Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  It was still there. With a shiver, I realized it had been there the whole time—including the night a cop had returned my car to the house after the handcuff incident.

  I leaned back against the door with a thud. “What—um, what does Gretchen say is missing?”

  Courtney looked back at the house. “Something from Maddy’s room, but she can’t say what it was. It’s a bust. But the window was left open, so someone was here.”

  “The window in Maddy’s room?” I stood up straight. Someone had really broken in, but looking for what? “That was sealed tight when I was here.”

  “Probably just some kids messing around. Maybe they saw the news and figured out how to make a terrible situation even worse. People are like that. We’ll check into it.”

  It seemed to me they were still checking on quite a few things. “Anything on the diamond yet?”

  Courtney made a face and glanced all around before she turned her back on the house and said in a low voice, “Funny you should ask.”

  “Not funny, really,” I said. “I have nothing else to occupy my time, you know. Until the Mid-Night opens.”

  “Have you looked for a different job?” she said. “I mean, just in case? And what about the reunion?”

  “What about it?”

  “Maybe you could use it to … network?” she said.

  I glared at her.

  “OK, fine. You’re not—bringing a date or anything, right?”

  We were in competition again. “And where do you I think I’d get one of those?” I said.

  “Good, OK.”

  Had I agreed to be Courtney’s plus-one? For the briefest moment, I imagined walking in on Vincent’s muscular arm. “Funny I should ask?”

  “Right, the diamond. We can’t seem to track down any jeweler who will admit they purchased or brokered a purchase of Maddy’s diamond. We found the guy who cut the fake for her, but he says he handed her back the original gem, too.” Courtney looked at me pointedly.

  “So she sold it on her own. Maybe she was in town to drop it off—”

  “Do you know anyone here with two cents to rub together? And, besides, no one’s come forward to say they had a meeting scheduled with her.”

  “Would they come forward? If they were buying a diamond that shouldn’t have been for sale?”

  “Didn’t say I thought she was selling it.” Courtney chewed at her pinkie nail and looked over her shoulder at the house. She didn’t understand how unlikely it was that Maddy would have come here at all, let alone put the diamond in Gretchen’s care. But I saw why she was attached to that story. Something was stolen, but no one could say what—except I knew at least one thing missing from the house, because I’d taken it.

  “Did something happen today?” I said, suddenly eager to get away from the subject of Maddy’s room. “I saw the motel on the news, I think.”

  “Billy’s arraignment was today,” she said. “He’s probably not going to miss a beat, you know? We hardly have a thing on him, and that very young witness changed her story yesterday. Convicted, he’d have to register as a sex offender, but he’s probably going to walk. Slap on the wrist at best. That was my big bust.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “There’s always plenty of them,” she said. “He’ll have no trouble—”

  “No, I mean—will they get some help or something?”

  Courtney looked at her shoes. “We don’t know who they are. But if they came forward, no, help is probably not what they would get.”

  “Would they get a slap on the wrist?”

  “Now they would probably get public humiliation,” she said. “As if the guys who paid them didn’t exist at all. Double standards are the best. Hey, speaking of public humiliation, what are you wearing to this thing?”

  “What—oh, the reunion.” I hadn’t thought about it. “My uniform from the Mid-Night.”

  “That will turn some heads.”

  “No sense in pretending to be something I’m not,” I said. Except I wasn’t a housekeeper anymore, either. I looked at the clock on the dash. I needed to get going. I had yet to do Shelly’s bidding for the reunion and would need to get cleaned up. It was a lot to ask of someone who didn’t want to attend the event at all. “I’ll wear a dress, a regular one. It’s black. I’ll probably have to wear it to the funeral, too.” It was the dress I’d worn to my father’s, in any case.

  “That’s lucky, since the funeral is right before the reunion.”

  I waited for the punch line. Shelly had said … but she was joking, surely.

  Courtney looked at me shrewdly. “You haven’t heard? I thought with your mom involved, you’d know all about it. Hey, are you OK?”

  The scene around us receded into the background. Courtney grabbed me, opened the door of my car, and let me fall into the seat. I held my head in my hands. “Right before? Like … at the hotel?”

  “A memorial service. She’s being cremated—hey, Gary, can you see if there’s a bottle of water in one of the rigs?” She squatted down beside me and after a short silence, a bottle of water appeared in my narrowed vision. I took it and held it against my face. Courtney grabbed it, opened it, and put it back in my hands. “The committee you put together decided this was the best way to get mourners to the service. What with her not, you know, living here anymore.”

  With her not being a person people liked. I gulped at the water until my vision cleared.

  “I didn’t mean for Shelly to turn the reunion into a funeral,” I said.

  Courtney smirked toward the house. Her compatriots were spilling from the front door and down the porch stairs. “I’m actually looking forward to the reunion now,” she said. “The speeches will be tremendous.”

  They would want me to speak. I gulped at the water, then let the empty bottle drop to the floor. Courtney watched the bottle roll under the seat. I retrieved it before she offered, before she reached for the bottle and found the thing missing from Gretchen’s house. “Who?” I said. “Who’s giving speeches?”

  “Only everyone who might have killed her,” Courtney said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  At the Mid-Night, I parked across the road at the construction site and walked in, keeping to the edge of the lot. There were no news crews or anyone at all. They’d moved Billy’s clunker out to the back of the lot and set up crime-scene tape across the front of the building. The place looked totally abandoned now.

  I felt bad for Billy despite everything, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to.

  I stopped. Shadows from the high sun on the face of the Mid-Night played with my eyes. Someone might be there by the stairs, or in that dark spot near the vending machines. The sun was high overhead. A brisk wind rose, raking over the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot and lifting my hair. I hugged my elbows and imagined the women who’d been employed here secretly. The strays.

  So many girls never had the chance to find out who they really were before other people started telling them. Maddy was among them, and I didn’t mean just that Maddy had died too young. It all started long before that belt, that railing. Sexualized, Coach and Fitz had called it. I had my own memories: boys grabbing at me on the bus, jeering faces over Southtown High sweatshirts, men the age of my father calling out from cars as I ran. The more I catalogued my own experience, the more panicked I felt to understand it, to stop it. God, when did it end? The girls at Midway High, showing off their bodies, taunting each other, calling each other names. Giving the worst of it to each other.

  At last I made my way to the nearest stairs and up and around the end of the building. I paused at the section of railing where Maddy had been hanged, then slipped around to the courtyard side of the walkway. Here, the shadows were deeper. At the door to two-oh-two, the crime-scene tape had been removed. I pulled out the card and swiped, and the light flashed green. At the moment I used my forearm to push down the handle, I heard something under the wind.

  Before I could look, I
was grasped from behind, plucked off my feet, and shoved into the black room, a hand over my mouth cutting off my scream. I kicked and raged, scratching and swinging with every ounce of fight I had. There might yet be something to knock down in this room. Not here. Not yet. Not me.

  The door closed behind us, leaving us in almost total darkness. “Quiet,” a man’s voice said. “It’s me.”

  I froze. I recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. The killer. The killer was someone I knew. I raced through the math again, but I couldn’t make anything add up through my own panic.

  “I’m going to let you go now, OK? No screaming. It’s just me.”

  He let me slide out of his arms to my own feet and held me upright when my knees threatened to buckle. I ripped myself out of reach and turned, listening as someone fumbled at the wall switch. A shallow pool of light from the fallen lamp lit his anxious face.

  “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?”

&nb
sp; 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.