Little Pretty Things (38 page)

I didn’t bring up the other girls. Things would be out in the open soon enough.

Beck directed me to his truck and helped me into the high seat. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the ER? You hit that railing pretty hard. And your neck—”

“I’ll live,” I said. As he closed the door and jogged around the truck’s hood to join me, I knew it was true. I would, finally.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I went to the ER anyway, because once my mother saw the finger marks on my neck and the bruise covering my entire right side—you could almost see the filigree imprint—she forced me into Mrs. Schneider’s Camry and drove us there, hunched over the wheel.

“If I lost you—” she started.

“I know, Mom,” I croaked, wincing as she took a turn too short. She hadn’t driven in ten years, but I enjoyed how much she wanted to take care of me.

Much caretaking went into the next few days as I lay in my childhood bed. Vincent stopped by with flowers and awkward silences. “What will you do with her ashes?” I asked.

He hadn’t thought it out. “Not sure yet,” he said. “Not here.”

We agreed on that. Maddy had done enough time here, though I’d stopped thinking of Midway as the problem. “Please don’t keep her in that urn on some shelf,” I said. I was supposed to be saving my voice, but I had to get this out. “She wouldn’t want to be kept in a winner’s cup.”

Vincent closed his eyes. “Oh no,” he moaned. “I never thought of that.”

“And the diamond,” I whispered. “You’ll do something with it?”

“I want to do whatever it was Maddy wanted to do,” he said. “I just wish I knew what it was.”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But if you think about that fire she had, you’ll think of something.”

The girls from the Midway track team brought by grocery-store daisies. “You should be our new coach,” Jessica said. Mickie shot her a look but didn’t disagree. “You might want to move out of your mom’s house first, though,” Mickie said, sneering at the wallpaper. She was going to graduate, on time, and was entertaining invitations to run at several schools clamoring over one another to sweeten the deal. Jessica listened to this story without saying anything for a long time.

“I couldn’t figure out,” she finally said to me, “why you talked that guy up to me.”

“He was a good coach,” I said. “That was my experience.”

“He was a lot of other stuff, too,” Jessica said, eyeing Mickie.

Mickie threw her chin out. “Who here isn’t a lot of other stuff than what they seem, huh?”

Jessica flashed her a sly smile. They were keeping each other’s secrets. “And what about the other one, always fluttering around being helpful and asking if you need anything. It’s gross.”

“Don’t you just hate helpful people?” I said.

“Helpfully pushing me toward a pedophile,” she said. The irony of Jessica saying this was lost on everyone but Mickie and me. We shared an embarrassed glance. I had to give her credit, though. She’d sized up the situation on her first day on the team, while I walked around in my own world, letting everything around me stay a blur. “I don’t need anyone always fussing around me, you know?” Jessica said. “I’m just there to run.”

She had rejoined the team, it seemed. She had time to fill and needed a different way to pay for her escape from Midway.

Lu came by as much as she could, sometimes late, after her kids were in bed. She’d lie next to me and tell me about the terrible things the rich people at the Luxe left behind for her to clean. “I’ve never seen such filth,” she said. “It makes me wish the Mid-Night would open.” We didn’t think it would. The owners were talking renovations now that Billy was likely to be convicted, but it seemed like an empty promise. Lu and I imagined the building going to seed, the whorls of the balcony rail collecting spiders’ webs and birds’ nests until someday, far in the future, all of it would be bulldozed. These stories allowed me to drift off to sleep, Lu gone to her early-morning shifts.

Beck brought me a few books to pass the time, then stayed a while. When he caught himself calling me by my last name, teammate style, he corrected himself. I settled on Tom, to make sure I didn’t call him what Maddy had.

“She wasn’t cheating on me, then,” he said one day. “She was . . . that poor kid.” And that seemed to tuck her nicely into the past.

When I gained enough strength, I deconstructed my room, tearing down the wallpaper and piling the trophies into a box. Second place, second place. After a while, I got the joke. They couldn’t be recycled or donated. Nobody wanted them. They were literally worthless, except that they provided the moment I hadn’t yet allowed myself: the moment I finally said good-bye to Maddy.

The box of trophies became trash, but none of it had been wasted.

