Little Pretty Things Read online

  One of Billy’s eyes double-winked at me. Tic number two. “He came and asked for change for the vending machines. Why?”

  That, at least, was good news. “He’s been in there, do not disturb, for two days. When is he checking out?”

  Billy picked up the stack of info cards next to the computer and sorted through the short deck. One, he put to the side. The Bargains, gone and good riddance. I saw the card with Maddy’s handwriting flick past.

  “Today,” he said. “But not yet. Now tell me about the hot ride parked outside my place. We have a celebrity staying with us?”

  Lu stepped behind the desk and hip-checked Billy out of the way. “Juliet’s friend.”

  I wished she hadn’t said it, but I did feel a glimmer of pride as Billy looked between the two of us, trying to catch us teasing him. “Yeah? Well, thank her for my late night, will you? She and her fella were banging around in there until all hours. That room’s going to be a mess.”

  Lu looked at me sadly. “I hate being right all the time,” she said.

  I didn’t care about that. Maddy’s car was still here. I hadn’t missed her.

  “Oh, and what did you ladies do to my ice machine last night?” Billy said. “It’s leaking all over God’s creation.”

  I ignored him and went to the closet to spring the cleaning cart. He and Lu were still arguing over the ice machine as I dragged the cart out of the lobby and over a slim stream trickling all the way from the vending area out across the sidewalk to the parking lot. There’d be no ice within a day, and then we’d have something new for the guests to complain about.

  The sun was getting hot. I pushed the cart into the shade of the central stairway, listening to the sound of the cars on the interstate. By ten, when the commuters were where they needed to be and traffic thinned out, everyone else would speed up. It would sound like the Indy 500 out there, the roar of engines bouncing off the walls of the motel.

  Inside one of the pockets on the cart, I found the little notepad Lu and I used to keep track of waning supplies or things that needed fixing. Tapping the dull pencil against an empty page, I waited for the right words to occur to me.

  When I was done, I tore out the note and tucked it under the windshield wiper of Maddy’s car. I hoped she wouldn’t ignore it, but she had every right to. I’d tried to hurt her the night before, and when I actually tried at something, I was pretty good at it.

  Back to work. In the central breezeway, the light on the vending machine fluttered. Full of corn chips and crumbling pastries, it never saw much action. But it seemed we needed a maintenance visit for the ice machine, anyway. I made a note of it, then popped the lid on the ice chest. Full, for now.

  Time passed slowly as I swept crabapple blossoms out of the breezeway and hosed down the sidewalks, one eye always on Maddy’s end of the building. Nobody stirred. I took the center stairwell to the second floor and swept the same few feet of balcony for a long time. Nothing.

  The door to two-oh-six cracked open.

  A pudgy man in a tight, shiny suit emerged. When he saw me, he ducked his bald head and shot past me and down the stairs. “You checking out?” I called. He nodded, his chin to his chest.

  Not being able to make eye contact was a bad sign. His room would have to wait. I continued with the broom, sweeping the length of the walkway, always watching for movement near Maddy’s room, and then back again, swatting at cobwebs in the eaves of the roof. And then back again, brushing at the detail in the railing. Billy would be pleased with this effort, but there was no sign of Maddy.

  Back downstairs, I leaned on the cart, considering all the tasks I could invent to keep myself handy to her room.

  “Come in, Juliet,” said Lu’s voice on the cart’s walkie-talkie. “This is Command. You there? Over.”

  I grabbed the radio. “Uh, yeah, Command. What’s up? Over.”

  “It’s ten o’clock. What’s the report? Over.”

  “Checkout is eleven,” I said. “You heard Billy. She’s … tired. Over.”

  “But weird, right? Did you think she’d sleep in, you know, here? Um, over. Lady of Guadalupe, I feel like such an idiot when I have to say this over, over, over,” Lu said, her accent getting thick. “Over.”

  “Roger that.” I thought for a second. “Do you think I should check on her?” I let up on the button, then had to click it again to finish. “Over.”

