Little Pretty Things (35 page)

“Honestly?” he said. “I don’t know anymore. It was years ago and I don’t know if I ever—”

“Yeah.”

He glanced at me and quickly back to the road. “Did the Olympic torch burn brightly in your soul, then? Is that what
you
wanted?”

It was so long ago. I tried to remember what I’d actually wanted back then. All I could come up with was that sweaty hug from my dad at the end of every race, of the silly games and songs on the bus on the way back to school. Of Maddy racing the Coach of the Year trophy toward the front of the bus, laughing. “I think I wanted to be part of something,” I said. “And I was.”

We rode into the city’s edges in silence.

“She did that for me, too,” he said at last, so quietly I thought he might not want me to hear it. “People expect something of me, still, because I was with her, did you know that? She created me. Without her, I wouldn’t have existed. I didn’t mind so much then. Well, I didn’t get it, did I? I was just a kid. Now I wonder what I might have been, if she’d just left me alone. I think you might be the only one who—who understands what I mean. Without thinking I’m a monster for saying it.”

I didn’t think him a monster, but it disappointed me for some reason. Maybe because he was just a guy who still didn’t understand the full scope of what we were bumping up against—Maddy’s past, but also Jessica being taken home in a police car, and all the girls Billy had pressed into service. The girls at the school, preening and hating each other. Mickie was on my mind. What had that sad, erratic girl with the swagger of a woman twice her age been through already? Who among us had become what we might have been? Who had been giving out the chances, and who had been yanking them away?

As we neared downtown Indianapolis, I caught just the barest glimpse of the university stadium where our state finals had run on without us, lit up for someone else’s activity. Beck took the long way to the Luxe, spinning a full turn around the circle monument at the center of the city before arriving at the hotel. We had barely paused in the curved drive before a valet was tugging at my door. I hopped out on bare feet and reached back for my heels and purse.

A clutch of onlookers waiting for their car watched as I slipped into my shoes. A woman among them stared in horror at the streak of dried blood down my shin. I grinned at her. Beck, having finally let the parking guy claim his keys, came around the truck hood, tucking his shirt into the back of his pants. His black boots were dusty. We made a pair, exactly like two kids from Midway High would look walking into a place they didn’t belong and didn’t want to be. I swept my hair over my shoulders, for a wild moment considered taking Beck’s arm.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

We turned toward the wide, golden revolving door, turning on its own at the pace suitable for ball gowns and prim old ladies. I entered, then Beck jostled in behind me, close, and then too close, stepping on the back of my heel. “Sorry,” he mumbled into my hair.

Inside, the hotel shined as brightly as my memories: the tall, winding stairs to the protruding mezzanine above, the pearl marble floors streaked with silver below. Feasting my eyes all around, I paused at the ornate filigree of the banister spindles on the mezzanine then looked away, but not soon enough.

My child’s mind had stored the opulence, the sparkle. Now I saw the decorative detail—all the elaborate and sumptuous features—as things that would need to be cleaned.

A lot of Shinez-All and old toothbrushes had gone into this place.

But the ghosts lived here, too. We had run up that curved staircase and across the slick marble mezzanine to gaze over the glowing lobby below, giggling and daring the coaches to correct us.

“Look at the bald spot on the back of Trenton’s head,” Maddy had said behind her hand. She’d taken to calling him by his last name, a habit I’d assumed she’d picked up from Beck or his rough friends. “From up here, you can see it shine like the moon. Like the moooooon,” she crowed out so that everyone looked our way—other runners, other coaches, some snooty people huffy and put out that they’d booked a nice hotel only to find it overrun by participants in the high-school track meet going on down the street. Fitz guided Coach back to the business of getting us checked in and away from any scolding or correcting. Coach liked Maddy to be the silvered girl on the top of the trophy at all times: fast, stoic, gleaming, a prize. He didn’t like her fooling around, especially on stairs. She could get hurt and then where would we be?