I kept only the extra copy of my class’s yearbook that Shelly had dug up, as a sort of apology, embarrassed to realize the pain she’d caused Maddy.

Everything else from high school, though, went into the garbage: the bulletin board, the wallpaper, the old cross-trainers. After a little hemming and hawing and pro-and-conning, I took the bulging roll of money from Yvonne’s tip jar and gave it to my mom for the bills, saving back just enough to buy a new pair of running shoes.

I wore them to the first home meet the girls had, cheering and clapping as Mickie and Jessica tore through the finish line one, two.

This is where Courtney caught up with me. She came up the stands in jeans and a Midway High sweatshirt.

“Brought you something,” she said, holding out a paper bag. Inside the bag: the little bits of stuff I’d once treasured. I rifled through them, then stood up, climbed down the risers to the garbage drum and tossed it all.

“You sure?” Courtney said. “There was a pretty cool baby sock in there.”

I laughed. “I guess if I took that bag to a shrink, she’d be able to tell me what my problem was—is.”

Courtney sat down next to me and stretched back on her elbows on the bench behind us. “Don’t need a shrink for this one. What was the lineup? Pretty perfume bottle, romantic postcard, baby sock, little girl’s barrette—I mean, that’s a trajectory that’s fairly clear to me.”

It sounded so thin and needy. Maybe I did want those things in my life. Maybe I did want a future, a family. Who would fault that?

But I thought she didn’t have the whole story. Maybe the things I’d collected were the versions of myself I wanted to try on. Test the fit. Could I be this kind of woman? That kind? I wasn’t sure I could explain it. “Please don’t tell anyone that theory,” I said.

“Like Tommy Beckwith, perhaps?”

My face burned. “Exactly like.”

“So I have some questions,” she said. “The forensics are starting to come in finally, and some of it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Like . . . fingerprints and stuff?”

“Yeah, fibers under nails, phone records, all the crime-scene photos. It’s just making us go over everything again. Like the photos of her neck,” she said, and gestured to mine. The bruises from Coach’s hands had finally begun to fade to a smudge of yellow. “It’s not like fingerprints or DNA. Not a clinch. But your bruises and hers, well—Like I said, not enough to break the case.” A shotgun start made us both look out at the track. Mickie again, fast as hell.

“The thing I never got was the diamond,” I said. “Why did she bring it to Midway in the first place?”

“Good instincts.” Courtney said, sitting up to watch Mickie’s progress. “That girl can fly, can’t she? Wow. Well, Maddy’s computer from Chicago told us a few things. Her search history turned up a lot of eye-clawing research on what happens to little girls in this world, but there was some repeat activity around some assisted-care facility under construction.” Courtney held out a brochure with a shiny new building on the front and photos of happy old people inside. “The theory is that she had plans for her stepmother to live there, but that doesn’t seem right to me. You?”

“Vincent’s parents, maybe?” I said. “Or grandparents? I don’t know anything about his family.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Never thought of Maddy as an adult before now, you know? How she ended up—I mean, not dead. But grown up, making things happen, even with everything she went through, still taking care of everyone else.”

Taking care of everyone else
. I stood up.

“What’s wrong?”

I turned the brochure over in my hand. These had been all over town. “This is the place over by the Mid-Night,” I said. “How did Maddy have this?” Thoughts and memories rushed at me.

“She had an application for residence. I guess she sent for information? What am I missing?”

“Could someone younger live there?” I said. The words would hardly form in my mouth. “If they were sick, I mean?”

She looked at me. “How young?”

“Teeny Switzer can’t be older than thirty,” I said. “Fitz said he was helping her get into some new situation, but—”

Fitz. What would Coach do without Fitz? Nothing. That knock at the door of the Luxe before we knew we wouldn’t run state, Coach’s airy shoulder shrug that both his assistant coach and star athlete were missing. Fitz had known about Maddy’s pregnancy not just because he was an adult and schooled in health and wellness, but because it would have been his job, not Coach’s, to make arrangements. Maybe he didn’t know the details. That might explain his irrational hatred of Beck.

But those other schools they’d worked, two years here, two years there. How long had Fitz been following behind, sweeping Coach’s crimes under any convenient rug?

