Little Pretty Things (32 page)

“What the—Vincent, what the hell?” I slapped at him until he grabbed my hands. I had backed him up to the wall. Now his shoulder bumped the other light switch. In the new glare, we blinked at each other.

“I didn’t know it was you, not at first.”

I was shaking. “Who were you hoping it was?”

“Someone I could beat to a bloody pulp.” He showed me a place on his arm where I’d gotten in a good gouge. A welt rose the length of the scratch. “Guess I played that wrong.”

“No kidding. Jumping out at me after everything that’s—don’t let that blood drip in here.” Always giving advice to possible murderers. “Why are you here?”

He was staring past me to the room. A strangled sound escaped him. He pushed past me, rushing from one vision of horror to the next, from the toppled furniture and torn sheets, to the bathroom’s cracked mirror and back. The groan in his throat turned into a pathetic cattle low.

“What—” he said. “What happened here?”

I watched him carefully, but he seemed legitimately confused by the wrecked room. “She fought for her life.”

“Can you believe what I thought? When I heard she’d been killed at some cheap—” He turned from me.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It is really cheap.” I kicked at the matted gray-green carpet, which had certainly supplied the color of Maddy’s dad’s sweater in my memory.

“I thought she’d been with some guy,” he said. “And you know what? I wanted to kill him. Really kill him, not just a thing you say. Actually take his neck in my bare hands and crush it.”

His eyes were sunk in shadow, but I felt held in place by them. I glanced toward the door.

“And then,” he said, “I wanted to kill
her
.”

I believed him. I believed him not because I’d decided he was capable of such a thing, but because I felt, deep, the same inclination. I wanted to kill her, too. For doing this to me, for sweeping in after so many years and giving me hope. She’d taken both of us with her, again, and at the same time, here I was, alone.

There were patches of dark dust on the surfaces of the TV knobs and dresser handles where the police had checked for fingerprints. This room would have to be cleaned someday soon.

No one else would be here to do it.

I couldn’t let anyone else do it.

“You wanted to kill her but she was already dead,” I said. “And that seemed like the worst part. You couldn’t even tell her how bad you felt that she was gone.” Vincent’s gaze was heavy. “My dad. I really wanted to tell him how sad I was. About his death.” I managed a smile, but it was false. I let it slide away. There were things I was angry about that would never be resolved, and now Maddy was another one of them.

“And then.” Vincent’s voice was a nail pried from old wood. “And then I wanted to kill myself.”

And then? Would he continue? Did he not know that there was a lower point, yet, when you had accepted your own fate but found yourself too weak to go through with it? The point at which you understood you had made not a single ripple in the pond, and neither would your loss.

Vincent’s head dropped. He grabbed at his ears, as though to block anything anyone would say. I thought I knew why he’d agreed to the slapdash memorial service. It hurt less to let it pass him by, to let someone else push him through the motions.

I went to him and, after an awkward moment, placed my hand on his arm. He reached for it, and pulled me against him. This time he didn’t topple on me but held me against his chest. We stood in silence for a long moment. The air had changed around us, or was it only that I couldn’t breathe from how tight he held on?

The palms of my hands began to hum.

The wind pushed against the door, time and the rest of the world hoping to intercede. To interrupt. To put a stop to this, whatever this was or could be. I could almost feel the shudder of the building in the wind, the beginnings of a quake that wanted to swallow me up for entertaining ideas. Vincent’s breath was shallow.

I stood on my toes and caught the edge of his mouth with mine, flicking my tongue at his lips. The groan returned, and I felt an answering hum of blood rushing not just through my palms, but throughout my body.

Vincent slid his hands down my back, my ass, my legs, then rubbed them up my body again, taking me up against him. Our mouths tore at each other until he dropped his face to my neck. He bit at the thin fabric of my shirt, moaning against my skin. I scratched my fingers across his back, luxuriating. It had been a long time since a man had held on to me with desire.

And then the moan in Vincent’s throat caught. “Maddy,” he sobbed against my neck.

We both froze.

I dropped my arms, and he let me step away.

