Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  I reached into the depths of the ice bin and plucked out Maddy’s diamond, loose and heavy and worth more than her life. Worth far more than mine. I held it in my hand and then I closed my fist around it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The diamond in my pocket, I went back to the office and ran the towel under cool water. The bar would have ice. I felt for Yvonne’s keys, but at the door to the bar, I stopped. I could see the table where we’d had our last drink. That last chance to be with her, and I’d left it lying there. And now I had the sum of her life in my pocket. It was possible no one would ever be punished for what had happened to her. For any of it.

  And now Billy would go free, too, and, in his wake, leave the Mid-Night tainted, our jobs lost, and all those strays without anywhere to turn.

  If only the police had turned up something definitive in Billy’s room. And then I realized: Billy’s room would have its own freezer.

  Here was a last chance I couldn’t leave on the table. I grabbed the front-desk keys from the drop box at the door and slipped out the front door and through the breezeway to the courtyard.

  My hands shook as I let myself in, looking all the while over my shoulder for one of them to come after me.

  Inside, I closed the door behind me and stood in the dark, waiting for the stench of unwashed man and old pizza boxes to waft over me. But the room was just a room. I hit the lights. The room was configured differently than a guest room, with a narrow galley kitchen up front and the bed and TV hidden behind a screen. He’d removed the country cornfield prints from the wall and redecorated with a series of beer-logo mirrors and neon signs. The room smelled a little dusty and close, but not like the dumpster bin.

  I hurried, taking in as much as I could without touching anything, then throwing out the rules. I opened drawers and rifled through whatever was there, hoping I would know what I was looking for when I saw it. In the bathroom, I checked below the bottom vanity drawer—it was a good hiding space—and for any loose wallpaper. I stood on the toilet and pushed at the ceiling tiles. Nothing.

  Back in the kitchen, I tried all the drawers and cabinets, but found only canned goods and boxed pasta. The mini-fridge held only squares of orange cheese and a few cans of soda, and the tiny tray of ice in the freezer was almost empty. I scammed what ice I could from the tray and went to the sink.

  An old office phone sat on the counter. On the wall above it, a phone number had been written in pen. I filled the tray and put it back in the freezer, then returned to the counter. The phone number seemed familiar. What you’re looking for. I picked up the phone and dialed, only to hear an auto message. The number was disconnected.

  I checked the wall, the drawers again, then the cabinets above, pulling everything out. There, behind the boxed pasta, was a handwritten list of numbers, long strings of them with a single letter afterward. Some of the numbers had been crossed out, but a handful remained. The bottom number looked freshest. I hesitated using Billy’s phone, and then realized that using Billy’s phone might be the only way anyone might pick up. I dialed it.

  “Thought you were in jail,” a young woman’s voice said. “I thought we were out of business. Which room?”

  My thoughts raced. I channeled Billy’s stuttering, stringy, hillbilly voice. “One-oh-n-niner.” And then I hung up. Room one-oh-nine was the room just next to the vending machines. I had no idea what I’d just done—maybe nothing. My Billy impression was fine for fun with Lu on the walkie-talkies, but did it hold up for people awaiting his calls?

  Someone pounded on the door. “Police,” came Courtney’s tired voice. “Again.”

  I opened the door. She stood with her arms crossed.

  “How many rooms am I going to have to pull you from?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  I brandished the homemade ice pack. “Getting Vincent some ice for his arm.”

  “So romantic, getting it on in the motel where his girlfriend was murdered,” she said, batting her eyes at me. “You’re such an easy date. And an easy suspect, really, when you think about all the motive you keep giving me.”

  “Nothing happened. And anyway, it … wasn’t planned,” I said, wondering how much I was giving away. “I didn’t know he would be here.”

  “You just can’t leave this place alone,” Courtney said wearily. She looked around. “What’s the draw?”

  The Mid-Night had not drawn me. Maddy had. But I couldn’t say that. And I was not sure it would be the whole truth, no matter what I said. “Come on,” I said.

