The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,46
in your own backyard, not thirty feet from where your own baby lies at night, then you can’t put your nose down and graze all sheeply and stupid and hope it passes into another yard next time. Neither can I. I’d best go throw some panties in a bag. You wait here or in the lobby so I can smooth it with Gary. He’s not going to love me going off with you, of all people, especially since we’ve got company auditions set for Monday week.”
Thalia stood up and walked out of the circle of light, over to the curtained entrance on the left that the actors used. Laurel could barely make her out as she slid her feet into her shoes and unfurled a long strip of weightless cloth from the floor.
“Little Shelby and your weirdo neighbor, what a list of suspects,” Thalia muttered to herself.
“Shelby’s not a suspect,” Laurel said, so hard and loud that the good acoustics picked it up and amplified it, setting the words ringing in her ears.
“Oh, relax, Mother Bear. I’m coming home with you mostly because I’d burn down Paris for Shelby, and you know it,” Thalia said. “I meant that Stan-Webelow-gives-you-the-wig and Shelby-has-a- secret shouldn’t be your whole list. You’ve missed the obvious.”
The heels of her black slides clicked on the wood as she walked back to the edge of the light. Thalia shook out the cloth she’d picked up, a sheer scarf in leopard print, and wound it around her body. The addition didn’t make her look less naked. It only made her look accessorized. “You didn’t lay clubs, Bug. When Aunt Moff lays the cards, clubs are for family. Maybe things are ugly inside the Dufresne house. You ever notice Molly having bruises, anything like that?”
“No,” Laurel said.
“Still, a young girl goes running out into the night, coming to her best friend’s place, you have to ask what happened in her house to drive her from it. Statistically speaking, it’s more likely. It’s almost always people in a family who kill each other.”
Thalia stepped back out of the light, turning away and walking toward the door that led backstage. “No one knows that better than you and me,” she added, and exited stage left.
CHAPTER 8
Uncle Marty had the short eyes.
That’s what they would have called it if he had ever gone to prison. He didn’t. Instead, Laurel’s daddy took them hunting in a county where he and Marty knew the sheriff so well they were borrowing his cabin. Marty had the short eyes, and Daddy shot him.
Put that way, it didn’t seem like murder. Laurel had seen similar stories on late-night cable, one with Clint Eastwood, and she thought maybe Charles Bronson had done one like that, too. Clint Eastwood had been the hero. It was a good story, but Laurel couldn’t claim it as her own. In spite of what had happened between them the day before Marty died, Laurel’s uncle never laid a hand on her that wasn’t proper. Laurel didn’t even know which way his tastes ran until his last day on the earth.
Laurel was eleven years old, and Marty came, as he did every year, for the first weekend of deer season. He brought a real silver charm bracelet with a starter charm each for Laurel and Thalia. Laurel’s was cutesy kidsy, a mouse with obsidian chip eyes, but Thalia got a high-heeled shoe with gem flecks set to make a flashy daisy on the toe.
When Laurel and Thalia got home from school on Friday, it was obvious that Marty and Mother were already skirmishing. Marty was the closest thing Mother ever had to an in-law, and they fussed over Daddy like those squabbling ladies who came before King Solomon with one hapless toddler pulled so tight between them he was probably spread-eagled.
Marty sat on one end of Mother’s faded cabbage-rose sofa, and Mother held court at the other end. Both of them were drinking coffee and not looking at the other. Mother smiled a cream-filled cat’s smile, clearly well ahead on points. The air around Marty fairly crackled with electric anger.
Thalia rolled her eyes and whispered, “Want to take a long-odds bet over who’ll get to cut up Daddy’s meat tonight?”
Laurel stopped in the doorway, but Thalia said a quick hello and then meandered down the hall toward the room she shared with Laurel. Halfway there, out of Marty and Mother’s sight, she turned back to face Laurel. She grabbed her blouse on either side