The Ugly Girls' Club: A Murder Mystery Thriller

by C. A. Wittman

  Call me please.

  Over the course of the next hour, Emma visited the post several times, comments growing by the minute. Why the hell was Blue Mars, a freshman in high school, a girl who was not involved in Emma’s life on any level, having a party at Oliver Dawson’s house on the same day Emma was graduating from middle school? Emma forgot to eat dinner. By the time she took notice of the hollow ache in her stomach, it was well past eight-thirty and the locks had timed into place.

  For several hours, she tossed and turned, her stomach rumbling and her mind spinning about the party and her dad not responding to her calls. At 2:30 AM, she opened her phone and got a partial answer to her question from a new post in Blue’s feed. Shocked, she stared at the picture of Blue and a young woman sitting at a table in what appeared to be a club somewhere. They had taken a selfie, making kissy lips at the camera. A splash of purple lights dissected the room and their faces. Beneath the post, Blue had written,

  Sister time. Love my sis.

  Blue’s sister was Mia, the woman Oliver was dating. From just over their shoulders, Emma could make out her dad at a long glossy bar crowded with patrons. He was holding drinks and grinning at Blue and Mia.

  Chapter 16

  A flank of police cars surrounded Santa Monica Middle School, their lights flashing, and Emma paused mid step, her heart dropping.

  What was going on? Was there a school shooting?

  A crowd of kids milled around outside the campus, and Emma approached them.

  “What’s happening?” She asked a boy who held a skateboard under his arm. He was straining his neck to look over the crowd. His eyes flitted over her dismissively, the usual look she got from boys. “That chick who offed herself last week, her friend did a copycat suicide,” he said.

  “What?! Which one?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “But why are the police here?”

  “Fuck if I know. I just got here, like you.” He walked away to stand near a group of girls, all texting.

  Emma pulled out her own phone. A tap on her shoulder had her spinning around to see Cat and Cassandra behind her.

  “Did you hear?” Emma asked in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” Cat said. “It was Poppy. They found her at the Santa Monica Swim Center. She was wearing a bikini, sitting in a beach chair with her nails…”

  “Oh my god,” Emma gasped before Cat could finish. Her eyes meant Cassandra’s. She looked bleak. “Where’s Nisha?”

  “I don’t know,” Cat said. “We haven’t seen her yet.”

  “Did you text her?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Emma started to send out a Where are U? to Nisha when Cassandra said,

  “Didn’t Hunter say they were going over to Poppy’s yesterday?”

  Emma’s fingers froze over her screen, and an icy chill swept through her body. Suddenly, the big news she wanted to share with her friends about her dad and Blue’s connection to him seemed minor compared to the tragedy of another suicide. She sent Hunter a quick text.

  Just heard about poppy. Wru?

  Immediately, the little dots started moving.

  At the police station waiting to be interviewed. I was one of the last people she saw.

  “Oh my god,” Emma said out loud.

  “What?” Cat and Cassandra said.

  “Hunter’s at the police station. They said they were one of the last people Poppy saw before she, you know.” Emma couldn’t bring herself to say the word “died”. The dots were moving again. They were typing something else. Cat and Cassandra huddled around her.

  Might not be suicide

  “What, so, like, it could be murder?” Cassandra breathed the question into Emma’s ear, her warm breath tickling Emma’s neck.

  Call me when you can, Emma texted back.

  I will.

  “This is insane,” Cat muttered, crossing her arms. Her brows stabbed down creating dimpled crevices that looked like reverse quotation marks.

  “But why are the police here?” Cassandra asked.

  “Maybe because it is murder, and they were both students here,” Cat said, sounding like her mom without the rasp.

  “I wonder where Nisha is,” Emma said, looking around, and then shot out a quick text.

  Wru? Hv u heard about poppy?

  Emma waited, Cat looking over her shoulder. There was no response.

  “Call her,” Cat said, then, “I’ll call her.”

  She pulled out her phone, just as the vice principal Mrs. Lang came out and stopped to talk with one of the policemen. A minute later, students were being waved toward the entrance and Emma began walking slowly forward with everyone else, Cat with the phone still at her ear.

