All The Pretty Dead Girls

by John Manning

  So many times, Sue had wished that her grandparents would talk to her about Mariclare. Couldn’t they understand how much it means to me to know something—anything—about my mother? I know it must be incredibly painful to lose your only child, but wouldn’t that wound ever heal enough? It surely wasn’t healthy to never mention her, never talk about her. And they could help me so much…why didn’t they understand that I need to know about my mother and my father?

  She shut off the shower, stepped out, and began towel-drying her hair. This was the result of her grandparents’ years of silence. On Sue’s first day of college, rather than thinking about her classes and what lay ahead, she was still ruminating over the same old questions.

  That’s what meeting Joyce Davenport last night had done. It had sucked out all the anticipation about college from her, and left her once again a little girl pining after her unknown mother.

  Sue had so envied her friends at Stowe Academy. She was the only student there who was technically an orphan. She would fall silent whenever any of her friends would launch into a litany of their parents’ latest sins against them, always thinking, At least you have a mother, even if she does drink too much or fight with your dad or won’t let you stay out as late as you want. She’s your mother and when you need her she’s there. You don’t have a grandmother trying to take the place of your mother—a grandmother who’s really too old to take care of you and a grandfather who won’t even let you bring up the subject of your parents. You have brothers and sisters and you don’t have any idea of how lucky you are—all I have are my grandparents and when they die—and they aren’t young now—I’ll be all alone in the world.

  Her earliest memories were of standing in front of the shrine to Mariclare, thinking how beautiful her mother was and indulging herself in fantasies about the life she could have had with her parents. They would have been a family—a real family—a real family that her grandparents, no matter how much they might love her, had never really given her.

  Sue understood her fantasies were just that, but in her mind it was so easy to imagine Mariclare as the perfect mother. Mariclare would understand her. She’d be her best friend. She’d take her shopping and out to see movies. They’d have lunches together in the city, chatting about their lives. Sue would be able to talk to Mariclare about anything, and Mariclare would always understand. Mariclare would be wise and kind and loving, with a soft gentle voice and a wonderful laugh—the kind that made you smile when you heard it, because it was so full of love and joy.

  Whenever her grandparents were out, sometimes Sue would lift one of the pictures down from the shrine and carry it into the bathroom. She would hold the photograph up next to her own face and try to see any resemblance there. She never could. All through her teen years, Sue kept doing it, but never did she see a trace of herself in her mother’s face.

  But Joyce Davenport said I had my mother’s eyes.

  Sue had always assumed she took after her father. But her father was even more of a mystery to her than her mother.

  Once, when she was ten, she found a photograph in a drawer. She recognized Mariclare, but the man she was standing with was unfamiliar. A man about her age, with blondish hair and a serious expression. On the back of the photograph someone had written the name James. When Sue had shown her grandmother the photograph, the old woman had snatched it away from her and told her not to go snooping in drawers. But the name lingered in Sue’s mind. She was convinced “James” was her father.

  I must have other relatives out there somewhere, she always thought. There must be someone on my father’s side who would know something.

  Dressing for class, Sue tried to refocus. This was the day she’d been waiting for—the day she’d dreamed about. Away from home, on her own. In college! She could spread her wings, be her own person, find out what life was like outside the oppressive glare of her grandparents.

  But all the excitement of the first day of classes paled before the simple fact that she had met someone who actually knew her mother—and knew her well!

  If only it wasn’t Joyce Davenport.

  “Maybe she isn’t so bad,” Sue mumbled to herself as she slipped her shoes onto her feet. “She probably goes for shock value because it sells books.”

  She glanced down again at the cover of Joyce’s book. The bio on the jacket described Joyce as “witty and vivacious”—though Sue had found the book to be bullying.

