The Ugly Girls' Club: A Murder Mystery Thriller

by C. A. Wittman

  “Yeah, because only riding a bike once in a while means you can’t possibly fall and hit your head,” Brenda shot back. That was all she was going to say about it, though. Cat’s mom wasn’t strict about anything. Brenda was fifty-eight and often complained about being tired. She was also fond of saying, “when I was a kid, your folks told you to go outside and play, locked the door, and didn’t let you back in until it got dark.” Emma’s dad treated her more like a grandchild. She’d noticed that older parents had a different way of interacting with their children—a permissive, live-and-let-live, sort of approach.

  In the bike shop, an attendant was pulling down a bike for Nisha from the overhead rack. Cassandra stood off to the side, holding the handlebars of a cruiser with a wide blue seat.

  “Cruisers for them too,” Brenda said, holding her hand up over the tops of Cat’s and Emma’s heads and moving it in a circle.

  The attendant glanced at them.

  “Emma almost ran over a toddler,” Cat said by way of greeting the other girls.

  Emma gave her a shove and then nibbled on her pinky nail.

  “Those scooters are dangerous, too,” Brenda said.

  “Mom,” Cat rolled her eyes.

  Brenda held up her hands. “Okay. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  “Yeah, my mom says there’s roughly thirty-two thousand head injuries a year from scooters,” Emma said.

  “If y’all don’t change the subject, I’m not gettin’ on a bike. I don’t want to think about my brains all over the pavement right before I go bike riding. You feel me?” Nisha glowered at them.

  “Jeesh.” Brenda opened her purse, fishing around for her wallet.

  Emma pulled out her phone and opened her Venmo app, sending Brenda twenty-five dollars.

  “So, like, do you guys think pangender and omnigender are the same thing?” Emma asked.

  Cassandra shifted her stance, cheeks reddening. “Where in the world did that come from?” She asked.

  “We were talking about it on the way here,” Cat said. “Em noticed that we’re all cis and then we were naming the different genders. I was trying to tell her that pan and omni are different.”

  “They are different,” the bike attendant said.

  “Oh.” Emma nibbled at a nail again.

  “Wait a minute,” Nisha said. “Let’s look it up. Just because he says it is, doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about. Men are always making things official like if it comes outta their lips, it must be so.”

  The assistant grinned. He had giant gold snake tunnels in his earlobes. “Look it up, then.”

  Nisha swiveled her head. “I will.”

  The assistant leaned Nisha’s bike against the counter and got two more bikes down for Emma and Cat, giving them a rundown on how to adjust for height.

  “Yeah, it’s different. Sorry, Em,” Nisha said, looking up.

  Emma shrugged.

  Brenda paid for the bikes and filled out the waiver forms. Outside, she put her giant sunglasses back on her face. “Goodbye, my little cis ducklings,” Brenda said with a wave.

  “Whatever, Mom,” Cat muttered.

  “Thanks, Mrs. B,” Nisha called after her.

  “Yeah, thanks, Brenda,” Emma said.

  Brenda gave another wave and picked up her pace, heading toward the promenade.

  The girls mounted their bikes and minutes later they were cruising the crowded bike path by the ocean, swerving around the slower cyclists. Emma stared out at the placid water, little hillocks of waves rolling to shore and crumbling into foam. Two boys loomed before them, shirtless, nipples puckered into pink nubs of flesh, cigars hanging out the sides of their mouths. One of them removed his cigar as the girls got nearer. Then he leaned forward, placing his hands on bent knees, and barked at them. His friend burst out laughing and Nisha gave them the finger as they stumbled away hooting out their laughter.

  “Idiots,” Emma grumbled. The other girls said nothing.

  A mile later, the boys were forgotten as the girls approached a crowd gathered around something. A young man was stretching his neck to see above two girls who stood with their hands over their mouths.

  “Yo, what happened?” Nisha asked him as they slowed to a stop.

  He turned, eyes aglow with excitement. “There’s a dead girl on the beach.”

  “For real?” Nisha said in a low voice. The others drew closer to her.

  “Move aside. Move aside,” a man said from behind Emma, making her jump.

