Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  “I’m about to do something ridiculously stupid,” I said. “The question is, do you want to help?”

  I locked up the office, tossing Yvonne’s keys to her and ignoring the stares as Beck and I passed through the bar.

  We took the middle stairs. I couldn’t bring myself to take the other way, around the alcove and past the railing from which Maddy had swung.

  “Let me get this straight,” Beck said at my back. “Why are we doing this again?”

  The night was stunning in its blackness. Billy needed to replace about eight light bulbs on the second floor. I felt for my notebook to jot down a reminder but only felt the square of Maddy’s room card.

  “You and I are suspects,” I said. “What more reason do you need?”

  “I’m in the clear,” he said. “You know why? Because I didn’t kill her.”

  “Neither did I. How airtight is your alibi?”

  He snorted. “You’ve been watching too much prime time.”

  “You know where I was? I was home, in bed. Alone, before you ask. That’s how loser single girls nearly thirty years old who still live with their mothers roll.” We reached the door to two-oh-two, still crossed by two strips of crime-scene warning tape. “How about you?”

  There was just enough light here to see Beck calculating his odds. “I was home in bed, too.” His eyes flicked to mine and away. “Alone. And I don’t even live with anyone who can say I came home last night.”

  “Worse news for you,” I said. “Billy heard a ruckus from this room last night—a sexual ruckus, if he can be believed to know the difference. Which—anyway, you’re far more likely—”

  “I got it. I’m a much better killer than you. Great.” He turned to the door. “So. How do we do this?” He reached for the handle.

  “Don’t touch it,” I hissed, and slapped his hand away. “Do you not watch TV at all? Your job is to keep your fingerprints to yourself. And your DNA—”

  “That’s awkward,” he said.

  “I mean spit or, like, skin particles or whatever. There’s no reason for you to have been in there and if they can prove you were—at any point—you’re getting a lifetime change of address. Stay out here. And don’t touch the rail or—”

  “I got it, OK? I appreciate your concern for my future defense team. I’ll try not to spit. How are you getting in without touching anything?”

  “I go into this room every time someone checks out. They’ve probably already found my fingerprints.”

  The idea chilled me, but I had to be realistic. I’d cleaned it two days ago. We wore gloves to clean the bathrooms, but I would’ve touched plenty of things before I’d put them on. The TV remote. We always had to locate it and put it back on the side table. I would have touched the side table, too, cleaning up the water-glass rings everyone left. The trash can, to shake out whatever bits of wrappers and tissues the former occupants had tossed. The door handle, for crying out loud. I would’ve touched the handle on both sides, without giving it a second thought. I’d only been doing my job.

  Last to see her alive, first to find her dead, and my fingerprints decorating the entire crime scene. No wonder Courtney Howard’s pie-faced grin still shot through me like an electrical current.

  “But how—”

  I whipped the key card from my pocket, reached through the tape, and swiped the card at the practiced, perfect speed. The light blinked green, beep-beep, all is well. With one finger, I hooked the door handle.

  We watched the door swing inward into the black room.

  Why had this seemed like such a good plan?

  Sometimes, when a Bargain was checking in to the motel, I caught a whiff of pity. They don’t need any evidence at all to believe that I must be stupid to be stuck in this life. I wasn’t stupid, or at least I hadn’t thought I was, until now.

  “Are you going in or not?” Beck whispered.

  “Give me a second, OK?” I was not this person. Creeping around in the dark—

  I suddenly remembered standing inside Coach and Fitz’s dark office, hissing at Maddy to hurry up from the doorway while I watched for anyone to come along. We’d be expelled. We’d never run for Midway again. Her tennis shoes had squeaked dangerously against the floor while I chewed my nails.

  Why had we been there? Pranks had been a big team activity that year, getting so out of control at one point that Fitz had to sit us all down and call a truce.

  Now I stared at the threshold of this room, trying to grab more of that memory.

  “Well, if you’re not going in—” Beck reached for the light switch.

