All The Pretty Dead Girls

by John Manning

  “Yes,” she told the secretary. “I spoke with Sheriff Holland down at the gate. It’s terrible. I certainly hope she’s all right.”

  “She’s probably with a boy.” Hazel laced the words with condescension and contempt. “That’s how those scholarship girls are, you know. You can’t make a sow’s ear into a silk purse, after all.”

  Ginny bit her lip and walked to her office. Her voice mail light was blinking. She picked it up.

  “Ginny, this is Dean Gregory. As I am sure you are already aware, one of the students is missing, and so I am afraid I’m going to be tied up all day and have to cancel our meeting. We’ll need to revisit this, though, sometime in the future. As you know, we now have a new board of trustees, and they are quite concerned about the curriculum we’re teaching. So at some point soon, we’ll need to have a conversation.”

  She set the phone down thoughtfully. She didn’t like the way Gregory said “conversation.”

  Gregory’s postponement of their meeting, however, also put off the eventual confrontation she’d have with him over seeing Bonnie Warner at the Yellow Bird. The fact would be noted in the investigation, and Gregory would want to know whether Ginny had planned to report the girl or not.

  Ginny closed the door to her office, sat down at her desk, and covered her face with her hands.

  What happened to that poor girl?

  She realized she was shivering, and that her office was freezing, even though the temperature read seventy-five.

  16

  Pierre deSalis never could quite pinpoint the moment when his life went wrong. As he lay in bed listening to all the noise in the small house he shared with his family, he gave up on trying to get back to sleep until they were all out of the house.

  Only a few more years and all the kids will be gone, he said to himself. If I can make it that long.

  Pierre had Sundays and Mondays off from the paper mill. On Sundays, Maddie nagged him out of bed so he could drive them all up to Senandaga for Mass. And during the school year, the noise of the kids getting ready for school woke him up every goddamned Monday morning. So he never got to sleep in. Never.

  Pierre buried his head in his pillow and tried to count his blessings. His children were healthy. He had a good job. And if maybe things hadn’t turned out the way he might have wanted when he was first married, he supposed things could be worse. Things could always be worse.

  They’d been thirteen when they fell in love: a pair of rural farm kids without much future in Richelieu. They used to go on picnics and laugh and tease each other, always planning to move to the States once they were married. Right after high school, they’d tied the knot in the little Catholic chapel in Richelieu in front of their family and friends, and instead of going on a honeymoon, they’d packed everything they owned into an old battered Chevrolet station wagon and moved across the border. Pierre got a job at the paper mill in Senandaga, and Maddie worked at the A&P as a checker. Between them, they scrimped and saved every cent they could. There were no vacations. In several years, they’d had down payment money for a nice little house in Lebanon.

  Their little house was a dream come true for them; at the time it seemed big, roomy, and perfect for children. There was a backyard, three bedrooms, and an unfinished basement that could also be converted into bedrooms if the family grew that big. Until that point, they’d been using birth control—a secret kept from their priest—but as soon as they moved into their house, Maddie had stopped taking the pills. Within a year she was carrying their first child, Pierre Jr.

  It was a bit of a commute for Pierre every day to the mill, but the house made Maddie happy. Pierre considered the drive a small price to pay for Maddie’s smiles, to hear her singing in the kitchen as she cooked or cleaned. That first pregnancy, she’d glowed and been beautiful—and been so happy.

  But Pierre Jr. hadn’t been born healthy. There was something wrong with his blood. They’d had to drain all of his blood, give him transfusions, and it was touch and go for two weeks. Maddie spent almost all of that time in the chapel at St. Agatha’s Hospital, or talking to priests. She wouldn’t talk to Pierre hardly at all. Finally, Father Michaels had told him, “Maddie blames herself for the baby’s sickness.”

  Pierre, exhausted from lack of sleep and still worried, just gaped at the priest. “Why?”

  Father Michaels had shaken his head. “She thinks God is punishing her for the years of birth control, which you know is a sin, Pierre. I’ve told her God doesn’t work that way, but she’s hard to persuade.”

