Little Pretty Things (7 page)

But we could blame the student reporter, who’d been waiting for a gotcha, and had constructed one out of nothing. That reporter had come to the interview with a chip on her shoulder. Maybe she had today, too.

“You always read more into that phrase than she meant,” I said.

“I report what people have the lack of self-awareness to say in front of me. Then, and now.” Courtney pulled out her notebook and flipped it open. “Why weren’t you friends with Maddy anymore?”

I looked at the pen’s tip on the blank page, then away. “People fall out of touch. Are you still friends with everyone you hung out with in high school?”

“I didn’t hang out,” she said. “I liked to think of it as doing time. Did you have a fight?”

“When?”

She smiled at me in a way I didn’t like. “Back in high school?”

“No.”

“Last night, did you have a fight?” she said.

“No.”

She waited.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Tell me what happened.”

What had happened? We’d compared plans to avoid the reunion, disagreed on how time passed, and then she’d riled me up with her inability to see what separated us. What had always separated us. “She accused me of being jealous of her,” I said.

“Were you?”

The only thing Maddy had ever done that I wasn’t jealous of was getting killed. “Of course I was. She won every race, ever.”

“Except that last one.” Courtney looked up from her notes. “Why didn’t she run that last race again?”

“She was sick,” I said.

“What kind of sick?”

“I don’t know. Sick sick.” I got up and walked behind the bar. I had always hated everything about this story, and I didn’t want to tell it. Afterward, everyone had wanted to know. What happened? What had gone wrong? But by then I’d been shunned long enough because of Maddy’s blur comment, and I didn’t owe anyone anything. Nobody needed to know. Nobody cared, really, and the few who did just wanted the dirt. But there wasn’t any. “You want a Coke or something?”

I aimed the bar’s soda gun at a pint glass. I didn’t want to remember, but it came anyway—the image of Maddy, curled into a ball on the edge of the hotel bed, the garish bedspread gathered in her fist.

That morning I’d woken to find Maddy already out of the room. She’d gone to stretch her legs or work out the nerves. I thought she might have been with Coach, except he came to our door trying to round us all up for breakfast, or just juice if we wouldn’t eat. The Luxe had a nice dining room. Fitz was out, too, so we knew he must have gone looking for her. When she came back, she locked herself in the bathroom and emerged a long while later only after I begged for the toilet. When I came out again, she was pale in her red Midway High uniform, folded over the edge of the mattress. She’d pulled something, she said at first. But it looked to me like cramps.
Cramps
. You’re in the state capital for the big show and cramps can stop you?

The melodrama of it still galled me. Both of our big, male coaches bumbling around, trying to make things right. They located maxi pads that truly lived up to the name and ibuprofen, and Coach offered to stretch her out, but nothing could release Maddy from the fetal position. She wouldn’t leave the room, and when I tried to leave her side to get dressed to run, she pulled me back down to her and asked me to stay. When Coach went to call her parents and find mine in the stands, Fitz finally whispered if maybe we should take Maddy home. Maddy held tightly to my hand, whimpering into the bedcover. It was my decision: We would both miss the race. “I know you’re disappointed,” Fitz said. “And your parents will be, and I am, too. Mike’s going to be—but it’s a small price, isn’t it?” But it had never felt like a small price to me.

Now, the whole story was small. I couldn’t bear to tell Courtney that it had taken so little to divide us. “Coke?” I repeated.

“No thanks.” Courtney turned to watch. “Are you allowed to skim a drink off the bar anytime you like?”

“I’m not a dishonest person, Officer Howard.” My hands itched, but I ignored them.

Something flickered behind her eyes. “Of course not. Sorry.” She snapped her notebook closed and tapped it on the table. “Can I ask you a question—off the record?”

“You’re the record keeper,” I said.

She put away the notebook and plucked up the coaster again. It had begun to disintegrate. “Is this what you had in mind?” she said.

I was rinsing my glass in the sink and nearly dropped it. “How do you mean?”

“You know,” she said. “Midway, this job. Not that there’s anything—”

“Save it,” I said. The there’s-nothing-wrong-with-hard-work chat I didn’t need. Fitz sometimes stopped by for a pep talk, but it always ended the same. Me, here, pulling sheets off the beds abandoned by people who had places to go.