  I caught his arm. “You have a surprising lack of self-preservation.”

  He looked at my hand on his arm. I dropped it.

  “Wouldn’t that be good news for you?” he said. “If I got nailed for this?”

  “Believe me, I’ve already thought of that.”

  “And?” he said.

  “And I really want to know who killed her, OK? Someone killed her, Beck. My best—” My voice strangled in my throat. Apparently Beck wasn’t the only one harboring feelings a decade old. When I glanced back at him, his expression was lost in the shadows. “If you get mixed up in this, and you didn’t do it—you’d better not have done it, you son of a bitch—we might never know who did.”

  “Well, what if they think it was you? What if you get sent up for life?”

  I wasn’t going to let that happen, but I saw his point. “Then at least the two of us will know they got it wrong.”

  He took a long time to nod, and I felt it, too. We were agreeing to far more than the plan at hand. It felt like we were sweeping away everything we’d ever felt toward one another, and starting over. I turned back to the door, ducking under the yellow tape into the room and using my elbow to swipe at the light switch.

  A dim circle of light appeared on the floor, where a lamp from the bedside table had been knocked over. I fumbled for the other switch. A floor lamp across the room showed us the scene.

  “Oh,” Beck said.

  I hadn’t gotten a good look over the shoulders of the police earlier, but now I could see the full extent. The place was torn apart. The sheets and blankets had been ripped from the bed, the window shade pulled to the ground, the bedside table ransacked. The dresser, gutted. Its surface was clean, the diamond swept away to an evidence locker.

  And of course, the two garage-sale landscapes over the dresser and bed were askew. The nightmare tree and the road to nowhere, both hanging a little off balance, as always.

  Disaster, my mind provided. Aftermath. I didn’t see any blood, but I watched for it as I picked my way across the room. Blood on my shoes would be tough to explain.

  “I was going to ask you if anything was out of place,” he said.

  In the center of the room, I turned in a full circle. The mattress had been bumped off its box springs. The mirror over the bathroom sink was cracked. The ruckus Billy had heard must have been full-on combat.

  “Everything is, but also—”

  “What?” Beck said.

  “Stay where you are.” I couldn’t place it, but something nagged at me. Some little piece called out from a place that was more out of place than everything else.

  I knelt to look under the bed, then rose and went to the bathroom. Maddy might have only stepped away. Her makeup, lotion, and perfume waited like soldiers on alert.

  She’d meant to stay.

  The towels were folded as I’d left them the last time I’d turned the room. Only the bathmat was out of place, having slipped off the edge of the tub. Nothing might have happened, except for the ruined mirror.

  In it, my reflection was cut diagonally across the neck, folding in on itself along the crease.

  I turned my attention to the bottles on the sink, leaning to sniff at them until I’d found the warm cookie scent. It was a small, slim bottle. My palms tingled, then rushed to a fierce burn.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Nothing,” I said
, but I’d already reached for the bottle and slipped it into my pocket. Against my hip, the perfume was cold. It wasn’t the same as stealing from a friend.

  “What’s taking so long?” Beck hissed.

  “Just—be quiet for a second,” I said. I reached for the bathmat, realized what I was doing and stopped, then squatted down to take a closer look. The fibers at the tiniest corner of the mat had been crushed into a pattern. A shoe print.

  I came back to the room, picking my way around all the sheets. Using my skirt as a barrier against leaving new fingerprints, I pulled open the dresser drawers, one at a time, then closed them.

  While Beck fidgeted at the door, I went to the bedside table and peered into the drawer still hanging open. An old phone book, a Bible. I reached in and felt around the back of the drawer, accidentally lifting the cover on the Bible as I pulled my hand out. A scrap of paper blew out from the pages. I reached back in and plucked it out.

  “What you’re looking for,” it said, with a string of numbers below. A Bible verse, maybe, missing the book name. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a church. Or a Bible.

  “Are you almost done?” Beck turned and looked at the courtyard behind him. I added the paper to my pocket.

