Little Pretty Things (24 page)

The Lu who’d
sweet-lady
’d me away from Maddy’s body was gone. This was someone else, someone I didn’t know. She’d seen Maddy swinging from the balcony and thought—what?—just a white woman on the wrong end of something, none of her business? A good excuse as any to cower on the steps and not look in my direction. As long as she didn’t see me, none of this was hers. None of this touched her.

I stumbled through the yard toward my car. I might have looked back if Lu had made even a small sound or movement. But she didn’t. I drove away, watching to see if she would change her mind and stop me.

Now.

Or now.

Or before I turned at the next block and could no longer see the small form huddled under the darkened porch light.

“Now,” I said under my breath. Then she was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY

On my street, our house was a beacon, lit from within and without. I parked the car and stared, looking over my shoulder to see if the neighbors were at their windows, wondering. Down the block, a patrol car had taken up residence in front of Mrs. Schneider’s house.

I hurried out of the car and up the walk. The front door was open. “Mom?”

I heard the TV, the microwave. Finally. Finally we’d reached the upswing of my mother’s psychosis, and every electronic appliance in the house hummed with her manic energy.

“Mom?”

“There you are, Juliet, my God.” My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, one hand to her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you.” I heard a chair scraping the floor behind her, and then Courtney stood there, uniformed and watching. “Oh,” I said. “I mean—I didn’t know how.”

“Well, it turns out it’s very easy,” my mom said. The hand at her throat fluttered. “Officer Howard here assumed I knew.”

Courtney had always been one for breaking news. “Well, you didn’t. She doesn’t read the paper,” I said, giving Courtney a hard look. The police had been visiting Lu’s house, so I supposed it was my turn. “What are you doing here? Did something happen?”

Courtney tilted her head, reminding me of the tiny sparrows that fought over spilled pizza crusts near the Mid-Night’s bin. “Actually, I thought you were the one with something to say.”

Vincent. God, this town. “Maddy’s fiancé made it to town. But I guess you know that.”

“That poor man,” my mom said. Behind her, the microwave dinged, and she didn’t notice.

We both looked at her, then each other.

“Thank you for talking with me, Mrs. Townsend,” Courtney said. “Sorry to bring you such awful news.”

Mom nodded and turned back to the kitchen.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Courtney rolled her eyes in my mother’s direction. “Without disturbing anyone.”

I’d led her halfway down the hall to my room before I realized I could have put us on the front porch, as Lu had done to me. In a lucky move, I’d left the running man from Maddy’s room in the car.

I opened the door, suddenly seeing the room through the eyes of a visitor. It was a child’s room. I lived in a child’s room, slept in a child’s bed. I still had clips from high school up on a bulletin board on the closet door, and some of my biggest trophies still stood on the dresser. I had blamed Maddy for my inertia, but she hadn’t decorated my room.

“It’s been a while since I had a guest,” I said, trying not to think how long ago I’d cleaned the place. “Maddy. Maddy was probably the last person here, senior year.”

Courtney’s sparrow eyes took it all in. She walked to the bulletin board and peered at it.

The photo Maddy had left me lay on my bed. I pulled the comforter up over it. Courtney turned around in time to see me tucking the cover around the pillow. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“It might be time for a change of season in here,” she said. “Maybe a—” She waved her hand. “Facelift?”

She had alighted on the kindest possible thing to say. I was on notice. “You know all about the thing with Vincent, right?”

“I would never take a storytelling opportunity from you,” she said. “Is this the bathroom?”

She’d opened the door and helped herself to the light switch before I could answer. “Nice lighting,” she said, leaning into the mirror, then rooting through the bottles in the mess on my vanity. “What kind of scent do you wear?”

“What? I don’t wear anything . . . much.”

Her fingers landed on the spice cookie perfume bottle just once, and then moved on. I tried not to imagine the mechanics by which her knee might nudge the bottom drawer and reveal the bits of shiny trash hidden there.

Not stolen, exactly. Nothing prosecutable. I thought.

“The car smelled sweet after you got out the other night—cinnamon, maybe. Is it shampoo?”

“Maybe. Look, Courtney, what do you want?”

She finally turned her attention away from the bottles and came to lean in the doorway. Her gold badge gleamed.

My palms, dormant for most of the day, began to hum.

I ran them across my jeans to remind them of their recent interaction with the gravel road. I looked up. Had she heard about that already, too?

“What I really want is to solve this murder and get promoted,” she said. “Or use it to leverage a spot on a unit in Indianapolis or Chicago. Anywhere that isn’t here. That’s what I
want
. What would I settle for tonight?” Her eyes were bright with ambition, but as soon as I saw it, she seemed to realize what she was saying. The raw desire dropped away. “I’d settle for even a tiny shred of information that I don’t already have about Maddy’s murder.”

I had talked to the fiancé, and I bet she hadn’t. Loughton would be keeping some of the low-hanging fruit to himself. My dumb luck—some might say bad luck—had given me more access to a suspect than her job had. Courtney was indifferent now, hanging out in my bedroom as though we’d always done so, but I couldn’t think of another reason for her to be here. I felt the old buzz of competition. She was here because I had better information, maybe better ideas. “Has her purse turned up yet?” I said, and I enjoyed Courtney’s expression traveling between raging curiosity and nonchalance. An ambitious woman who thought ambition was dirty. Maybe she would have done better not to have any, as I had done.

But of course I carried my own dirty desires around with me, too. We all did. What Maddy hadn’t wanted people to know about her. What I didn’t want anyone to know about me or my family. The filth was inside, invisible.

“Her phone did,” Courtney said. “Crushed, in the bin, and wiped.”

The phone rang. We both turned to look, and then my mother called my name from down the hall.

