Free Too Pretty to Die by Susan McBride

it?
    Though what did I know about suicide? I’d never tried it, never even considered it, even when I’d felt the most alone.
    Maybe Miranda had felt too damaged—too humiliated—to greet another day. Maybe it hadn’t taken much thought at all.
    The stoic mask returned to Anna Dean’s face, and I wasn’t surprised when she said, “We’ll see what the medical examiner has to say, but the evidence is looking pretty strong from where I stand. I’m not one to rush to judgment, though, Andrea, and I won’t do it here. When the M.E. tells me the cause of death, that’s when I’m sure and not a moment before then.”
    “Thank you.” At least she hadn’t dismissed my concerns. That had to count for something.
    The deputy chief rounded the granite island. “Why don’t you stop by your mother’s before you go home? It might do you good to have someone to talk to about this.”
    Oddly enough, the idea of seeing Cissy and telling her about Miranda didn’t sound all that atrocious. My mother could be hard on me sometimes, a tad overbearing and overprotective; but beneath the Chanel and pearls beat a truly caring heart. Even if she didn’t like to show it, Cissy felt things very deeply. I’d grown up thinking my mother was indomitable, sort of a modern day Joan of Arc who could stand in the fire and not flinch. I’d only begun to see how wrong I was over the past year.
    Despite the fact that one would rarely ever glimpse Cissy Blevins Kendricks with a hair out of place, she bled red like everyone else. (Okay, so it was Coco Red by Chanel, but still.)
    I slid off the stool, rubbing damp palms on my thighs. “You’re right,” I told Anna Dean. “I should go.”
    There was nothing else I could do for Miranda besides.
    It was too late for that.

Chapter 5
    I shuffled out of Miranda’s duplex just as the medical examiner’s van pulled up, and I can’t say I was unhappy to miss what came after. I didn’t want to view Miranda’s lifeless corpse encased in a body bag as it was wheeled outside on a stretcher.
    Long ago I’d decided it was far, far better to remember people as they were (i.e., alive and breathing). If you got a glimpse of them in death, you could never shake it from your mind.
    Trust me on that.
    And call me insensitive, but it felt even worse when the deceased was someone young with an interrupted life. It always left you to wonder what they could have become had they stuck around.
    Though, most often, dying wasn’t a matter of choice.
    Sometimes life derailed like a bad day at Amtrak, and there wasn’t much you could do except hang onto the handrails, grit your teeth, and ride it out.
    I knew Miranda DuBois and I had never been tight, and maybe it shouldn’t have been so difficult for me to accept that she had chosen to check out of the Heartbeat Hotel way earlier than scheduled.
    But it was.
    I just couldn’t reconcile that a woman who’d braved her way through beauty pageants, debutante balls, sorority rush, and television news would end it all because she was no longer the prettiest girl in the room.
    Sure, Miranda had been superficial and vain, but she could conjure up tough when tough meant winning instead of losing. Pageant queens were no pansies, despite how they fluttered around in glittery ball gowns and rhinestone tiaras. Miranda might’ve oozed charm on the surface, but she had the cunning of Donald Trump. She’d used what she had to get where she wanted to be. Was that such a bad thing?
    She’d carved herself a place as a bona fide Dallas celebrity with a sandwich named after her at Who’s Who Burgers in Highland Park Village, and a cartoon rendering of her bodacious blond self hung on the walls of The Palm on Ross Avenue in the West End.
    In the yearbook, Miranda had written her ambition as “To be famous,” and she’d achieved that, for sure. Were a droopy lip and an eye tic worth giving up all that?
    My answer would have to be, “No.”
    Was I in denial?
    Maybe that was