Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  Above, Teeny murmured to herself. The girls, the girls.

  The girls. Like the girl who’d dropped out of school instead of finishing, who’d disappeared into plain sight, disappeared so well that people thought she had died. She was a ghost now, but she’d been a star, Coach and Fitz’s first success.

  Their first love.

  “Teeny,” I said. The people nearest me jumped in surprise. “Do you want me to help you pick up your beads? I can fix this for you.”

  I waved to everyone around me and knelt to pick up the beads at my feet. The others began to join in, uncertainly at first, then with the gusto of a scavenger hunt. Even Shelly dipped to retrieve a bead and appraise it.

  Above us, Teeny shifted her weight to watch us.

  “Come on down,” I said. “Courtney, maybe you could help her.”

  Courtney inched out toward Teeny and offered her a hand. Teeny accepted the help, stepping down with care. She looked like royalty, except for her bare toes gripping the steps.

  Fitz rushed to meet her. He glanced uneasily in my direction, not quite meeting my eyes. “That was impressive. Not everyone is so good with her.”

  “Are you her caregiver?”

  “No,” he said, watching the duo approaching. “Nothing like that. She was on the team. A good kid, and someone had to—I took an interest, I guess. Thought I had a plan to get her out of that place she’s in now, into a new, nicer facility, someplace with better security, but—I just check in once in a while, that’s all, lift her spirits if I can.”

  “Meet her in the park, that sort of thing,” I said.

  I didn’t need a confirmation and didn’t receive one.

  “Why did you bring her, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, leaning in to speak quietly. “I never would have brought her here—that Vincent arranged it. Said she and Maddy were friends. They never—How could that be? Anyway, Vincent doesn’t understand how delicate she is.” He let Courtney hand Teeny down to him, and then escorted her into the crowd where people were scooping pearls into her open hands. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her, as happy as I’d seen anyone in years.

  Courtney stood at my elbow. “Well, does Shelly know how to throw a party, or what?”

  I searched the crowd for Coach, but he was gone. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think you might have something to tell me,” she said. “About a certain shiny object, probably missing from a certain best friend’s room?”

  Over Courtney’s shoulder, through the broad, rotating door of the hotel, police lights rolled.

  “I took it when I went to Gretchen’s house the first day,” I said. “Someone else broke in, but they might have been looking for what I had already stolen.”

  Courtney’s lips twisted into doubt. “We’re still talking about that trophy runner, right? OK, explain it to me. Why does everyone want it? Is it platinum? Is it the Maltese falcon? I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a guy,” I said. “It’s not from one of Maddy’s trophies. Don’t you see? She’s the one who stole it first. It’s from an award Coach Trenton received our senior year. We didn’t get to run our top race, but he did, in a way. He won that award on her back—” I looked away. “Very literally, actually.”

  Courtney sucked in a breath. “That guy? Are you saying—he’s the dad? Oh, my God, he’s the dad,” she said, then looked around and pulled me farther from our classmates. “And then he took her to get—taken care of? I haven’t been able to find the place, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t here ten years ago. Oh, wow, this is gross. I mean, maybe not as gross as what we thought before—”

  “Courtney, he killed her.”

  She froze. After a long moment, she surveyed the room, eyes once again keen. “To keep her quiet? But why, after all these years?”

  “I think it had something to do with … the girls,” I said, unable to get Teeny’s reedy refrain out of my head. “She wanted to get him out of there, to get him away from the girls on his team now. From Mickie, from—the next girl and the next.”

  “Mickie’s the, uh, young lady from the hotel room?”

  “No, Mickie’s the star.” I waved my arm toward the staircase. “And she’s cracking up, right on schedule. Teeny was his star, then Maddy, now Mickie, don’t you see?”

  We stared at each other.

  “I’m sorry to say I do. I finally do.” She reached for her phone and, checking the room again, thumbed madly at the screen. “I thought all that stuff in yearbook was … well, I didn’t think it was true.”

