Little Pretty Things Read online

“Well?” I finally asked. We might have been halfway home by the time I got up the nerve. We stopped and got tacos—I remembered the bag of tacos keenly now, how neither of us wanted them, how the smell took over the car until I felt sick.

  “I won’t know for a day or so. They’ll call.”

  “God, what if Gretchen answers the phone?”

  She shrugged.

  What if it’s positive? Why didn’t you tell me? I couldn’t seem to catch my breath to ask her anything. I felt as though I’d been running hard to catch her.

  The drive home was long and silent. When she dropped me off, a part of me wondered if I’d ever see her again, if she hadn’t planned the trip as a good-bye of some kind.

  It was. Or at least it seemed so for a while. The results must have been something she could live with, because she never mentioned them. She came back to herself after a little while. But I could no longer stand the sight of Beck’s hand on her. What disease had he almost given her? How many other girls had he put his dirty hands on? Why hadn’t he been the one to take her to that cold, blank building?

  Now, Beck was sliding through the crowd away from me. Everyone pulled back to let him through, dark and swift against the current. What had she ever seen in him? Good-looking, in a hard-labor kind of way, sure. But he didn’t run or play football or come to school events, or come to school, really, all that often. He was a farmer’s kid, who’d driven a tractor long before the rest of us could drive cars. Now he helped run the farm, or that’s what I’d heard. Midway was a small place, but in the ten years since graduation, I’d only seen Beck a few dozen times, and never in the Mid-Night. I didn’t want to see him. He might have gone out of his way not to see me.

  I watched the regulars nod their welcome. They were farmers, some of them. He wedged an elbow in at the bar among them and caught Yvonne’s attention.

  In his wake, the circle around me dissolved, and the room recovered its roar. Someone put a tragic song on the juke. For the moment, they’d all forgotten about me.

  Again I felt that rushing wave of certainty meeting uncertainty. Maddy Bell was dead. How could that be real?

  I looked around. It was real and now. Beck, me, all these people. Maybe we were here for more than gossip and gawking. For more than tip money, in any case, more than an overpriced drink.

  They were waiting, watching. Guys like Mack, slumped at the bar. Women from the plant down the street on their third happy-hour whiskey sour. Happy hour was long over. They had kids at home, but here they were. They held out for something that I hadn’t thought to give them.

  This was not my responsibility, this impromptu wake. No one had invited them here.

  Yvonne made a face at me from behind the bar. I searched the room for someone needing service. All the glasses were full, all hands held a bottle. When I glanced back to the bar, Yvonne was handing Beck a beer and jerking her head toward him.

  No way. We’d never had a kind word for each other, and we weren’t going to start tonight, as some kind of touching scene for the gathered audience.

  And then a terrible keening sound cut through the noise and silenced the room. We all turned to the front door.

  Our track coach, Coach Trenton, leaned into the room like a puppet with its strings cut. His face hung slack and tortured. Behind him, Fitz, our former assistant coach, wiped his face with his hand.

  “We just heard,” Fitz said. “The girls, at practice, someone got a text—”

  “It’s not true, is it, Jules?” Coach said. Only the terrible sobbing music on the jukebox kept the place from falling in on its own silence.

  I thought, suddenly, of all the calls I should have made. My mom—oh no. I hadn’t softened the blow for anyone.

  And then I swung, pendulum-like, toward rage. Why should they be spared? I’d found the body. I’d suffered more than any of these hangers-on. Maddy’s gray face would never leave me.

  But the truth was that I couldn’t have called anyone. I’d never have been able to say the words. And I hadn’t wanted to. I was carrying Maddy’s death around in my arms like a wriggling newborn, as though I could keep it confined and safe, and—mine. I couldn’t put it down. Meanwhile, the news spun away from me, growing monstrous.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  Coach seemed to crumple. Fitz held him by the shoulders. “Maybe we could talk, Juliet? Somewhere else?”

  “Sure.” When I turned to wave off-duty to Yvonne, I saw Beck watching, his fist clenched white around his beer mug.

