The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,102
husband wasn’t cheating on me,” Laurel said.
“Okay,” said Thalia. “But Shelby’s run away, just like I told you she would.”
“She’s not running from me, Thalia. She’s running from Molly’s funeral. I think seeing Barb so blatantly destroyed on our sofa the other night messed her up. She’s gone with Bet because she feels so guilty for falling asleep and not meeting Molly—she thinks it’s all her fault. The poor kid didn’t want to go to the viewing.”
“No,” David said, and Laurel jumped. He’d gone so quiet that, driving down this old road with her sister, she’d forgotten he was there. “She would have left a note.”
“I bet she did,” Laurel said. “It’s probably behind the bed or under her dresser, tucked barely out of sight so that it looks like it fell naturally. But Bet moved it.
“Bet can’t let me talk to Shel. She doesn’t know we already went down to Stan’s. She only knows Shelby will say that she never saw Molly going in there. If I talk to Shelby, Bet’s whole house of cards falls down. And Bet can’t bear that. She can’t bear for me to know the awful thing she did. Don’t you get it?”
Thalia and David shrugged in tandem, and Laurel said, “God, can’t you see? The reason I kept going on so hard about Stan Webelow is that every damn time I started to look in other directions, Bet Clemmens pulled me back to him. She told me when I came to get you, Thalia, that she’d seen him with Molly. She’s the one who said Shelby saw Molly going in his house.”
“Yeah, and?” Thalia said.
“She saw,” Laurel said, giving Thalia the same small words the Ouija had given her. “She saw, and she decided. She stood there and let Molly drown.”
Thalia shook her head. “What did she have against Molly?”
“Nothing. She couldn’t care less about Molly. It’s me. My life, the one you think is such a nightmare, looks pretty damn good to her. Bet loves me.”
“That makes even less sense,” David said.
“It was dark outside,” Laurel said. “The porch light was off. A storm was coming.” She could see them, first David and then Thalia, groping their way to her conclusion.
Kneeling on Shelby’s empty bed, Bet looked out the window. The only light came from below, diffused and softened as it shone up through the water. Shelby wasn’t in her room, and Bet had not been privy to her plans with Molly. Bet saw a slim little blonde sitting out on the diving board. Bet went downstairs to join her and saw her slip and fall, saw her roll into the water and sink.
Bet didn’t see Molly Dufresne. She saw Shelby, the girl who lived in the space Bet wanted to occupy. Laurel’s life was so full, she never really looked at Bet. As Bet watched Shelby drowning, she must have seen it as an opening she could slip inside. She could find herself forever in that lovely place, take the seat beside Laurel, who smelled like Bet knew mommies ought to smell.
“Bet can’t afford to let me talk to Shelby,” Laurel said. “Not ever.”
The temperature in the car seemed to drop three degrees.
Thalia said, “I’m not going fast enough,” and jammed her foot down on the gas.
CHAPTER 18
They were close. The Burger Kings and Wal-Marts fell away, replaced by pawnshops and check-cashing outlets. They passed a final Piggly Wiggly, and then the only chain stores were three different places that would take a car title as collateral on a small high-interest loan.
The last of these was on the end of an otherwise boarded-up strip mall. After they passed it, there were no businesses at all, no buildings, nothing on either side of Highway 78. No trees, no kudzu, even. The trees had been ripped out for their wood, and the land had been peeled back to the shale for its metals. They had entered a wasteland.
It looked uglier to Laurel than it had at Christmas when she came with her family. Even with the distant trees providing a line of color on the horizon that was absent in winter, it looked immeasurably worse. Bleaker. The only difference was that her mother wasn’t here. DeLop looked softer when Mother was along, as if it were being filmed through cheesecloth. Mother’s blindness was so powerful, so catching, that Laurel hadn’t seen DeLop this baldly even when she’d driven here alone to check out and return Bet Clemmens. It was as if she were