“Where’d you go?”

I looked away from the staircase, surprised to find Beck, his sideburns short, instead of a ten-years-gone coach hovering, concerned. “This is where we stayed,” I said. He had never been on the bus. “For state.”

“I waited in the stands all day for that race,” he said, and I might have felt a little sorry that no one had tried to reach him the way they had my parents, except at that moment I caught someone watching us from a doorway on the mezzanine. She turned and fled but I’d already seen her.

Lu—in a Luxe housekeeper’s uniform.

“Excuse me for a second,” I said, and all the ghosts—former best friend, more recent former best friend—led me up the stairs.

CHAPTER THIRTY

From the mezzanine, I stopped and pondered the lobby below. The Luxe was such a gorgeous hotel, so little of it reminded me of the Mid-Night. But that was where my mind went, looking out over the open expanse, as Maddy had done. I had never been afraid of heights, but now I shivered and pulled back from the railing. Then Shelly was racing across the lobby below toward Beck, and to avoid her I dropped farther back and down the dim hall after Lu.

Lu would be easy to find. The hallways were wide and clear, except for the hulking cleaner’s cart parked outside a room down at the end of the hall. I trailed my fingers along the wallpaper. Even the walls at the Luxe felt lush to the touch.

At the cart, I took a quick assessment. Shinez-All, of course, in its big yellow can. There was a talkie unit hanging unobtrusively on one side. Inside, Lu, her back to me, wrestled a pillow into its case. She wore another radio at her waist. I reached over and pressed the button on the radio in the cart. “Come in, Lu,” I said. “Over.”

She turned, the pillow pressed to her chest by her chin. “Roger,” she said. “They don’t use all the over-and-outs here.” The pillow wouldn’t be contained by the case. She let it drop from her chin and held it helplessly. “I miss it.”

I crossed the threshold, slow, as though I were easing up on a wild animal. I took the pillow from her—down-filled, only the best at the Luxe—and rammed it into the case one corner at a time, then tossed it in the air to fluff it, caught it, and held it out to Lu. She placed it into the array of pillows waiting on the bed and chopped it, karate-style, with the side of her hand.

“Nice,” I said. “You’re picking up some luxury skills here. How do they deal with the fleur de whatever up in the railings? That’s gotta be a bitch.”

“Feather duster,” Lu said, sneering. “That’s what I had to do my first day, all day, all over the whole building. I think to make sure I wouldn’t quit so easy. But they give health insurance, Juliet, and the uniform fits. We had to buy another car for me to get here, but—” She shrugged, trying not to look as happy as she sounded. “I didn’t think the Mid-Night would ever reopen.”

“It wouldn’t be the same, if it did,” I said.

“What are you going to do? I could talk to someone here, if you want.”

I didn’t want to say what I thought of that idea. “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

She knew what I meant. “So . . . you haven’t been getting into trouble, right? With the . . . killing? Carlos thinks—”

“What?”

She sighed. “He thinks that girl who got beat up there is a liar—”

“She is,” I said.

“He also thinks if they can’t pin your friend’s death on that black man, they’ll never pin it on anyone.”

Vincent. I tried not to think about the feel of Vincent’s lips against my neck. Just more theft. “I think it might have been a white guy, actually,” I said.

“You know who? But how—”

“I don’t know anything,” I said. I didn’t know. And I didn’t have any way of knowing. Carlos was probably right, in a way. No one in Midway cared enough to solve it. Vincent would go back to the city and grieve. And no one else in the world loved Maddy enough to push for a solution. Except me. I did. And it wasn’t just Maddy I loved. I loved Midway. I didn’t want this sort of thing to happen in my town, and for everyone to look away. “I should get downstairs. Shelly Anderson has probably put out a missing-person’s alert on me already.”

“That one is so bossy,” Lu said. “She made the catering manager cry.”

“Just the one time?”

We smiled at each other, Lu raising her hand to hide her crooked teeth.

