Little Pretty Things (28 page)

Courtney looked around the room at Loughton and the others. “Where’s the photo?”

“Inside the pillow on my bed,” I said. “There’s a cover, with a zipper.” Someone marched off to collect it.

“Grab her shoes,” she called after him. Courtney’s eyes found mine. “Were you lovers?”

“What? No. Friends.”

She shrugged. “Had to ask.”

The cop who’d gone back to the room returned and held out the photo, sealed in its own baggie. Courtney took it, spent a long, silent moment studying it. “Surprised this didn’t make
Tracks
,” she said, handing it off and waving it away.

That she knew it hadn’t caught me by surprise. “You got a yearbook?”

“You didn’t?”

“Maddy told me not to.”

“Maddy told you not to buy your own senior yearbook.” Courtney clucked her tongue. “Now I’m starting to wonder if you weren’t master and pet.”

“
Friends
,” I said.

Another officer came up the hallway with my old running shoes, a pair of scuffed high heels, a pair of boots, and some slippers. We could hear others tramping around the back of the house, then the door to the other bedroom open. Next to me, my mom stiffened.

“What does that photo mean to you? What do you see?”

How to explain my conflicted feelings, to explain that every time I looked at the photo now, it was like a prism, showing a different view of my life and everything I’d done right or wrong? One day I am forgiven. One day I am forgotten. One morning I see nothing but my triumphant smile. Another morning I see the dark pall over Maddy’s face, and I remember all over again what was taken from her, and then from me. “I was jealous of her,” I said. “In that photo, I’m happy, though. Do you see? I only remember how petty I was when our season ended short. I only remember the envy. But that photo shows that I wasn’t only jealous. I wasn’t only petty. I was other things, too. Look at everything going on around me. All that Southtown business and the jeering, people calling us terrible names, and then Coach and Fitz picking their favorite again and again, right in front of my face. Look at them—they’re already planning her celebration party, her ascension. And I’m still happy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this when I said I wanted to know everything?” Courtney said.

“Everything about her
death
,” I said. “I don’t know anything about her death that you don’t.” My hands were growing numb behind my back. “Everything I know is about her life.”

Courtney brought out her phone and thumbed at it a bit. Then she held her hand out toward the guy with the shoes. “Those,” she said, pointing at the running shoes. “Turn them over.”

We all studied the worn down treads. “That’s it? That’s what you run in?”

“I don’t run anymore,” I said.

She eyed the black canvas sneakers with white toes I wore. “Kick one of those up for me.”

My heart rose in my throat. They were matching the print mashed into the bathmat, I was sure of it, and I’d worn these shoes into the room. I turned my heel up, and we all studied that worn pattern.

I put my foot down. Courtney and I stared at each other for a long moment, then she nodded to Loughton, and he moved to take off the cuffs. I rubbed at my wrists. Courtney’s gleaming badge raised no tingle of desire in my hands whatsoever.

“The killer has better shoes than you,” she said.

Not surprised. I hung my head, waiting.

“You might not know this,” she said. “But a death like this is always about the life that preceded it.”

She sounded as though she’d found this out the hard way.

“OK,” she said. “We’re not going to arrest you—yet—on the evidence tampering. Tell me there’s nothing else back there I need to worry about.”

“No, nothing. No giant diamond ring, either, you noticed.”

“Point taken. No charges, no ticket,” she said. She seemed to notice the officer still holding my shoes. “But I have one demand.”

I braced myself.

“We go running tomorrow.”

Everyone in the room turned to look at her.

“I told you I don’t run anymore,” I said.

“Great, then maybe I can keep up. One run, tomorrow, and I’ll do what I can to keep all this tamped down.”

My mother and I both turned to look out the window. The neighbors had umbrellas.

“A misunderstanding,” Loughton said. He waved the officers from the hallway out the door. Within minutes they’d decamped the group inside and dispersed the onlookers outside. One by one, the patrol cars shut down their lights and rolled away, the last idling with Loughton in the passenger seat.

“I’ll meet you here,” Courtney said. “Six too early?”

Not for someone who might keep me from jail. I shook my head.