  Cat lowered her phone and clicked it off, pocketing it. “Nisha’s not picking up.”

  “Strange,” Cassandra said with a frown.

  “Quiet, please. Quiet down,” Mrs. Lang called out to the students in the packed cafeteria. Her voice, amplified by the microphone in her hand, cut through the din of noisy chatter. She stood on a platform at the back of the room. Several of the teachers and the school counsellor sat behind her, their faces grim. Off to the left stood two patrol officers and an officer in plain clothes. Mrs. Lang waited while the multitude of different conversations taking place died off and she had everyone’s attention. Emma, Cat, and Cassandra were in the middle of the pack of students. They hadn’t been lucky enough to grab chairs at the tables once the teachers opened the doors to the cafeteria for the students to assemble.

  Mrs. Lang’s face looked drawn and taut with tension, the lines around her mouth prominent.

  “As you have probably heard, another one of our students, Poppy Fields, is no longer with us.” Mrs. Lang’s voice caught and Emma felt her throat tighten. “We are devastated to hear this news and to lose such a bright, promising young woman who had her whole life ahead of her. Today, we will not be conducting our regular school activities. Instead, we will have you go to your home rooms where you can have a chance to process your feelings and talk with our grief and bereavement team, as well as with Ms. Sendak. If any of you are not up to being at school today, we understand. You are welcome to call your parents or the adult on your contact form to pick you up. At no point is it okay to leave the campus on your own. You must sign out with an adult guardian in the school office.”

  She gazed around at the sea of student faces. A sharp silence filled the void as Mrs. Lang paused in her speech. Turning to the police officers, she said, “Detective Garcia will now say a few words.”

  Mrs. Lang stepped aside, and the plain-clothes officer took her place.

  “Hi, I’m Detective Garcia,” he said into the microphone. “I want to say that my colleagues and I at the Santa Monica Police Department are deeply sorry for the loss of this young woman, Poppy Fields. Our hearts go out to her family and friends during this very trying and tragic time. I will not be going into detail about the demise of Ms. Fields, as her death is still under investigation. I would like to say, though, that if any of you have any information, or if you noticed anything suspicious in the days leading up to Ms. Fields’ death, please come forward and talk with us. We welcome any information, no matter how minor.” Detective Garcia cleared his throat and did a little bob with his head. “I’ll be in the school office this morning in case any of you would like to come in and talk with me. Um, thank you.” He took a step back and handed the microphone to Mrs. Lang.

  “This will be the close of our assembly,” she said. “We’ve had our cook, Mr. Bindle, prepare tea, and there’s juice and bottled water, along with cookies, if you’d like to take a beverage and snack with you into class.”

  Immediately, the shuffling sounds of several hundred eighth graders filled the room. The sixth grade class had been directed to the band room and the seventh graders to the theater room.

  Emma got in line for the tea and cookies, Cat and Cassandra beside her.

  “I’m gonna call my mom,” Cat said. “The last
thing I feel like doing is sitting in a classroom for hours, doing grief processing. You guys staying?”

  Cassandra made a face. “I definitely don’t want to deal with my mom right now.”

  Cat looked at Emma.

  “Jill’s day is completely mapped out. It’s just too unsettling for her when something switches up in the schedule.”

  “My mom’s on your form as a backup, though.” Cat said.

  They both glanced at Cassandra. Emma desperately wanted to go with Cat, but she felt like she’d be abandoning Cassandra. For years, she, Cat, and Nisha had each other’s parents as emergency contacts on their school paperwork. Cassandra had only been in their friend group for six months.

  “It’s fine,” Cassandra said. “Whatever. I’ll just catch up on my schoolwork.”

  “No. I can stay,” Emma said. They both had the same home room.

  “Really, you should go if you can,” Cassandra said. “I’m behind on my algebra homework. I’m just going to do that.”

  They had arrived at the end of the hot bar, shuffling past a row of empty stainless steel covered trays. Stacks of plastic containers filled with chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies were on a table, along with carafes of hot water, paper cups and boxes of tea bags.

