Little Pretty Things (23 page)

“That’s not fair,” I said, remembering Vincent’s weight on my shoulder. “He definitely cares about her death.”

“Meaning?”

I sighed. “Meaning he got enraged talking about it, and then really sad, and then sort of, overwhelmed, I guess, at having to put together a funeral service.”

“He went from enraged to sad to overwhelmed right there on the street? So he’s manic, is what you’re saying,” Beck said. “He can’t control himself. This is our guy.”

I didn’t like the eagerness in his voice. As much as I would have liked to have the killer turn out to be someone from far away, I wasn’t sure Vincent was our guy.

Our
guy, as though Beck and I were in this together. I wished I’d never taken Beck to Maddy’s room.

When I didn’t say anything, Beck went still. “You still think I did it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. The way you’re looking at me—” He kicked at the gravel, sending rocks and dust flying into the corn. “But why should anything be different now? You’re not the only one who lost her, you know. I mean, neither of us had her, but we both—
had
her, as much as anyone ever did. I don’t exclude you from that, so why should you exclude me from this?”

“This . . . what?”

“From—” He waved his hands up and above his head, as though directing the fields around us to rise up. “From this, from tracking down whatever festering disease did this to Maddy, to us, to this town.”

“I’m not excluding you from anything,” I said. But I remembered all the times he’d wanted me to leave the two of them alone, and Maddy had made me promise not to. Maybe I was keeping him out, from habit. Or maybe I hadn’t excluded him from the list of suspects yet, not entirely. Either way, I wouldn’t be telling him or Vincent about the terrible green sweater anytime soon.

I realized I’d put my sore hand on my stomach, thinking again of Maddy clutching her own belly. I dropped it. “I have to go.”

“Where?”

I couldn’t think. Not the Mid-Night. It was closed—really closed, and I’d been escorted off the premises enough for one week. Not the school, where all the fresh-faced youth was starting to get on my nerves. Track practice was probably over by now, anyway, and I’d missed Shelly at the bank. “Home,” I said. But I knew I wouldn’t go there yet. I still hadn’t told my mother about Maddy. I didn’t have the guts. “I don’t know,” I said. I had nowhere to go. “I don’t—Maddy was pregnant.”

It was outside my mouth, like words in a cartoon balloon, before I knew I was going to say it.

His face jumped from concern for me, to confusion, to something I didn’t recognize, and finally, to sadness. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I can’t believe—did she tell you? Or, oh . . . the fiancé, I suppose. Wow, just when you think the news can’t get worse.”

A gentle wind made the cornstalks in the field rustle. “I didn’t mean when she was killed.”

Our eyes met. “When?” he said, his voice small. “When was she pregnant?”

It was too late to pull back. The truth was the only way forward. “At state,” I said. “She miscarried. That’s why we didn’t run.”

His expression morphed again, this time to solid rock. “That’s not true.”

“I’m sorry. I know what this must mean to you—”

“I doubt it.” He took a step backward, looking around the countryside as though he had just woken up there. “You couldn’t.”

“So she didn’t tell you,” I said.

“She most certainly didn’t.” He looked as though he might need to throw up, too. “You’re sure?”

Was I sure? I thought it through. Shirl’s discovery of the positive pregnancy test. Everything I’d learned about Maddy’s last year in school. That morning in our room at the Luxe, Maddy’s thin shoulders hunched over the edge of the bed. “It all fits,” I said.

“Well, excuse me for saying so, but it doesn’t fit for me,” he said, and he kicked gravel toward the field again. “Maybe it might have, if Maddy and I had ever slept together.”

“Oh,” I said.

“
Yeah
, oh,” he said. “Oh, my girlfriend who I loved and worshipped and followed around and devoted myself to was cheating on me. God, this shouldn’t sting at all, should it? We were—what? Seventeen. I should have been cheating on her, too—who the hell cares, right? We were kids! What the—”

He turned to the side of his truck and leaned on it with both hands. “Who?” he said. “Who was it?”

The news could get worse, but I couldn’t tell him. “I don’t know.”

“Who else did she see?”

“No one,” I said, relieved to be able to tell a little bit of truth. “She hardly had time to see you, remember? School, track, homework.”

“And you were always there,” he said to the bed of his truck. “How in the world did you think I managed to knock her up when you were always there?”

The sting had been taken out of this one long ago. “Just so we’re clear, she begged me not to leave, no matter how rude you were to me,” I said. “You were incredibly rude, by the way.”

“I wanted to make out with my girlfriend,” he said. “I wanted to—well, you know what I wanted, and so did she, and that’s why she kept you there, isn’t it? You were the chastity belt. And the whole time—oh, God, this should not suck this bad.” He reared back and kicked the side of the truck. It left a dent. “I’m an adult now. I can go to the Mid-Night and take just about any woman home any night of the week. Who cares if my high-school girlfriend was a tramp the whole time she was putting me off?” He kicked his truck again. A bigger dent.

“Stop it,” I said, checking the road. Deserted. I should have kept my mouth shut. “We don’t know enough—”

“She was pregnant and I never laid a hand on her,” he said. He backed up and eyed the dent. “I think there are a couple of words I can use if I feel like it.”

“It’s just high school, right?” I said. “It’s all in the past.”

The problem with that: there would be no answers, no putting anything to rest. I felt scared for his next girlfriend, for the next woman he took home. For myself, alone with so much anger. The kind of anger I’d never seen in person. I remembered the swipe in the wallpaper in Maddy’s room at the Mid-Night.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and retreated to my car.

My hand shook at the door handle. I wanted to say I didn’t think he’d done it. But the last two days had taught me a few things about how much I trusted, how much I assumed. Fitz was right. I had to be more careful.