“Great,” she said.

I found that I couldn’t let it go. “‘A death like this’?”

“The unquiet kind,” she said. “I’ll have one of the guys bring your car back to you.” She nodded toward my mother. “Ma’am, sorry for the disruption.”

When the door closed behind Courtney, neither of us moved. Behind me, the house was in shambles. My mother had taken so many years to crawl out of her waking coma. What would this do to her? Finally I looked her way.

“Now I know,” she said, thoughtfully, “why you never invited that little bitch over.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The next morning, I waited on the front step in old, faded running pants and a baggy T-shirt I’d pulled from my dad’s dresser.

I missed the photo already, yearned for the pile of stolen trash they’d removed from my vanity. It was all gone, something I’d recently wished for. But not actually gone. It was out there, tagged with my name. Every time I thought of Courtney holding up each bag, in turn, I felt sick again. I was sick—that was the only explanation, and why Courtney’s voice had gone soft and gentle. I was sick and now everyone would know it.

When the car pulled into our drive, I sighed and stood, then realized the car wasn’t Courtney’s.

Vincent unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Good morning,” he said, crossing the yard. “You heard about the ring?”

“I was accused of taking it,” I said. I wondered how much longer I could say something like that and have people believe me.

“You didn’t, though.”

I remembered his panic at having it stowed at the bank. The bank, where jewelry appraisers could probably be called upon at a moment’s notice. Had he given her a fake diamond engagement ring to begin with? “How do you know?”

He stopped a few feet away and glanced up and down the street. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “A few weeks ago, Maddy wasn’t wearing her ring. It’s hard not to notice when it’s gone, you know? She said she was having it cleaned. When I noticed her wearing it again, it was—different. It was shiny and—too shiny. The stone. It wasn’t right. I thought it was from a good polishing, but now—now, I don’t know.”

“You think she had the stone replaced with a fake? Why would she do that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

For a moment, I caught that feeling again, that Maddy was really gone, that everything she had been would never be reconciled with the girl I’d known. Or thought I’d known. None of it would ever match up. All that was left of her were her trophies. Trophies and questions.

“If she replaced the diamond, where is it?” I said.

“Or the money from selling it.” Vincent’s eyes had gone glassy and far away. “God, didn’t she know that I would have given her anything she needed or wanted? No questions.”

“Is there unexplained extra money in her bank account? Stocks?” I didn’t know how any of this worked. My bank account was flat, but I supposed rich people had more than a passbook savings that scraped bottom every month.

“She didn’t have any extra, ever,” he said. “She didn’t work, remember?”

“Wait, no money at all?”

“I supported us,” he said. “Our apartment, the bills, whatever she wanted for clothes and entertainment. My finance guy takes care of it all.”

I couldn’t imagine how such a thing worked. “So how did she go to the grocery or go shopping? You gave her an allowance?”

He gave me a sharp look. “She wanted for nothing, I promise you.”

“But it was all yours,” I said. “Oh, God. She was a trophy.”

“What? She was not—she was never a trophy.”

I stood back and glared. “Don’t you see? She would have hated that. She needed something of her own.”

“Maddy had plenty of her own. Her charities, her good works, her—” His shoulders dropped. “I never meant to . . . it never was supposed to be that way. She wanted to go to law school. She wanted to work for reproductive rights and for abused girls. She wanted to prosecute rapists. These news stories—last year there was a little girl abducted and drowned in the Chicago River—” He made a terrible sound in his throat. “Any one of those stories could set her off. She had such . . . fire.”

His face was lit up with her memory. I looked away. My hands had begun to itch, and I was afraid of what it was they wanted me to steal. There was nothing of Maddy’s that I hadn’t wanted for my own.

But I didn’t envy what her life had become. That ring, sure, that coat. But the fire, as Vincent called it. I didn’t envy that, and he had no idea where the spark had come from.

A car door slammed. Courtney approached, strangely feminine in form-fitting running pants and a windbreaker. She had good shoes—better shoes than I’d ever had.

She wore a prim little pack at her hip.

“You don’t have a gun in there, do you?” I said.