  “Only two cookies per person,” the woman monitoring the snack table said as they poured hot water into their cups and plunked Lipton tea bags into the water. Emma took a chocolate chip cookie and reached for an oatmeal cookie, then stopped herself, thinking of her conversation with her mom last night. She had eaten a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal for breakfast. Cat and Cassandra each took their two cookies.

  “What, only one?” Cat said as they moved forward.

  “I had a big breakfast,” Emma lied.

  “That’s a first,” Cat said.

  Emma blushed. Out of the four of them, Emma had the biggest appetite and the biggest sweet tooth.

  “I’m just not that hungry,” she said as they meandered out of the cafeteria behind a crush of their classmates.

  “I mean, I don’t care. I was just saying,” Cat said.

  “Can we drop it?” Emma snapped.

  “Okay, jeez. So triggered.” Cat rolled her eyes.

  Emma raised her cup to her mouth to blow on her tea when someone bumped her shoulder, the hot liquid splashing up onto her mouth and nose. “Ow! Shit!” she cried out.

  “Oh god. My bad. So sorry.”

  It was Posie, Donovan’s sister. Her eyes were red and it was obvious she’d been crying. Another girl who Emma didn’t recognize had her arm linked through Posie’s. The friend’s eyes skimmed over Emma and then she pulled Posie away, the two pushing ahead through the crowd.

  Suddenly, things felt very real. A second girl from their school was dead. Emma tried to imagine what it must be like to be Posie right now, to lose two friends in little more than a week.

  Outside, Emma and Cat parted ways with Cassandra and went to the office. Apparently, half the school wanted to leave, and they got stuck in a throng of kids, waiting outside the office, calling their parents and seeking early release forms.

  “I’m going to try Nisha again,” Cat said.

  “Do you think it was suicide?” Emma heard someone say. She turned around.

  A group of girls Emma knew vaguely from elementary school and the last several years of middle school stood clustered by a bench. Charlie, Lena, Anna, and Jaylene. They sipped their tea and gazed at their phones.

  “I think so,” Anna said in answer to the question about suicide. “Poppy and Wren were really tight.”

  “Still, that’s, like, so—” Charlie started to say.

  “Selfish,” Jaylene finished for her.

  “That’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say sad,” Charlie said.

  “I think it’s selfish,” Jaylene said. “I mean, it’s not just about you. Think about your family and friends. Now Posie’s lost both her best friends. It’s fucked up. I mean, people get depressed. Get over it. Period.”

  “That’s insensitive,” Lena said, glancing up from her phone.

  “I swear. It’s like a disease. Next week, it’ll be Posie, you know? Like how you have those copycat mass shooters.”

  “Jay, you’re taking this next level. Chill, okay?” Charlie said.

  Jaylene made a face and glared at her phone.

  “Did you see Posie?” Anna asked in a low voice. Her friends glanced up at her. “She’s a hot mess.”

  “Yeah, Posie’s been hanging with those two since third grade,” Charlie said. “And Hunter, recently.”

  “I didn’t see them around this morning,” Lena said.

  “Must have found out before school started,” Charlie said, and in a lower voice. “I heard Posie’s older brother was dating Wren.”

  “Isn’t he, like, in his twenties?” Jaylene said.

  “Yeah. But he’s a snack,” Charlie said.

  “He’s a dick,” Anna said. “I saw him at the Platform in Culver City, sucking the face off some glam chick. Wren hasn’t even been dead two weeks.”

  “Oh, you know who that is?” Lena said, her eyes lighting up. “She’s the older sister of that girl, Cassandra.”

  The girls looked at her with wrinkled brows.

  “You know. She’s kind of weird looking.” Her eyes flashed at Charlie. “And don’t even start on me with your whole PC body shaming lecture circuit. She just is. She hangs out with Emma Dawson, Cat Smith, and Kanisha Dubois.”

  The other girls’ expressions cleared, and Emma felt her throat tighten, stepping closer to Cat, who wasn’t paying attention because she was busy watching something on her phone. Emma hoped no one from that group would notice her and Cat.

