Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  I slipped out of my fleece and dropped it on the passenger seat, then opened the car door and got out. When Shelly saw me, the smile fell from her face, replaced by a long blink, as though she’d caught a prayer passing by on a breeze.

  “Oh, Juliet. You poor thing. It’s a shame,” she said. “People coming in today couldn’t believe it. Such a remarkable person as Maddy was, they just couldn’t.”

  I imagined the lingering customers at Shelly’s window, the theories and half-remembered facts that must have been slipped across her counter today, keep the change. Everyone having his or her say. “Remarkable”? To Shelly, anyone might be remarked upon, especially if life had taken a sour turn for them.

  “I can’t believe it, either.” I couldn’t. The news felt ridiculous to me all over again, as though I were watching a day-long cop-show marathon, or having one of those busy dreams where you woke up exhausted. And before I could say or think anything else, I was. Exhausted. All the anger I felt toward the gossips left me and I sat, hard, on the curb.

  “Are you OK?” Shelly rushed to me and knelt down, looking around in real fear. Tomorrow I would be a charming story of grief for the first fifty customers, but for now I was causing a scene and keeping her from getting home.

  “Sorry … I don’t know,” I said. “I just needed to sit down.”

  “Do you want me to get you anything?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I’d scraped my palms on the sidewalk, but maybe that would shut them up for a while. “Really. Things just caught up with me for a second.”

  Shelly stood up and took a step away, glancing down the street one way and then the other. Then, in a flash of understanding, I knew that I wasn’t simply keeping her after work. I was forcing her to fraternize with a suspect. Not that Shelly Anderson didn’t want the dirt. But she didn’t want to be seen digging in it.

  “Look, Shelly, I get it. But I need a favor.”

  She had started to edge away.

  “Can I borrow our senior-class yearbook for a couple of days?” I said. “I swear I’ll get it back to you.”

  Her curiosity got the better of her. She stopped, considered. “What for?”

  “It’s … hard to explain. I’m trying to make myself remember some things from senior year. An exercise in mourning, I guess.”

  She sniffed. “If only there had been a chance for you to buy a full year of memories for only twenty dollars.”

  “Were you on the yearbook staff?” My voice came out sharp. A few of my questions could be settled by someone from that year’s Tracks staff.

  “I would have been, if I’d had time,” she said. “I helped out here and there, but senior year was like a full-time job for me, you know. Class president is a lot of work, in case you haven’t noticed or, you know, RSVP’d to our reunion.”

  “Shelly, I might be in jail by then.”

  That got her attention. She looked at me shrewdly. “People were saying today, ‘Juliet Townsend’ but I kept telling them no way could Juliet do something like that.”

  No way I could do it. Not would. I might—but it was a matter of skill, of ability. I wouldn’t be capable of pulling together a murder, not the way Shelly could plan a reunion.

  “I didn’t, of course not, Shelly. But it looks like not everyone knows my limits as well as you do. Courtney Howard, for one.”

  “Courtney, good lord,” Shelly said, reaching a hand to help me up. “But I suppose she’s in a position to have her opinions listened to. At long last.”

  I dusted the palms of my hands lightly on my track pants. They burned, but in a real, physical way I didn’t mind. “And her opinion of me is well known.”

  Shelly blinked at me. Maybe she didn’t know what Courtney thought of me. Or maybe I’d read her wrong again, and her opinion of me had always been just as low. “Is that why you don’t borrow Courtney’s copy of the yearbook?”

  I laughed. “Right.” Courtney was the last person in my class I’d have expected to own a yearbook, not to mention the last person I’d be asking for favors. “But seriously, can I borrow yours? I’ll take special care of it. I only want to take a look at a couple of pages.”

  Shelly suddenly went still. “Are you—wait. Have you been reading too many Agatha Christie novels? You think her death had something to do with high school? Juliet, really? Where is your dignity?”

  In the Midway County morgue. No, I knew just where it was: Back ten years ago in a room in the Luxe, when I held out for running the state tournament longer than any best friend should have.

