Little Pretty Things (15 page)

“No chance she wants to be a manager, huh?” someone said. “Isn’t she a freshman?”

Behind me on the lowest benches of the stands, the rest of the team tied their shoes and arranged their headbands, cutting secret glances toward Coach and the new recruit.

“It’s not you who needs to worry,” said one of the other girls. “Right, Mickie?”

“I can beat her,” said a girl lying on her side along a bleacher plank higher up. The other girl from the fight. She had a scratch down one cheek and a dark bruise on one of her arms, but she might have been lounging poolside at a spa. “One way or another.”

“Juliet,” called Coach. “Are you staying for practice?”

I glanced back at the girls. They’d gone quiet. “Until my ride gets here,” I said. “What do you need?”

“Get the girls warmed up, will you?”

“I’m warm enough,” said one I recognized from the last-hour PE class.

“Stay that way, then,” I said. “Let’s go, ladies.”

They rose in a group. “Have you noticed that all coaches call us ‘ladies’?” one of the girls said.

“Except Coach, right?
Girls
.”

“Technically that’s what you are, though, right?” I said. They went silent again. I felt the wave of curiosity and suspicion coming off them, but it only urged me on. “If you mean age. I mean, that’s the division between being a girl and being, well, a woman.” I sounded like an idiot even to myself. They’d called me a
coach
.

“Mickie’s eighteen,” someone said.

We all gave Mickie another glance. She was gorgeous—slim and lithe as a dancer, her dark hair in that thick braid. I looked around. All the girls were gorgeous. Young, bright-eyed, their skin poured milk, their tiny waists accentuated by the slim-fitting running gear they’d chosen. Little pretty things, all of them. Kids were cuter these days. Or we’d been just as beautiful, and hadn’t known it.

“Fine,” I said. “Young-women Panthers, let’s blow the dust off the track.”

Once the girls got moving, they stopped fussing. Coach took his time courting the gazelle—Jessica, I remembered—so I had the chance to check out his pool of talent. Mickie was the star, of course. No one on the track could touch her. She was certainly the girl Mrs. Haggerty had mentioned, the one destined to sweep Maddy’s records off the walls of Midway High once and for all.

Beautiful, elegant on her feet, and twice as fast as I had ever hoped to be. I imagined the Midway High trophy case filled with her name, and those with Maddy’s and mine shoved to the back and, eventually, into some back-hall storage.

I didn’t like her.

The other girls didn’t, either. Every start, she bolted ahead. At every finish line, she crossed the white line long before her next competitor. No split-second finishes here. Mickie didn’t simply win. She killed. She even outpaced the sprinters. Distance runners weren’t supposed to be the stars, but this girl hadn’t heard that. By the time I gave them five to go take swigs from their water bottles, the easy camaraderie of the bleachers before practice was gone. While the girls gathered around the pile of their duffels and joked easily together, Mickie stood alone. In this isolation, she reminded me of Maddy. She had the straight back of someone who was used to turning it on everyone else. The price of championship, of winning too often and by too large a gap.

One of the girls had been playing music on her phone, singing along. A new song started, and they all joined in. Even Mickie, taking dainty sips at her water bottle, mouthed a few lines. The lyrics were lost to me until the tune dropped into a rap and an angry voice said something I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. Something about tying a woman he loved to a bed and setting the house around it on fire.

“Wait, what?” I said, a chill going through me. “Shut that off.”

They exchanged confused glances. “What? It’s just a song.”

“Nothing is ever just a song,” I said, not even sure what I meant. I stared at the girl’s phone until she silenced it.

Coach was approaching from the gates. “I don’t know how you did it, Jules,” he said. He waved the girls back onto the track and set his stopwatch. With a single nod of his head, the team shot off the starting line and into a loping, long-distance stride.

“Is she joining the team?”

“We’ll see if Jessica’s interest survives the night. She’s bringing some gear tomorrow.” He winked at me. “She’s going to try us out. She seems to have a very busy schedule we need to work around.”

“Well, I hope you all meet her requirements,” I said. I couldn’t help admiring Jessica’s sense of herself. “She’s got some stiff competition.”