“Maddy seemed like someone with plans, didn’t she?” Courtney said. “Even in high school. Like she wasn’t just running, but running toward something?”

“That’s a far different tone than what I remember from the article you wrote,” I said.

She flapped a hand at me. “Yeah, sorry about that. I was just trying to win the Pulitzer Prize. But you seemed driven to me, too. You were leaving the rest of us in the dust. That’s how it felt. I always meant to leave, too, you know?” She tossed the coaster to the table and brushed the shredded bits of it from her uniform pants. “When I got that invitation to the reunion last month—I mean, I’ve been thinking pretty hard about life, ever since. I almost can’t remember what it was I planned to be.”

I leaned a hip against the bar. “You didn’t want to be a cop?”

“My uncle was a cop. He made it sound like something real. Like saving the world, with vacation pay. Striking out for justice, undying gratitude of the community, that sort of thing. Like every day would be a ticker-tape parade.” She glanced at me. “He thought I’d be good at it.”

“Aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “I’ve barely had a chance to find out. We don’t get any decent crime here, just robberies and drunk drivers. Loughton—he’s just letting me run with this because he’d rather stay in the car. He’ll come out of his seat if we get an arrest, just you watch. And the only parades I’ve been in were for the Fourth of July, and I was on traffic detail for snotty marching-band kids. A hundred and two in the shade, and me in my synthetic blues.”

“Any ticker tape?” I said.

She smiled. “Not for me. What about you? What did you think you’d be doing by now?”

I’d never had a big goal. Some kind of business, maybe. I was organized when I remembered to be. Something with travel? I hadn’t even declared a major before I’d had to leave college for good. The truth was that I hadn’t been doing all that well in school when my dad had died. I’d had plenty of opportunities to question my own intelligence since dropping out—other people had, too—but it was the memory of failing for the first time that kept me from trying too hard to get back on track. The last time I’d seen my dad, we’d talked about my grades, how I needed to buckle down or get some help, or maybe take a semester off to get my bearing. He wore an old plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his sunburned forearms. He hadn’t been to college.
What could you do different?
he’d asked. And I guess that was a question I was still trying to answer. “I thought I’d figure it out, once I got the chance,” I said. “Only—”

“Only you never got the chance.”

“I never felt like I did,” I said.

“First Maddy screwed up your chance at a full-ride somewhere, and then your dad—that’s a lot of tough breaks in a row.”

I shrugged. The sympathy felt nice, but also heavy for how little Courtney and I knew each other. “Maybe someone else, someone stronger, could have figured it out.”

“Maddy, you mean,” she said. “It must have been a shock to see her walk in, dressed to the nines. Ms. Mendoza said she had a giant diamond engagement ring.” Courtney’s voice dropped. “I would have been, like, what have I done with my life? And this—I don’t want to use a word I’d regret, you know, but this
woman
gets to have it all? And where am I? You know?”

I stared into the dull shine of the bar sink. “Yeah,” I said. The word was barely a whisper. But when I looked up, Courtney’s encouraging smile had turned triumphant.

There was a rap on the glass door. Courtney’s partner stuck his head in, scowling. “Howard, if you’re done interrogating the witnesses, a word?”

“One more thing,” she said to him, then shot me a look I couldn’t place. “Ms. Townsend, we found the note on Ms. Bell’s car. Let me see if I can recall—right: ‘I’m sorry—see me before you leave.’ Why did you insist on seeing Ms. Bell this morning?”

“I didn’t
insist
—”

“What time was that meeting?”

“We never—she was
hanging
—”

“Why are you sorry?”

I swallowed. “I guess I didn’t take her visit as well as I could have.”

They both stared at me. “Well, then,” Courtney said. “You’re free to go. However, it would be best if you didn’t travel far from Midway until this is sorted.”

“Wait.” I glanced between them. “What do you mean? Do you mean I’m—I’m a—”

The word wouldn’t come to me, and then it did.

Suspect.

“We may have further questions,” Courtney said.

