Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  In races, of course, she always had a little more to give than I did, a fault of nature that I hadn’t been able to forgive or forget. But it was no one’s fault that I had wasted the last ten years. No one’s fault but mine.

  I stood and went to the bar’s exterior door. Outside, the fire trucks were gone, but an ambulance had joined the patrol cars. To take her body, I realized.

  A wave of nausea rushed over me. I lay my forehead against the cool glass of the door and took gulping breaths until the brackish taste at the back of my throat was gone. And then I began to cry.

  If I’d been asked the day before what my reaction would be to the news of Maddy’s death, even this long since I’d seen her, I don’t think I would have known how much it would hurt. I had already been living without her.

  But Maddy wasn’t just the woman I’d been out of touch with for a decade. She wasn’t simply the person I’d spent all this time blaming for my own mistakes, or the one I’d begun to pin new hopes to since our reunion the night before. She was the girl who’d been my greatest friend. She was also, and always, the one who’d loved me best. She’d known me better than anyone else ever had, and I was enough.

  I would never have a chance to make it right. Doors in every direction had suddenly closed.

  I caught my own puffy-eyed image in the door, and stood back. The hem on my uniform had crept north. A crucial button had come undone during the crying, and my hair was falling out of its ponytail. I hadn’t been enough—for anyone, and least of all for myself—in a long time.

  Outside, the cleaning cart sat in the sun. Someone must have moved it out of the way of the stairs. In all the chaos, I’d never brought it in. I tugged at my uniform skirt, wiped my face, and headed out to retrieve it.

  At the cart, I heard a noise. I shaded my eyes and found Loughton, Courtney, and a couple other uniformed officers overhead on the balcony.

  Loughton spotted me below. “The key won’t work. Where’s Batts?”

  “I’ll make you a new one. Just a minute.”

  The cart stowed, I took my spot behind the counter and called up the screen on our computer for Maddy’s registration.

  She was still checked in. I wondered when someone would go into the system and open up that room on the computer. I didn’t want to be the one to do it.

  It was simple enough to make the card: a few keystrokes and then a swipe with a blank. The card twitched in my shaking hand.

  And then I reached for a second blank and swiped it, too.

  I slipped the second card into the pocket of my uniform, where it felt heavy and obvious. Trying to breathe normally, I took the center stairs up to the second floor.

  Loughton had given up on the dud. They all stood along the walkway with crossed arms.

  “Sometimes Billy—when he imprints—he swipes too fast.” To my own ears I sounded like someone rushing headlong over the truth. I handed over the card and watched as Loughton and his team pulled their guns and approached the door of two-oh-two. I started to follow them. One of the officers held me back.

  Loughton swiped the key. Nothing. He tried again, again. Fast, slow. He fumbled the card in his gloved hands, glancing up at me, tried another angle. “Here, let me,” I said, pushing past the uniformed arm keeping me away and into the center of them. I took the card back, turned it, and ran it through at the speed Lu and I had come to understand as the only one that worked without fail.

  The light turned green. The lock beeped.

  Loughton pocketed the card, nodded. Someone pulled me out of the way, and Courtney and Loughton took up positions on either side of the door. I took a step backward, clutching the rail. None of us knew what might be inside. The murderer. Another body. A blood-soaked nightmare. Anything at all.

  Loughton turned the handle just before he would have had to swipe the card again, and he and Courtney jumped into the room, guns swinging into the corners.

  “Clear!” Courtney barked.

  “Clear!” Loughton agreed.

  I couldn’t help myself. I peered into the dark room past the shoulders of the cops still at the door, unable to see much of anything except that some of the bed sheets had been pulled to the floor.

  Loughton launched himself across the expanse to the bathroom.

  “Clear,” he bellowed. “Check the closet, Howard.”

  But Courtney had already raked the room with her eyes and stiffened. “Sir—”

  “Don’t touch anything, Howard,” Loughton said.

