Read Online Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day - Free Book Online

realized no one had asked me. I had a thousand things to tell Courtney now that she’d left.
    Maddy had come to see me, and she’d been killed. Why wouldn’t the cops want to know more about that?
    For the first time since I’d seen her hanging from the balcony, I felt the punch to my gut—
    Maddy Bell was dead.
    Maddy, my friend. Memories rushed at me—sleepovers at my house, phone calls that lasted four hours or until my parents forced me to the dinner table or to bed. Riding to track team meets with our knees tucked against the seat ahead of us, hunkered down over each other’s dramas. And running. Always running. On training runs or during practice, we kept pace. Maddy’s breath was my metronome. We ran as a team, anchored together like conjoined twins, as though we’d never part.
    In races, of course, she always had a little more to give than I did, a fault of nature that I hadn’t been able to forgive or forget. But it was no one’s fault that I had wasted the last ten years. No one’s fault but mine.
    I stood and went to the bar’s exterior door. Outside, the fire trucks were gone, but an ambulance had joined the patrol cars. To take her body, I realized.
    A wave of nausea rushed over me. I lay my forehead against the cool glass of the door and took gulping breaths until the brackish taste at the back of my throat was gone. And then I began to cry.
    If I’d been asked the day before what my reaction would be to the news of Maddy’s death, even this long since I’d seen her, I don’t think I would have known how much it would hurt. I had already been living without her.
    But Maddy wasn’t just the woman I’d been out of touch with for a decade. She wasn’t simply the person I’d spent all this time blaming for my own mistakes, or the one I’d begun to pin new hopes to since our reunion the night before. She was the girl who’d been my greatest friend. She was also, and always, the one who’d loved me best. She’d known me better than anyone else ever had, and I was enough.
    I would never have a chance to make it right. Doors in every direction had suddenly closed.
    I caught my own puffy-eyed image in the door, and stood back. The hem on my uniform had crept north. A crucial button had come undone during the crying, and my hair was falling out of its ponytail. I hadn’t been enough—for anyone, and least of all for myself—in a long time.
    Outside, the cleaning cart sat in the sun. Someone must have moved it out of the way of the stairs. In all the chaos, I’d never brought it in. I tugged at my uniform skirt, wiped my face, and headed out to retrieve it.
    At the cart, I heard a noise. I shaded my eyes and found Loughton, Courtney, and a couple other uniformed officers overhead on the balcony.
    Loughton spotted me below. “The key won’t work. Where’s Batts?”
    “I’ll make you a new one. Just a minute.”
    The cart stowed, I took my spot behind the counter and called up the screen on our computer for Maddy’s registration.
    She was still checked in. I wondered when someone would go into the system and open up that room on the computer. I didn’t want to be the one to do it.
    It was simple enough to make the card: a few keystrokes and then a swipe with a blank. The card twitched in my shaking hand.
    And then I reached for a second blank and swiped it, too.
    I slipped the second card into the pocket of my uniform, where it felt heavy and obvious. Trying to breathe normally, I took the center stairs up to the second floor.
    Loughton had given up on the dud. They all stood along the walkway with crossed arms.
    “Sometimes Billy—when he imprints—he swipes too fast.” To my own ears I sounded like someone rushing headlong over the truth. I handed over the card and watched as Loughton and his team pulled their guns and approached the door of two-oh-two. I started to follow them. One of the officers held me back.
    Loughton swiped the key. Nothing. He tried again, again. Fast, slow. He