  I’d thought we’d come for a funeral. All of us. We’d all come to be a part of the drama. Some of us had come to sell her memory for a share of the tips.

  Except Beck. Out of all of us, he seemed to be the only one who’d come to hold out hope.

  Well, too bad. None of us had any. Not anymore.

  I led them out into the night. Maddy’s car had been towed away. I stared at the empty space and, without a lot of options for where to take them, remembered Yvonne’s keys in my pocket and led the coaches back to the front doors and into the lobby. Fitz pulled Coach to the sofa and let him slump to the cushions.

  “I can’t believe it,” Coach moaned.

  I tried not to stare. I saw Coach and Fitz whenever I went to Midway High to substitute teach or in town like anyone else, but it had been a while since we’d sought each other out. They seemed older, both of them, but had aged in completely different ways. Fitz had gone big—barrel-chested and muscular, a little on the chubby side. He was the one of them always quickest with a bandage or an ice pack or just a smile. He had a way of touching an elbow or a shoulder, just a small gesture that gave an upset runner a dose of perspective. Coach had gone the other direction. His legs, even now clad in workout gear, were tan and tight as ropes. While Fitz had softened and blurred, Coach looked like a more sharply focused image of himself.

  It made sense. Fitz was the former football player never good enough to go pro, but Coach was a former Olympian. His bronze medal had a place of honor in Midway High’s trophy case. He’d wanted gold, sure, but had never gone back to the Games. He still trained, though, like someone with his best time trials ahead of him.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Coach said.

  I reached for the lights, then realized the spectacle we’d make to anyone in the bar. I turned on a low table lamp instead. In the half light, the coaches looked even more haunted. “It’s been an unbelievable kind of day,” I said.

  “You found the—I mean.” Fitz swallowed hard. “You found her? Where? It was really her? You’re sure?”

  “She was hanging by a belt around the neck,” I said. “Off the railing in the back. It was Maddy.”

  We all lived with it for a moment. In the bar, another sad, twangy song started up.

  “What was she even doing here?” Coach had managed to gain some control. He sat with his bony wrists dangling from his knees.

  “Business, she said.”

  “You talked to her?” Fitz said. “When?”

  “Well, before.”

  He shifted in his cross-trainers. “Right. What kind of business?”

  “She didn’t say.” I thought back to our conversation. She hadn’t told me what she did. She hadn’t told me anything.

  “I didn’t realize you were still in touch,” Coach said.

  “We weren’t,” I said.

  “She got away from us all,” Coach said. “She couldn’t run fast enough or far enough, could she?”

  Fitz shook his head.

  I felt as though I’d walked into the room late. “Fast enough or far enough from what? What are you talking about?”

  “Her dad,” Coach said. “If that bastard were still alive, I don’t think we’d have to look very far—”

  “Come on, Mike,” Fitz said. “Not the time.”

  “Her dad?” I’d met Maddy’s dad only once, and he hadn’t seemed like anyone to stir such passionate feelings, one way or the other. He worked a lot, was gone a lot. The only time I’d s
een him, at Maddy’s house the first and last time I’d ever spent the night there, he kept to himself. He wore an ugly cardigan sweater—really ugly, the color of throw-up. And slippers. My dad had never owned a sweater of any type, only flannel or fleece and Carhartts for severe weather; he wore his work boots in the house up to the minute he took them off for bed. To me, Mr. Bell was exotic. He’d gone to college. He worked in an office. Now he and my dad were, at last, in the same place: the nondenominational cemetery on the east side of Midway. “What am I missing?” I said.

  “Mike had some idea,” Fitz said, “that something—funny was going on with Maddy back then. At home.”

  I looked between them. “Funny how?”

  “Did she ever confide in you, Jules?” Coach said. He and Fitz both were nearly twitching from discomfort. They reminded me of the morning Maddy turned up crampy at the state tournament. I would have thought two men who taught and coached pubescent girls for a living had seen a tampon or two in their day. “Anything—not right, with the family?” he said.