  After the baby came home, everything changed. Maddie filled the house with statues and paintings of the saints. She was always saying the Rosary, watching the baby like a hawk, and many nights slept in the baby’s room on the floor next to the crib. Once, when Pierre complained, Maddie turned on him in a fury. “It’s your fault the baby was sick!” she snapped. “You insisted on me taking those accursed pills!” And she stormed off, leaving Pierre staring after her with horror.

  Shortly thereafter, she returned to their bed as though nothing had ever happened.

  Then the other children started to come, and it was as though each pregnancy shut something down in Maddie. Every pregnancy drove her further and further toward the Church. They’d never been particularly religious—they went to church on Sunday, that was all—but now Maddie spent two or three mornings a week driving up to Senandaga for Mass. She started putting on weight, and stopped wearing makeup and fixing her hair. Every child after the first was born healthy, which was a relief—and even Pierre Jr., after such a rough beginning, was an extraordinarily healthy child. But if anything, Maddie only became more devout. And when she’d put the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the front yard, Pierre had supported her against the neighbors who wanted them to remove it.

  “We’re Catholic,” he’d told Jacob Cobb and his sour-faced wife Bernice when they’d stopped by to ask that the “eyesore” be taken away. “And there’s no law against having the Virgin Mary in our front yard.”

  Maybe I should have given in to them then, he thought as he heard Maddie yelling up the stairs at their youngest to hurry up. Maybe I should have put my foot down and made her take down all the pictures of bleeding hearts and saints all over the damned house. Maybe sometime I should have told her I wanted a wife and not a nun to live with After the last child was born, it was a very rare day when Maddie agreed to have sex with him.

  Yet Pierre never objected when he came home from work to find a new picture of Jesus or Mary hung somewhere, or when another little statue of a saint appeared on a ledge like magic. Maddie had also lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way, and he couldn’t quite figure out when that happened. In the old days, she’d never complained when he sat up watching a ball game and drinking a few beers, but now she’d purse her lips and furrow her brow in that annoying, disapproving way. How many times did Pierre come across her sitting in the kitchen, eyes closed with her fingers counting off the beads on her rosary?

  Damn it, I work hard and if I want a beer while I watch a ball game, I’ll have one! Whatever happened to that pretty young girl who liked a beer every now and then, who loved to laugh and cuddle up to me in the bed at night after the kids were asleep?

  None of the boys took to religion the way Maddie wanted. Pierre Jr. had stopped being an altar boy. Michael, their second son, was urged by his mother to join the priesthood. That’s about as likely as me sprouting wings, Pierre thought with a smile. Michael had always had an eye for the girls. He was a handsome boy, a star of the football team, and girls were calling him on the phone all the time, much to his mother’s distaste. Frankie, their third son, wasn’t likely to become a priest either. Right now he was reading tracts on Buddhism, which his mother called “paganism.”

  But their youngest child, Bernadette, worried Pierre. Thirteen and quiet, she was always reading books about the saints and praying with her mother. Today was Bernadette’s first day of high school, and she and her mother had sat
up until nine last night saying the Rosary in order that the Virgin would protect the girl as she started out on a new journey.

  “Where is that girl?” Maddie was asking now, bustling around the kitchen as Pierre came down the stairs. “I’ve called her three times.”

  “Maybe you both stayed up too late last night praying,” Pierre ventured. Maddie just glared at him.

  Pierre sighed, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “Bernadette!” Maddie shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you up?”

  There was no answer.

  Maddie gripped the banister and began hurrying up the steps. Pierre settled down at the table with his coffee. In seconds, he could hear Maddie’s heavy footsteps across the ceiling down the hall to Bernadette’s room.

  Her scream made him stand abruptly, spilling his coffee all over the floor.

  Jesus preserve us, Pierre thought as he ran up the stairs. He could hear Michael and Frankie bounding out of their rooms.

