Free Over Her Head by Shelley Bates

down Kate’s perfect skin as her soft voice filled the church, mourning the loss of a schoolmate “who dressed
     like a real original” and who “is remembered every day.” Brendan O’Day spoke next, and a girl called Rose Silverstein, both
     of whom Laurie had not met personally, but whose parents she knew by reputation. Everyone knew Brendan O’Day’s father—he was
     as full of bombast as the furniture crates in his warehouses. He ran the Hawthorne House chain from its head office in Pittsburgh,
     selling reproductions of English country-house interiors to people who thought they deserved them. She couldn’t stand Jack
     O’Day, but he and Colin sat on the church board, and she was as sweet as southern tea whenever they met.
    Tanya didn’t get up. Laurie was glad that Mary Lou and Debbie had worked with her on the scrapbook—it formed the record of
     Randi’s life that Tanya was too shattered to say out loud.
    During the last hymn, Laurie and her team slipped downstairs to the multipurpose room and got the coffeepots going and the
     trays of cake and cookies and sliced fruit laid out on the tables. It didn’t take long for the room to fill once the memorial
     was over. Cammie made sure Tanya had a comfortable place to sit and brought her a plate full of food, heavy on the protein.
    Cammie was not a nutritionist for nothing.
    Laurie laid a paper doily over a round plastic serving tray and began to arrange her famous pecan tarts on it. On the other
     side of the table, Natalie Martinez moved a tray of coconut squares from the meat table onto the one that held sweets, and
     said to Maggie Lesser, “I hear the police are making their rounds.”
    “I know,” Maggie said. “I just talked to Joyce Silverstein. I can’t tell you how glad I am that my Kevin’s only in fourth
     grade. You have to hand it to Rose, though.” She glanced at the other end of the long table, where the teenagers were piling
     their paper plates high with sweets. “Interrogated one night and eulogizing her friend the next. That’s character.”
    “Why are they interrogating Rose? She babysits for us. She’s the last person who would be involved in . . . something like
     this.”
    Natalie stole a mini cherry cheesecake. “They’re interrogating everybody. No one is exempt, apparently.” She glanced around
     her. “Rose. Kate. Even Anna Hale.”
    A skinny man in tight jeans and a silk shirt stepped in front of Laurie, and she restrained herself from pushing him out of
     the way.
    While she waited impatiently for him to move so she could join her friends, Natalie went on: “Who’d ever have thought something
     like this would happen in our town? Especially among kids we all know.”
    “How do we really know what they’re thinking?” Maggie asked. “With all this TV violence and sex and shootings in the schools
     . . . man,” she said on a sigh. “High school isn’t what it was when we were young, that’s for sure. But still, you’d think
     you’d be able to write some kids off the suspect list. Anna, for instance. Or Kyle Edgar or Kelci Platt.”
    The skinny guy finally stopped filling his plate with desserts, and Laurie pushed past him.
    “I don’t know,” Natalie went on as Laurie came up behind her, “sometimes the quiet types are the worst. I mean, Anna is a
     lovely kid, but in a murder investigation you can’t rule anyone out. Still waters run deep, if you know what I mean.”
    Laurie could stand it no longer. Natalie’s tone had Anna clothed in jailhouse orange and manacles by sundown. “Come on, Nat,”
     she said as she joined them. “We have to stand behind our kids, don’t we?”
    She couldn’t help a little internal smile of satisfaction at Natalie’s guilty start. That would teach her to talk behind people’s
     backs.
    “Of course we do,” Natalie said. She made a quick recovery, Laurie would give her that. “I’m just saying that Anna, like so
     many of these other kids, is a deep person.