“But the money fell through,” Courtney said. I had to remind myself what she was talking about. The new situation for Teeny that Fitz had mentioned hadn’t worked out. “Someone came to town with a lot of money for Teeny’s new place,” she said in a musing voice. Writing the headline again, this time for the true story.

“In the form of a diamond that wouldn’t be missed,” I said.

We looked at each other.

“This person with the diamond perhaps made some threats or—or stipulations,” Courtney said.

“An ultimatum,” I said, imagining it easily. Maddy, fired up, off to meet Fitz somewhere in her little silver car, having slipped the diamond for safekeeping not in her room but in the ice machine. And unplugging it, just in case. And even more just in case—in case of the worst—the photo tucked behind the frame that only I would find.

Not a photo of Maddy being instructed by Coach, though there were a hundred pictures like that. No, this time it was Fitz reaching in. Not to instruct her, but to tame her. To smooth things over. To take care of things.

The deal Maddy wanted to make with Fitz would have been—what? Coach goes to jail? Coach goes into retirement? Maybe she’d allowed herself some hope that Fitz would agree. That he would somehow talk Coach into moving on, at least, as they’d done so many times before. He’d be tired of cleaning up after all Coach’s indiscretions, tired of making the apologies, making things right. I remembered watching him pull Teeny out of danger as I drove past the park. He wanted her off his hands, somewhere safe, somewhere with better locks on the doors.

Fitz might have even thought Maddy owed him one. It must have come as a terrible surprise when she didn’t consider what he’d done for her a favor. Another surprise: that she’d known about Teeny. I wonder how far her research had taken her, how many girls she’d found among the reports not officially filed, the deals made, the secrets kept?

She hadn’t come to help Fitz settle Teeny. She’d come to unsettle the comfortable life he and Coach had built.

With one, beautiful stone, she must have tried to strike a bargain. The diamond, for their retirement. The diamond, for their withdrawal. The diamond, for the girls.

And she lost.

Courtney hadn’t said anything for a long time. “The bruises on Maddy’s neck were from larger hands than the ones on mine,” I said. “Weren’t they?”

She pulled out her phone and held it to her ear. To me, she said, “You know, I’m glad no one’s keeping score on who’s solving this thing,” she said. “You’re a pretty decent detective. Did you ever think about joining the force?”

“Wait,” I said, staring down at the dizzying colors of my new running shoes. Too bright, too clean. I looked like I was trying too hard, but I didn’t care. I wanted to try hard. I had already decided what I wanted to be, and now that I wasn’t cleaning the Mid-Night Inn anymore, it was time for me to begin. But everything was changing too fast.

Both of them? I would lose both? All?

The desire to deny what I knew was strong. This is how Coach had gotten through so many times. Because the truth of what he’d done and been allowed to do was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to face it, or him. I couldn’t bear for it to be true, and yet I knew it was.

“Look, Juliet, I don’t mind making this quiet, but he’s a dangerous guy.”

“Just—” I located Fitz in the inner circle of grass. He was noting something on a clipboard and yelling encouragement to the girls racing by. A breeze blew the raw scent of cut grass over the stands, but it didn’t smell like spring, like a new start. I only smelled decay, life cut short.

The girls. The girls would need someone to tell them the truth. They would need someone to steady them without a single intimidating gesture.

I had already talked to someone at a college in Indianapolis about part-time school, about scholarships and loans. I would need a job, and I had applications out. It would take years, probably. The plan was hazy.
What could you do different
? my dad had asked me, back when I’d been struggling with my college courses. I could try. Nothing else was up to me, but I could try.

“Just wait by the outside fence,” I said to Courtney.

I stepped down from the bleachers and walked the distance to the opening in the fence to the track. Every step was shattering. I felt as though I were leaving pieces of myself behind as I went.

I waited for a lull in the heats, then crossed the red lanes of the track into the grassy field. The girls looked up at my approach, pleased. “Hey, Coach,” Jessica said, grinning. She had tied a Midway-red ribbon around her ponytail.

Fitz glanced up from his clipboard, equal parts alarm and hope, then disappointment. His eyes flicked behind me, presumably finding Courtney, maybe a few more officers in uniform by now, a police car or two waiting without sirens or lights. He dropped his arms, the clipboard dangling at his side.