  “Give her the beauty sleep, I guess,” Lu said. “Not that she needs it. Over.”

  And roger the hell out of that. “Help me watch for her, OK?” I said. “I want to say good-bye, at least. Out.”

  Upstairs I leaned into the balcony for another minute before giving up and going to see what damage had been done to two-oh-six. One swipe of the cart’s master key, and the dead guy’s disaster lay before me.

  Except he wasn’t dead, and the room wasn’t a disaster.

  It did smell, as Lu had noticed. The room had taken on the bouquet of old Chinese food and dirty feet. I propped the door open. In the bathroom, I flipped the switch for the fan and gave the place the once-over. He’d used a lot of towels, but I’d walked into worse. Much worse. I’d encountered bloody towels left behind the door, sheets covered in terrible things. I’d had to clean up spilled beer, used condoms, dirty diapers, and more. People came to motels like the Mid-Night to be someone else for a night, and their new identities rarely wanted to pick up after themselves. Sometimes their new selves wanted to smear things on the walls. We relied on Shinez-All, a potent chemical cleaner in a bright-yellow spray can, for the worst of it. Actually, Lu and I used Shinez-All for everything—nasty things, sticky spills, streaky mirrors, and big spiders.

  I toured the dead man’s room, looking for any trace of damage or devastation. Even the bathroom was fine. He’d piled all the used linen together in one place on the tile.

  I spotted a loose seam on the wallpaper over the sink. I’d have to bring back some clear nail polish from the cart to glue it back down, an old trick I’d picked up.

  Other than that, this would be a quick flip. I’d have to vacuum the awful gray-green carpet and wipe the baseboards—for some reason, female guests really cared about baseboard dust—then wipe up any hairs and water drips around the sink, toilet, and tub, and give the mirror a quick Shinez-All polish. Then replace any amenities, as Billy insisted we called the little bottles of freebie shampoo and lotion, and clean up any trash the guest had left. Oh, and corner the toilet paper to a little military point. People made jokes about it, but if we didn’t do it? We’d hear about it, and not just from Billy. I could be done in a half hour, and then go see the damage done by the Bargains, and still be available when Maddy woke up.

  The framed art over the dresser was hanging askew. I glanced at its sister over the bed. They were the same in every room, ugly, color-drained landscapes of country fields, of dark trees like figures out of a nightmare. Just what you wanted to wake up to in a strange room. If country roads and dirt roads were art, all you had to do was open the front door and gaze at the landscape beyond the parking lot. The problem for Lu and me was that none of the frames were well secured to the wall. They went wonky at the smallest breeze or bump. I nudged them both back into place and surveyed the rest of the room.

  Here was a surprise. The guy had wrapped up all his trash into one bag, tied it, and left it by the door. A few bills lay on the dresser, for my trouble. The dead man was a tipper? Hardly anyone was.

  I grabbed the trash and took the walkway past Maddy’s room to the far stairs.

  At the bottom, I thought I heard something. I let the bag drop and hurried around the corner of the building to see the parking lot. The silver car stood where it had been all morning, my note wedged under the windshield wiper.

  Back at the stairs, the trash bag lay torn open. I hated to touch whatever the dead guy had been doing with his copious free time and extra towels, but there was no way around it. I knelt to sweep everything back into the bag before it started to blow around in th
e breeze, tying it into a neat little bundle again.

  Behind me, cars rushed past on the highway. People passing Midway, to and fro. They’d be going to work or traveling through, going fast, and who could blame them? I stood up and watched them through the brush in the fence, wrapping my arms around myself. It was spring finally—the time of year that reminded me of childhood, when the windows were thrown open after a long winter. When the new track season started. My youth felt distant, but the clean wind blew in the scent of possibility. I hadn’t always been so off course. Something might still happen to change everything.

  I thought of Maddy, still asleep upstairs, and pulled my elbows in tighter. Something had to happen to change everything. I picked up the bag of trash and turned, and I knew that something already had.

  Maddy.

  Maddy, hanging by her neck from the balcony railing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Her face was a color I’d never seen.

  No.