I slid into my car. Beck stood by as I brought the rattling engine to life and pulled a U-turn back to town. He didn’t move, not until I was out of sight of his truck, not until I was gone.

At Lu’s house, the porch light was out. I rang the bell and waited for what seemed a long time before the door opened. Lu peered out. “Hey,” she said, drawing the word out. She wore a sweatshirt too big for her with the sleeves rolled up. For some strange reason, tears stung my eyes. I remembered the way she’d cradled me away from the sight of Maddy, calling me gentle names. I supposed most people expected these things from their mothers, but if one source of comfort was closed off, at least I had Lu.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too. It’s weird, isn’t it? Not having the Mid-Night to go to.”

It was weird, too, that I still stood on her porch, dusk at my back. “Can you, uh, talk?”

“Sure.” She opened the door and slipped outside. She sat on the top step and patted the spot next to her. “The kids—better to hear ourselves,” she said. “Carlos is in a mood, anyway.”

“Did he have to take on extra hours?”

She glanced up and down the street. “He asked for them. I don’t know, Juliet. I might have to go on one of the services for a while, clean some rich lady’s home or something. My own house is too clean now, you know? I see a piece of lint, and I have to stop and pick it up, and I look at it, try to decide where it came from. And the kids are screaming at me, and Mamá is here all the time, watching game shows with the TV yelling, and now Carlos—” She flicked her hand at the closed door. “He doesn’t want me to go back there, even if it opens tomorrow.”

I could see why. Until this thing was solved, who was to say the Mid-Night was safe? And if it never got solved, better to be in a group of cleaners in a little yellow car than to be the single cleaner going in and out of dead people’s motel rooms. “He’s just worried about you,” I said.

“He’s worried about . . . a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh,” she said, letting her eyes wander from me down the block again. “Nothing.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Nothing?”

She hung her head. “Maybe his job. The things on the news—it’s not good for us right now. He keeps saying the immigration people will come, this and that.”

“But,” I said. “But you’re legal. Aren’t you?”

Her look was sharp. “Yes, of course, and Carlos and the kids and Mamá. You don’t know what it’s like, and it’s not just us we have to think about. Carlos’s uncle Lester just came over, and his cousins—”

“What do they have to do with Maddy? Or me?”

Lu rubbed a spot on her elbow, trying not to look at me.

“Lu?”

“Just—everything,” she said, sighing. “The police have been in the neighborhood all day. Coming to the doors, questions, questions.”

I couldn’t think what she was talking about. “Today? Oh—” The attack the night before, the possibly Hispanic male. “Oh, no.”

“Yeah, it’s bad,” she said. “Someone says ‘brown skin’ and we spend the day saying ‘yes, officer, no, officer.’”

“I didn’t even think—”

“You’re lucky that way,” Lu said. “How many questions did you answer today? How many times did they come sit at your kitchen table and ask you everything. So much everything, I think why they didn’t ask the color of my underwear today. How many times did they come to your house?”

Once, and only to drive me home. But then I did tend to run into Courtney everywhere I went these days.

“Do you mean Courtney? I mean Officer Howard? She came here?”

“That one, the other one, some new ones I never saw before. Carlos says he can’t take all this. This, this terror—what’s the word, what they’re doing?”

I thought for a second. “Terrorizing.”

“Because it happened at the Mid-Night, they think Carlos—” She pulled her knees up to her chest and curled around them. “I wish things could go back.”

“Me too.” At the same time I said it, though, I realized I meant it only by half. If I could have saved Maddy, I would have gone back. But if I couldn’t, I knew I would do anything not to have to live it again. I took a quick look at Lu. I never wanted to go back to the Mid-Night, and not just because Maddy had died there. Because I wanted more. I deserved more, and so did Lu—

The door opened behind us, a string of Spanish trailing off into silence.

Lu said a few words to the dark figure there, and the door closed again.

“Was that Carlos?” He was usually friendly, always taking the time to say hello.

“He’s—”

“In a mood, yeah, you said.” But I knew which mood, now—the same one that seemed to be infecting most of the town. Wherever I went, people started to edge away. “I guess the invitation to come over anytime is withdrawn.”

“You have to understand, Jules,” Lu said. “He’s scared. He’s scared because I’m scared, and the kids—they know something is wrong. It has to go back at some point, right?”

“I don’t see how things are ever going back, Lu,” I said. “Maybe we should start wishing for something else. Something new.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said. “White girl scrubbing the toilets. Give me a break.”

I froze. “I cleaned as many toilets as you did.”

She rolled her eyes. “You could be in an office—”

“Cleaning an office.”

“Or in the bank, maybe,” she said.

I could picture Shelly’s face if I asked after jobs at the bank. “You think I haven’t imagined a different life? Same as you?”

“You say the same, but you don’t know. I walk in, and all anyone can think is what the brown girl might steal.” She gave me a pointed look. I’d never stolen anything from her, but maybe I hadn’t been as careful as I could have been around the shampoo bottles and the lotions. Or the lost-and-found box. “You get to walk into a room, any room, and be who you are.”

“You seem to think that’s someone worth being,” I said.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she mumbled. “Why are you being like this?”

“Being like . . . what? Sad that a friend died? Sad that another friend is leaving me on the porch?” She flinched. I stood up. “I’m sorry you’re getting bothered by the cops. It’s not fair—but none of this is my fault. I expected you to understand. You
saw
—” My voice twisted into strangeness. “You saw her. Of all people, I thought—”

I’d expected something from her that she didn’t have to give. She sat with her arms clutched around her knees. To keep from trembling, maybe. To keep from saying other things she hadn’t been able to tell me, or didn’t want to tell me. She was right. We weren’t the same. We didn’t have the same experience of the Mid-Night or of the town. As much as we’d talked about what we wanted from this life, had we ever talked about what we’d gotten, what we might have to settle for?