Free A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson Page B

Lynch’s daughter?” Big asked me. “Is she here?”
    I shrugged. “She didn’t come in with Mrs. Lynch.”
    Big wheeled toward the chief, but right then his phone started playing calypso music. He held up one finger and said, “My wife,” and answered it.
    Big stared at him, this WTF look on her face. He turned away and hunched his shoulder up at us. After a minute Big turned her glare at the Places and yel ed, “Jim and Irvin! You get your sorry selves out of my woods before I fetch the shotgun and load it up with salt and shoot your looky eyes out!”
    Jim’s and Irvin’s mouths went al unhinged, and they moved away and then disappeared.
    “And that’s how you do that ,” Big muttered at Chief Warfield’s back.
    I said, “How much longer are these people going to be here?”
    She shrugged. “They’re waiting on the state medical examiner.”
    “Why is he taking so long?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Big said. “Probably he’s held up at a real crime instead of whatever mess this is?”
    She said it real dark like, and al at once I got that Chief Warfield and Officer Joel and the two professors were standing around nodding and whispering to each other because they thought the bones meant there had been a crime. Big was worried that they were right, that there was a crime. Maybe even that my mom had done a crime; that’s why she was shushing me. She didn’t want anyone to know what Liza had said about the bones being her baby, and she was so het up over it she was threatening to salt-shoot our neighbors, which was so un-Big-ly that I couldn’t hardly believe I’d heard her say it. Her skin was pale and creased, like she’d been heavily asleep for hours and hours with her face pressed into crisp sheets, dreaming bad things.
    The chief got off the phone, and Big stalked over to him with her legs gone al stiff.
    I knew that Roger had a pretty good view of the back woods from the tree house, so I flipped my phone open and texted him, R the Places stil behind there?
    He answered, Nah, out in front with others.
    That got my attention. Others?
    Dood, 1/2 of Immita is in your front yard.
    The chief was talking to Big now, pointing this way and that, from the wil ow’s remains to the truck to the box, so I slipped inside the house. I hurried through the kitchen to our den. I jumped up on Big’s saggy sofa, and my feet sank up to the ankles into the cushions.
    I lifted one of the blind slats an inch so I could peek through on the sly, and al my breath came whooshing out of me. More than twenty people were standing in clots of three and four on our personal grass, whispering and shrugging and watching our closed front door like any second they expected Oprah to pop out and make concerned eyebrows and narrate.
    Most were from our neighborhood—some Perkinses and Places and Baxters, al the Daughtrys, and even Emily Beaumont with her brand-new baby in a strol er. They must have seen both of Immita’s cop cars parked in front of our house and come down to eyebal us. But I also saw Margee Beechum, who used to work with Big, and the Beechums lived al the way over past Chester Street. I blinked, unsure how the news could have gotten so far already.
    That’s when I saw Mrs. Lynch’s skinny-skank daughter, Olive, wearing a jean skirt cut off so short that if she sat down, I’d have been able to read it was Thursday off her days-of-the-week panties. She was stomping it out from one group to another like a rexed-up Bond girl, face lit up in a vile grin. No doubt she was spil ing those make-believe gory details I’d heard Mrs. Lynch saying into her cel , about how I’d hid a pregnancy and the bones were my secret murdered baby. And why not? I was Liza’s daughter, just like Liza was Big’s. A baby at fifteen was practical y my destiny. I felt my stomach seizing up, heating and curling, going harder and smal er like a Shrinky Dink.
    I forced my gaze away from Olive and saw we’d even attracted some of the