  Maddie was standing in Bernadette’s doorway, her mouth open and her hands clasped together so tightly, the knuckles were white.

  Pierre peered into the girl’s room. His daughter was lying on her bed, flat on her back, her arms straight out on either side of her.

  There was blood on her feet and on her palms.

  “Call an ambulance!” Pierre shouted down the hallway to his sons, pushing past his wife and hurrying to his daughter’s bedside.

  Bernadette turned her eyes to him. Her face seemed to be bathed in an eerie light.

  “Papa.” She smiled at him. “The Holy Mother spoke to me. She came to me.”

  “The wounds of our Lord.”

  It was Maddie, whispering behind him. Pierre glanced around to see her make the sign of the cross and drop to her knees. “It’s a miracle! Praise Jesus!” She grabbed at her husband’s hand. “Pray with me, Pierre!”

  He pulled his hand away from her, and turned to his sons. They were standing in the doorway, their mouths open. “Didn’t you hear me? Call an ambulance!” Still, they just stood there. “Now!”

  Frankie turned and disappeared down the hallway again.

  “Is—is Bernie all right?” Michael stuttered.

  Pierre couldn’t answer. He turned back to his daughter, placing his hand on her forehead. “How did this happen?” he asked her. “Did you cut yourself?” He forced himself to look at the wounds. They did not appear deep, but the blood was fresh and flowing freely.

  “She spoke to me, Papa.” Bernadette’s face was wreathed in smiles. “She told me that I am blessed.”

  He grabbed a shirt near the foot of her bed and began wrapping Bernadette’s hand, trying to stop the blood.

  “No!” Maddie pushed him away. “Don’t!”

  “Are you crazy? She’ll bleed to death!”

  Bernadette looked up at him serenely. “No, Papa, it’s a miracle.”

  Maddie began mumbling, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…” Hail Mary.

  In the distance, Pierre heard a siren.

  For the first time in a very long time, he started to pray.

  17

  It was three days after Bonnie Warner’s disappearance that Sue once again saw the face at the upper window.

  And just as before, the face was screaming.

  All of her books fell to the sidewalk as Sue stared up at the window, transfixed.

  “No,” she mumbled. “It can’t be…”

  A terrible thought entered her mind. Was the face always there? Always screaming? Maybe it was—because until now, Sue hadn’t had the courage to look up at the window again. Every day as she’d left her dorm, she’d studiously kept her eyes averted, and it would be the same when she returned.

  But today, on her way back to the dorm from class, when life on campus was just starting to return to normal after the scare of Bonnie’s disappearance, Sue had summoned the nerve to look up.

  And there, from that same third floor window, she saw a girl screaming as if in mortal terror.

  “Malika!” Sue shouted, spotting her roommate across the yard. “Come here!”

  “What is it?”

  “Look up at that window! On the third floor!”

  Malika turned around and peered upward. “Which window?”

  “The one where—”

  Sue’s words trailed off. The face was no longer there.

  “Where what?” Malika was asking.

  Sue leveled her eyes at her. “This is the second time I’ve seen a girl at that window, and she’s always screaming.”

  Malika grinned. “So, some weird chick is screwing around.”

  “No.” Sue shook her head. “It’s not.”

  “It’s not, huh? So what is it, a ghost?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Sue said, trying to laugh.

  “Sweetie, you are still jumpy about Little Miss Bonnie,” Malika said. “Everybody is. Just let it go.”

  Sue let out a long sigh and looked up again at the window. Just a dim darkness behind the glass. Nothing there.

  Nothing behind the window of the room I was somehow convinced was my mother’s.

  Maybe Malika was right. Bonnie’s disappearance had indeed unsettled her. She kept remembering that dream she’d had the night Bonnie disappeared—of a blond girl on a bicycle. The coincidence unnerved her.

  For three days, everywhere Sue went, someone was talking about Bonnie. The story of the missing girl and the bicycle covered with blood had made the national news and become the buzz of the campus.