  I was about to say so when someone raced past us. We turned to watch a tall man give the bank doors a violent yank. The doors rattled in place, locked. He raised his hands to peer in, then pounded on the glass until I thought it would shatter.

  “Hey,” Shelly bellowed.

  The man turned, but instead of running away, he lunged out of the building’s shadows toward us. He was tall, dark-skinned. I knew who he was at once. “Is there anyone left inside?” he said. “I need to talk to someone in that bank.”

  “The bank is closed, sir,” Shelly said, her voice insulted for the door’s sake. “You can set your watch for it to open tomorrow at eight.”

  “I could be in jail by then,” he said.

  Shelly looked my way. “My,” she said. “But that jail is getting very crowded.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Maddy’s fiancé blinked between us.

  I stood back. In the flesh, he was tall, imposing. The affectionate gaze from the photo Gretchen had showed me was gone. Instead, his eyes tore me apart, a look sharper than any Beck had ever attempted. If this guy had tried to get me to leave him alone with Maddy, I would have done it. Shelly pulled her purse close to her body.

  The name came to me. “Vincent.”

  His features couldn’t decide between relief and suspicion. “Yes, how did you—wait. Are you Juliet?”

  We stared at each other in stunned silence while Shelly took another long look up and down the street.

  He knew my name. Had she told him about me? Had I still been special to her? I wanted it to be true and not true at the same time. More likely that she’d taken her yearbook with her and had shown off a few track team pictures one lazy afternoon. Or maybe one of her trophies made it to Chicago after all, and she’d mentioned how tight a race she’d run. Against whom? Just some girl named Juliet.

  “She told you—” I started.

  “Or are you Kristina?” he said.

  I stared at him. “Who—”

  “Oh, you’re that guy,” Shelly brayed, grabbing my arm and pulling me closer to her. I was the suspect a few minutes ago, but now that we had a better one, I was her bodyguard. “Oh, no, no, this is too much,” she said. “It is locked up tight, and you can forget about it until this is all sorted out.”

  “The ring,” Vincent breathed.

  “What about the ring?” I shook Shelly off and turned on her. “Why would you have the ring?”

  “Well, I don’t have it, but the bank—”

  “Why is it here?” I said.

  “It’s evidence in an ongoing investigation,” Shelly said. “The authorities felt the ring would be best kept in the vault, where it would not fall into the very hands that strangled that poor woman.”

  “She was strangled—by hand?” I felt my own hand at my throat and dropped it. “But the belt—”

  “That was just a cover,” Shelly said, a little too brightly. “Her murderer looked her in the eye and strangled her until she was dead. And then hung her up like a—”

  Vincent made a noise that convinced Shelly not to give any additional visuals. “That’s what I heard, anyway, and you’ll just have to wait until they know it wasn’t by your hands that she died before you get the ring back.”

  “That ring belongs to Maddy,” Vincent said. Shelly backed up. “Not to some hick town or any of its dough-faced inhabitants.” I glanced to see how Shelly was taking this. Her face was indeed doughy, now that h
e mentioned it. “If I find out that you had that ring on your greasy finger, I’ll never let you forget where you went wrong. None of you.” He gestured wildly up the street. “This shit hole has always had too much of a hold on her. And now it’s finally taken her from me. If I could think of someone to sue, I would sue—”

  “A lawyer,” Shelly said to me.

  “—and the—the—devil who did this, he’d better hope the cops get to him first.”

  Shelly shot me a mock impressed look. “I’ll bring the yearbook to the bank tomorrow if you want to stop by,” she said and turned on her heel. “Stay out of jail, now. Juliet, I mean. You, sir, can check yourself in anytime you like.”

  I watched her down the street and around the corner, then tried a glance in Vincent’s direction. Staying out of jail suddenly didn’t seem like the biggest problem I had.

  He stood with his fists clenched against his thighs. Maybe he’d done it, but his anger seemed real. His hands could have strangled a woman easily—or maybe they only ached for revenge or action, the same way mine did for whatever shiny piece of crap I couldn’t help wanting.

