Crowded, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been to visit recently?”

I tried not to hear the accusation. I could feel the keys in my pocket as I nodded, the blush creeping up my cheeks. I’d finally done it. I’d stolen from a friend, a friend who was alive and would suffer the loss of what I’d taken. “After Maddy, I came to see if I could do anything.”

“Did you? Do anything?”

“I took a look in Maddy’s room,” I said. She would have heard this already, I decided. There was no chance Gretchen hadn’t mentioned it. “Seemed dusty, but otherwise exactly as she left it years ago.”

Courtney nodded, and I was grateful for being able to tell the truth. Part of the truth. I suddenly remembered the running man loose from his trophy from Maddy’s room. But I’d lost track of him. Courtney and I stared up at the house while I retraced the silver man’s path from this house to my lap, then to the floor of the car, under my seat.

It was still there. With a shiver, I realized it had been there the whole time—including the night a cop had returned my car to the house after the handcuff incident.

I leaned back against the door with a thud. “What—um, what does Gretchen say is missing?”

Courtney looked back at the house. “Something from Maddy’s room, but she can’t say what it was. It’s a bust. But the window was left open, so someone was here.”

“The window in Maddy’s room?” I stood up straight. Someone had really broken in, but looking for what? “That was sealed tight when I was here.”

“Probably just some kids messing around. Maybe they saw the news and figured out how to make a terrible situation even worse. People are like that. We’ll check into it.”

It seemed to me they were still checking on quite a few things. “Anything on the diamond yet?”

Courtney made a face and glanced all around before she turned her back on the house and said in a low voice, “Funny you should ask.”

“Not funny, really,” I said. “I have nothing else to occupy my time, you know. Until the Mid-Night opens.”

“Have you looked for a different job?” she said. “I mean, just in case? And what about the reunion?”

“What about it?”

“Maybe you could use it to . . . network?” she said.

I glared at her.

“OK, fine. You’re not—bringing a date or anything, right?”

We were in competition again. “And where do you I think I’d get one of those?” I said.

“Good, OK.”

Had I agreed to be Courtney’s plus-one? For the briefest moment, I imagined walking in on Vincent’s muscular arm. “Funny I should ask?”

“Right, the diamond. We can’t seem to track down any jeweler who will admit they purchased or brokered a purchase of Maddy’s diamond. We found the guy who cut the fake for her, but he says he handed her back the original gem, too.” Courtney looked at me pointedly.

“So she sold it on her own. Maybe she was in town to drop it off—”

“Do you know anyone here with two cents to rub together? And, besides, no one’s come forward to say they had a meeting scheduled with her.”

“Would they come forward? If they were buying a diamond that shouldn’t have been for sale?”

“Didn’t say I thought she was selling it.” Courtney chewed at her pinkie nail and looked over her shoulder at the house. She didn’t understand how unlikely it was that Maddy would have come here at all, let alone put the diamond in Gretchen’s care. But I saw why she was attached to that story. Something was stolen, but no one could say what—except I knew at least one thing missing from the house, because I’d taken it.

“Did something happen today?” I said, suddenly eager to get away from the subject of Maddy’s room. “I saw the motel on the news, I think.”

“Billy’s arraignment was today,” she said. “He’s probably not going to miss a beat, you know? We hardly have a thing on him, and that very young witness changed her story yesterday. Convicted, he’d have to register as a sex offender, but he’s probably going to walk. Slap on the wrist at best. That was my big bust.”

“What about the girls?”

“There’s always plenty of them,” she said. “He’ll have no trouble—”

“No, I mean—will they get some help or something?”

Courtney looked at her shoes. “We don’t know who they are. But if they came forward, no, help is probably not what they would get.”

“Would they get a slap on the wrist?”

“Now
they
would probably get public humiliation,” she said. “As if the guys who paid them didn’t exist at all. Double standards are the
best
. Hey, speaking of public humiliation, what are you wearing to this thing?”

“What—oh, the reunion.” I hadn’t thought about it. “My uniform from the Mid-Night.”

“That will turn some heads.”