  “Did you write it?”

  “Some of it, but not all, I swear. Shelly used to stop by, give us funny things to write—but it was a joke. I never thought—I thought it was just kid stuff, you know?”

  I thought darkly of Shelly’s gossip trade at the bank. If I ever got any money at all, I’d move accounts somewhere else. “Some of us weren’t given the choice to think it was kid stuff.” I was thinking of what Maddy must have felt when she saw those comments, the photo of her with Coach’s hand on her shoulder, forever. It made sense now, how forbidden the book became.

  “I’m sorry,” Courtney said. “For then, and for now. Are you OK?”

  I folded my arms around myself. “I guess so. No.”

  “I take it he was some kind of father figure to you—”

  “I had a father,” I said. “A great one.”

  “Good thing, I’d say,” she said, raising her phone to her ear. “Or he might have found you more attractive than he did.”

  She wheeled and was off. I stood, dismissed, shaking with what she’d said, because I could see the process now, his new crop of girls every spring, his recruits. All the little pretty things dropped in his path, and all he had to do was pluck up what he wanted. Was that the only difference between my life and Maddy’s death? A man had already fenced a protective barrier around me?

  Shelly and the hotel staff urged the crowd out of the lobby and into the room for the reunion. The party must go on. Meanwhile, the revolving door up front was halted and collapsed to let a significant number of party crashers—the police, led by Courtney, with her gun suddenly strapped against the hip of her dress. Classmates rushed away from me into the safety of the party as the stream of police flooded around me and into the depths of the lobby, up the stairs, to the elevator, and beyond.

  Courtney looked back from the stairs. “Juliet,” she said. “Get yourself someplace safe. I’m sick of funerals.”

  I nodded, and then I was left alone in the vast lobby of the Luxe, trembling and cold. A breeze blew through the rigged revolving door, and on it, the sound of more sirens rising. Safe place? I felt as lost as I’d ever been, thinking only of home, and my mother. Now I knew how someone could burrow deep into a place and stay hidden. Was there such a thing as a safe place? A place where you were always welcome, where the lights were always on?

  Lu. I was flooded by my need to be near her, to comfort and be comforted, to protect and be protected. To have a friend, to be a friend. I thought I knew, at last, how. I turned and raced up the stairs. Halfway up, I stopped and pulled off my shoes and carried them, to get to her faster.

  The cart wasn’t where it had been earlier. I stalked the hallway first in one direction and then the other, tripping over a dirty room-service tray left outside a room. Spoons and cups scattered, rattling. The halls were narrower than I remembered, and more complicated. I tried every turn I came to, losing track of where I’d come in along the quiet, plush halls. I passed a set of elevators, then another set, and stopped to decide if I was going in circles. At last I came to a service door and tried the handle. Locked. “Lu,” I yelled, pounding the door. “Lu!”

  Down the hall, a door cracked open. “Keep it down out there,” said a woman’s muffled voice.

  I tried another hall, coming upon the same room-service tray. Or another one. I looked around. No, the same one but the spoons had been kicked toward the tray.r />
  “Lu?” I said. Lu wouldn’t have kicked the spoons. She would have picked them up. I turned and headed back in the direction I thought I’d started, but now I was really turned around. The hallways stretched long ahead of me, the deep carpet stilling all noise, all hints that anyone else might be in the entire building.

  I felt chilled, in a different way than I had downstairs. The next elevator I found, I’d take to the lobby and get Beck to drive me home.

  Now the halls seemed purposefully long and empty, bloated excess in every detail. I missed the neat symmetry and simplicity of the Mid-Night.

  Finally, up a stretch of hallway, I saw light coming through an open door and headed for it.

  The cart had been rolled into the room, propping the door open. I squeezed past it. “Lu?” The room was empty of Lu, of guests, of suitcases. I checked the parameters: remote control on the bedside table, water glasses covered with paper doilies and set on a tray. The room had been turned over already, but she’d be back for the cart. The walkie-talkie hung from the side. How much trouble would she get in if I called for her through the system?