  “Jim, isn’t that—”

  I didn’t need her to finish. Neither of us could have missed it. Even from as far away as the balcony railing, I could see what had caught Courtney’s attention.

  On the dresser, bright as a beacon: Maddy’s diamond ring.

  Before I knew what I was doing, my hand reached toward it. Not pointing, but open-handed and grasping. If I’d been close enough, I might have scooped it up, just to hold it, just to have it against my palm.

  I felt Courtney’s eyes on me, and dropped my hand.

  Downstairs, I sat on the curb. I’d taken the front door keys from the desk to lock up, tight, as instructed, and then put the keys through the drop box in the door. But I’d forgotten to call for a ride. Maybe if I’d had a cell phone like everyone else, I might have called Lu to come back for me. But cell phones cost money, far more than I had to spare.

  A team of uniformed guys in rubber gloves picked over Maddy’s car. A tow truck sat in the corner of the lot, the motor running. Cops were tramping all around the motel and lot, peering closely at things on the ground and in the weeds against the fence. One of them was on his hands and knees in front of the vending and ice machines. “Do these work?” he called to me. “The ice is almost gone. Looks like someone unplugged it.”

  “We need to call for service,” I called back.

  He shrugged.

  I felt for the key card in my pocket and rubbed it with my thumb. What good did it do me? Courtney and her friends were going over the room now. It would be a long time before the room didn’t have a cop inside it. And once it didn’t? There wasn’t much for me to do but change the sheets, wipe up the bathroom. Take out the trash.

  I thought of Maddy hanging over the trash bin and shuddered.

  There might be blood.

  I didn’t know how to clean up pools of blood. I didn’t want to learn.

  The sound of a car pulling into the lot drew my attention. Yvonne’s Jeep swung into a spot near the bar, and she hopped out, tugging up her jeans and tossing a black waist apron over her shoulder. Yvonne was the kind of woman who made me think I could wear red cowboy boots, too. “Heya.”

  “Von, didn’t they call you?”

  “Billy called.” She eyed the ambulance. “Sorry about your friend.”

  I remembered the forty-two-buck tip and was ashamed—of myself instead of Maddy, this time. She was generous. I was the petty, suspicious one. “Thanks.”

  “You should see what this looks like from the overpass,” she said. “I bet you could have seen her from the southbound lanes, even—”

  “Yvonne.”

  “I’m just really surprised somebody didn’t run off the road—”

  “Yvonne, if Billy called you, why are you here?”

  “Oh.” She was staring hard at something over my shoulder.

  The moment had come. The gurney rolled across the uneven ground toward us, the black body bag mercifully strapped down to keep it from bouncing. The matched set of EMTs seemed vaguely familiar, maybe from high school, maybe from the bar. Courtney trailed behind, checking her notes.

  “Wow,” Yvonne said. “That’s some real-life shit, right there.”

  Courtney looked over at us, then followed Maddy’s body into the back of the ambulance. The doors closed and the rig took off across the lot. The flashing lights, which had been rolling the entire time, suddenly cut out. There was no hurry.

  We watched the ambulance until it was out of the lot, across the overpass, and
out of sight. Yvonne shuffled her boots against the asphalt in a silence I assumed was meant to be respectful. A part of me wished I’d been asked to accompany Maddy to the hospital, to help smooth her passage in whatever way I could. To escort her. Hadn’t I been at her wing all those races? Someone else would call Maddy’s fiancé. And Gretchen. There was a protocol, but I didn’t fit into it.

  The other part of me, the larger part, was glad to see the patrol vehicles start to leave.

  “Can you give me a ride to Lu’s? She’s got my car.”

  “I gotta get the bar ready,” Yvonne said.

  I watched the toe of her boot draw a line in the dirt.

  “Wait,” I said. “The inn’s closed. At least for a few days.”

  A smile spread across her face by degrees. “They didn’t say a thing about the bar, though, did they? Besides, we can’t close tonight. This is going to be the busiest night the Mid-Night’s ever seen. I mean, sorry. But it is.”

