Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  Jessica shrugged, her face still tilted toward the sidewalk. “Just wanted to see, you know,” she said. “See where that woman died.”

  It sounded like a lie, and not even a good one.

  Courtney turned to me. “You know this one?”

  “Midway,” I said. “She’s a strong runner.”

  Jessica glanced up, and that’s when I noticed something wasn’t right. “Hey,” I said.

  Courtney was way ahead of me. She pulled out her baton flashlight and lit Jessica’s face from below. The deep hollows of her eyes weren’t shadows. She was growing one hell of a black eye. She ducked her head away from the light, but we’d had a good look.

  “Jesus,” Courtney said. “What happened to your face, kid?”

  Behind me, I heard Billy make a noise. He came to the door and looked over my shoulder.

  Jessica shook her head.

  Courtney put away the flashlight and was silent for a moment, looking off into the parking lot. “Look,” she said. “If there’s something going on with your parents—”

  “It was a—a man,” Jessica said. “Tall, big. He—grabbed me.”

  “Are you hurt? Besides the eye?” I asked.

  “Did you get a look at him?” Courtney said.

  Jessica held up her hands. “No, no—look, forget it. He was nobody—”

  “How tall? Was he white, black, what?” Courtney’s voice was rising, excited. I saw what she was thinking. Maybe Maddy’s killer had made another attempt, and this time left a witness.

  “No, no,” Jessica pleaded. She glanced at me. “OK, he was tall, like—just tall. And, uh, maybe not white?”

  “Think hard,” Courtney said sternly. “Not white? Black? Hispanic maybe?”

  Jessica nodded slowly.

  “Hispanic?”

  “Yes. Maybe. Not black. Maybe—I don’t know. It was so fast.” The tears came finally. This time when she hid her face, we let her.

  Courtney called for backup. While she went to look the place over, we hurried behind the desk and into the laundry room, kicking the piles of dirty sheets to the side. Billy didn’t have a word to say, which went to show how rattled he was, or how much he feared losing that stupid star.

  In the end, Jessica wouldn’t admit to any other injuries or give much more of a statement. She also wouldn’t take a ride home from Courtney. Her car wasn’t too far away, she kept saying, so finally Courtney talked her into accepting a ride to the car, and offered her the passenger seat.

  Then she offered me the back door, where the criminals sat.

  “Come on,” I said, but got in, and let her guide my head under the roof, allowed her to close the door behind me, and didn’t bother with further complaints when she set the lights rolling. We dropped Jessica off at her car, which was indeed across the road, in the dusty lot of the construction site there. We waited for her to get in, start the car, and drive away. Courtney gave the site a long look, then started off toward my house.

  “You’re making it very hard for me not to think of you as a suspect,” she said after a few minutes. She caught my eye in the rearview mirror, her face cross-hatched by the wire divider between us.

  “Didn’t realize you were trying to fight your feelings. I’m touched.”

  “What were you really doing out there?”

  I watched the town pass in the dark. All the good people were already inside their cozy homes, the occasional flickering blue lights of a TV through a window the only visible life. Only degenerates like me, rolling past in cop cars, left awake to see how pretty it all was.

  At least she hadn’t started the siren.

  “It seems to me that this person who attacked Jessica is a much better topic—”

  “What were you doing there?” Courtney insisted.

  “I wanted to ask Billy what he’d heard.”

  “Kinky.”

  I glared at her in the mirror and looked away. “Actually, I just wondered if Billy even knew what that sounded like. I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend. I mean, I’m sure there’s someone somewhere who would date Billy, but I’ve never seen her. And he doesn’t seem to go out or anything. He doesn’t even hang out at the Mid-Night.”

  “The bar,” we both said in unison.

  “You’re saying you think Billy Batts, a grown man, wouldn’t know what sex sounds like?”

  “He probably watches porn, anyway. And of course he lives in a cheap motel. I don’t know why I came. It was a dumb idea.”

  Courtney sat up straighter in her seat. “It wasn’t a dumb idea,” she said. “You got him to admit it, didn’t you? That he wondered, even while the noise was going on, if someone was getting hurt? He never said that to us. Asshole.”