“I’m—I’m so—”

“No,” I said. “Don’t.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Probably the same thing I was,” I said. “Nothing much.” But that wasn’t the truth. We’d both been thinking of Maddy. Vincent, seeking comfort. Me, keeping track. Me, taking and taking.

The Mid-Night shuddered again. This time, Vincent looked at me. “What was that?”

“The wind—”

A fist thundered against the door.

We looked at one another. He held a finger to his lips.

“Police,” boomed a dry voice. “Open up or we’ll break it down.”

I rushed to the door and swung it open. Loughton stood with his hand to his gun, and behind him, a line of other officers, Gary, smirking. Below in the courtyard stood two figures.

Beck shook his head. “Wow,” he said.

“Of course,” Courtney called. “Why wouldn’t you be in there? Who’s in there with you, I wonder?”

“No one,” I said.

Loughton shifted against the doorway. “Sir?” he said.

Vincent hesitated, finally appearing, squinting into the sun.

“Mr. Beckwith here happened to witness your assault and made us aware of the situation,” Loughton said. He eyeballed me, then Vincent and grinned. “One of many possible situations, I should say.”

“Are there any charges?” Courtney called.

In a low voice so that even I could barely hear him, Loughton said, “Any charges, there, Miss?”

I shook my head.

“No charges up here, Howard,” he said. “Any charges down there?”

Courtney’s laugh was a bark. “God no. I’m sick of them both. Get them out.”

I led the way around the end of the second floor to the far stairs and hurried down them. Vincent and Loughton lagged behind, but Beck cut through the center breezeway and caught me at the edge of the parking lot, grabbing my elbow as I tried to pass. “What kind of friend are you, anyway?”

“Not yours.” I shook him off.

“Nobody ever made that mistake,” he said. “But this—” He waved his arm to the stairwell, where Vincent and Loughton descended.

“Careful, there, Beck,” I said. “You’re caring an awful lot about things that are none of your business. What are you doing here, anyway?”

He blinked at me, and reared back a step at the sight of Vincent. “Keeping an eye on things—”

“On me, you mean.”

Vincent came up to me and tried to pull me aside. “I just want to say—”

“Please don’t,” I said, flinging off his hand. I was tired of men touching me and talking to me right now. “Vincent, Beck. Beck, Vincent. You two have so much in common.”

They sized each other up. Beck looked away first. “Not as much as you might think,” he said.

“You’re the guy?” Vincent said. “If I find out you laid a hand on her—”

“You didn’t cover that during pillow talk, Jules?” Beck said.

“Leave her alone. That—that was my fault,” Vincent said, wincing. He held up his arm. The welt where I’d scratched him was garish. Blood dripped in a trickle through the fine dark hairs on his forearm. “Does this need stitches?”

“I would know, with all of my medical-school training,” I said. They stood staring down at me. “I don’t know. Wait here. I can get you something for it.”

I left them, jogging across the lot to the vending area. I let myself in with Yvonne’s keys and then tried a few of them on the cart closet before finding the right one. I grabbed a clean hand towel and a bandage.

Back outside, I lifted the lid on the ice machine. Empty. I’d forgotten the leak.

A lone ice chip sat at the bottom of the bin, defiant. I let the bin lid fall closed, and started back out. The trickle of water out to the lot had long ago dried up. At the edge of the curb, I stopped and shaded my eyes.

Courtney and Loughton conferred at their car. Vincent and Beck formed an uneasy pair, both determined to stick it out to say whatever they wanted to say to me.

I turned back to the machine and lifted the lid again.

My hand shook on the handle. Time slowed, stopped. I imagined the thing I was supposed to do. Then the thing I knew I would do.

I reached into the depths of the ice bin and plucked out Maddy’s diamond, loose and heavy and worth more than her life. Worth far more than mine. I held it in my hand and then I closed my fist around it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The diamond in my pocket, I went back to the office and ran the towel under cool water. The bar would have ice. I felt for Yvonne’s keys, but at the door to the bar, I stopped. I could see the table where we’d had our last drink. That last chance to be with her, and I’d left it lying there. And now I had the sum of her life in my pocket. It was possible no one would ever be punished for what had happened to her. For any of it.

And now Billy would go free, too, and, in his wake, leave the Mid-Night tainted, our jobs lost, and all those strays without anywhere to turn.