  The parking lot was empty except for Billy’s car and Loughton, steadfast in the passenger seat of the police car. “We sent your suitors along home,” Courtney said.

  “Can you get your partner to move your cruiser behind the bar for a little while?” I said. “I want to try an experiment. Call it a sting if that makes you happier.”

  She looked at me oddly but went to talk to Loughton. I shook the ice cubes from the towel and returned it to the laundry room, where piles of sheets and towels still lay tangled on the floor.

  On the way out, I left the lobby lights on and flicked the neon sign back to vacancy. The Mid-Night was open for business.

  Back outside, both Loughton and the cruiser had been tucked away. I led Courtney to the door of one-oh-nine. I battled both sets of keys out of my pockets around the money and the diamond. Courtney raised her eyebrows. “You always seem to have the key,” she said. “Have you noticed that?”

  I flipped the switches for the room’s lights, gestured Courtney past me, and closed the door. The remote was where it was supposed to be. I found a baseball game on the TV and turned it up a bit.

  “What are we doing?” She seemed as uncertain as I’d ever seen her.

  “I’m showing you the draw.” I flung my arms wide.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “No one knows where we are,” I said. “Except maybe your partner out there, no one knows and no one cares.” I turned to the window, pulled the curtains tight, and set the air-conditioning to cool. It rattled to life, knocked about, and evened out.

  She looked uneasy now. “Hiding out here didn’t work out so well for Maddy.”

  “Just listen for a second,” I said. “It only takes fifteen minutes to turn over a room, but Billy thinks it takes longer. Probably should take us longer. I mean, if you were the next person staying in the room, you’d want it to take longer.”

  “So you sit up in one of these nasty rooms and—what?—watch your soaps?”

  “Lu does, even though she won’t admit it,” I said. “I usually just sit for a while. Sometimes I keep a book in the cart to pass the time.” And sometimes I sat and stared at the framed prints of dark trees and a car driving off the landscape into the unknown, wondering what it would be like to take that trip. When hiding out in a dank motel room was your escape, your fantasies could be simple, even stupid, because none of it would ever happen.

  “What do you read?” Courtney said.

  I looked away. “It’s silly.”

  “Lots of people I know don’t read at all,” she said. “I read a little, crime, mystery. They kill off a lot of women, have you noticed? Always beautiful, never ugly. I would be scared to walk around if I was at all good-looking.”

  I stared hard at the baseball game, trying not to see Maddy’s silver face, turned ugly in death. “I got the reading list from some English courses at one of the universities,” I said. “The books come from the library.” There was something about wanting something so badly that was hard to admit, as though I were opening up my chest to show her my beating heart. As though I’d pulled out the silver running man stolen from Maddy’s room to show her what raw ambition looked like. But she’d already seen the grubby little trophies I’d hidden away. I felt at my jeans pocket for the roll of cash and the diamond I’d tucked inside it. Things were going to change. And because of that, I didn’t mind telling her how it had once been. “At least, I used to get the books from the library, until I dum
ped Shinez-All on one and couldn’t afford the fine.”

  There. Now Courtney had all she needed for whatever headline she wanted to write for my life. I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn’t and yet a fifteen-dollar library fine could cut all that determination off at the knees.

  Courtney opened her mouth to speak, but then a small knock came at the door. I held up my hand to stop her, glancing at the alarm clock next to the bed. That was pretty fast service. Faster than you could get pizza delivered, you could have what you were looking for.

  That is, if what you were looking for was a girl.

  I moved toward the door. Courtney followed, flipping the cover open on her gun. I shook my head at her.

  The knock came again, a little more insistent.

  I reached for the door and pulled.

  A little pretty girl.

  The gazelle stood at the door, ripped jeans in place, the combat boots replaced by cheap stiletto heels. Her eyes, heavily made up to cover the last of her bruise, shuttered—click—to disaffected.

  “You guys got any change for the machines?” she said.