  I had reached over and grabbed the radio when Coach entered the doorway. We both startled a bit, then he relaxed.

  “Juliet, thank goodness it’s you,” he said, pushing the cart farther into the room.

  The door closed behind him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Juliet,” he said. “I didn’t kill her.”

  I pushed down the button on the walkie-talkie on the cart and held it. “Who killed Maddy, then, if not you?” My voice sounded thin and quaking to my own ears.

  “How should I know?” He paced back and forth in front of the cart, nervously rubbing the Coach of the Year medallion between two fingers like a miser with a gold coin. “I thought they were circling on some guy who beat up a girl there or something.”

  “That was unrelated,” I said. But not really, was it? It was all related. How Coach treated girls—like bon-bons at a party for one—was only a single thread in the fabric of this world in which teen girls were sneaked in and out of the Mid-Night and probably a thousand other places. As long as there were men ordering them as room service. I remembered the song the girls on the team had been listening to, singing along with. As long as we all played along, as long as no one questioned. “I think you know perfectly well who killed her.”

  “You think I did?” The look on his face was honest hurt. “I loved that girl, just as I’ve always loved you.”

  “Not exactly the same way, probably,” I said.

  Some other emotion flickered over his features. “Ah, OK,” he said, looking around the room. “You never thought of yourself as highly as Fitz and I did—”

  “Stop it—this isn’t about some stupid race,” I said. “It’s not about running or winning or losing. What you did to her—I will never forgive you, and I will make sure you never touch another girl in your life. With the right jury, maybe your life will be short.”

  He gave me a look of such disgust that I nearly stepped back. My thumb relaxed on the walkie-talkie. I couldn’t keep up eye contact. He edged around the cart slowly. I cowered against it, blocked, and then he was behind me, his breath warm against my neck. I stared into the cart, its contents calming me. Such order. The fresh rolls of toilet paper stacked in a column, the bright-yellow can of Shinez-All ready to take on smears and smells. I concentrated on the smiling cartoon woman on the can.

  Coach stood so close I could feel the heat of him. When he pressed against me, the crush I’d harbored came back to me in waves of shame. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. The door was closed and so far away. I held fiercely to the radio, hunching over the cart to hide it. “If you think I killed her,” he said, “what’s stopping me from killing you?”

  The floor of my fears dropped away. My mind, blank. Except: My mother. My father. Lu. Beck.

  Coach backed off. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “What is it going to take to make you believe me?”

  I swallowed hard. “And what about those girls? Did you do that? Teeny, Maddy, Mickie. Who knows how many girls at all those places you coached before—”

  His hands were around my throat in an instant, so fast and so hard that I didn’t have time to take a breath. His fingertips met over my windpipe, squeezing until I heard a terrible sound. I dropped the radio and clawed at his hands, then grasped madly for anything. The Mid-Night, the moment Maddy walked in, the appraising look of the young runner finding her zone, all of it rushing at me, through me. The room began to darken, shimmer. The elevator doors I’d been searching for opened, bright inside. I reached—

  Static from the walkie-talkie. “Miss? Which room are you in?”

  “What the—?” Coach said. His grip loosened. My hand held the can of Shinez-All.

  I raised the can over my shoulder and sprayed into his face.

  Coach screamed and dropped away from me. The mist caught me, too, eyes, lungs. My throat was on fire, inside and out, and I couldn’t see. I leapt away, felt my way around the cart, and to the door, out. My eyes streamed with chemicals and tears. The dark hall, darker yet, and hazy.

  I ran.

  The halls stretched longer than ever. Corners jumped into place for me to run into them. There were people in the hall now, dark blobs rising out of nothingness. Brought out by the scream, and chattering at me, each other, to call the cops, the cops were already here, do you need help. I pushed through them, around them, through a clattering room-service tray down one hall and around another corner.