If only the police had turned up something definitive in Billy’s room. And then I realized: Billy’s room would have its own freezer.

Here was a last chance I couldn’t leave on the table. I grabbed the front-desk keys from the drop box at the door and slipped out the front door and through the breezeway to the courtyard.

My hands shook as I let myself in, looking all the while over my shoulder for one of them to come after me.

Inside, I closed the door behind me and stood in the dark, waiting for the stench of unwashed man and old pizza boxes to waft over me. But the room was just a room. I hit the lights. The room was configured differently than a guest room, with a narrow galley kitchen up front and the bed and TV hidden behind a screen. He’d removed the country cornfield prints from the wall and redecorated with a series of beer-logo mirrors and neon signs. The room smelled a little dusty and close, but not like the dumpster bin.

I hurried, taking in as much as I could without touching anything, then throwing out the rules. I opened drawers and rifled through whatever was there, hoping I would know what I was looking for when I saw it. In the bathroom, I checked below the bottom vanity drawer—it was a good hiding space—and for any loose wallpaper. I stood on the toilet and pushed at the ceiling tiles. Nothing.

Back in the kitchen, I tried all the drawers and cabinets, but found only canned goods and boxed pasta. The mini-fridge held only squares of orange cheese and a few cans of soda, and the tiny tray of ice in the freezer was almost empty. I scammed what ice I could from the tray and went to the sink.

An old office phone sat on the counter. On the wall above it, a phone number had been written in pen. I filled the tray and put it back in the freezer, then returned to the counter. The phone number seemed familiar.
What you’re looking for
. I picked up the phone and dialed, only to hear an auto message. The number was disconnected.

I checked the wall, the drawers again, then the cabinets above, pulling everything out. There, behind the boxed pasta, was a handwritten list of numbers, long strings of them with a single letter afterward. Some of the numbers had been crossed out, but a handful remained. The bottom number looked freshest. I hesitated using Billy’s phone, and then realized that using Billy’s phone might be the only way anyone might pick up. I dialed it.

“Thought you were in
jail
,” a young woman’s voice said. “I thought we were out of
business
. Which room?”

My thoughts raced. I channeled Billy’s stuttering, stringy, hillbilly voice. “One-oh-n-niner.” And then I hung up. Room one-oh-nine was the room just next to the vending machines. I had no idea what I’d just done—maybe nothing. My Billy impression was fine for fun with Lu on the walkie-talkies, but did it hold up for people awaiting his calls?

Someone pounded on the door. “Police,” came Courtney’s tired voice. “Again.”

I opened the door. She stood with her arms crossed.

“How many rooms am I going to have to pull you from?” she said. “What are you doing?”

I brandished the homemade ice pack. “Getting Vincent some ice for his arm.”

“So romantic, getting it on in the motel where his girlfriend was murdered,” she said, batting her eyes at me. “You’re such an easy date. And an easy suspect, really, when you think about all the motive you keep giving me.”

“Nothing happened. And anyway, it . . . wasn’t planned,” I said, wondering how much I was giving away. “I didn’t know he would be here.”

“You just can’t leave this place alone,” Courtney said wearily. She looked around. “What’s the draw?”

The Mid-Night had not drawn me. Maddy had. But I couldn’t say that. And I was not sure it would be the whole truth, no matter what I said. “Come on,” I said.

The parking lot was empty except for Billy’s car and Loughton, steadfast in the passenger seat of the police car. “We sent your suitors along home,” Courtney said.

“Can you get your partner to move your cruiser behind the bar for a little while?” I said. “I want to try an experiment. Call it a sting if that makes you happier.”

She looked at me oddly but went to talk to Loughton. I shook the ice cubes from the towel and returned it to the laundry room, where piles of sheets and towels still lay tangled on the floor.

On the way out, I left the lobby lights on and flicked the neon sign back to
vacancy
. The Mid-Night was open for business.

Back outside, both Loughton and the cruiser had been tucked away. I led Courtney to the door of one-oh-nine. I battled both sets of keys out of my pockets around the money and the diamond. Courtney raised her eyebrows. “You always seem to have the key,” she said. “Have you noticed that?”