The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,15

business of some sort.

He’d stayed, and stayed unemployed and single. He’d never brought a date to neighborhood potlucks, but he had an unctuous, touchy-feely way with the ladies that made Laurel doubt he was gay. He was around thirty, and most of the neighborhood women considered him attractive, though he gravitated toward women a good ten or even twenty years older than he was. Laurel found it puzzling before it occurred to her that these women had something besides their age in common: They had teenagers.

Laurel watched him closely after that, especially with Shelby. Although she never saw him do anything untoward, she couldn’t shake her uneasy dislike of him, so she’d warned Shelby to steer clear. Now she was pretty sure he’d been in her cul-de-sac, way off his turf, and Molly had led Laurel to her small body as if it were a message.

If so, Molly had chosen the wrong woman to interpret it. Laurel wasn’t Joan of Arc, with a team of helpful angels to light her up a path to truth. She wasn’t even a poor man’s Nancy Drew.

Still, Molly had chosen Laurel to pull her from the water. She’d put her blood on Laurel’s hands, and since the moment Laurel had seen it, she hadn’t stopped thinking of her sister. She’d heard Thalia’s voice, and she’d woken up with her hand on the phone. Now, staring down at Shelby’s wan face, she knew the number she needed to dial.

She had to talk to David first. He thought of Thalia’s name as a synonym for all hell breaking loose. He wouldn’t want her. Laurel would have to make him see that Thalia could do no harm. Here on their pretty street, hell had broken loose already.

CHAPTER 3

David was down in his office in the basement, sitting in one of the two leather rolling chairs. He had three worktables set in an L-shape that he used like an enormous desk, and the monitor sat centered in the longer leg. His game was running, so looking at his monitor was like looking through the cockpit of a plane with the controls all at the bottom of the screen. He leaned in toward the flat-screen LCD he had hooked up to his multi-box system.

Laurel saw another plane flash by. David muttered, “Gotcha,” and began firing. He spun after it, zooming through an endlessly unfolding blue sky. The sound effects were on low, but he still had no idea she had entered the room. He probably didn’t know he was in the room, either. David was in the zone.

She could call him out of it. After thirteen years of marriage, all she had to do was say his name, and he would come to her, beaming himself in from the foreign place he lived when she was silent. When she first met him, in her freshman year at NC State, he’d seemed strange and closed, as if he lived buttoned up inside his brain. He was weird, and Laurel hadn’t liked him. She had about enough weird to last her, thank you.

Growing up two years behind Thalia had been like going to Strange boot camp for eighteen years straight. By the time Laurel started ninth grade, Thalia had already infiltrated every nook and cranny of Pace High. She’d been a cheerleader and a stoner, and she’d made and dropped track team, student council, and the twirling majorettes in quick succession before joining—and as rapidly unjoining—debate squad, band, and chorus. Finally, she’d defaulted to hanging out with the five geek-lunatics who called themselves the Drama Club.

Thalia had entertained herself on Laurel’s high school orientation day by spreading a rumor that she’d been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome over the summer. Thalia calibrated her performance carefully, operating well below teacher radar, but her small, controlled twitches, head tics, and soft squeals and profanities were convincing. Even the most Thalia-jaded members of the student body became true believers, and kids Laurel didn’t know kept stopping by her locker and her lunch table to ask about Thalia’s “condition.”

Laurel had gone shopping with Mother in August for Chic jeans with tapered legs, and strawberry lip gloss, and brown mascara. She kept her shiny hair in a thick French braid and was quiet and smart but not too smart. She should have been allowed to blend.

Instead, she found herself saying over and over, “I don’t want to talk about it,” while staring down at her pink Converse high-tops. Every third girl in her class had those same