“Mickie, you mean.” We both looked out to find her. It wasn’t difficult, as far out front as she was. “She’s the real thing, Jules. It’s been a long time since—”

He slammed his fist at the chain link. A few of the girls glanced back at the noise. When he leaned on the fence again, one set of knuckles was scraped and bleeding. “I’m just so angry. She deserved more.”

“I know,” I said. In that instant, my jealous guardianship of Maddy’s records was finished. I hoped Mickie stripped them all, and good riddance. Maddy was dead, and Coach, Fitz, and I were the only ones who kept watch. We would see her memory erased from Midway, from history, from everything but our own minds. The whole world would forget or pretend to, in order to spare us the pain of remembering. But I already knew a little about this. The worst tragedy of loss was that the world kept spinning.

I begged off to go meet Lu, hurrying away before I made a fool of myself in front of these self-possessed girls. Or in front of Coach, who was barely keeping himself together for the sake of the team. For my sake. Fitz took care of everyone, he’d said, but that wasn’t the entire truth.

As I walked toward the parking lot, I noticed another lone figure at the outer fence. We recognized each other at the same time. Officer Courtney Howard—in her civilian jeans and a sweater, as small as any of the girls on the team—strode toward me.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Was going to ask you the same thing.” Her eyes scaled the length of my track-pant stripes. At least I wasn’t wearing my too-short Mid-Night Inn uniform this time.

“I was called in to substitute teach today,” I said. “Phys ed.”

“I imagine school was over at three o’clock, like every other day of the year.”

Somehow we’d fallen into the well-tread tracks of interrogator and interrogated. “I don’t think there’s any reason why I’m not allowed to stay and assist the team, is there?” I said. “I mean, I’m not a felon.”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Get off it, Courtney. You don’t really think I killed Maddy. You can’t possibly believe that.”

She pushed her chin out toward the track and watched the girls circling. “I’m not sure what I believe. But—” Her eyes shifted around, trying to avoid mine. “But I suppose I think it’s pretty unlikely that you did it.”

“I knew it.”

“Unlikely,” she said. “Not impossible.”

“What’s more likely, then? That I conjured her out of thin air after ten years only to hang her—which, how strong would you have to be to pull that off?” An image fluttered out of memory. “Like, like—oh, shit. What about the dead guy? Oh, my God—”

“Dead guy? What are you talking about?” Courtney’s attention was all mine.

“He’s not really—it’s a long story,” I said. “The guy staying in room two-oh-six. He checked out that morning. I was taking his trash—oh, that’s why he was so neat—”

“I have a lot of questions right now, but I’ll jump to the end,” Courtney said. “We checked that trash bag. Nothing but a lot of—let’s just say he was spending a lot of quality time alone—but no trace of him anywhere near her room or the trash bin, and we’re checking his alibi for the time of Maddy’s death—”

“How does he have an alibi for being in his room?”

“Her name is Brandi.” Courtney looked back toward the girls on the track. “She graduated from Midway last year.”

Like Billy said, we catered to weirdos and wackjobs. And apparently a certain clientele who kept themselves too busy making new friends to rack up long-distance charges calling wives and girlfriends back home. It went to show you could never tell about a person. The dead guy had seemed so pudgy and innocent, like an oversized baby, but he’d had a barely legal girl in his room.

And then I shuddered, thinking of the moment when I’d swiped all the guy’s trash back into the ripped bag with my bare hands.

“So.” She gave me a side glance. “Who else should we be looking at?”

“The fiancé, right?” I said. “I’ve seen those TV shows. It’s always the boyfriend or husband. You’ll be looking at him.”

“Of course,” she scoffed, then looked away from me. “Loughton’s interviewing him. He arrived this morning. To see the body.”

Maddy’s body—on a slab, her lovely skin painted all over with that dead-fish color. The things I knew from those crime shows gave my imagination too much visual detail. I was stuck there until Coach’s voice, urging the girls around the track, brought me back to the fence.

“Money,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“She was—well, it seemed like she was rich. Her clothes and that ring—”

My palms itched at the memory of the diamond.

“So you think someone killed her over her money? And then didn’t take her ring?”

“Look, I don’t know anything about her life in Chicago. Aren’t there millions of people there? One might have wanted to kill her, for reasons you and I know nothing about.”

