Free Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day

eye on Teeny, pulling the tip jars closer to the center of the bar. I didn’t know everyone. Everyone, though, seemed to know me.
    “Your friend,” one of the regulars said over the noise. He wore a pair of red suspenders over his round belly and a red Mack truck hat. The other guys called him Mack as a matter of shorthand. One of the guys who’d had trouble with Maddy’s disruption the night before, Mack seemed shaken at the amount of company he was being forced to keep. He kept turning to give the crowd a raised eyebrow, but stuck tight to his stool. “Mighty pretty gal,” he said. “They know what’s been done to her?”
    “She was murdered,” I said.
    People turned to listen, creating a small circle around me. “Murdered?” someone said. “Are they sure? I thought—”
    “Was she robbed?” someone else wanted to know. “Was it a break-in? That happened up in Muncie last year. Some people staying in one of those Regency Stay places—”
    “No,” I said. “Her jewelry was left behind.”
    “The girls,” Teeny said, barely audible.
    The jewelry’s reputation had already spread. We’d all watched enough crime-solver TV to know that no one would attack a woman, hang her, and leave the easy pickings of such a bauble. Loughton and Courtney hadn’t admitted it, but come on. If there was something I knew about, it was pilfering. Almost anyone would have swiped the ring. Anyone.
    “Someone said she come from Chicago,” Mack said. “She brought that trouble with her. I used to haul up to Chicago. I once saw a man—”
    “What makes you think she brought it on herself?” said a woman from a nearby table. “What kind of thing is that to say?”
    “She got killed here,” said a loud voice behind me. “Whoever it was, he’s probably from here.”
    The circle, expanded to include half of the room, turned to see who’d dared to say what they all hoped wasn’t true. The din dropped a few notches.
    I already knew who it was, but I turned anyway. The Mid-Night had certainly turned into a class reunion tonight. “Get you a drink, Beck?” I said.
    Tommy Beckwith shot me a look of such force I almost backed up. But I’d had practice. All those years as the tagalong, the chaperone. That hard stare over Maddy’s shoulder, when he had hoped I’d be anywhere else but where he was trying to be alone with her. I had learned to withstand it. I’d learned how to plant my feet and lean into it. Maddy’s boyfriend didn’t scare me anymore.
    Then, with clarity so sharp I sucked in a breath, I remembered driving with Maddy to Indianapolis, the jostle of her beat-up car over bad streets.
    “Where are we going?” I kept asking. Winter, mittens not keeping my hands warm. Where, where, come on, where. Her coy refusal to say had made me wonder if she was treating me to something special, like my dad taking me for ice cream when I made the honor roll or improved my time on the track. Maddy and I didn’t have that kind of relationship, but the idea of a treat occurred to me. The farther we drove into the city, deep into pockets of empty buildings and cracked sidewalks, the more I thought she was tricking me. Trying to scare me. We didn’t have that relationship, either. But it occurred to me.
    That feeling, that roiling suspicion in my gut. I felt that again now. She was tricking me. She’d tricked me. She wasn’t really dead. Where had she gone? Where, where, come on.
    Back then, I’d held on to my seat belt, making a plan in case we were lost. She’d been acting strange for a few days, like someone I didn’t know. My hands were freezing. I blew hot breath through my mittens, waiting for her to return to herself, to give a sign it would be OK, whatever it was.
    When she pulled to the side of a quiet street, I grabbed the door handle.
    “That’s where we’ll run state,” she said.
    And there it was. The stadium belonged to a university neither of us thought we had any chance of being accepted to or, in