  I wasn’t seeing this.

  There was a noise. The noise came from me.

  I wasn’t seeing this. This wasn’t happening.

  The noise turned into a strangled sob, then found its way to a scream. I tumbled backward into the scrub and fence, and clung there, the interstate roaring at my back, screaming and screaming until—

  No, this couldn’t be happening. That couldn’t be real. That couldn’t be Maddy. That wasn’t the belt of her raincoat around her neck—

  Then Lu came running around the side of the Mid-Night, and I could see them both: Maddy, hanging limp and gray from the railing above the alcove, like a fish, and Lu, her eyes wide and frantic, and I knew it was happening. It had. It was over, and Maddy was dead.

  Billy loped around the corner several paces behind. “What the hell is going on?”

  Lu rounded the edge of the building and looked into the alcove to see what I was seeing.

  “Díos—oh, sweet lady.” She ran to me, and pulled me up from the brambles and into her arms. I wasn’t sure if the sweet lady was me, or Maddy, or if the Virgin Mary herself had been called upon. I closed my eyes against Lu’s shoulder and found I could stop screaming. We clung to one another as Billy hurried around the corner and took a look.

  “Oh, hell, are you kidding me? Who’s got a—wait, I do.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and fumbled with the buttons. “It’s really nine-one-one, right? Oh, hell, this is just what I need.”

  “Shut up, Billy.” Lu squeezed me tighter. “Oh, poor, sweet lady.”

  I wheezed into Lu’s nice shirt, my throat and lungs burning.

  “This is ridiculous, is what it is,” Billy said. “How many years we’ve been catering to wackos and nut-jobs and not one of them—Hello? Yes, I’ve got an emergency here—” I peeked out from Lu’s hair to see Billy turned from the highway with a finger in his other ear. He gave the address and waited, nodding. “Now I’d like to keep the name of the place out of it. Ma’am, I understand that—”

  “Billy, stop being an asshole,” Lu yelled.

  He snapped his phone closed. “They are going to take our star from us so fast, and then see where you are.”

  “Billy, shut up. That is Juliet’s friend. And no one comes for that stupid star, anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Then why do they come?”

  I leaned my head on Lu’s shoulder, waiting to hear what they came up with. It was a good question.

  “From now on,” Billy said. “They’re going to come for the sturdy balcony rail. See if they don’t.”

  Lu shuffled me around the building, grabbing a hand towel from the cleaning cart as we passed it. In the lobby, she forced me into the seat behind the desk and disappeared. When she came back, the towel was wet and wrapped around some ice from the machine. She pressed it to my face. “Oh, poor sweet lady.”

  A few minutes passed, the only sound my ragged breath. Then sirens, at first distant, then close and wailing. Tires skidding on loose gravel.

  “Lu—” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d had plenty to say the night before, though, hadn’t I, and where had that left Maddy? She was the one, the woman we all should poor lady for. Poor Maddy. Why had I said those horrible things to her? “Oh, God.”

  Lu patted my hand, and then went to the windows to see what was happening. “Two fire trucks and two—three cop cars. Four, now. I didn’t know we had so many.”

  What had I said to Maddy? That the true friendship she believed in had been a myth.

  Which was a lie.

  Because I’d been mad at her? After ten years?

  Because she’d suggested she might have thrown a race my way. Because she felt sorry for me. She saw me rotting here behind the Mid-Night’s front desk, still fretting over a few long-distance high-school track races from ten years ago, and she pitied me.

  But I couldn’t let her have even that, could I? I’d stripped her of her compassion until she’d felt naked and exposed. Until she’d felt alone and abandoned enough to—

  I remembered all the expectancy and good feeling I’d had all morning. I’d been thinking I’d found the cusp of a new beginning, because Maddy had made me think I could live a larger life, be a different person. And all the while I’d been looking forward to the apology I owed her. The apology that might open up my future, always selfish to the last. But Maddy had needed much more than I’d been willing to give. She’d needed a friend. The real kind.

  This was my fault.

  “Here they come,” Lu said. She came to my side and gave my arm a quick squeeze.