  She’d score more political points if she didn’t come across so intolerant herself, Sue reasoned. Joyce reminded her of a girl she’d known at Stowe—Lorraine Harrington. Lorraine was just mean. She liked making fun of people—plain and simple. She often would mock another girl right to her face—making fun of her braces, or her clothes, or her accent. Thankfully, Sue had never been a target of Lorraine’s cruelty, but still she’d disliked her. In some ways, she disliked even more the girls who’d been friends with Lorraine—the girls Sue had thought of as the “flunkies.”

  Is that what my mother was like? One of Joyce’s flunkies?

  She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She wore a pink T-shirt over khaki pants. Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Kind of preppy, but not as prepped out as some of these girls here. She flicked on a little mascara.

  No matter what I might think of her, Sue told herself, I am going to have to call Joyce Davenport.

  “Now,” she said, gathering up the books she’d need for her first class, “where did Malika say that coffee was?”

  The lounge. It was next to the bank of elevators, a tidy little room with two plaid upholstered couches, and a big television set mounted to the wall. Girls were all heading in and out, grabbing Styrofoam cups of coffee from the big silver urn set on a table. Sue briefly wondered if any of these girls might be future friends. A few nodded at her as she entered, but most were engaged in animated chatter with their friends. It was going to be difficult breaking into cliques, especially being a freshman in a mostly sophomore dorm.

  Sue filled a cup, dumped in some cream and sugar, and took a sip. Not bad.

  “Oh, my God!”

  It was a girl’s voice in the hallway. Sue couldn’t see her face, as other girls were gathering around her. A small huddle gathered in the doorway of the lounge.

  “No way!” someone else said.

  “What’s going on?” Sue asked, looking over at a couple of girls beside her.

  “I don’t know,” one of the girls replied, raising her eyes to look at the group in the hallway.

  Sue took a few steps toward the excitement, as the chattering of the girls just outside the lounge grew louder. She could see the first girl now. She was tiny. She looked like she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds soaking wet, and her long brown hair tumbled over a WILBOURNE COLLEGE sweatshirt. She had apparently brought some news to the group.

  “Yes, you do know her,” the tiny girl was telling one of her friends. “She was in our lit class last semester—remember, she was the blond chick with the thick Brooklyn accent?”

  “Oh, right,” said the other girl. “She didn’t like Jane Austen. I thought Dr. Michalak was going to have a stroke.”

  “So she skipped out on the welcome ceremony?” another girl was asking. “How did she get away with that?”

  “Tish Lewis signed her in,” the tiny girl told her. “You know Tish, don’t you? I can only imagine how much trouble she’s in.”

  Sue gulped down the rest of the contents of the cup. “Excuse me,” she said into the group. “But I need to get to class.”

  “Honey,” said one girl, “I’m not sure there are any classes at the moment.”

  Sue looked at her oddly. “Why not?”

  The girls all looked back at the tiny girl in the sweatshirt. She gave Sue a quizzical look.

  “And who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Sue Barlow. A freshman.”

  The girl’s face softened. “Okay. Chrissy Hansen.” They shook hands. “Welcome to Wilbourne. But
I hope you don’t go running right back to wherever you came from.”

  Sue smiled. “Why would I do that?”

  “Something’s happened to one of the students. They think she may have been attacked.”

  “Attacked?” Sue gasped.

  Chrissy nodded. “Her name was Bonnie Warner. I was just out jogging, and down by the front gate there are police cars everywhere.”

  The girl to Chrissy’s left shuddered. “This freaks me out.”

  “The campus is safe,” Chrissy insisted. “Bonnie was attacked off campus.”

  “But right outside the front gate!” another girl chimed in.

  “When did it happen?” Sue asked.

  “Sometime last night. They found her bike this morning.”

  Sue looked at Chrissy intently. “They found her bike? Where is she?”

  Chrissy took a deep breath. “That’s just it. No one knows. All they found was her bike and her baseball cap.” Her face had turned pale. “And a whole hell of a lot of blood.”

  “Blood?” Sue asked, her knees suddenly weak.

  Chrissy nodded. “Everywhere. On the road. On her bike. But no sign of Bonnie anywhere.”