  “Hey, buddy,” said a man’s voice behind me. “Leave the girl alone—hey!”

  Now I heard under my own booming heartbeat the controlled breath and footfalls of someone coming along behind me. Catching up.

  “You’re not as fast as you used to be,” Coach called.

  He closed in, but I could see a little better now and used that to complicate the path. Under my own breath and his, I began to make out the low and heavenly sound of a wide-open space, of voices. I concentrated on that, bouncing off turns and corners with both hands.

  I reached the mezzanine just as fingers ripped through my hair and took hold. But our momentum was too great. We entered the high stage of the mezzanine entangled and still moving toward the rail, the stairs. A cry went up below us, but I still couldn’t see much except now everything was bright and glaring. I heard something hit the floor, then the marble under my feet was wet and slick, propelling us faster toward the rail and then the nothing beyond.

  We hit the railing, hard. For a moment we both teetered at an odd angle against the curved steel.

  Voices below cried for help, footsteps on the staircase.

  Something cold touched my face. The medal. His Coach of the Year medal, still dangling from his neck, touching my face obscenely. Sexualized, he’d said. But he was the one who’d sexualized her. The injustice of this, of that swipe on the wall of a room where she’d struggled for her life—I couldn’t stand it.

  A wave of black rage welled up within me, and I pushed him, the medallion, everything away.

  His arms flew up, and then he was falling backward, reeling on the top step of the staircase, his heels loose and then everything loose and over the railing.

  He screamed, but then the medallion around his neck snagged in a bit of filigree, the sturdy ribbon catching just under his jaw.

  His head snapped back. The scream cut in half. And then the ribbon gave out, and his body fell to the lobby marble.

  Horrified cries rose from below.

  I let myself slide to my knees on the wet floor, my fingers laced in the whorls of the railing. All around me, water pooled. It ran off the mezzanine in rivulets, a waterfall.

  There was screaming and shouting, voices barking orders. I heard everything and nothing.

  At last a hazy figure approached. She holstered her gun and crouched next to me. “We heard it all over the radio,” Courtney said. “Smart. And really dumb. What happened in there?”
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  The trace of him was still all over me, and the Shinez-All coated my skin, my hair. I clung to the railing, water seeping into my dress.

  “Cleaning product I swear by.” My voice was tight and wheezing. “Cleans up nasty stuff. I got some in my eyes.”

  She gently pried my hands from the railing and helped me to my feet. “You got that stuff in your eyes? Is everything a blur?” she said. “Oh, wait. I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth.”

  “Things are less blurry than they used to be,” I said.

  That was true literally, too. My eyesight was indeed coming back. Now I could see the overturned mop bucket nearby. In the dim hall opening at the back of the mezzanine, someone watched from the shadows, the mop still in her hand. I mouthed a “thank you” in her direction.

  “Are you hurt?” Courtney said. “Couple of those dance moves looked like they might have knocked the wind out of you.” We maneuvered toward the top of the stairs. At the bottom stood an indistinct figure I thought might be Beck.

  “Wait, before we go down.” I unzipped my purse and pulled out the baggie with the diamond. “I found it in the motel the other night. In the ice machine.”

  “In the—you know I’m going to want to know more about this, right?” She held the bag to the light. “Holy carat size.”

  “I’ll tell you as much as I know.” What I still didn’t understand was why Maddy had brought the diamond all the way to Midway—and then had hidden it in a place it was unlikely to be found, at least for a while. The imagined scene made me ache for her. She must have known someone else would come looking, that she wouldn’t be the one. How brave did you have to be to go through with something you didn’t think you would survive?

  Like, tomorrow, the next day, and the next.

  Courtney escorted me down the stairs as gently as she had Teeny, and at the bottom, Beck took over, turning me away from where Coach lay. “Don’t look,” he said.

  Outside, Fitz stood watching an ambulance pull away from the hotel. When he saw me, his face crumpled. He came to me and pulled me into his arms, tight. His best friend was gone, now, too.