  Two paramedics and three cops made their way through the crowd, which began to disperse.

  A sharp intake of breath came from Cassandra and Cat said, “Oh my god, that’s Wren.”

  “Fuck, it is Wren,” Nisha said in the same low voice.

  Emma finally glimpsed what everyone else saw, the smell of Hawaiian Tropic invading her nostrils from a nearby girl in a bikini on roller-skates.

  Wren’s body was propped up in a green and blue beach chair situated in the sand, facing the bike path. She was wearing sunglasses and a sunhat, and her hands rested on the armrests of the chair. Oddly, her nails were each painted a different color.

  Chapter 6

  “Hi, girls,” Brenda said as the four of them climbed into her black Toyota Land Cruiser. She pulled her sunglasses up to the top of her head, watching them get into the vehicle. “Why the long faces? Bike ride no fun?”

  “Wren Mahoney’s dead,” Cat said, pulling on her seatbelt.

  “Wren?” Brenda’s brows pulled together, deepening the two parallel lines etched into her skin. “What? How?”

  “We saw her on the beach.”

  “It was so horrible,” Cassandra said. “She was just sitting in this fold-up beach chair, dead.”

  Brenda gasped, covering her mouth with her hand, then lowered it. “Was it foul play?”

  “We don’t know,” Cassandra said. “We only caught a glimpse of her and then the paramedics and police showed up and started herding everyone away.”

  Brenda lowered her hand. “Oh my god. Are you sure it was her?”

  “Yes, Mom. It was definitely Wren,” Cat said. “And her nails were each painted a different color.”

  “Oh my god.”

  The five of them sat in silence for several minutes before Brenda pulled her glasses back down over her face and started the land cruiser, backing out of the parking stall and winding round the parking garage.

  “Did you find out anything?” Emma asked Nisha, watching her scroll through the news on her phone. She shook her head, tapping into the search bar:

  dead girl on the beach in sm

  A slew of social media links filled Nisha’s screen. She tapped the first one on the list, Facebook. An image of Wren filled her screen along with the post.

  Awful. Dead girl found at the beach. Who knows how long she was sitting there. I passed her earlier while on a walk, enjoying the weather. Had no idea she was dead. When I came back, I found people surrounding her. The police had already been called.

  “God, how can Facebook let her post that?” Emma said, pulling out her own phone to pull up the post, but it had already been removed.

  “Didn’t Wren go out with Donovan?” Cassandra asked in a low voice.

  “She did?” Nisha said, her voice rising in surprise. “The same Donovan who was perving on Em’s gram?”

  “I don’t think he was perving,” Emma said.

  Nisha gave her a look. “Girl, sometimes you’re a babe in the woods.”

  Emma blushed, feeling slightly angry at Nisha’s comment.

  “He was definitely perving on that Fifty Shades of Grey S&M pic you posted, and him going out with Wren proves he’s a pervert.”

  Emma looked up and saw Brenda watching them from the rearview mirror.

  “Who’s Donovan?” She asked.

  “Mom, pay attention,” Cat said from up front. “Never mind who Donovan is.”

  “Donovan is, like, twenty, Mrs. B,” Nisha said. “And W
ren’s our age, thirteen.”

  “Do you think he has something to do with what happened to Wren?” Brenda asked.

  “Mom.” Cat groaned. “You don’t just go accusing people of murder.”

  “I’m asking a question. No one’s accusing anyone of anything.”

  “We don’t know what happened to her,” Cat said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he snuffed her,” Nisha said.

  “Nisha!” Cat groaned.

  “What?” Nisha said. “I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s creepy as fuck.” She glanced at Brenda. “Excuse my language, Mrs. B. Y’all remember that my friend murdered my cousin.”

  The girls all knew the story, but they listened, riveted anyway.

  “He raped and murdered her and shoved her in the closet of her bedroom.”

  “What?” Brenda gasped.

  Nisha nodded. “Yeah. Alla us had no idea it was Darnell. Do you know how many times I cried on that psychopath’s shoulder?”

  “When did you discover it was him?” Brenda asked. She ran a hand over her hair. “Jesus. I could use a cigarette.”

