Little Pretty Things (11 page)

I came back to the room, picking my way around all the sheets. Using my skirt as a barrier against leaving new fingerprints, I pulled open the dresser drawers, one at a time, then closed them.

While Beck fidgeted at the door, I went to the bedside table and peered into the drawer still hanging open. An old phone book, a Bible. I reached in and felt around the back of the drawer, accidentally lifting the cover on the Bible as I pulled my hand out. A scrap of paper blew out from the pages. I reached back in and plucked it out.

“What you’re looking for,” it said, with a string of numbers below. A Bible verse, maybe, missing the book name. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a church. Or a Bible.

“Are you almost done?” Beck turned and looked at the courtyard behind him. I added the paper to my pocket.

“Something’s not right,” I said. “More than just knocked around.”

“I don’t know how you could tell that. Nothing’s where it should be,” he said. “I mean, maybe the wallpaper stayed put.”

I checked the wallpaper to be sure. There was a dark swipe under one of the framed prints. Something—someone—had been dragged against the wall.

For a long moment, I stared at the swipe. Then the thing worrying me snapped into focus.

“We should go.” I crossed the room like a kid jumping from rock to rock across a stream. “Come on.”

“What? Why? I thought we were going to—do something.”

“I don’t want to get caught here. What if someone sees the light on? Or Billy—God, Billy could come up here any minute. Or someone from the bar.”

Beck looked at me, then at the wall. “What did you see?”

“What do you mean? Nothing.”

“Which is it?” he said. “You don’t know what I mean, or you do know what I mean and you saw nothing?”

He stood between me and the cool evening. Over his shoulder, one low star stood out against the hazy, dark horizon. I thought of Maddy again, of course. I was the one who kept her head down, focused, and still lost. Maddy kept her eyes open. I was beginning to understand how well, and how much I would have to pay attention to keep up with her.

As clear as anything, her voice came to me. “Do you think there’s a real place, where you go?”

We’d stayed out past my curfew that night, passing a bottle of something terrible from her stepmother’s liquor cabinet back and forth, parked in her old car in a cornfield. I was going to get into trouble for being late, and I wasn’t sure I’d brought any mints to hide the booze on my breath. But Maddy hadn’t wanted to go home or go to my home, or go anywhere. She’d had more than I had, I guess. She didn’t seem to mind the taste of whatever we were drinking. “I mean, a real place, where you can touch things, and have a dog, and eat chocolate?”

When you died, she meant.

“Did you ever have a dog?” I’d asked. Supposing that to have a dog in heaven, you’d need to have had one in life. It all made sense in my mind. A lot of things made sense that night.

But I didn’t think I’d really answered her question, even then. Now, I knew I hadn’t. I understood now what she wanted to know. Did you get a chance to get it right? Or was this it?

I didn’t know. I didn’t have to wonder, though, if Maddy had been scared to find out.

She’d put up a fight here, a real fight.
Things aren’t always what they seem
, she’d said to me in the bar. But this messy room was the opposite of what I’d first believed about her death. She hadn’t wanted to die. She’d wanted to live, badly. And she must have known that she wouldn’t.

Beck’s stare weighed on me.

I turned and went back to the scratch on the wallpaper. Above it hung one of the cornfield landscapes, the one with the dark tree. I pulled the picture off its hook and turned it over. Nothing.

“What are you doing?” Beck looked behind him nervously. “Put that back.”

I put it back, then cut carefully back across the sea of torn sheets and blankets to the other side of the room. The frame hung over the bed, almost true, the only thing that might have gone untouched in the room—except it was on the wrong wall.

Lu and I hated these prints. They not only bored us, they defied any cleaning method we’d devised. Bugs somehow got stuck under the glass. The frames grew mysteriously sticky, and even a blast of Shinez-All couldn’t take it off.

But we knew exactly where they belonged in each room. These two frames had been swapped in the last two days, since I’d last flipped the room.

That couldn’t be a mistake.

The second print was the cornfield cut by a lonely road, the dust kicking up behind an unseen car getting the hell out of there.

I grabbed the frame from the wall and held it up. A white square of paper had been tucked into the back. I lay the frame upside down on the bed and peeled the paper away.

“Oh, what did you do?” Beck said quietly. At first I thought he meant me, but then I knew he didn’t.

It was a photo of me and Maddy, Coach, and Fitz after the Southtown regional tournament our senior year. A girl in Southtown black and white stood at the edge of the photo with a grim expression of disappointment. In the center, Coach was picking up his Indiana High School Coach of the Year trophy and medallion. At the moment the photo was taken, he was shaking the hand of an official mostly off camera, and the three of us, me, Maddy, Fitz, are being jostled against him in the chaos of congratulations.

Maddy and I carried our regional trophies against our hips like infants, and Fitz squeezed Maddy’s shoulder, gazing upon us like a proud father. But Maddy’s face is serious, determined. Her eyes cut to the left of the cameraman, away from the festivities. She was already thinking about the state finals. She was already way ahead of everyone else.

In the photo, I’m living in the moment. My smile is a thousand-watt beauty, all that orthodontia finally paying off, all those chewy vitamins and two vegetables at dinner and access to vaccinations and fluoride in the water radiating from me. I looked like a corn-fed State Fair dairy princess reigning over my subjects.

It was a great photo of a great day. I studied it, letting myself remember. The bus trip home that night had been epic. We sang songs and screamed at passing cars until our throats grew raw. We were strung out on runner’s high and winning and youth and the world spinning precisely the way it was meant to. On the bus, Coach passed his Coach of the Year trophy around, a team win. We ran our fingers over the cool metal of the running figure, over the smooth wood and the etched words of recognition, over Coach’s name. Finally the winner, finally after his disappointment at the Olympic Games. He’d worn the medallion from the ceremony, all the way home, a long, dark ride. Fitz commented on the craftsmanship of the medallion, of the sturdy, bright-blue ribbon, while we girls took turns studying the trophy and sending the runner racing for his life, bouncing seat to seat, past the point of hilarity.