  “Something’s not right,” I said. “More than just knocked around.”

  “I don’t know how you could tell that. Nothing’s where it should be,” he said. “I mean, maybe the wallpaper stayed put.”

  I checked the wallpaper to be sure. There was a dark swipe under one of the framed prints. Something—someone—had been dragged against the wall.

  For a long moment, I stared at the swipe. Then the thing worrying me snapped into focus.

  “We should go.” I crossed the room like a kid jumping from rock to rock across a stream. “Come on.”

  “What? Why? I thought we were going to—do something.”

  “I don’t want to get caught here. What if someone sees the light on? Or Billy—God, Billy could come up here any minute. Or someone from the bar.”

  Beck looked at me, then at the wall. “What did you see?”

  “What do you mean? Nothing.”

  “Which is it?” he said. “You don’t know what I mean, or you do know what I mean and you saw nothing?”

  He stood between me and the cool evening. Over his shoulder, one low star stood out against the hazy, dark horizon. I thought of Maddy again, of course. I was the one who kept her head down, focused, and still lost. Maddy kept her eyes open. I was beginning to understand how well, and how much I would have to pay attention to keep up with her.

  As clear as anything, her voice came to me. “Do you think there’s a real place, where you go?”

  We’d stayed out past my curfew that night, passing a bottle of something terrible from her stepmother’s liquor cabinet back and forth, parked in her old car in a cornfield. I was going to get into trouble for being late, and I wasn’t sure I’d brought any mints to hide the booze on my breath. But Maddy hadn’t wanted to go home or go to my home, or go anywhere. She’d had more than I had, I guess. She didn’t seem to mind the taste of whatever we were drinking. “I mean, a real place, where you can touch things, and have a dog, and eat chocolate?”

  When you died, she meant.

  “Did you ever have a dog?” I’d asked. Supposing that to have a dog in heaven, you’d need to have had one in life. It all made sense in my mind. A lot of things made sense that night.

  But I didn’t think I’d really answered her question, even then. Now, I knew I hadn’t. I understood now what she wanted to know. Did you get a chance to get it right? Or was this it?

  I didn’t know. I didn’t have to wonder, though, if Maddy had been scared to find out.

  She’d put up a fight here, a real fight. Things aren’t always what they seem, she’d said to me in the bar. But this messy room was the opposite of what I’d first believed about her death. She hadn’t wanted to die. She’d wanted to live, badly. And she must have known that she wouldn’t.

  Beck’s stare weighed on me.

  I turned and went back to the scratch on the wallpaper. Above it hung one of the cornfield landscapes, the one with the dark tree. I pulled the picture off its hook and turned it over. Nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Beck looked behind him nervously. “Put that back.”

  I put it back, then cut carefully back across the sea of torn sheets and blankets to the other side of the room. The frame hung over the bed, almost true, the only thing that might have gone untouched in the room—except it was on the wrong wall.

  Lu and I hated these prints. They not only bored us, they defied any cleaning method we’d devised. Bugs somehow got stuck under the glass. The frames grew mysteriously sticky, and even a blast of Shinez-All couldn’t take it off.

  But we knew exactly where they belonged in each room. These two frames had been swapped in the last two days, since I’d last flipped the room.

  That couldn’t be a mistake.

  The second print was the cornfield cut by a lonely road, the dust kicking up behind an unseen car getting the hell out of there.

  I grabbed the frame from the wall and held it up. A white square of paper had been tucked into the back. I lay the frame upside down on the bed and peeled the paper away.

  “Oh, what did you do?” Beck said quietly. At first I thought he meant me, but then I knew he didn’t.

  It was a photo of me and Maddy, Coach, and Fitz after the Southtown regional tournament our senior year. A girl in Southtown black and white stood at the edge of the photo with a grim expression of disappointment. In the center, Coach was picking up his Indiana High School Coach of the Year trophy and medallion. At the moment the photo was taken, he was shaking the hand of an official mostly off camera, and the three of us, me, Maddy, Fitz, are being jostled against him in the chaos of congratulations.