  The door chimes sounded. Two of them, dark uniforms, entered. Billy trailed behind, came to the counter, and leaned against it, shaking his head.

  “Well, she’s dead.”

  “We know that, Billy,” Lu said.

  “Sergeant Jim Loughton,” said the uniformed guy. I looked up, recognized them both. Sometimes we got a patrol out to the Mid-Night, the bar, when somebody had too much to drink, or if a fight broke out. Loughton was big, round-bellied, and looking around in distaste as though he feared touching anything. He took off his cap, revealing salt-and-pepper hair, and gestured to the other cop. “Patrol Officer Howard.”

  The other cop gave me an awkward wave from her hip. “Hi, Juliet.”

  I struggled for the right thing to say. There was nothing. “Courtney.”

  “Weird about Maddy,” she said.

  I nodded.

  Loughton took a second to glance between us, settling his gaze at last on his partner.

  “Juliet and I graduated from Midway High together,” Courtney said. She took off her cap, too, and tucked it under her arm. Courtney Howard was small—not just for a cop, but for a human—with a cropped barbershop haircut that showed off her sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes. She had a little lisp that was hard to pinpoint, but that made her sound younger than she was. In her uniform, she seemed like a little girl playing dress up.

  Loughton cleared his throat with a rumble. “Who checked in the deceased?”

  The deceased. I swallowed hard. “I did.” My voice was small in the still room.

  “When was this?”

  I couldn’t think. Lu nudged me away from the computer to look it up. “She checked in at nine twenty-six last night,” she said.

  Loughton gave Courtney a loaded look. She reached for her notepad and flipped it open. “How did she pay?” she said.

  “Credit card. Do you need the number?”

  “Not yet,” Courtney said. “Was she alone?”

  They all turned to me. “Yes.”

  “The hell she was,” Billy said.

  “She checked in alone,” I said. “She said ‘just me.’ But—”

  “But there was a heckuva racket in there last night about two a.m.,” Billy said. He ran his hand through his hair five or six times while we all watched. Tic number three. “Her room was right above mine, so I heard it well enough.”

  I cleared my throat. “What I was going to say was that she left las
t night—”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Lu said. “We saw her leave right after you came back from the bar.”

  “Who went to the bar, now?” Courtney said.

  Loughton held out his hands, traffic-cop style. “Whoa. One at a time. You,” he said, pointing at me. Billy had done the same thing just a few hours ago. I wished it were still then, before I knew what I knew and had seen what I’d seen.

  “Maddy checked in, and then she wanted a drink.” I thought for a second, and everyone let me. My legs felt shaky. “Except she didn’t seem to want the drink, really. We sat in the Mid-Night—the bar—until my break was over, and then I pointed out her room. But Maddy didn’t go to her room. We both saw her drive away. This morning—” I remembered finding the silver car parked in the lot and felt again the rising hopes of catching her before it was too late. It was too late. “This morning, her car was here when we came in.”

  “‘We’ refers to you and Ms.—” Courtney nodded toward Lu.

  “Mendoza,” Lu said. “Luisa. Juliet drives me when we have the same shift.” Her eyes shifted between Loughton, Courtney, then Billy. “Most days, I mean, she drives me.” I could feel her trembling beside me.

  Loughton grunted. “And the victim’s name?”

  “Madeleine Bell,” Courtney and I said, together.

  “Well,” he said, looking between us again. “Now that everyone’s properly introduced.”

  Loughton went out to see to Maddy, leaving Courtney to take our statements. She looked between the three of us, meeting my eyes and looking away. “Ms. Mendoza?”

  After a brief negotiation, Billy led them to the doors between the lobby and the bar, unlocked, and flipped the lights for them.

  Back at the counter, Billy leaned toward me. “What do you think they want us to say?” he said.

  I didn’t know. There was a knot in my stomach. “They’ll ask questions.”

  His eye twitched, twitched. “Jesus, what kind of questions?”

  “About Maddy, you idiot.”

  “I don’t know anything about her.”