The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,19

and she treated Shelby like a perp on Law and Order, bad-copping her. We sat there and let her.”

“You think Thalia would have stopped her?”

“Yes,” Laurel said.

No hesitation. After all, it had worked that way before. Daddy had shot Marty, and after, in the bitter dregs of that long day, Thalia had done all the talking. When the deputy had turned to question Laurel, Thalia had taken her thumb out of her mouth and said, “My dumbass sister had her eyes shut. She’s scared of guns. She’s probably scared of deer.”

Laurel hardly had to say a thing after that.

Now Laurel said, “That detective kept saying we had to answer her questions first, but then there never was a turn for us to ask anything. Molly Dufresne is dead, and Moreno is treating Shelby like a criminal. Thalia would make her stop. She’d make Moreno tell us what’s going on. Thalia would—”

“Thalia isn’t magic,” David interrupted.

Laurel had to bite the inside of her lip because she was about to ask him how he knew. There was a tiny piece of her that still believed her big sister had taken Super Glue and put that shattered snail right back together. Maybe he had gone creeping off the garden to live out his life, eating moss and making more snails.

David said, “They’ll tell us what’s going on when they know.”

Laurel didn’t believe that. On the monitor, the game reset, the plane’s windscreen repaired, the controls restored. The view showed a red dirt runway that bisected a grassy field.

Laurel said, “What was Molly doing in our yard? After midnight? All by herself? That’s not like her.”

“It’s not?” he said.

“Of course not,” Laurel said. “What do you remember about Molly? As a person?”

He thought for a moment, his forehead creasing. “She was blond?” he said. “And not loud.”

“That was the wrong question. Never mind. Molly wasn’t a leader in that dance gang of Shelby’s. She did whatever Shelby did. I’m not saying she wouldn’t sneak out to TP a house or maybe even meet a boy, but she wouldn’t do it alone.” Laurel remembered the drowned girl’s ghost landing beside the pool, changing into a moving shadow that faded into the darkness as Laurel’s gaze found Molly in her pool. “What if someone else was there, David? I think I saw someone moving in our yard when I was looking out the window.”

He shook his head. “You were sleepwalking. You could have seen dancing trees. It wouldn’t mean our pines were sentient.”

“There’s more, though. After, when we were walking over to Simon and Mindy Coe’s, I thought I saw Stan Webelow. He was standing in the Deerbolds’ yard.”

“The creepy guy who lives all the way down Queen’s Court? Are you sure?”

“No,” Laurel said. “I only saw curly hair.”

David thought about it. “Rex Deerbold has curly hair.”

“It wasn’t curly like that. Anyway, I think Trish said it was a travel week for him.”

“Wait. Why didn’t you tell that detective?”

Laurel lifted her hands and said, “I don’t know. She didn’t ask who was in the cul-de-sac, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly. All she wanted to do was pry at Shelby.”

The screen saver came up, fish swimming peacefully in an aquarium.

“You have to tell the police,” David said.

“Tell them what? I saw suspicious hair? I was sleepwalking, and there was a shadow that might have been a dream or a fox or a . . .” She stopped before she said the word. Ghost. David knew the name of her every childhood hamster, every boy she’d kissed, every favorite teacher. But she’d never told him that her dead uncle Marty used to visit her at night.

She hadn’t known David very well when they’d married, and since that day, Marty had not come. Not once. Of course, David had heard her family mention Marty’s name. He knew that her daddy had been raised by his older brother and that Marty had died in a hunting accident. But that was all.

At some point early in their marriage, she began to believe that to talk about dead Marty would be to make him real for David, too, to reinvite him, perhaps to reinvent him. So she had tucked all thoughts of him deep away. She slept curled against her husband’s long back with her face buried in the warm corner made by the mattress and his side, and Marty could not penetrate the high, hard wall of David’s rationalism. David did not know her ghost, and she couldn’t explain it