  “What—what do the police think happened to her?” The coffee was churning in Sue’s stomach, and she was struggling to keep on her feet.

  Chrissy shrugged. “No idea.”

  Another girl came bounding off the elevator just then. “Classes have been postponed until noon today,” she blurt out. “Bonnie Warner is missing and they found her bike with a lot of blood—”

  “We know!” Chrissy yelled. For such a little thing, she sure had a loud voice.

  Sue staggered away from the group, feeling light-headed and queasy.

  One of my dreams last night was about a blond girl on a bicycle.

  13

  Lebanon started its day early, around five A.M. as alarms went off in darkened houses all over town. Lights flickered to life, and sleepy-eyed people staggered into their days. Coffeemakers perked, margarine melted in frying pans, teeth were brushed, showers got the blood pumping. School-age kids heard their parents’ alarms faintly through their dreams, and knew their turn to rise and shine would soon be here. In the big bus barn behind the high school, the yellow buses with LEBANON SCHOOL DISTRICT printed across their sides were fueled up. The New York Times truck rolled over the back roads to throw bundles of papers out in back of the Lebanon Herald office, where at around quarter to six, Jimmy Madsen, thirteen, and his mother would arrive in their SUV to pick them up. All the newspapers would be delivered in time for Jimmy to be at school when the first bell rang at eight.

  In his apartment above the Yellow Bird, old Wally Bingham heard the Times truck rattle by. Almost time to get a move on, he told himself. Wally could set his clock by that truck, even though he didn’t need to. He woke every morning right at five on the dot. Even after being out of the Army for almost thirty years, it was a habit he couldn’t seem to break. No matter how late he stayed up, no matter how much he drank, no matter what kind of sleeping pill he took, every morning his eyes opened as the digital clock on his night-stand switched to 5:00.

  The apartment was empty and silent, except for the sound of his coffeemaker brewing in the kitchen. Wally lay there in the bed for a few moments more, relishing the sound of the silence. After his wife Lena died ten years earlier, he’d thought about marrying again—but then he’d gotten used to the notion of being alone, for the first time in his life, and he liked it. He’d been the youngest of seven kids, had gone into the Army straight out of high school, and after he finally decided not to re-up and “retired,” there had been Lena. They’d never had kids—they tried when he was still in the Army, but Lena never could get pregnant. “God just doesn’t seem to want to bless us that way,” Lena said whenever someone brought up the subject of their childlessness. Wally admired her ability to publicly shrug off a question he knew caused her great pain. No one knew how many nights Lena had cried herself to sleep over her inability to conceive, his arms holding her until her body stopped shaking.

  They had talked about adopting halfheartedly, but nothing ever came of it—and then came the illnesses, one right after another, until Lena finally just quit fighting and died. Wally thought he’d be lonely without her, but he wasn’t. Not really. It seemed almost disrespectful that he liked the quiet, liked being alone. But it’s not, he reminded himself as he stared at the ceiling, Lena wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and neither am I. And if people think it’s strange I didn’t marry again, they can go to hell. It’s none of their goddamned business.

  He got out of the bed and did his morning routine: two hundred push-ups and two hundred sit-ups, before getting a cup of coffee and heading into the bathroom to shave and shower. Now that he was past sixty, his body and joints ached more than they used to, and the mornings were getting harder for him. The winters and cold weather were getting rougher—some mornings when it was cold he woke up with his joints so stiff, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get up. He was dreading the onset of the coming winter—he didn’t look forward to shoveling the sidewalk in front of the café, or digging his car out of snowdrifts, and the apartment didn’t seem to warm up quite as much as it used to. The weather was going to start turning cold in another month or so—and as he shaved, Wally looked at himself in the mirror and thought the magic word that had gotten him through the last two winters: Florida.