“No sense in pretending to be something I’m not,” I said. Except I wasn’t a housekeeper anymore, either. I looked at the clock on the dash. I needed to get going. I had yet to do Shelly’s bidding for the reunion and would need to get cleaned up. It was a lot to ask of someone who didn’t want to attend the event at all. “I’ll wear a dress, a regular one. It’s black. I’ll probably have to wear it to the funeral, too.” It was the dress I’d worn to my father’s, in any case.

“That’s lucky, since the funeral is right before the reunion.”

I waited for the punch line. Shelly had said . . . but she was joking, surely.

Courtney looked at me shrewdly. “You haven’t heard? I thought with your mom involved, you’d know all about it. Hey, are you OK?”

The scene around us receded into the background. Courtney grabbed me, opened the door of my car, and let me fall into the seat. I held my head in my hands. “Right before? Like . . . at the hotel?”

“A memorial service. She’s being cremated—hey, Gary, can you see if there’s a bottle of water in one of the rigs?” She squatted down beside me and after a short silence, a bottle of water appeared in my narrowed vision. I took it and held it against my face. Courtney grabbed it, opened it, and put it back in my hands. “The committee you put together decided this was the best way to get mourners to the service. What with her not, you know, living here anymore.”

With her not being a person people liked. I gulped at the water until my vision cleared.

“I didn’t mean for Shelly to turn the reunion into a funeral,” I said.

Courtney smirked toward the house. Her compatriots were spilling from the front door and down the porch stairs. “I’m actually looking forward to the reunion now,” she said. “The speeches will be tremendous.”

They would want me to speak. I gulped at the water, then let the empty bottle drop to the floor. Courtney watched the bottle roll under the seat. I retrieved it before she offered, before she reached for the bottle and found the thing missing from Gretchen’s house. “Who?” I said. “Who’s giving speeches?”

“Only everyone who might have killed her,” Courtney said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

At the Mid-Night, I parked across the road at the construction site and walked in, keeping to the edge of the lot. There were no news crews or anyone at all. They’d moved Billy’s clunker out to the back of the lot and set up crime-scene tape across the front of the building. The place looked totally abandoned now.

I felt bad for Billy despite everything, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to.

I stopped. Shadows from the high sun on the face of the Mid-Night played with my eyes. Someone might be there by the stairs, or in that dark spot near the vending machines. The sun was high overhead. A brisk wind rose, raking over the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot and lifting my hair. I hugged my elbows and imagined the women who’d been employed here secretly. The strays.

So many girls never had the chance to find out who they really were before other people started telling them. Maddy was among them, and I didn’t mean just that Maddy had died too young. It all started long before that belt, that railing.
Sexualized
, Coach and Fitz had called it. I had my own memories: boys grabbing at me on the bus, jeering faces over Southtown High sweatshirts, men the age of my father calling out from cars as I ran. The more I catalogued my own experience, the more panicked I felt to understand it, to stop it. God, when did it
end
? The girls at Midway High, showing off their bodies, taunting each other, calling each other names. Giving the worst of it to each other.

At last I made my way to the nearest stairs and up and around the end of the building. I paused at the section of railing where Maddy had been hanged, then slipped around to the courtyard side of the walkway. Here, the shadows were deeper. At the door to two-oh-two, the crime-scene tape had been removed. I pulled out the card and swiped, and the light flashed green. At the moment I used my forearm to push down the handle, I heard something under the wind.

Before I could look, I was grasped from behind, plucked off my feet, and shoved into the black room, a hand over my mouth cutting off my scream. I kicked and raged, scratching and swinging with every ounce of fight I had. There might yet be something to knock down in this room. Not here. Not yet. Not me.

The door closed behind us, leaving us in almost total darkness. “Quiet,” a man’s voice said. “It’s me.”

I froze. I recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. The killer. The killer was someone I knew. I raced through the math again, but I couldn’t make anything add up through my own panic.

“I’m going to let you go now, OK? No screaming. It’s just me.”

He let me slide out of his arms to my own feet and held me upright when my knees threatened to buckle. I ripped myself out of reach and turned, listening as someone fumbled at the wall switch. A shallow pool of light from the fallen lamp lit his anxious face.