  The car cruised through my neighborhood. “Is that what you think it was? Just sex?” I was thinking of Beck. It couldn’t have been anyone else. No one else in town would have held any interest for Maddy.

  Courtney was looking at me in the mirror.

  “What?” I said.

  “Was going to tell you something. Not sure if I can trust you.”

  “Frankly, Courtney, I’m not exactly keeping a lot of company right now. There’s no one to tell.”

  “All those teenaged girls at school … What about your coworker?”

  I recalled the waver in Lu’s voice when she said she didn’t suspect me. “Not sure when I’ll be seeing her.”

  “Swear it. Swear you’re trustworthy.”

  “Come on. Do you want to pinkie swear or what? I didn’t miss this part, this, this—girl-versus-girl crap,” I said. “You wouldn’t trust me, no matter what I said, and I’m not sure I can trust you, either. That’s how it’s always been. That’s probably how it will always be. So what do you want to do about that?”

  Courtney turned the patrol car into my street, and I was gratified to see the curtains at Mrs. Schneider’s house pulled tight.

  “If I hear about this from any other source—”

  “Courtney, I give up. Don’t tell me and do us both a favor.”

  “Fine. It’s this: Maddy hadn’t been participating in any … sexual activities. Not the night she died.”

  The car stopped in front of my house. Dark, of course. I hoped that meant my mother would also miss my arrival by police escort.

  “They can tell that?”

  She turned off the lights. “They can tell lots of things. She hadn’t had any drugs or alcohol, either, which is bad news for you, since you claimed she had a beer with you.”

  “I said she bought a beer. I also said she didn’t drink it. She wasn’t pregnant, was she?” Sometimes the happy-hour ladies stopped drinking inexplicably, and their friends went to town on them about being knocked up. The thought of it—Maddy a mother?—gave me a deep, terrible feeling not entirely from the fact that she wouldn’t get the chance now. The palms of my hands hummed with the slightest tickle.

  “You’re missing what I’m saying. She wasn’t raped, and she wasn’t having sex in that room. At least not—well, you know.”

  At least not the kind of polite sex we nice Midwestern girls would know about. “Yeah,” I said, so she wouldn’t continue. I already had too many disturbing images in my head tonight. “I heard she was strangled first, before the belt.”

  Courtney turned in her seat. “Who—”

  “Shelly.”

  “Damn, she’s fast. Look, I’m sorry about making you leave your car tonight. If you want, I can come pick you up tomorrow and take you out to it.”

  This was as near an offer of friendship as I’d ever received from Courtney Howard, beyond that day at the Mid-Night. But that was the day Maddy died, and Courtney had tricked me into admitting that I harbored something like ill will toward the best friend I’d ever had. I hesitated, and then imagined the patrol car rolling up to my house again, only this time in the daylight. “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  She got out of the car and shut her door. For a moment I sat in the back of the
police car, waiting for Courtney to come around and let me out. I didn’t believe in premonitions or in ghosts, but they were both living in this backseat with me. And so was guilt. Guilt and frustration and fear. And death. It was all here, soaked into the faux-leather seats from those who had come before me, a scent radiating out and onto my skin, a cloying smell that I’d never wash off, never get out of my nostrils. The car was small, tight.

  When the door opened, I leapt from the car and hurried up the walk, home again at last.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Hey, Coach!”

  I looked up from the stopwatch I’d been using to time the gazelle’s laps. But the voice didn’t mean my Coach, the Coach, Coach Trenton, or even Fitz, who had called in sick to the school a second day. The voice meant me. Jessica ran past me with her mouth twisted into a wide grin, her newly blackened eye puffy but hidden behind thick makeup. She’d been claiming allergies to the other girls.

  “What?” I said.

  “Where are those sweatpants?”