  The thought brought a smile to his face. He was closing the café for two weeks at Christmas, flying down to Pensacola, renting a car, and driving all over the state until he found the place he was going to settle in when he’d had enough of the winters and the snow. He wasn’t sure where yet in Florida it would be, but this year he was going looking for it. He’d last in Lebanon maybe another year or two, and that was it. He wanted to head south while he could still get around and spend his mornings fishing and enjoying the sun. I’m still in pretty good shape, he thought as he got into the steaming-hot shower, and as long as I can do my morning calisthenics, I’m doing okay. I’m in better shape than most men half my age.

  He opened the café every Monday, and his morning routine hadn’t varied once in all the years he’d owned the place. The first thing he’d do was turn on the grill and the deep fryers, and while they were warming up, he’d get the coffeepots brewing. After the grill was warmed up, he seasoned it with a layer of lard, and brought out eggs and slabs of bacon and sausage from the big walk-in cooler. Monday mornings were always the busiest of the week, and this one promised to be no different. Might even be busier than usual, since it was the first day of school over at Wilbourne. As he picked up the crates of eggs, Wally looked around and made sure everything was where it was supposed to be. There was plenty of everything. There was nothing worse than having to send Marjorie over to the A&P to buy something at retail grocery prices.

  The diner would open promptly at six thirty, and there were always a few people waiting outside the door when he unlocked it. Even with the competition from the damned fast-food joints out by the highway, Wally still had a good breakfast rush every morning. Although Micky D’s has cut into some of my factory crowd with their rubbery food and fucking acid coffee, he thought as he tossed an English muffin into the toaster,

  At six thirty sharp, he opened the door. Waiting to come in were a couple of people he didn’t recognize—he suspected they were parents of a Wilbourne girl, heading back to wherever they called home—and just at that moment getting out of his car was Sheriff Miles Holland.

  “Howdy, Sheriff,” Wally called. Miles waved back at him as he locked his car.

  Sheriff Holland was well liked and respected by most people in Lebanon. Wally was always offering him a free cup of joe, but Miles always refused anything for free; he paid for every bit of food he put in his mouth. Now that is one rare cop, Wally thought. Miles was an honest man, and that he’d raised his son that way, too, had earned the respect of everyone in town. Like his son Perry and Perry’s regular st
anding order of chili-covered cheeseburger and fries, Miles always had the same thing for breakfast every morning—scrambled eggs, a couple of slices of bacon, buttered toast with apple jam, hash browns drowned in ketchup, and lots of black coffee.

  Rosie, his morning waitress, had slipped in the back door. She was tying her apron around her waist as Wally headed to the kitchen to get Miles’s eggs scrambling. “One couple in the front booth,” he told her. Rosie nodded and hurried over to take their order.

  Wally heard the tinkling of the bell as Miles came inside.

  “Sure you don’t want to switch to sausage this morning, Miles?” Wally called through the opening.

  “Can’t eat this morning, Wally,” the sheriff called back. “I just need to get the coffee to go, if you don’t mind.”

  “No breakfast?” Wally asked, coming around to the doorway.

  “No breakfast?” Rosie echoed.

  Miles smiled. He was a few years younger than Wally, but was starting to spread out in the waist. He had thin legs and a barrel chest, and he shaved his head bald. Wally noticed that his blue eyes—usually so clear—were bloodshot and bleary. Since his wife died a few years back, Miles had aged what seemed like twenty years and seemed to put on weight. But this morning, Wally thought, he looked worse than usual.

  “No breakfast,” Miles said, sitting down at the counter.

  Rosie handed Wally the order from the couple in the front booth. He glanced down at it, then looked back over at Miles. “You look like hell,” Wally blurted out as Rosie filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee. “What’s going on?”

  Miles sighed. “Got a call up to the college.” He accepted the coffee from Rosie and handed over two dollars. “Keep the change.”

  “What happened up at the college?” Wally asked, his voice low, glancing over at the couple in the booth, wondering if they really did have a daughter there.

  The sheriff took a sip of his coffee. “One of the girls went missing.” He raised his eyebrows at his friend. “Been a while since that’s happened.”