  She was right. They’d come in droves. They’d come early, stay late. The guys who’d so much as caught a glimpse of Maddy last night would be back to hold court over those who hadn’t. I had no idea what time it was, but had a feeling the not-so-happy hour was almost here.

  “I’ll give you a ride home after, if you stay and help me serve,” she said. “And a cut of the tips.”

  I thought of my dark room at home. Then: Maddy, hanging by her own belt. Her gray, almost silver face.

  I would have no use for my bed tonight. With the Mid-Night Inn closed, I also needed the money.

  “Half the tips?” I said.

  “Was going to say sixty-forty.” She threw her head back and sighed. “Fine. But you have to hustle, all right? No wallowing, just because your friend died.”

  There was a wink in her voice that made me feel, for the moment, like myself. I let her pull me to my feet. She eyed my uniform, my black canvas sneakers with the white toes. “I don’t have anything else with me,” I said.

  “It’s good, actually, cute.” Yvonne hooked her arm through mine and led me toward the bar. “And when they show up, go ahead and wallow a little. They’ll love it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We stocked the cooler to capacity. Yvonne gave me her keys to open the lobby and grab some extra chairs from storage. We turned an empty pitcher into a second tip jar. That was Yvonne’s idea. “They’ll all be wanting you down at their end, see? You make them work for your attention, and I’ll keep the beer flowing.” She chewed on her lip, thinking. “Maybe we’ll send you out to the tables to take orders. Give them all a chance.”

  I carried her words around like a rock in my gut, but I didn’t have time to think about whether or not we should be open, whether or not what we were doing was a good idea. The crowd filed in, filling all the available space, and then called their friends to join them. By six, we were a fire hazard.

  Among the crowd I saw people I knew, people I hadn’t seen in the Mid-Night in a long time, if ever. Dickie showed up. Teeny, layered in additional layers and smelling of old sweat, skulked around the edges of the room, talking to herself. Yvonne kept an eye on Teeny, pulling the tip jars closer to the center of the bar. I didn’t know everyone. Everyone, though, seemed to know me.

  “Your friend,” one of the regulars said over the noise. He wore a pair of red suspenders over his round belly and a red Mack truck hat. The other guys called him Mack as a matter of shorthand. One of the guys who’d had trouble with Maddy’s disruption the night before, Mack seemed shaken at the amount of company he was being forced to keep. He kept turning to give the crowd a raised eyebrow, but stuck tight to his stool. “Mighty pretty gal,” he said. “They know what’s been done to her?”

  “She was murdered,” I said.

  People turned to listen, creating a small circle around me. “Murdered?” someone said. “Are they sure? I thought—”

  “Was she robbed?” someone else wanted to know. “Was it a breakin? That happened up in Muncie last year. Some people staying in one of those Regency Stay places—”

  “No,” I said. “Her jewelry was left behind.”

  “The girls,” Teeny said, barely audible.

  The jewelry’s reputation had already spread. We’d all watched enough crime-solver TV to know that no one would attack a woman, hang her, and leave the easy pickings of such a bauble. Loughton and Courtney hadn’t admitted it, but come on. If there was something I knew about, it was pilfering. Almost anyone would have swiped the ring. Anyone.

  “Someone said she come from Chicago,” Mack said. “She brought that trouble with her. I used to haul up to Chicago. I once saw a man—”

  “What makes you think she brought it on herself?” said a woman from a nearby table. “What kind of thing is that to say?”

  “She got killed here,” said a loud voice behind me. “Whoever it was, he’s probably from here.”

  The circle, expanded to include half of the room, turned to see who’d dared to say what they all hoped wasn’t true. The din dropped a few notches.

  I already knew who it was, but I turned anyway. The Mid-Night had certainly turned into a class reunion tonight. “Get you a drink, Beck?” I said.