  Maddy and I carried our regional trophies against our hips like infants, and Fitz squeezed Maddy’s shoulder, gazing upon us like a proud father. But Maddy’s face is serious, determined. Her eyes cut to the left of the cameraman, away from the festivities. She was already thinking about the state finals. She was already way ahead of everyone else.

  In the photo, I’m living in the moment. My smile is a thousand-watt beauty, all that orthodontia finally paying off, all those chewy vitamins and two vegetables at dinner and access to vaccinations and fluoride in the water radiating from me. I looked like a cornfed State Fair dairy princess reigning over my subjects.

  It was a great photo of a great day. I studied it, letting myself remember. The bus trip home that night had been epic. We sang songs and screamed at passing cars until our throats grew raw. We were strung out on runner’s high and winning and youth and the world spinning precisely the way it was meant to. On the bus, Coach passed his Coach of the Year trophy around, a team win. We ran our fingers over the cool metal of the running figure, over the smooth wood and the etched words of recognition, over Coach’s name. Finally the winner, finally after his disappointment at the Olympic Games. He’d worn the medallion from the ceremony, all the way home, a long, dark ride. Fitz commented on the craftsmanship of the medallion, of the sturdy, bright-blue ribbon, while we girls took turns studying the trophy and sending the runner racing for his life, bouncing seat to seat, past the point of hilarity.

  “All right, all right, girls,” Coach finally said, “Give him back.” The round, brassy Coach of the Year medallion hanging heavy around his neck. Maddy had jogged the trophy up the aisle and back into Coach’s hands.

  That was Southtown, after all the hell some people had put us through, calling us names and telling us we didn’t deserve what we’d earned. But that night, we’d garnered our team the two top spots in the state finals, and our leader the state’s top coaching honor, and no one could tell us we were anything but champions.

  “What?” Beck said. “What is it?”

  “It’s just—” I held up the photo.

  He peered at it, then b
ehind him again. “Let’s go.”

  I put the frame back, then retrieved the photo and held it to myself tenderly.

  “You’re taking that?” he said.

  “She left it for me.”

  “This is a crime scene, Townsend—”

  “She meant for me to find it,” I said. “I’m the only one who would have.”

  He frowned at the photo in my hands. “Shouldn’t we—”

  There was a creaking sound down behind him. We hurried out and closed the door gently behind us. I led Beck to the center stairwell and down past the office. At the bar’s end of the parking lot, several cars remained. A young woman teetering in high heels struggled into the open passenger door of a car with a buckled hood.

  I went to the door of the bar and peered in. The crowd had dispersed, but a few of the hardcore regulars were closing it down. I still didn’t have a ride home, but now it was too late to call Lu or bother her for my keys. If I fetched my haul from Yvonne’s tip jars, I could see who was left sober enough to ask for a ride. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in.

  Beck’s boots kicked gravel as he crossed the lot toward his truck. Something in his movements reminded me of the boy he’d once been—the one who caroused, who skipped out of woodshop and art classes to strut past our advanced English class, winking. The one who wanted Maddy all to himself. Even now, it seemed. Even now, he wanted all the grief there was. I hadn’t liked that boy, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like the man he’d turned into, either.

  For a long moment I watched him walk away. Why had I trusted him?

  But I knew why.

  Because Maddy had. And she’d trusted me, too. I held the photo of us to my chest and wished again that I’d been better to her on that last night. Maybe everything would have turned out differently.

  “Hey,” I called to Beck’s back. “Give me a ride home, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The next morning, the phone rang early. I’d been hoping to sleep in, since the Mid-Night was no-vacancy for a while, and then walk to Lu’s house to fetch my keys and car. After that, my plans petered down to lying in front of the TV until Billy called us back in. I did a few calculations in my head with the balance of my checkbook. Change of plans. I’d have to get a newspaper for the want ads.