  My stomach dropped into my shoes. I needed to sit down. “You don’t mean—”

  But I couldn’t finish. A terrible image: Maddy’s face pressed into that puke-colored sweater. Then that blank brick wall as I waited for Maddy to come out. I thought I might be sick. Their queasy looks matched how I felt. “No. No, she never said anything like that. How do you—I mean, why did you think so?”

  “It was all speculation, or we would have done something.” Fitz looked uneasily in Coach’s direction. “And it hardly matters now, but we always felt, and not just us—you should have heard what some of the other parents, especially mothers, would say—anyway, we always wondered.”

  “We worried,” Coach said. “She just seemed so—sexualized. For such a young girl.”

  “A couple of mothers did mention how mature—” Fitz gave me a pained, apologetic look, for dragging me into this or for using the word mother around me, I wasn’t sure which. “But I did have my concerns about that boyfriend.”

  “Beck?”

  “He was a distraction,” Fitz said. “That part I’m certain about. Her head wasn’t on straight after she took up with him.”

  “He was possessive,” Coach said. “You saw it.”

  I’d seen it.

  An odd look played across Coach’s face. “That guy—where is he these days?”

  That guy sat on a bar stool less than a hundred feet away. I glanced at the door to the bar, just catching the heel of a boot as someone stepped away. “He, uh, he still lives in the area. I think.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” Coach said. “She got away from him once, but damned if he didn’t catch up with her when she came back to town.” Coach looked at me, hard.

  He couldn’t be saying what I thought I was hearing.

  “Beck?” That was crazy. But I felt again the weight of Beck’s gaze, saw Maddy’s feet dangling over the trash bin. Everything was crazy. “Do you think he’s capable of—” The word still stuck in my throat. “Killing her?”

  “Hey,” Coach said, throwing up his hands. “I don’t know what to think. Who would want to kill Maddy?”

  Nobody said anything, but I found myself thinking about our senior year. Maddy won so often and for so long that we’d started to get some guff from the other schools. Not just from the other runners, who liked to trash-talk us at the starting blocks. Sometimes students in the stands had things to say. Sometimes parents. There were adults, we learned, willing to say terrible things as soon as they got you alone. That last year, the closer we got to the state finals, the more people seemed to want to catch us aside and let us know how little they thought of our winning streak. They made accusations of steroids and such, of course. At least that made sense. But we also got called sluts, as though an active sex life might make us faster.

  We didn’t juice, and we certainly weren’t sluts. Now, all this talk of being sexualized struck my sense of justice like a gong. Maddy had a boyfriend. A lot of girls did. Even I had managed a date now and then.

  But none of that had led, surely, to Maddy’s death. Idle threats, ten years on.

  “Maybe you should tell the cops about him,” Fitz said. “The boyfriend?”

  Courtney’s triumphant smile came back to me and, with it, a sinking dread.

  My mind raced to justify it. If the police had two suspects instead of only one, maybe Courtney and her partner would be more likely to consider all the angles, not just the easy one. If they had two suspects, they’d have to work harder, and they would find the real killer. Right? Since neither of us was the real killer? Well, I wasn’t. I didn’t really know about Beck. Which was reason enough to tell Courtney about him. His possessiveness, as Coach called it. For the first time since I’d found Maddy’s body, I felt a tiny opening. Hope.

  “Tell them what?” Coach said. “She dated that kid a decade ago.” The opening slammed shut. “But I feel like we need to do something,” Coach said, looking at me. “Jules, shouldn’t we do something?”

  The last of us to see Maddy alive. The first to find her dead.

  Me. I was the one who should do something, and fast.

  CHAPTER NINE

  After a long silence, Coach finally gathered himself and stood to go. He rolled one of his shoulders with a grimace, then glanced my way. “Who knew grief was such a physical thing?” he said.