Even as I said it, I knew what Courtney would say. What she had to say.

“She was killed here,” she said.

I didn’t like that logic at all, since she hadn’t just been killed here, in Midway, but at the specific place where I worked. “She said she was here on business,” I said, relieved to have this information passed on at last.

The field of girls thundered by on the track. Courtney watched them run away from us. Out in the field, Coach was focusing Mickie, leaning in to get her full attention and giving her shoulder a squeeze.

“What business?” Courtney said.

“She wouldn’t say. She only said it was boring. Or, no, that I wouldn’t find it interesting. Something like that.”

“That’s it? That’s all she said?”

And here we were, back at interrogation. Courtney hadn’t opened up her notepad, but I could hear that we’d gone back on the record. “Honestly, Courtney,” I said. “She didn’t say anything else. I wish I’d asked more. I wish I’d—I wish I’d done a lot of things differently. That’s all she said. But you could call her office, right? Talk to her boss or supervisor. Or if she shared an office or something? They’ll know why she was in town.”

She leveled me with a look that reminded me of Beck.

Beck. Was he a suspect or was she waiting for me to mention him?

“What about Gretchen?” I blurted.

“What about her?”

“Well.” I hadn’t thought it out. “Gretchen and Maddy never got along—”

“Gretchen married Maddy’s dad, lay in wait for him to die, and then killed his daughter in a fit of delayed . . .
dislike
?” she said. “If Gretchen didn’t kill Maddy when she was a self-centered brat living in the same house, why bother now?”

Self-centered. Brat? Courtney seemed to know all about it. I might have told her what Coach and Fitz had suggested about Maddy’s dad or what I’d learned or not learned from Mrs. Haggerty—except all my ideas and information had already occurred to her or inspired her derision. Maybe I’d stop giving my best ideas away. Maybe I’d beat Courtney at her own job and show her a thing or two. “I was only trying to help,” I said sweetly.

“Don’t.” She pulled herself into an authoritative stance, but without the uniform, she seemed like a bossy little girl who wasn’t getting her way. “We don’t need you bumbling around with your theories, getting in our way.”

“You mean getting into Sergeant Loughton’s way?” I said.

Now I felt the full force of her hatred, stronger than anything Beck had ever sent my way.

“You’re smart,” she said. “I didn’t remember you as smart. I hadn’t thought of you as anything other than Maddy’s shadow, really. Second-place Juliet. Perpetual third-wheel.”

I watched the muscles in her face working around the words, knowing I had made a mistake. She hadn’t really believed I was a suspect. But every time I opened my mouth, she wanted to believe it more.

That headline about everyone being a blur—Courtney had made that happen. She’d created the opportunity for backlash from our own team, from girls we thought were our friends, from girls who knew exactly what we meant. Maddy had said it. But if Courtney hadn’t pulled it out of the story and held it up as evidence—as some defining statement—no one ever would have given it a second thought.

There was the truth and then there was the truth molded into a shapely headline, into the story that would fly.

I was beginning to see the story that would fly the farthest this time, given the right headline. Courtney, always the accomplished storyteller, only had to write it. With enough proof—or whatever looked like proof—she would.

“You’re smart. We’ll be keeping that in mind,” she said.

Courtney stalked off toward the parking lot. I let myself fall against the fence and watched the girls round the track toward the finish line. They were soaked in sweat, pulling loud breaths and running without any thought to form or anything past the next step.

I’d gotten ahead of myself, trying to compete with Courtney. I hadn’t bested her. I’d only drawn her attention. Now all those theories and ideas I’d supplied seemed like nothing more than the frantic scurrying of someone trying to avoid blame by assigning it to anyone else. Like nothing more than the desperate clawing of a rat caught in a trap.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I had watched the entire team of girls pile into their parents’ minivans and SUVs before my own car finally rattled into the lot, Lu small behind the wheel.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said as I opened the passenger door. She was unbuckling her belt. “No, you drive. I had to wait for Carlos to get home to stay with the kids.”

With the driver’s seat adjusted back to the length of my legs, we headed for the exit and toward her side of town. “How was school?” she said, her voice as light as if she were talking to one of her own children, home from the second-grade field trip.