  Given Wilbourne’s rather prim reputation, of course, the story was almost always discussed in a hushed whisper, and few of the faculty would address it directly. The vast majority of the students had known Bonnie Warner only by sight, if that. Those who actually knew her from either having had a class with her or from living on her floor at Bentley Hall were—for the last few days anyway—minor celebrities on campus. Bonnie apparently hadn’t been an outgoing girl, preferring to spend her time in her room studying or surfing the Internet. There were a couple of girls—Tish Lewis, for example—who knew her better than the rest, but even they didn’t know a whole lot about her. She’d had a Brooklyn accent so thick you could only cut it with a meat cleaver, and was on scholarship. But other than that, no one really knew much about her, except that “she’d seemed nice.”

  Driving the talk, of course, was an undercurrent of fear, an unspoken terror that someone was out there, watching the campus, stalking them…There were still bloodstains on the road—blood that had been identified as Bonnie’s. So much of it had been spilled that police didn’t think she could possibly be still alive. But there was no trace of her body anywhere. That made the whole thing even creepier.

  Malika put her arm around Sue. “Come on,” she said kindly. “Let’s go to the caf and get you some food. You are trembling, baby.”

  Sue agreed to be led away from Bentley Hall. She didn’t dare look back up at the third-floor window again. She wondered if she ever would.

  But at the cafeteria, Sue’s mind wasn’t on food, Even as she grabbed a tray and took her place in the line, she was thinking back to a girl she’d known at Stowe. After the winter break of her sophomore year, Sue had found out that one of her fellow students had been killed in a weird skiing accident. There followed a terrified hush over the girls at Stowe, much like that which had fallen over the girls of Wilbourne. Everyone talked in whispers, just as they were doing now here in the caf, as if speaking in normal tones would somehow be disrespectful to the dead girl.

  Her name was Lori Powers, Sue remembered with a jolt, and I didn’t like her very much, and my first thought when I heard she was dead was “Good!”

  Lori had been a loudmouth, always bragging and name-dropping. Her father was a playwright—musicals, and he’d had several shows on Broadway at the time. Lori had long thick brown hair and gray eyes, but was inclined to be over-weight and she talked several decibels louder than she needed to. Sue made a point out of avoidi
ng Lori as much as she possibly could, but she remembered now—she had forgotten—that on their last day of school before winter break, she’d found herself in an argument with Lori.

  “Watch where you’re going, you clumsy bitch!” Lori had shouted at her as Sue bumped into her in the hallway. Lori’s books had gone flying. Sue instinctively knelt to help her retrieve the books—but something had snapped inside her, and she started shouting back at her.

  “If anyone’s a bitch around here, it’s you, Miss Lori Powers!” Sue stood, refusing to help any longer. “You can take your attitude and loud mouth and go fuck yourself!”

  The girls who witnessed this little scene were shocked. Sue was no demure little thing—far from it—but such language was out of character. She could never explain her rage in that moment. Lori, like many a bully, had no response when confronted, just gathered up her books, her face red, her eyes filled with tears. Sue had just stood there, arms akimbo, glaring at her, until Lori hurried out the doors of the school.

  A few days later, she skied headfirst into a tree and died.

  That’s weird, Sue thought as she placed a glass of orange juice on her tray. Lori Powers! I haven’t thought about her in years. Poor thing. I never got to apologize to her.

  She added a bowl of Cheerios and another cup of coffee to her tray, and headed out to the eating area.

  She sat at the end of a table where three girls were huddled. They glanced over at her before going back to their conversation as if she wasn’t even there. Sue shrugged. She didn’t recognize any of the girls anyway. And they’re probably just gossiping about poor Bonnie Warner.

  Malika settled her tray across from her and gave her a bright smile. She was just having coffee and a granola bar.

  “What’s your first class this morning?” she asked.

  Sue opened her backpack and took out one of her textbooks. The Sacred Feminine, written by her instructor, Dr. Marshall. “Theory of Religion,” she told Malika. “This is a really fascinating book.”