  My grabbing had come from the same kind of loss. The first time I nabbed something pretty that didn’t belong to me, my dad had already died. I’d already been through the funeral, but I was still angry. As I packed up the last of my things in my dorm room, knowing that I would never come back, I took a lipstick case of my roommate’s I’d always admired. It was gold and carved like something from a museum. She must have known I’d taken it, but I didn’t care. I was owed.

  My first crime. My hands hadn’t itched that time.

  But the time after that, they tingled, urging me on until I took the thing, until I owned something that I hadn’t only a minute before. There was magic in that, power. This thing—shiny, silver, gold, pink, beaded, flowered, whatever it was. Some little pretty thing that was someone else’s. With the flick of a wrist, it became mine.

  Now, I looked Vincent over. He was extraordinarily good-looking. Maddy hadn’t evaded that question, of all the things I’d asked her.

  My thoughts drifted away and then snapped back.

  “I heard you had an alibi,” I said.

  “I heard you didn’t,” he said, his eyes flat. The fists, the heaving breath. I shouldn’t have worried about Shelly leaving me alone with a possible killer. I should have worried she’d left me alone with someone who thought I’d done it.

  “Not really,” I said. “But if Maddy told you about me, maybe you already know that I wouldn’t hurt her. At least—I wouldn’t hurt her any more than I already did.”

  “You know, that’s one thing she could never explain to me,” he said. “She talked about you. She showed me all the old pictures and stuff, told me all the old stories. But she never called. Even when I suggested we invite you up for the weekend. She wouldn’t come here, but I thought, maybe …” He closed his eyes and sighed.

  A weekend in Chicago. This was a shining mirage I’d hardly dared imagine. I swallowed hard. “What did she say?”

  When he opened his eyes, they scared me again. They were bottomless, black. Empty.

  “Never the right time,” he said. “Work or that thing we promised to do or that event we got tickets for. The opera, that show, a wine tasting, a—goddamned sailing lesson.” He scuffed the heel of his shoe against the curb. “You see what she did? She kept us so busy with events and lessons and seminars and ribbon cuttings that we never got around to getting married or coming down here for me to meet her family. This place ruled her, but she didn’t want to bring me here. What am I supposed to take from that?”

  “Maybe she was protecting you from this place.”

  Vincent turned on me. “What’s that mean?”

  I’d said it without thinking. “I’m not sure. Only—well, she came back and ended up dead. Maybe she was protecting you.”

  “You don’t think I did it, then.”

  I didn’t know. So far I hadn’t met anyone in my life I thought might be capable of murder. Maybe no one I knew was. Maybe whatever Maddy had been mixed up in had nothing to do with Vincent or me or the motel or Midway. Maybe she’d chosen the area to conduct her business—what I wouldn’t give to go back and ask her for more details—because it was a place that was already ruined. A place that was already lost to her.

  “What was she here for?” I said.

  “No clue,” he said. “You know what they’re saying, right?”

  His fists had clenched again. He radiated raw anger that anyone would say she’d had a lover in her room.

  “She told me she was here for business,” I said. “What does she do for a living?”

  He took long enough to answer that I began to wonder if her work had been scandalous or seedy in some way. Lu and I sometimes ran into people near the motel who weren’t guests, weren’t likely to be coming from the bar. Strays, we called them. They were women, mostly, often quite young-looking. But they were there on business, too, we figured. Where they came from, we had no idea.

  “Nothing,” Vincent said at last, his rage gone. “I guess that’s the honest answer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She lost her job a couple of years ago. Two or three. Oh, man, longer ago than that, I guess. She didn’t bounce back from that.”

  “She didn’t work.”

  “She wanted to take some time, maybe go back to school.”

  “Which school? To study what?”

  He looked over at my eagerness, confused. “A master’s degree in something, but she never did,” he said. “She toyed with law school a lot. She had some causes that really fired her up.” He seemed to fade away. “When she got going about things—tough stuff, like child brides, abused kids—well, you know how she was.”

  I didn’t want to argue the point, or think about where Maddy’s interest in abused kids came from. “So she finished college? The first time, I mean?”

  “Of course she did.”

  “What was her degree in? Did you ever see the diploma?”

