Little Pretty Things Read online

  “What you—heard, you know. Her and her—”

  The guy.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “What?” Billy said.

  Maddy, hanging from the belt of her own coat, surely a suicide. But what did it mean if she’d had a late-night guest?

  “Tell them everything you can about the noises you heard,” I said. “Billy, if someone was with her, maybe she didn’t kill herself.”

  He whistled. “What difference does it make? You think they’ll let us keep a half star if some bitch gets herself murdered here?”

  “Billy, she—”

  The bar door opened, and Lu emerged. She seemed stunned.

  Courtney stood in the doorway. “Mr. Batts? Billy, was it?”

  He smiled wide enough to show the black socket of a missing molar. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ms. Mendoza,” Courtney said. “You can go.”

  “Juliet is my ride.”

  “Call for another one. We’re going to need to talk to Ms. Townsend at length.”

  They all looked at me.

  “Take my car, Lu,” I said. “I’ll get a ride over to your house later.”

  “Someone better be cleaning some rooms, is all I want to say.”

  “Billy, shut up,” Lu said. “We still have lots of rooms clean and ready—”

  “If the premises aren’t completely shut down,” Courtney said.

  “The premises is where I live, lady,” Billy said. His fingers raked through his hair three, four times. We all waited.

  “Well, you must be devastated to have this happen on your doorstep,” Courtney said, her lisp menacing in its cuteness. She waved him into the bar. The doors swung closed behind them.

  Lu looked at me, shook her head, and pulled me farther from the door. “This is very bad stuff, here.”

  “Lu, the noises Billy said he heard in her room—you know what that means, right?”

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, that’s why all the bad cop, bad cop. I thought she—”

  “So did I.”

  Lu tilted her head at me. “Don’t look so relieved. Your friend got murdered last night.”

  “I had this bad feeling that she’d—that I’d—” I couldn’t bring myself to admit how badly I’d treated Maddy. “I felt bad I hadn’t seen the signs, you know?”

  She nodded uncertainly. “Instead, we only have a madman stalking the place we work,” she said. “That is not a comfort to me.”

  Or to me. My head swam. I folded my arms on the counter and rested my face in the dark circle they created. I wanted to be at home, in bed, ignoring the alarm clock, or I wanted it to be three days ago, totally unaware that Maddy Bell even remembered my name. Or I wanted it to be three decades from now, when this all might be a dull memory.

  But it would never dull. I remembered this roaring ocean of feelings from when my dad had died: confusion, horror. Anger. What was the point of living, really, when it was so easily gone, and left so much disaster behind? My mom standing at my dad’s gravesite, head bowed. Then again, just the night before, head bowed over the empty sink. I couldn’t quite remember the sound of his voice or his laugh. These things faded, but the pain hadn’t.

  The bar doors opened, and Billy scuttled into the lobby like a cockroach trying to find the dark. “We’re going to go no-vacancy for a few nights, girls,” he said, looking at me. I usually scolded him for calling us that, at our age, but I let it go. “Just ’til things die down. I mean. You know what I mean.”

  “Ms. Mendoza, I believe you were dismissed,” Courtney said from the doorway. “Juliet. It’s time.”

  Billy came behind the desk. He nudged me out of the way and clicked through some screens on the computer. With the flick of a wrist, he swiped a room card. Maddy’s room. They would have to search it. Billy grabbed under the counter for the switch for the no-vacancy neon we hardly ever had a chance to put into service. I reached into the pocket of my uniform and slid my car keys across the counter to Lu.

  Billy held the door for her. “Lock up tight, Juliet,” he said, fidgeting with the room key in his hand. “Might be a couple of days.” He looked at Courtney. “Or longer.” He let the door sail closed behind them.

  It was time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I’d been in the closed bar before, but it had never seemed as ominous. The daylight pouring in from the outside door seemed strange—was it still only the morning? Courtney waved me toward the same table I’d sat at with Maddy the night before. Casual, as though we’d be catching up over coffee. “So, what did you think, when Maddy walked in the front door?”

  “I thought, ‘We sure are busy for an off-season night.’”

  Courtney sat across from me and gave me a long, level stare. “All of this is on the record.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Which means no bullshit.”

  Courtney and I hadn’t been friends at Midway High, or enemies. The hostility seemed earned, though. I searched my memory for what I’d missed. I barely remembered Courtney from high school, couldn’t place her among the cliques and groups of girls formed there. Maybe not remembering was the problem. “Sure,” I said.

  “Were you in touch with Maddy before she arrived last night?”

  “I hadn’t seen or talked to her since graduation day,” I said.

  “Your best friend from forever ago arrives unannounced at your workplace one night, and all you can think is how busy you are?” Courtney’s sharp cheekbones looked sharper in her disgust.

  “I did wonder why she’d stay here instead of at home—at her old home, I mean. But I guess she and her stepmother still don’t get along.”

  “Did you and Maddy get along?”

  “I told you, we weren’t in touch.”

  “Not at all?” she said.

  I’d seen enough cop shows to know what she was doing. “Like I said, not until last night. I heard she lived in Chicago—”

  Courtney leaned forward. “Who told you that?”

  “Shelly. The reunion’s coming up.” Shelly, our class president, used her bank window as a throne from which to maintain control of her subjects. If I didn’t RSVP to the reunion soon, I wouldn’t be able to deposit my paycheck without getting a lot of attitude. Of course, with the Mid-Night closed, maybe the greater concern was when I’d ever see a paycheck again.

  Courtney fell back against her seat, less rigid through the shoulders. “Shelly. Right. Are you going to the reunion?”

  “I wasn’t planning to. What about you?”

  She reached for a paper coaster on the table and worried it between her fingers. “I don’t have much to say to those people.”

  “Those people?”

  “My high-school years don’t need to be revisited,” she said.

  “Your high-school years and mine were the same years.”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “Come on,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Her glare cut through me. “For you, it wasn’t that bad. For Maddy. You were too busy being track superstars to notice anyone else. The rest of us were just blurs.”

  Now I remembered.

  The headline had read something like And Everyone Else Is a Blur. It was something dumb Maddy used to say. I’d never given it much thought until she’d said it during an interview with the school paper. In big, black print, it sounded ugly and stuck-up. And people had taken it seriously. Even a few of the other runners had given us a pass after that. Maddy and I laughed it off, but we knew damage had been done. We couldn’t really blame the newspaper—nothing in the article had been wrong or misquoted.

  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 encour
aging 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.