  “It was a bullshit investigation. Sorry. Excuse my language again, Mrs. B. Murdered black kids aren’t a top priority and murdered black kids in East LA—well, forget it.”

  “Christ,” Brenda said.

  “My uncle finally figured it out. Yep, my ex-homie is in the slammer for ten.”

  “Ten years! For murder?” Brenda said.

  “He was underage.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two years ago. But he better find somewhere else to live when he gets out because if he comes around our hood, his life isn’t worth two pennies rubbed together. It ain’t just my uncle who’d take him out.”

  Nisha’s mother had inherited money from Nisha’s grandma after she passed away, and the two had moved from Lincoln Heights to Santa Monica when she was five. Although she no longer lived in Lincoln Heights, she still spent time there with family and friends. Anything horrible that could happen to a person had happened to Nisha, and all of it happened in Lincoln Heights.

  She’d told the girls about a man driving an ice cream truck through the neighborhood, and how she’d run up to the truck to buy ice cream with her friends only to find the driver masturbating. There was the time she bought a box perm to straighten her hair at a cousin’s apartment, and the water was shut off in the building while the product was still in her hair. The chemicals burned right into her scalp and all her hair fell out. Another time, a strange man tried to climb through the window of a friend’s house during a sleepover. Fortunately, there were six girls who managed to fight him off. The police were called, but they never showed. Nisha’s aunt Jada wouldn’t allow her sons to wear red or blue T-shirts because they represented gang colors. A boy could get snuffed out for innocently wearing the wrong color in the wrong territory.

  Nisha had witnessed three drive-by shootings and had narrowly escaped the third. The popping noises that rang through the neighborhood before a speeding car came careening around a corner had sent the same aunt racing out of her house to herd the children inside. They’d barely missed being flattened by gunfire. Although an older boy, Chucky Grinds, hadn’t been so lucky. His pants, worn at thigh level, had inhibited his movement. Nisha had watched through the screen door as he was mowed down by a riddle of bullets.

  Emma had once remarked, “why do you even go out there anyway?”

  “It ain’t so bad,” Nisha had said with a shrug.

  Brenda now snatched looks at Nisha, her face a mask of horror. “Nisha. That’s terrible about your cousin.”

  “Yeah, Mrs. B. It is,” Nisha said with a sigh. She put in her Bluetooth earbuds, opening the TikTok app to watch the beginning of a slew of dance videos to the tune of “Sally Walker”.

  The rest of the car ride to Cat’s was in silence.

  Emma liked Cat’s house. It was the coziest and homiest of all their homes.

  Nisha lived in an apartment on 24th street with her mom, Deja. Deja kept things nice, but it felt a bit sterile and lonely. Cassandra’s house was like something out of one of those corny 1980s sitcoms—the all-American home. Louise Baker’s love of chintz and pastel clashed with the modernity of the architecture. Wicker baskets were placed strategically in the various rooms, filled with various items like books, throw blankets, hand towels, iPads, phones, and keys. Vases of fresh flowers crowned the accent tables in the living room and dining table. Their kitchen was outfitted with every state-of-the-art cooking gadget. The Bakers all looked perfect and beautiful, and, like Emma’s mom, Louise Baker could be a bit of a neat freak. Emma never felt like she could relax at the Bakers until she got to Cassandra’s room.

  But Cat’s felt like home away from home. Her house smelled like potatoes, soap, and cigarettes. Things were a little shabby and worn out in a comfortable way, her family fun and quirky.

  The girl’s traipsed through the front door, leaving Brenda to settle her nerves with a cigarette on the front lawn. Inside, a powerful chemical, peppery odor invaded their nostrils.

  “The grans are making soap,” Cat said.

  The girls paused at the entrance to the kitchen to say hi to the two old women, busy with their project, backs humped with age. Grandma Ada stood over two pots on the stove, the contents gently heating, one filled with lye, the other lard. Grandma Tess shook a mason jar full of an already cooled concoction, her teeth resting in a smaller jar on the kitchen counter. The girls had been over often enough to have seen the process of Cat’s grandmother and great grandmother at work in their soap-making process. There was also the candle-making, the butchering of chickens in the backyard, the gardening, cooking, and quilt-making. Cat’s great grandmother Ada Bowling, was close to a hundred, and her grandmother Tess, eighty.