  “No, but who keeps their diplomas lying around?” he said. The black eyes landed heavily on me. “What’s going on? What is this about?”

  If Mrs. Haggerty’s slip could be trusted, Maddy had never started college, let alone finished, but Beck had said she’d left for college early. What if, instead of arriving to college early and eager, she’d dropped out of high school and out of Midway and out of life, struck out on her own and not looked back?

  She could have talked about going back to school every day of her life and not done it, knowing that she’d have to start way back at the beginning.

  The important thing was that she hadn’t had a job. Whatever business she’d been in town to conduct couldn’t have been professional. It had to have been personal.

  Beck.

  I hated to think it, but there it was. If she’d not gone to see Gretchen and she’d only stopped by to talk to me on her way to another appointment, there was really only one person left. And only one kind of unfinished business I could think of.

  “What’s this about?” Vincent said again.

  “Truthfully, I’m not sure.” I felt sick, remembering my hand on Beck’s arm. Had I touched a murderer? Had I taken a murderer back to the scene of the crime? Had I taken pains to keep a murderer from leaving any damning evidence? “Did she mention anyone from here by name? Was she in touch with anyone?”

  “Just you,” he said.

  So many myths to dispel, I couldn’t begin. “Other than me.”

  “There were some teachers she didn’t care for. She wouldn’t say why.”

  I looked at him. Was it worth explaining that far more teachers had never cared for Maddy? “Wait,” I said. “You said Kristina. Who’s Kristina?”

  “Some friend of hers. Her name came up once in a while.”

  “From here?”

  “I assumed. I mean, yeah, because she knew her from the track team.”

  The rippled edge of that Indian
a-shaped trophy came back to me. Kristina. In the end, she’d done what Maddy never had. She’d run state and come home with a prize. But how had Maddy even known her? “She never mentioned someone named Tom? Tommy? Beck?”

  “Who’s that?” In a flash he was fired up again, spit flying and fists tight. “If he did this—”

  “If he did this, then the police can deal with it,” I said. “But you’re a much better suspect. Running around after your investments was probably not the best way to spend the day. You’re supposed to be a man in mourning.”

  “I’m a lawyer. We don’t mourn—” At this, his face started to crumple. He conquered it, composed himself. “We don’t mourn the same way as other people. Besides, it wasn’t just the ring I was after. They said her effects were here. I thought something in her pockets, or in her purse, her phone, would give me some idea how she spent her … last day.”

  I didn’t remember her carrying a purse or a phone.

  For a second, I was strangely protective of Maddy. No—of Maddy’s death. Maddy’s murder felt like something that had happened only to me. Vincent, shutting off his pain. Gretchen, her eyes lighting up at the idea of being next of kin. Lu, telling me to stay away from it all. Billy, flipping on the no-vacancy sign as though he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Maddy’s death hadn’t just happened near me, but somewhere deep in my bones. Somewhere under my feet, and now I couldn’t stand on such uneven ground.

  There was no point in keeping all the grief to myself. I was the one trying to save an eighteen-year-old girl who hadn’t been eighteen years old in a long time. If anyone had a right to this, it was Vincent. Gretchen. Even Billy, listening downstairs.

  Billy.

  Billy was the one who knew how Maddy had spent some of her last hours.

  “I’m sorry, Vincent,” I said. “I need to go. Will you hold the funeral in Chicago? Or here?”

  He stared through me. “Oh, God, I don’t think I can do this.”

  I knew I couldn’t do it, either. But I knew who could. I felt eyes watching us up and down the street, felt the nods and exchanged looks as I led Vincent to my car for a scrap of paper. I couldn’t find anything but a brochure tossed on the floor of the backseat, something I’d picked up somewhere, and tore a big corner off the back. A pen, finally, in the glove compartment. Handing the phone number over, I hesitated, then reached for Vincent’s shoulder to squeeze, the least I could do, and so was in place to catch him as he fell toward me and landed upon me. I held on, straining under his bulk and the additional weight of the things he believed about my friendship with Maddy. It didn’t seem important at the moment to clear anything up. It didn’t seem important, petty really, to point out that it looked like we all grieved the same way, after all.