Free What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman Page B

moment she would return to again and again. When Miriam tried to remember the last time she was happy, all she could summon up was a warmish glass of Gallo wine with slivers of glass in it and a dusty Fifth Avenue candy bar that was, in fact, quite stale.

CHAPTER 8
    T he bus shelter on Forest Park Avenue was a more-than-familiar place to Sunny, part of her school-day routine going back almost three years, but she found herself studying it that afternoon as if seeing it for the first time. Although its purpose was basic—keep bus riders from the damp, if not the cold—someone had cared enough to add a few nonessential flourishes so it might be mistaken for attractive. The roof was off-green, a shade their mother had wanted to use for the trim on their house, but their father had said it was too dark, and their father, as the artistic one, always won such arguments. The pale beige bricks had a rough texture, while the slatted bench inside the structure was the same shade as the roof.
    Boys in the neighborhood, indifferent to the bus shelter’s efforts, had scrawled rude graffiti on the walls in chalk and paint. Someone had come behind them and tried to remove the worst of it, but a few stubborn curses and character assassinations remained. Heather inspected these solemnly.
    â€œDo they ever—” she began.
    â€œNo,” Sunny said swiftly. “They leave me alone.”
    â€œOh.” Heather’s tone sounded almost as if she felt sorry for Sunny.
    â€œThey don’t like me because of the fight. The kids on the bus.”
    â€œBut they don’t live here,” Heather said. “The graffiti is done by people who live here, right?”
    â€œI’m the only one who goes to Rock Glen. Everyone else is older or younger, by a lot. That was the problem, remember? ‘We had right, but they had might.’ Majority rules.”
    Bored with this family story in which she had played no part, Heather sat on the bench, opened her purse, and examined its contents, humming to herself. The bus was not due for another fifteen minutes, but Sunny hadn’t wanted to risk missing it.
    The battle over the school bus route had been Sunny’s first brush with gross unfairness, a lesson in how money can triumph over principle. Most of the students on Sunny’s bus lived far up Forest Park Avenue, all the way on the other side of Garrison Boulevard. But under the city’s open-enrollment plan, they could choose to attend school wherever they liked, and they had bypassed the all-black school nearest them and picked Rock Glen on the city’s southwest side, which was still mostly white. A private bus service, paid for by all the parents, was set up. Sunny’s stop, the little shelter on Forest Park Avenue, was the last stop every morning and the first one every afternoon. For two years this seemed a logical plan to everyone involved. And then it didn’t.
    Last summer the parents at the far end of the route began to grumble that their children would have a much shorter trip if the bus didn’t have to stop on the lower part of Forest Park Avenue for Sunny. Or, as they called her, “Just the one.” As in, “Just the one student.” Or, “Why should just the one student inconvenience so many?” They threatened to find another bus service, leaving the company with “just the one,” which would never cover the cost of the route. Sunny’s parents were appalled, but there was nothing they could do. If they wanted to continue using the bus service—essential, given that they both worked—they had to agree to a compromise: The route would be reversed in theafternoon. So every afternoon Sunny watched her own block fly past as the bus headed to the beginning of its route and dropped students off in reverse order, backtracking to Forest Park Avenue. Given that their families had won, the other students should have been gracious, but Sunny discovered