  I was shaking, recognizing at last what I hadn’t wanted to believe. Jessica hadn’t been here to sightsee that night we’d discovered her. She was just another stray. “Cut the crap, Jessica,” I said.

  She hitched a thumb toward the vending area. “I was really hoping for a Yoo-hoo?”

  Courtney looked her up and down. “Is that trade jargon?”

  I went to the phone and dialed the number I’d called from Billy’s room. Jessica’s phone began to buzz in her pocket. She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “You Sherlocked the shit out of that one. What do you want?”

  “Not what you came to give,” I said, hanging up. “Come have a seat.”

  She hesitated, then wobbled on her heels to the bed and sat on the very corner. “Was that you on the phone?” she said. “Nice. I should have known he’d still be locked up. Who would bail him out?”

  “If you don’t want to join him there, you might want to tell Officer Howard here everything you know about this operation,” I said. “There’s an answering service that only works if you call from the motel, I know that much. They dispatch you to the room—” I waved my arm magician-like across the scene. “—we don’t need the details after your arrival, but maybe if you tell us enough, Officer Howard can find a way to look the other way when you teeter out of here in those shoes.”

  Courtney was mouthing something to me over the girl’s head. How old is she? She managed to clear the horrified expression off her face in time for Jessica to turn in her direction.

  “The rooms,” Courtney said. “The closed-off rooms as your headquarters. The dispatch system—anything you can tell me about that guy, I want to hear. I just have to—where are your parents?”

  Jessica shrugged. “My mom thinks I’m out with friends. I get a call, I go out. NBD.”

  Courtney looked at me. “No big deal,” I said, stuck on the idea of the south wing of the motel serving Billy’s sideline. Now I knew how the dirty laundry had always seemed to outpace the number of guests checked in. “It’s kind of a big deal, Jessica.” I tried to recall my pity for the girls who’d turned to Billy, of all people. “Why in the world would you do this? You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  Jessica glared at the baseball game. I leaned over and hit the power button. “The more clarity we have here tonight, the faster you get home to bed, alone.”

  “My whole life ahead of me,” she said. “Yeah. My whole, awesome life which won’t be worth living if I just let it happen. My parents,” she said with a giant eye roll at Courtney. “They don’t have any money and when they do, they spend it on themselves, OK? My mom is down at the boats every weekend, making sure we don’t have enough money for breakfast cereal. My dad is—who knows? Forget about college. If I’m going to get out of here, I need to figure it out for myself.”

  I couldn’t argue with any of that, not with Maddy’s diamond in my pocket. “Is that why you lasted three hours on the track team? You don’t have time for practice, not with all the time being a teen prostitute takes up? And wait—when Mickie said she knew someone who spent a lot of time here, it wasn’t me she was talking about, was it? Holy—she called you a whore that morning. She knows about you. How does she know?”

  Jessica scoffed. “Probably from her boyfriend,” she mumbled.

  Courtney had had enough listening. “Who is Mickie?”

  “Mickie is the star runner on the Midway track team,” I said. Jessica sniffed at the word star. “You had your chance to take her place,” I said to her.

  “I sure did,” she said, shaking her head at me. “You really have, like, no clue at all.” She sat hunched over the corner of the bed, all knees and elbows.

  Courtney jumped in. “You’re the one having sex with men old enough—”

  “Wait,” I said. Jessica’s rag-doll pose had sent me back to another hotel room, another girl. My palms began a quiet tremble. There was something I wanted more than the diamond in my pocket, more than anything else I could name. I wanted to understand. The answer was just there, on the other side of that memory. “What clue don’t I have?”

  Jessica looked between us, then shook her head. “All I’m going to say is that I wouldn’t take Mickie’s place,” she said. “Not for a million dollars and really not for some stupid trophy.”

  She tucked herself into an immovable stone.

  “You didn’t get attacked by just any man when you were here, did you?” I glanced at Courtney. “But a … customer.”

  “A john,” Courtney supplied.

  “Right,” I said. “Looks like filing a false report, right?”

  Courtney stared at me. “If she’d filed a report, Columbo.”