  “Hi,” Cat called out to them.

  Tess glanced at them, cheeks sunken from the removal of her “falsies,” as she called them. Grandma Ada didn’t respond. She was hard of hearing.

  “Hi girls,” Tess said, her voice muffled from the lack of teeth in her mouth. “We fixed some meat pies. They’re on the counter.” She pointed at two chicken pot pies, one almost all eaten.

  Cat grinned. “Thanks, Gran. They look delicious.”

  Tess smiled, her withered cheeks folding into fans of wrinkles, and resumed shaking the jar.

  The front door opened, and Brenda bustled in, bringing the scent of a fresh cigarette with her. She paused in the kitchen and groaned.

  “Ma. I told you and Gran not to make any more soap. We’ve got jars and jars of the stuff. There’s no way we can use all that.”

  “You never know.”

  “And, Ma, your teeth. What did I tell you about that? It’s unsanitary.”

  “The falsies hurt my mouth,” Grandma Tess said, a small frown playing at her lips.

  “I told you, I can make an appointment with the prosthodontist for you to get refitted.”

  Grandma Tess turned her back, shaking the jar in her hand more vigorously.

  “Mom, leave them alone.” Cat hissed. “They’re old.”

  Brenda threw up her hands. “Anyone want soap?”

  Nisha made a face. “I’m still working through the last five jars you gave me, Mrs. B.”

  The other girls shook their heads no.

  Brenda often referred to her mother and grandmother as depression-era mountain women. The girls knew Brenda’s story. The youngest of four girls, she’d grown up in New York, raised by her aunt Isla, her mother’s sister—the fairest of the Wallace sisters, of which there were eight, and three Wallace brothers. Isla had left the mountain life for the big city, married, and for one reason or another couldn’t have children. Tess, overwhelmed with babies at a young age, had given Brenda to Isla. Brenda grew up in Brooklyn Heights, spending her summers in West Virginia with her sisters.

  Ten years ago, when she’d gone home to visit, she’d kidnapped the grans, unhappy with their living conditions at Brenda’s eldest s
ister Bonnie’s house, and the rough way her husband and their brood of sons treated the women. Over the course of a week, she’d taken all the sentimental things her mother and grandmother had held onto over the years, stashing them in her rental car until, satisfied she had everything, announced she was taking the women for a little outing and never returned.

  Cat’s brother, Swen, squeezed past them, holding a plate and heading for the pies. Brenda placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Save some for the girls, Swen.”

  “Mom, I’m starving,” Swen said.

  “Then eat something else.”

  He pulled his shoulders in and slunk over to the fridge.

  “Come on,” Cat said to the others. “Let’s go to my room.”

  “What about the pie?” Nisha asked.

  “Help yourself.” Cat turned to Emma and Cassandra. “Are you guys hungry?”

  “No. Not really,” Cassandra mumbled.

  “No,” Emma said. The thought of eating the pie nauseated her. She’d seen Grandma Tess break a chicken’s neck in the backyard before. The flapping wings and jerking body had put her off ever wanting to eat chicken at Cat’s house again. Wren’s dead body flashed through her thoughts and she swallowed, trying to ignore the slick sensation of saliva in her throat.

  While Nisha served herself a plate, Emma and Cassandra followed Cat to her bedroom, which was nice and big with an attached patio— a great room, even if it did have a lingering odor of cats. Frisky and Tubby lay stretched out on her bed, napping. The girls collapsed on the bed too, picking up the pets and stroking them until the hum of loud purring filled the quiet as they each reflected on Wren Mahoney’s lifeless body, propped up in a beach chair next to a public walkway, looking to all the world like she was sunbathing.

  A hiss of a sob snaked out of Cassandra’s lips, and she placed her hand over her mouth as her shoulders began to shake, eyes filling with tears that slipped in rapid succession down her cheeks. Cat leaned in to hug her and Emma followed suit, the three comforting each other.

  “I was just talking to Wren the other day,” Cassandra said from behind her hand. “She was really nice. She didn’t deserve this.”