“Lu,” I said, and then realized I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Clearly I wasn’t one for speeches. “I hope—uh, I just hope this all works out for you. You shouldn’t have it this hard.”

She slapped at my arm with light fingers. “You’re getting so mushy and grown-up.”

“Well, you at least deserve a workplace where the hangings can be kept to a minimum,” I said.

She crossed her fingers and held them up, grinning.

The walkie-talkie at her waist hissed and crackled. “Luisa,” said a curt male voice. “Tonight’s event
liaison
is looking for an errant guest. Seen anyone up there in the rooms who shouldn’t be?”

The word
liaison
sounded like a swear. We looked at each other, trying not to laugh. Lu shooed me to the door and brought the radio to her mouth. “Roger that,” she said. “Sending her down now.”

I was out the door before I heard the voice answer. “Did you just call me
roger
? Do we work for NASA, Luisa? Are we in ’
Nam
?” Lu’s laugh followed me down the hall.

My descent of the mezzanine stairs felt dramatic. I took each slick marble step slowly, clutching the railing and gazing out at the lobby for anyone I knew.

Shelly waited for me at the front desk, red-cheeked and furious. The proper young man over her shoulder shot me a sympathetic look. “Where have you been?” she said, looking me up and down. She sneered at the blood on my leg but didn’t ask. “The service is starting any minute, and the setup for the reunion is in a shambles. Where are the nametags?”

But by the look she gave me, I didn’t need to answer.

“Two responsibilities, Juliet,” she said.

I couldn’t remember the second one, and must have looked stricken.

“Being on time,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That was the other thing you couldn’t manage. Let’s get this over with.”

She grabbed my elbow and directed me through the lobby to a side room with its door propped open. From the noise, Maddy’s service had rustled up a crowd, after all. It sounded like the Mid-Night, the bar, inside.

Once I’d been thrust through the doorway, I realized that was precisely what it was: Yvonne, Gretchen, a few of the regulars who’d been around the night she’d come by, like Mack, his slicked-back hair strange without his red hat. And then a few of the regulars who’d come in the night after, onlookers and gossip hounds, hoping to see something worth the drive and the trouble of putting on their best clothes. I spotted some of the teachers from Midway High, but not the coaches. Courtney nodded at me from across the room. She was clutching a squat glass of brown liquid and talking to a few people I should have recognized but didn’t, classmates from Midway who had come early to pay a few respects or have first shot at the open bar.

Shelly still had my arm. She grasped tighter and propelled me through the room, past a set of folding chairs, all of them filled, past everyone, including someone who reached out and missed making a gesture of support or empathy. I couldn’t be sure, moving as fast as we were, who it had been.

And then we stood in the front of the room, facing the group.

Shelly pushed me into position and retreated back through the chairs, and the room turned to me, hushing to silence. I spotted Beck in the back of the room, then Fitz. His large frame nearly surrounded a small-boned woman in a necklace of big, plastic pearls.

I was stuck. Not just for the words to begin, but for a single thought beyond the fact that Fitz had brought a date to a memorial service. Was she the real reason why he’d been missing all week, calling in, not doing his regular duty for Coach and the team? It was all the first blush of love?

I searched the room, seeing Coach, finally. He was wearing his Coach of the Year medal on its bright-blue ribbon around his neck.

I imagined what he’d told himself before he’d donned it today: that it was for Maddy, that it honored her memory. He’d probably considered a grand gesture, like placing it in the casket. Or upon her beautiful corpse.

Maddy’s silver skin came back to me, and I shuddered. The crowd murmured.

“Maddy was—” I began.

But now I was preoccupied with the Coach of the Year medallion. I remembered Maddy galloping the Coach of the Year trophy up the bus aisle, all of us cheering, the silver runner sprinting toward its new owner. “Why isn’t it a girl on the trophy?” rose one of the girls’ voices from memory. “That’s who’s doing all the running.”