“All right, all right, girls,” Coach finally said, “Give him back.” The round, brassy Coach of the Year medallion hanging heavy around his neck. Maddy had jogged the trophy up the aisle and back into Coach’s hands.

That was Southtown, after all the hell some people had put us through, calling us names and telling us we didn’t deserve what we’d earned. But that night, we’d garnered our team the two top spots in the state finals, and our leader the state’s top coaching honor, and no one could tell us we were anything but champions.

“What?” Beck said. “What is it?”

“It’s just—” I held up the photo.

He peered at it, then behind him again. “Let’s go.”

I put the frame back, then retrieved the photo and held it to myself tenderly.

“You’re taking that?” he said.

“She left it for me.”

“This is a crime scene, Townsend—”

“She meant for me to find it,” I said. “I’m the only one who would have.”

He frowned at the photo in my hands. “Shouldn’t we—”

There was a creaking sound down behind him. We hurried out and closed the door gently behind us. I led Beck to the center stairwell and down past the office. At the bar’s end of the parking lot, several cars remained. A young woman teetering in high heels struggled into the open passenger door of a car with a buckled hood.

I went to the door of the bar and peered in. The crowd had dispersed, but a few of the hardcore regulars were closing it down. I still didn’t have a ride home, but now it was too late to call Lu or bother her for my keys. If I fetched my haul from Yvonne’s tip jars, I could see who was left sober enough to ask for a ride. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in.

Beck’s boots kicked gravel as he crossed the lot toward his truck. Something in his movements reminded me of the boy he’d once been—the one who caroused, who skipped out of woodshop and art classes to strut past our advanced English class, winking. The one who wanted Maddy all to himself. Even now, it seemed. Even now, he wanted all the grief there was. I hadn’t liked that boy, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like the man he’d turned into, either.

For a long moment I watched him walk away. Why had I trusted him?

But I knew why.

Because Maddy had. And she’d trusted me, too. I held the photo of us to my chest and wished again that I’d been better to her on that last night. Maybe everything would have turned out differently.

“Hey,” I called to Beck’s back. “Give me a ride home, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

CHAPTER TEN

The next morning, the phone rang early. I’d been hoping to sleep in, since the Mid-Night was no-vacancy for a while, and then walk to Lu’s house to fetch my keys and car. After that, my plans petered down to lying in front of the TV until Billy called us back in. I did a few calculations in my head with the balance of my checkbook. Change of plans. I’d have to get a newspaper for the want ads.

I sat up, reaching first thing for Maddy’s photo. Beck had dropped me off the night before without either of us deciding what we’d do next. Well, he had decided. He wanted out of it.

As he drove me home, he kept glancing at the photo in my hands. “It bothers me,” he said. He seemed relieved to leave me on the curb in front of my house.

I’d stowed the perfume bottle in my bathroom among my other things, but not in the secret space, where it would’ve probably spilled. I didn’t want to waste a drop. The key card to Maddy’s room, too, seemed special. After thinking about it, I slipped the card under a patch of loose wallpaper next to my bed and glued it down with clear nail polish. I imagined the card as a time capsule. Thirty years from now maybe someone else would live here, and they would pull down the flowered paper, horrified that anyone would have such taste, only to find a tiny mystery. Where would I be?

I hated to think that I might still be here, but I had no better plans.

Putting these things away, I was satisfied. But the real prize of the night was the photo. I couldn’t put it away. I couldn’t get enough of my own glowing skin, my own radiant smile. All these years I’d remembered the disappointment of second place, but Maddy’s gift to me was a reminder that second place had come with rewards, too.

“Juliet,” my mom said against the crack of my bedroom door, sounding tired. “It’s the school.”

I threw the covers over the photo. I hadn’t had the heart to wake my mother the night before and let her know about Maddy. I couldn’t bear to hear what she would say, or wouldn’t say.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, waiting until I was sure she was gone before I picked up my bedroom extension. It had been a long time since I’d been called to substitute teach.

“Good morning, Juliet.” The clipped voice of the school secretary put me right back in the principal’s office. Mrs. Haggerty, stationed at the helm of Midway High as long as anyone remembered, ran the school with an iron fist. Having to see the principal for some indiscretion wasn’t much of a punishment if you’d already survived Mrs. Haggerty’s displeasure.

She didn’t wait for me to greet her. “We could use you in phys ed today,” she said. “Coach Fitzgerald called in sick—bereft, I’d say. So sorry to hear about Madeleine, of course. I can’t imagine you feel any better about the situation, but he requested you specifically. What do you think?”

The scrap of paper with the numbers from the Mid-Night Bible had fallen from my nightstand. I picked it up, thinking that the last thing I wanted to do today was to stand around a steamy gym while hormone-charged teenagers preened and flirted without breaking a sweat. Fitz got to be bereft, while Coach could barely pull himself upright, and I . . . but I needed the money. My car had nearly reached its last mile. I lived so lean, and yet so many decisions I made in my life came down to this one fact: I needed the money.

I also needed a ride. “I’ll be there. Thanks, Mrs. Haggerty.”

I tapped the hang-up button and sorted through my options. “What you’re looking for,” the paper in my hand said. I’d assumed it had something to do with the Bible it had come from, but now I saw it was probably a phone number. I dialed it. The line rang and rang. I didn’t know what I expected to happen, but I found myself hoping that Maddy would answer the phone. Maddy, alive, and this would all be a big misunderstanding.

No one picked up. Finally I hung up and dialed instead for what I was really looking for: emergency carpool.