But I’d seen the gleam of success in her smile. I’d admitted to feelings I didn’t understand, and now I’d need to convince the police that, whatever my reaction to Maddy’s return to Midway meant, I hadn’t resorted to murder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After Courtney left with Sergeant Loughton, I went to the other side of the bar, took a stool, and held my head in my hands.

A long moment passed before I had to admit that I looked like a pretty good suspect. Of all the places Maddy might have stayed, she’d chosen the dump where I worked. Ten years with no contact, and she’d made a beeline for me. She’d said she was in the area for work, and now I realized no one had asked me. I had a thousand things to tell Courtney now that she’d left.

Maddy had come to see me, and she’d been killed. Why wouldn’t the cops want to know more about that?

For the first time since I’d seen her hanging from the balcony, I felt the punch to my gut—

Maddy Bell was dead.

Maddy, my friend. Memories rushed at me—sleepovers at my house, phone calls that lasted four hours or until my parents forced me to the dinner table or to bed. Riding to track team meets with our knees tucked against the seat ahead of us, hunkered down over each other’s dramas. And running. Always running. On training runs or during practice, we kept pace. Maddy’s breath was my metronome. We ran as a team, anchored together like conjoined twins, as though we’d never part.

In races, of course, she always had a little more to give than I did, a fault of nature that I hadn’t been able to forgive or forget. But it was no one’s fault that I had wasted the last ten years. No one’s fault but mine.

I stood and went to the bar’s exterior door. Outside, the fire trucks were gone, but an ambulance had joined the patrol cars. To take her body, I realized.

A wave of nausea rushed over me. I lay my forehead against the cool glass of the door and took gulping breaths until the brackish taste at the back of my throat was gone. And then I began to cry.

If I’d been asked the day before what my reaction would be to the news of Maddy’s death, even this long since I’d seen her, I don’t think I would have known how much it would hurt. I had already been living without her.

But Maddy wasn’t just the woman I’d been out of touch with for a decade. She wasn’t simply the person I’d spent all this time blaming for my own mistakes, or the one I’d begun to pin new hopes to since our reunion the night before. She was the girl who’d been my greatest friend. She was also, and always, the one who’d loved me best. She’d known me better than anyone else ever had, and I was enough.

I would never have a chance to make it right. Doors in every direction had suddenly closed.

I caught my own puffy-eyed image in the door, and stood back. The hem on my uniform had crept north. A crucial button had come undone during the crying, and my hair was falling out of its ponytail. I hadn’t been enough—for anyone, and least of all for myself—in a long time.

Outside, the cleaning cart sat in the sun. Someone must have moved it out of the way of the stairs. In all the chaos, I’d never brought it in. I tugged at my uniform skirt, wiped my face, and headed out to retrieve it.

At the cart, I heard a noise. I shaded my eyes and found Loughton, Courtney, and a couple other uniformed officers overhead on the balcony.

Loughton spotted me below. “The key won’t work. Where’s Batts?”

“I’ll make you a new one. Just a minute.”

The cart stowed, I took my spot behind the counter and called up the screen on our computer for Maddy’s registration.

She was still checked in. I wondered when someone would go into the system and open up that room on the computer. I didn’t want to be the one to do it.

It was simple enough to make the card: a few keystrokes and then a swipe with a blank. The card twitched in my shaking hand.

And then I reached for a second blank and swiped it, too.

I slipped the second card into the pocket of my uniform, where it felt heavy and obvious. Trying to breathe normally, I took the center stairs up to the second floor.

Loughton had given up on the dud. They all stood along the walkway with crossed arms.

“Sometimes Billy—when he imprints—he swipes too fast.” To my own ears I sounded like someone rushing headlong over the truth. I handed over the card and watched as Loughton and his team pulled their guns and approached the door of two-oh-two. I started to follow them. One of the officers held me back.

Loughton swiped the key. Nothing. He tried again, again. Fast, slow. He fumbled the card in his gloved hands, glancing up at me, tried another angle. “Here, let me,” I said, pushing past the uniformed arm keeping me away and into the center of them. I took the card back, turned it, and ran it through at the speed Lu and I had come to understand as the only one that worked without fail.

The light turned green. The lock beeped.