  “They were sweaty from yesterday,” I called back, checking the time again. I couldn’t believe how fast she could do a circuit, not even out of breath and now taunting me from boredom. Daring me to say anything about her attack, to ask her again if she was OK, to mention how she seemed to be protecting her left side. Was she running this fast with a cracked rib? The independent study, Mickie, didn’t show, and that was a good thing. I had no idea what would have happened. The news had been in the paper and on the radio that morning—another attack, unknown assailant, male, possibly Hispanic.

  “Oh, did you run home?” she said. “Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t see you doing laps here yesterday, either.”

  “And they were running pants,” I said. “You should try keeping this pace in your big combat boots and shredded jeans and see how much breath you have left to chat.”

  The other girls snickered. Probably at my expense, not Jessica’s, but I didn’t care because they’d stopped complaining. They didn’t have the lungs to complain anymore, even at their age. Not at this speed. The redhead brought up the rear again, huffing and pink-faced, silent. Jessica lapped her without a glance. Delia. I hadn’t remembered that name, but I’d heard one of the other girls using it. Delia was the sort of girl whose name was often forgotten. I felt ashamed for not trying harder. “Come on, Delia. You’ve got this.”

  She rolled her eyes in my direction, and we both knew she didn’t have anything and would have even less if she answered me.

  “So Fitz is pretty sick, I guess,” Jessica mused from the across the gym, loping on long legs.

  “I guess.” It was Fitz who’d called that morning, actually, and he hadn’t sounded sick. He hadn’t looked sick, either, when he’d come to the house to pick me up and take me to my car so I wouldn’t have to ask Coach for a ride again. This was Fitz’s idea. Coach had done taxi service for me cheerfully the day before, but there were limits to what I would ask of either of them right now. Bereft, Mrs. Haggerty had called it. Fitz definitely seemed that way. He also seemed to understand that by calling in sick, he was calling dibs on grief.

  “I’m sorry to ask again,” he’d said, big, tan hands on the wheel. Fitz didn’t have a roadster like Coach. He drove an old trash heap of a truck, even though I assumed his teaching salary could do better. “I just have some things I need to see to, plus seeing the girls right now is too … distressing, I guess. Are you doing all right? Are you sleeping?”

  His call had woken me up, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to sound like I was complaining, because I needed the money.

  I needed the money. How long would my life always come down to this one single sentence? Surely not forever, but then here was Fitz in his junker truck, and my mother, barely scraping by with my help. Billy and his cheap rent for living in a place he compared to hell. Lu, thinking she’d have to find another job because a single week with no check from the Mid-Night made that much difference to her family’s survival. I’d always thought I’d outgrow this hand-to-mouth life eventually, but what made me special? What made me different from those around me? This might be it. This might be the best I could do.

  “I’m fine,” I told him. “As fine as I guess any of us are.”

  “Are you scared?”

  I started to say no, then yes. I hadn’t slept the night before, thinking about Jessica’s attack and Maddy’s death. Together, what did they mean?

  What came out: “You’re the first person to ask me that.” And I had been scared, and not just in the moment I’d found her body, and not just when Billy had hog-tied me behind the motel or when Courtney’s gun gleamed in the dark or Jessica’s shiner was revealed. Since Maddy had died, I’d been living with a sort of low-grade electric buzz inside me. In my nerves, in my blood. I felt tender, bruised but all over, and I thought I might have to live with it. It wasn’t going away. I told him about Jessica’s black eye.

  “So I guess whoever it is, he’s not done,” I said.

  He was silent a long time. “That place,” he said. “You’re not going there again, are you?”

  We traversed the same drive I’d done with Courtney the night before, in reverse. This time, though, I had a front seat and my dignity. The AC was hitting me square in the face. I leaned over and nudged it toward Fitz. “Do you think I have a reason to be scared? I guess I thought—”

  I thought Maddy’s death was somehow Maddy’s fault. I was as bad as everyone else. I raised my wrist to my face, but then remembered I’d decided against wearing Maddy’s perfume for a while. “But now … Is that where we are? It could be anyone, and they could do it again?”