“Probably the school—er, Fitz, I mean. To see if I can sub.”

“By all means,” she said. “Lean times with the Mid-Night closed.”

When I picked up the phone, the caller drew an indignant breath and unleashed a tirade of noise. Shelly. I held the phone away from my ear and checked to see if Courtney was getting what she’d come for.

“How am I supposed to pull this off?” Shelly cried. “The reunion and now a
funeral
? Why did you give him my number? How am I going to explain this to—well, anyone? Juliet, really, how? Surely there’s someone more—more
appropriate
.”

“You met him,” I said. “And he’s a mess. I just thought—well, Shelly, who’s more appropriate than you to help him pull it together? You’re the only one of us with this kind of organizational skill.”

She sniffed. “I know what blowing smoke up someone’s skirt sounds like, Juliet.”

“I’m not, I swear. He seemed so lost, and Gretchen can’t be trusted to do it well, and you’re so good at this kind of thing,” I said. “It’s not flattery if it’s true.”

Courtney made a noise behind me. I whipped around, my heart racing, sure she’d be elbow deep into the bottom drawer of the vanity or spraying herself with Maddy’s perfume, but she was still in the doorway. She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Fine,” Shelly said. “I’ll help a possible
murderer
bury his
strangled
wife, but you have to work it out in trade.”

My hands, at least, had stopped itching. “What then?”

“I help him, and you help me—with the reunion,” she said. “People think it comes together by magic, but it does not.”

I turned to Courtney, who was watching me as though I were her favorite TV channel. “When is it again?”

She sighed. “Saturday, Juliet. This Saturday. And thanks to you, it just became a memorial service, too.”

Right after I hung up the phone with Shelly, it rang again. “You’re so popular,” Courtney said, crossing her arms and settling in.

This time it was Fitz. “I hate to ask for another day, Jules—”

“It’s OK, I could use—I mean, I’m really enjoying it,” I said. “I’m just having them run. Was there anything else you wanted them to do?”

“You got them to run? They always complain when I make them do that.”

“Oh, they complain,” I said. “I recruited a new thirty-two-hundred-meter runner for you. Jessica somebody?”

Fitz was silent for a moment. “That’s incredible,” he said. “What did Mike say?”

I blushed a bit. Coach had said I had a good instinct, and I must have lit up like a twelve-year-old at the praise. All the girls ended up with a crush on one of the coaches, but I thought mine should have dissipated by now. “He was impressed. He said you’d had an eye on her.”

“Well, of course,” he said. “Who wouldn’t—”

“I’m sorry if I overstepped.”

“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “I was just thinking about the rest of the team, how she might fit in. Mickie runs the thirty-two hundred, but since when is it a problem to have two teammates challenging one another? You know that better than . . . anyway, maybe some drills for the girls tomorrow. There will be more whining for you to put up with, but you seem to have the talent for getting them to do what you want.”

He sounded tired.
Heartsick
, I’d said, but what if he really was sick, the kind of sick you couldn’t see and didn’t easily recover from? Or recover at all. I thought of my dad, and the call that robbed him from me forever. We hadn’t seen that coming. Coach and Fitz were about the same age that my dad would have been. I was keenly aware of Courtney watching me. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t. “So do you, Fitz,” I said. “You have that talent, too.”

He cleared his throat. “Mike’s got it, enough for both of us. I’m excited to work with Jessica, if she comes through. Whatever you said to convince her, let’s get that on a recruitment brochure right away. T-shirts, even.”

When I hung up the phone, Courtney said, “Jeesh, the longer we hang out, the more the track team seems like a cult.”

Was I allowed to tell an armed officer to shove it? “We just lost someone we care about. Also, I’ve found when you
hang out
with someone a lot, you start to indulge in a little hero worship.” Coach, especially, drew our adoration. We were protective of him and his missed chance at the Olympics. Sort of like Maddy had just missed state, now that I thought about it. They might have had a lot to talk about, afterward, if you could compare losing out on a gold medal for a bronze—not too shabby—with what Maddy had gone through.

“Hero worship, huh? I’m flattered,” Courtney said. She flicked at the door to my closet and glanced in. “But what I’ve noticed is more of the self-worship variety.”

“Maybe that’s because running that far and that fast makes you feel like a god,” I said, reaching past her and closing the door.

She looked at me in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

“You couldn’t know that,” I said. “The newspaper staff not being that active a sport.”

“So Maddy thought she was a god? A goddess?” Courtney said. I could tell her mind was racing to fit this newfound knowledge into the map of what we knew. “Maybe someone didn’t like being reminded he or she was merely human in her worship-worthy presence?”

“That wasn’t who she was.”

“Well, look who’s back in the fan club,” Courtney said. “How touching.”

Maddy had been through more loss than Courtney had ever known, it seemed to me. More loss than anyone had ever or would ever give her credit for.

I’d been too honest with Courtney. She had no idea what I meant. She’d never known the feeling of running twelve to fourteen miles, of walking off the track knowing you’d given everything you had. Knowing you were made of better stuff than most people. Knowing you were a hands-down bad-ass, even if it was the basketball players who got all the attention. Maybe she’d never had something like that, that sense of belonging to something, the solid feeling under our feet of having something to reach for and having someone to help you. It wasn’t worship. It was only love. We had loved each other and Coach and Fitz, who held the team together like a family.

Like a regular family, which Maddy had not had, and I’d had, but lost.

I pictured my mom sitting in the bright kitchen with the microwave pinging at her every two minutes.

I went to my bedroom door and opened it. Courtney shrugged, slid off the doorjamb, and strolled across the room and past me into the hall. She dawdled at a photo on the wall—me in severe braces—before she would let me escort her to the front door.

“Thanks for the hospitality,” she said. “But before I go, I have to ask you a few questions.”