“Funny.” She narrowed her eyes at Vincent. “You’re not ready to run,” she said.

“What?” he said, visibly startled, and eyeing the pack that did or didn’t have a gun in it. “Oh. No, I don’t run. That was Maddy’s . . . I—I’ll just talk to you later, Juliet.”

Courtney and I watched him to his car.

“You sure can chase a guy off,” I said.

“Girl’s got to have a hobby,” she said, shrugging. She gave me a long, empty moment to fill with what I’d been talking to Vincent about, and when I didn’t jump to fill it, she did. “Well, then. Here’s the deal: Let’s forget about Maddy’s death for a little while, OK? I want to hear about her life, as you put it. I wouldn’t mind feeling like a god before we’re done, here, either.”

We started off slow down the block. The first strides were stiff, filled with little aches and pains. My knees. My ankles. My thighs chimed in with complaints from the sprints I’d done with the classes the day before. I looked over at Courtney, whose gait was short and bouncing. Her breath was shallow. I slowed down a bit. “Don’t forget to breathe,” I said. “Deep, slow. Stretch out and let the pace choose you.”

“Pretty sure the pace that would choose me is back on my couch,” she said.

“This was your idea, not mine.”

“Tell me about her,” she said.

“You have to breathe, or I’m not talking to you.”

I waited her out, and at last she found the right posture, the right kick, the right landing. She glanced at me, appraisingly, the same way Jessica had the day I’d helped her find more breath, more distance, more speed.

The girls would be assembling in the gym in a few hours, and I wouldn’t be there. I wondered if Fitz had made it back from whatever ailed him, or if they’d had to call in someone else more long term. Someone to try and find the source of Jessica’s attitude or Delia’s secrets. Girls. I had never understood them, and having been one had never helped.

“I can tell you about her then, or I can tell you all the ways she’s confused me since,” I said.

“Start from the beginning.”

There was no beginning. We’d been friends for so long, I couldn’t remember the first time we’d met. But I tried: the year she showed up in junior high with a dead mother, a hated stepmother, an arrogance, and the best collection of lip gloss any of us had ever seen. The day we both stayed after school to see what the cross-country team was about. Seasons of meets, the giggling on the bus, the first time in our sophomore year when we’d beaten all the seniors on the track team and they’d shaving-creamed our lockers to full capacity. The overnights at my house. I left out the overnight at her house, the vomit-green sweater. When I got to senior year, I jumped around, skipping the problems with Beck and the trip we’d made to the stadium and the clinic just behind it.

When I got to the story of the state meet, Courtney stopped and leaned on her knees, gasping. “I thought you didn’t run anymore,” she gulped. “You’re killing me.”

I looked up. We’d come as far as the park. “We can rest for a few minutes,” I said.

Courtney staggered to a nearby bench and sprawled across it. “Tell me about that morning at the state tournament, and slow down for once in your life. Tell me the details.”

The truth of that morning lay heavy in my gut. I wanted to tell someone. I needed to. No one else knew how much Maddy had survived, only to be cut down. It wasn’t fair to her. It wasn’t fair to me. I didn’t want to carry it around anymore.

I started with waking up to find her gone.

“Where was she?”

“Let me tell it, Courtney.”

The assumption that she’d gone to warm up, to stretch. Normal. Coach at our door, looking to gather us all up for breakfast, even though neither of us would have eaten much. And then, with her return, the dawning realization that things weren’t normal. Maddy changing in the bathroom, then sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, clutching herself. I saw her now so much more clearly: a little girl, skinny arms, legs scrawny in running shorts. A little girl hunched around her secret and her pain. A little girl holding on to my hand, not letting go. She must have been so scared.

I turned deeper into the park and took a shaking breath. She must have felt so alone.

Courtney sat up. “Wait. What?”

I hadn’t gained control over my voice yet.

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” She hopped up and started pacing. “Do you even know what you’re saying?”

She’d called me smart not a week ago, but now I wasn’t bright enough to understand my own story.

“You tell me,” I said.

She paced, then took to the bench, hopping up on the back and tapping her feet on the seat. “That boyfriend—”