  “Until we know more about this, I want you to be careful,” he said. “Watch what you say and who you say it to, OK? Just … let the cops do their jobs, Juliet. They have something to go on, now. Be patient, but in the meantime, be …”

  He couldn’t think of the word, and neither could I. Quiet? Low-key? Paralyzed? In any case, this was the opposite of what I’d been.

  We were pulling into the lot of the Mid-Night, my dusty car the only sign of human activity, when I realized what Fitz had done. He’d found a way to keep me safe and busy, and away from Maddy’s murder. By calling in sick every morning when he wasn’t sick, he’d smuggled me into the safest place he could conceive of.

  At my car, he wished me a good day and waited to leave until my engine revved to life. Taking care of everyone else.

  I had to think that’s what it was. The only other reason I could think for Fitz making sure I was inside Midway High all day, every day, was to keep me handy for my arrest.

  “Hey,” someone yelled, bringing me back to the present. I stood amid girls, girls everywhere, collapsed on the floor or stretching and talking. Jessica holding her side—cracked rib from last night, for sure. “Hey,” she said. “I said, ‘What kind of sick is he?’”

  “Did I tell you ladies to stop running?”

  “We ran them all,” one of the other girls whined. “All the laps there are. I literally can’t run another lap.”

  I looked around. Even Delia had finished. “Yeah, OK,” I said. “I must have lost count. Hit the showers.”

  They thundered off, except Delia, who slid to the floor and made a poor show of stretching out her legs. And Jessica, who positioned herself in between me and the door.

  “What?” I said.

  “What kind of sick?”

  “Why is it your business?” I said.

  “Because I’m getting the hard sell about joining this track team from him and that other one, Trenton, and I want to know before I commit—is he mental? Does he miss practices a lot? Are they worth my time?”

  I’d never seen girls like this. How had they been raised? By fan clubs instead of families?

  “If you’re not into competition and camaraderie, then give it a pass, Jessica. Coach and Fitz are great guys, and you could learn a lot from them.” She looked unconvinced. “Look, you’re good. You’re really good. If
you join the team, you’ll probably medal in a lot of races, win sectionals, and place in regionals, and, maybe, run in state. To some people it’s a big deal.” I tried very hard to keep my face neutral. “And you’re only a freshman, so you’re going to get lots of chances to win it all. But if you think you’re doing anyone but yourself a favor by joining, then don’t. They don’t need someone who’s going to make them feel bad for enjoying what they enjoy. They just need an anchor for their relay team. Maybe someone who can do the thirty-two hundred without losing wind resistance from her flapping mouth.”

  A twitch of her lips had grown to a full grin by the time I stopped talking. “I guess to some people it’s a big deal,” she said.

  “To some people,” I said.

  “You ran with that woman, didn’t you? The one who was killed?”

  Delia looked up.

  “Yeah,” I said, leaving the word open, a question. “And?”

  “And she was on this team, with Coach and Fitz? She was good?”

  Was. I didn’t like how easily people who didn’t know Maddy pushed her into the past. “She … was good,” I said. “She was really good.”

  Jessica kicked at the gym floor, making a challenging little squeak. She wanted to know that she was better yet than Maddy, that her time on the team would be worth it, even if she died young someday. But I wasn’t sure if she knew that’s what she wanted to know. She was only fifteen or so, anyway. What had I known about myself then? Nothing at all.

  “She was really good, Jessica. And we all loved her, me, Coach, and Fitz.” We stared at each other until I knew what I wanted to say. “He’s heartsick,” I said. “That’s the kind of sick he is.”

  At the break, I sat for a while on the gym stairs, letting the girls get themselves put together. When they finally filed out, lips glossed and hair smoothed, they were a different species from the ponytailed runners I’d just put through their paces. They reminded me of exotic birds in their brightness, skinny legs in over-snug pants. When I was sure they were gone, I let myself into the girls locker room before the next group showed up.

  Ten years, but it smelled the same. Steamy, sweaty, like the air inside was holding tight just this side of a rain forest, but with a side of bleach disinfectant. I admired the scent professionally. If Lu and I had been in charge of keeping this space, the smell would have teetered into mildew.