  I took a quick hug from both of them. I’d always believed them to be more demonstrative with Maddy, squeezing her shoulder at practice when Coach needed her full focus or after she’d broken the finish line tape again. But then I’d had my dad there to offer finish-line hugs.

  I let them out into the night, imagining a funeral, a place to put all this fumbling for sentiment and solace. I was leaning toward the lamp to turn it off when the door chimed and opened.

  “What did those two old ladies want?”

  Beck. I glanced down at his black boots. Of course he’d been the one watching us. Who was he to demand anything from me? “Well, they did wonder about your alibi for last night.”

  “They’re a fine pair to be accusing me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “They drove Maddy crazy in high school,” he said. “She couldn’t wait to get away from those guys.”

  I’d never heard her say anything like that. Even now, even in her death, Beck couldn’t share Maddy with anyone. “Maybe she was trying to get away from someone else.”

  “Me, you mean,” he said.

  Actually, I’d been thinking of her father. That vomit-colored sweater. But I didn’t want to get into it right now. Beck looked like a wind-up toy twisted too hard, one turn away from breaking into pieces. What if Coach and Fitz could see him now? They wouldn’t hesitate to talk to the police about him. “Were you still in touch?” I said. “Were you ever, after she went to college?”

  That heavy look landed squarely on me again. I waited it out. I knew things about him—maybe that had always been his problem with me. He took a deep breath as I braced myself to withstand whatever he would say. And then he uncoiled, and fell back against the front desk.

  “That’s the thing I never—” he said. “I never understood it. That stupid race in Indy that she didn’t run—”

  “We didn’t run,” I said.

  “—and then the life seemed to go out of her. Remember?”

  His clenched fists were held tight against the thighs of his jeans. I imagined that’s what I looked like when I was trying to keep from reaching for something that wasn’t mine.

  “She wouldn’t let me take her to prom,” he said. “And she went up to college early to get a head start on classes. Who does that? It was like that race was everything, and when it went on without her—done. Us, high school, Midway, all of it.” His voice caught. I looked away. As much as I’d ever hated him, I also hated this new version of him, helpless and ensnared, even this many years later.

  I also hated that he’d expressed exactly my own
memories. The race, then the end of everything. Except I’d been so busy no longer being Maddy’s friend that I hadn’t noticed that Maddy had stopped being Maddy. I hadn’t known she’d gone off to college early. I hadn’t known how hard she’d let Beck down.

  The last time I’d seen her before she walked into the Mid-Night Inn was graduation day. By then we hadn’t spoken in weeks, not since leaving that hotel room without running the championship race. We were kids—we didn’t have it in us to forgive or chuck each other on the shoulder for old time’s sake. We’d been friends competing against one another, maybe more literally than most teen girls, but we were still just kids. And then we weren’t friends. We weren’t enemies. We weren’t anything at all. After state, I kept other company, but mostly my own, and when my parents asked me where Maddy was on graduation day, I shrugged and didn’t point her out. They would have forced a picture between us. She stood alone, sallow in her Midway High–red cap and gown. Had her parents shown up, at last, to support her? I didn’t even know. We’d already gone our separate ways.

  And then—there was no better way to say it—she’d lapped me.

  Maddy had beaten me so many times. But seeing her last night looking professional and happy and satisfied had bothered me more than any second-place finish ever had.

  In this contest, I wasn’t even coming in second. I wasn’t even in the field. I was a spectator.

  I had a headache. I hadn’t eaten all day. My car was parked miles away in front of someone else’s snug, cozy home. I had no income until the motel reopened, and I had no idea when that would be. My childhood best friend was gone, and the only ray of possibility I’d had all day was the moment when I realized I could turn the cops on the guy standing in front of me. This guy who couldn’t talk about his high-school sweetheart without getting choked up. No one had ever felt that way about me. Even in death, Maddy was winning.

  We need to do something, Coach had said. And we did. I did. I looked at Beck.

  “Tell me.” I swallowed hard. “Just tell me you didn’t kill her.”

  That heavy look again. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.