  “Is Cassandra the one with the short arms?” Anna asked.

  Lena nodded. “Yeah. She’s got dark hair and kind of a big nose.”

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “That whole group is kind of sad.”

  “Why? Because they’re not pretty?” Charlie asked, sounding offended for Emma and her friends.

  “No. They're just weird. Remember how obsessed they were over the Kardashians, like how they’d try to make themselves up to look like Kim and Chloe, and post about them constantly on the gram?” Anna asked.

  “So? All of America was obsessed with the Kardashians,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, but they were so next level, like in a really pathetic way.”

  “Anyway,” Lena said. “Cassandra’s older sister looks nothing like her. She’s super tall and hot. She works at Burger Lounge in Marina del Rey. Last time I was there, Donovan had come in and they were super flirty with each other. Then Cassandra came in with her friends, and her sister totally gave her a hard time. I felt sorry for her actually. I’d hate it if my sister treated me like total shit.”

  “Duh. Who wouldn’t?” Jaylene said. She was staring at her phone as she spoke, and suddenly her expression changed.

  “What?” Charlie said.

  “Blue’s having a party in Malibu.” She licked her lips, reading the post. “It’s going to be the same day we have our graduation. Wow! The house is so the house.”

  The other girls crowded round to look at the picture and Emma felt like she was going to be sick.

  “Whose house is it?” Charlie asked.

  Jaylene shrugged. “Fuck if I know. But I’m so going.” She glanced up at them. “Did you know Blue’s sister is a sugar baby?”

  “What?!” The other three girls shrieked. This time, Cat glanced up at them for a second, their screaming breaking through her Bluetooth earbuds and the endless TikTok videos she was watching on her phone.

  “How do you know that?” Charlie asked.

  “Blue was open about it. She said it’s the way her sister pays her way through college and that she might do the same. She said her sister makes buku bucks.”

  “Ew,” Charlie said.

  “Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do,” Jaylene said.

  Emma felt a wave of heat flush through
her body and wished the ground could open and swallow her up.

  Chapter 17

  Cat’s dad, Andy, was washing something over the sink. He wore an old stretched out AC/DC T-shirt, sweatpants, and glasses, his hair a scruffy mess. His writing attire. Andy wrote twelve hours a day, six days a week. He took a few days off during the holidays and weekends in July and August, when the family went for six weeks to France, Spain, or Italy—more specifically, Cannes, Barcelona or Otranto, Puglia. Cat said her dad enjoyed Saturdays with the family on these summer holidays, but was a grumpy pain in the ass on Sundays. She didn’t know why her mom wouldn’t let him return to his writing, as he was no fun to be around when all he wanted to do was write. The grands stayed behind, left under the watchful eye of a house sitter who stayed at the Smiths’ in exchange for making sure that Cat’s grandmothers didn’t burn the house down with their soap and candle making, or hurt themselves strangling chickens in the backyard.

  Andy whipped around as Emma, Cat, and Brenda approached the kitchen. He was holding Grandma Tess’ false teeth, dripping wet from the washing. He opened the dentures, his face full of mock seriousness. Emma grimaced, and Cat stared at her dad with undisguised repulsion as he clacked the teeth open and closed, belting out the theme to New York, New York.

  “Dad,” Cat shrieked. “God. Sometimes you’re so embarrassing.”

  Andy grinned, then, noticing that they were home on a school morning, he said, “What are you two doing here? Isn’t it a school day?”

  Andy Smith was not someone who kept careful track of time outside of his writing schedule, and Emma could tell he was wondering if there was a holiday he hadn’t been aware of. “Where are Swen and Carrie?” He asked on the heels of his first question.

  “There’s school today,” Brenda said. She leaned against the frame of the entryway to the kitchen. His focus sharpened as he studied Emma and Cat. “Why are you two not in school?”

  “There was another suicide,” Brenda said.

  Andy’s facial muscles tightened with shock.

  “Another one? Who?”

  “Wren Mahoney’s friend Poppy Fields.”