  Tommy Beckwith shot me a look of such force I almost backed up. But I’d had practice. All those years as the tagalong, the chaperone. That hard stare over Maddy’s shoulder, when he had hoped I’d be anywhere else but where he was trying to be alone with her. I had learned to withstand it. I’d learned how to plant my feet and lean into it. Maddy’s boyfriend didn’t scare me anymore.

  Then, with clarity so sharp I sucked in a breath, I remembered driving with Maddy to Indianapolis, the jostle of her beat-up car over bad streets.

  “Where are we going?” I kept asking. Winter, mittens not keeping my hands warm. Where, where, come on, where. Her coy refusal to say had made me wonder if she was treating me to something special, like my dad taking me for ice cream when I made the honor roll or improved my time on the track. Maddy and I didn’t have that kind of relationship, but the idea of a treat occurred to me. The farther we drove into the city, deep into pockets of empty buildings and cracked sidewalks, the more I thought she was tricking me. Trying to scare me. We didn’t have that relationship, either. But it occurred to me.

  That feeling, that roiling suspicion in my gut. I felt that again now. She was tricking me. She’d tricked me. She wasn’t really dead. Where had she gone? Where, where, come on.

  Back then, I’d held on to my seat belt, making a plan in case we were lost. She’d been acting strange for a few days, like someone I didn’t know. My hands were freezing. I blew hot breath through my mittens, waiting for her to return to herself, to give a sign it would be OK, whatever it was.

  When she pulled to the side of a quiet street, I grabbed the door handle.

  “That’s where we’ll run state,” she said.

  And there it was. The stadium belonged to a university neither of us thought we had any chance of being accepted to or, in my case, paying for. Inside the stadium would be the track, long white stripes on a red circle. The finish line. The launching pad. All of it, the early hours and the late hours and the blisters and shin splints—inside that stadium in just a few months, all of it would come to its natural end. I harbored hopes that we would run one, two, but in the other direction, with Maddy finally seeing what my jaw looked like for a change.

  We sat and watched the silent structure for a long moment. And I was satisfied. I felt exactly like my dad had taken me for ice cream, that I’d made the honor roll. That I’d been treated. Maddy and I had shared something special here. We knew who we were. We knew who we were going to be.

  In that moment, I knew everything I needed to know about our friendship. Everyone else was a blur.

  But then Maddy drove us out of the stadium’s shadows and down an even more secluded street. Within a few minutes, we were parking next to long, blank brick wall with a single, opaque glass door.

  “What is this place?”

>   “I need to do something, OK? Will you stay here and wait for me?”

  “You can’t be serious, Maddy.” I looked at the long side of the building, all the good feeling from the stadium dropping away. I couldn’t decide where my anxiety was coming from. There was something about the building’s empty face that said more than any sign would have. “What is this place? What if you don’t come out?”

  “You can be so dramatic,” she said. “It’s just a test, OK? No big deal.”

  What kind of test. What kind of test. My mouth wouldn’t form the words. I knew what kind of test, and why the building was unmarked.

  “Are you pregnant?” I said.

  “No way, shut up.” She bit at her nails. “Not a pregnancy test. Another one, OK? You can’t tell anyone.”

  We are seventeen, I wanted to say. Surely you can’t need any tests. Sex-ed films. All the times we’d whispered behind our hands at girls waddling gut-first past us at school. We were smarter than that. We had better things to do. What were we doing here? We would be running in that stadium in a few months, but only if we did everything right, timed every move perfectly, trained like we’d never trained—and she was getting tested for some sex disease? I wanted to shake her. No, I wanted to shake Beck. This was his fault.

  I hadn’t even known they were having sex. And this was how she told me. It stung. Maddy, rushing past me. Leaving me behind, as ever.

  We weren’t having the day I thought we were having. We were not having ice cream. We were not sharing something. I was not a part of this.

  I sat in the car, the heat roaring but still weak, until Maddy came back. I hurried to unlock her door. She slid into the driver’s seat, pale.