The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,14

wistful voice, “Do I gotta leave?”

Laurel swallowed hard and said, “I think if Shelby were at your house and something like this happened, I would want her home.”

Bet said, “Mama won’t mind none. I only been here four days this time.”

Bet stared unblinking into Laurel’s eyes, her mouth turned slightly down. Bet’s mother, Sissi, had the grayed-out skin of a longtime meth user and a mouth so chapped it cracked and bled at the corners. She’d waved one lazy hand and said, “Bye, then,” when Laurel took Bet away, but blood was blood, and surely any mammal would want her child home under the circumstances.

“You can come back another time. Soon. I promise.”

Bet nodded. Her rounded eyes had a downward tilt that matched her mouth. She looked like a little beef cow being led off toward an unfamiliar building. She hadn’t blinked in so long that Laurel’s own eyes began to itch.

“Good night,” Laurel said, and Bet rolled onto her back to stare up at the ceiling. Shelby’s eyes were closed and moving under her lids, as if she were dreaming. Maybe she wasn’t playing possum. Moreno had obviously exhausted her.

No matter how many times Shelby said she didn’t know whether Molly had been unhappy at home, at school, Moreno had come back to it. Moreno had also asked several times if Molly had a boyfriend. Shelby had been definite on that one, shaking her head, eyes down, shaking her head again when Moreno asked if there was a boy Molly liked.

But there had to be a boy she’d liked. Molly was a thirteen-year-old girl. She and Shelby had talked constantly about which of them liked what boy in an endless round-robin as Laurel ferried them from school to dance and home again. Yet Shelby had shaken her head, a definite no, no boy, and Laurel had seen someone who didn’t belong standing in her cul-de-sac. He’d been short, but not middle-school short. An adult with curly, tousled hair like Stan Webelow’s, and as always when she thought of him, her blood chilled and ran a little slower.

Stan had moved to Victorianna about three years ago, when his mother died and he inherited the house. Cookie Webelow had been a neighborhood fixture, always out digging in her flower beds. She kept gum in her apron pockets, and the neighborhood kids adored her, but she raised the hairs on the back of Laurel’s neck.

All of Victorianna had turned out for her funeral. It was open-casket, so Laurel had left ten-year-old Shelby with Mother. She thought the funeral-home people had lost their minds; they’d put Cookie in a full face of makeup, though she’d never so much as powdered her nose in the decade Laurel had known her. Her hands looked white and strange without her gardening gloves.

Trish Deerbold had stood in line ahead of David, putting one hand dramatically over her heart and exclaiming, “She looks so natural.”

The standard southern funeral response was “Lord, yes, she looks exactly like herself,” but David hadn’t recognized it as ritual, and his eyes widened at the blatant falsehood. He stared at Cookie’s round brown face, powdered pale around the lips with a big red mouth drawn on, as overblown as a rose four days past prime.

He whispered to Laurel, “Natural? She looks like a sock monkey.”

Trish gave him a fast glare, but his description was both so horrible and so accurate that Laurel had to quash an inappropriate spray of laughter that was rushing her throat. She forced herself to look away from Cookie, focusing instead on the small, dapper man in the black suit standing by the head of the coffin. He was passing out handshakes as if they were the prize a person won for viewing. Laurel assumed he was the funeral director, but as she reached the front of the receiving line, he took her hand and introduced himself as Stan Webelow, Cookie’s son.

Laurel murmured her condolences, but her spine went all a-shiver in his oily presence. His fine-boned hand felt as waxy and inanimate as his mother’s looked. Cookie had never mentioned a son, and in her house, there were only pictures of her late husband and her corgis.

The next week, Stan Webelow had moved into Cookie’s peach-colored house. Laurel wondered why a young single man wanted to live in a four-bedroom, three-bath home in a family neighborhood. He had no visible means of support, though Mindy believed Cookie’s estate was substantial, and Edie had heard he owned a Web-based