  A small twist of a smile played at Jessica’s lips. She’d known all along she was faster than I was.

  We couldn’t get anything more out of Jessica. Courtney took her home—not to jail, but with a set to her uniformed shoulders that made me think she was formulating a story and maybe a scolding for Jessica’s mother.

  I closed down the Mid-Night again, leaving the front-desk keys in the drop box. Then I went to retrieve my car from the construction site across the road and sat for a while, feeling the roll of tip money against my hip. From here I could watch cars turning onto the interstate, one direction Chicago, the other Louisville.

  The tiniest part of me imagined making the same choice, turning not toward home but toward the open road. The cash, in gas money, would get me pretty far.

  My job, gone. My mother, now functioning in society better than I ever had. A diamond in my pocket. There was nothing keeping me here, and yet I couldn’t make myself turn the key in the car. The diamond that should have meant a new life only felt heavy. An anchor. But I’d always felt that weight—before the diamond, before Maddy’s death, before even my father’s. I was afraid. I was a real chickenshit, to borrow from Billy. Given every chance in life to prove it, I had: afraid of being left behind, afraid of never catching up, afraid that the person I was supposed to be was someone just like this, someone just like I was.

  When my car finally choked to life, I drove to Yvonne’s house and returned her keys. “I must have grabbed them by mistake,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s weird,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I would have noticed at some point.”

  But there was something in her eyes that I recognized. I’d have to get used to it.

  I was a little lighter, but still the diamond pulled all my attention. It was my center of gravity, a black hole into which my entire life might tumble and disappear. That was the decision I’d made. The diamond over everything else.

  At home, my mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. “You should be getting ready. Are you hungry?” she said.

  I looked up. I’d heard angry, but then realized what she was asking and shook my head.

  “Are you sure? I picke
d up some cold cuts in case anyone wanted to come over after the service.”

  I stared at her. People in our house again. We were under siege.

  “You’re not going?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “I’m not quite ready for that.”

  For a crowd. For a funeral.

  “Most of her mourners are expected to go right into a party, after,” I said. “The reunion. Not sure who thought that was a great idea.”

  “Well, Gretchen won’t,” she said. “Or Vincent, Fitz, or Mike. Honestly, Juliet, you’re not the only one who lost her.” She sighed and threw the towel over her shoulder. “You didn’t even want to go to that party.”

  “I still don’t,” I said.

  “Well, you’re stuck now,” she said, nodding toward the couch where the envelope Shelly had sent home still sat, untouched. “Shelly called to make sure you didn’t forget—”

  “Six sharp,” I said, hating myself. I’d picked up some very teenager-like behavior at school these last few days.

  My mother gave me a cutting look in response. “Yes, and also your homework assignment. Shelly said not to forget. You’ll need scissors. And glue, she said. I got you some.”

  Great. A kindergarten craft project on top of everything else. Shelly had a knack for revenge.

  I flopped down on the sofa and took up the envelope. It was too light for a copy of our Tracks yearbook. I pulled out a sheaf of papers. Shelly must have already heard about my light fingers. She hadn’t sent the yearbook but instead several pages photocopied from it.

  A sticky note on the front, though, gave instructions. This was the project: to cut apart copies of the yearbook’s senior photos to create personalized nametags with each attendee’s high-school face.

  I glanced at the clock. I would never make it anywhere sharp. And for what? We’d only graduated ten years ago. How different could we look?

  On the first page, the young faces of Beckwith, then Bell easily caught my attention. Side by side for all eternity. Beck’s sideburns were too long, his hair too shaggy. The glower was just about right, though. Maddy, golden and perfect. I sifted through the pages for my own jack-o’-lantern grin and spotted Courtney, too, her hair long but her chin thrust out. A few extra pages had been copied in. Song lyrics, senior quotes, snide comments from the yearbook staff. I’d skipped them the day I’d had my hands on the book, but now I read them through, taking my time. I’d never had the chance to read it all. I found mine easily: