The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,83

I give you the shivers with them pieces.”

Laurel shook her head. “It’s a great present.”

“Naw. It fussed you. You’re like Aunt Moff, aincha? You see things.”

Laurel smiled, rueful and a little sad. “Sometimes I think I don’t see anything,” she said.

Bet’s eyebrows crumpled inward, worried or curious. “You ever see anything about me?”

Laurel shook her head. “No. But you have a good future, Bet. I know it. So maybe I should look.”

“Naw,” Bet said, hanging her head. “I am sorry I got you fussed.”

Laurel said, “Don’t be. Not everything under my jewelry is a happy memory. They’re things that matter to me, good or bad. The planchette belongs there because I’m the one who broke it. I asked a question, and I didn’t want to know the answer.”

“What’d you ask it for, then?” Bet said.

Laurel shrugged. She didn’t know why she had asked that question, of all the things she could have asked. She’d seen Thalia use the Ouija enough when they were kids to know that it worked best when you kept it simple, asking yes-or-no questions in a series. Otherwise, the Ouija’s answers could be ambiguous. Could haunt a person.

“What did you ask, anyways?” Bet wanted to know.

She stood a little too close to Laurel, as if trying to get inside the circle of Laurel’s body heat. A strange sweetness had sprung up between them; it was like that moment in the car on the way to Mobile. Bet would tell her more than the Ouija had, if only Laurel could ask the right questions.

“Shelby confides in you a little, right?” Laurel said.

“What’s a confides?” Bet asked.

“Talks,” Laurel said. “I asked that Ouija what I needed to know about the night Molly died. What I needed to know to protect Shelby.”

Bet’s eyes were dark, unfathomable. Her gaze fixed on Laurel’s face, and her mouth turned down. “What’d it say back?”

“She saw,” Laurel said. “It said She saw, and then I broke it.”

“You know what it meant?” Bet said. Her eyelids dropped; she was staring at the floor by Laurel’s feet.

“I hope I don’t. I hope to God,” Laurel said. “But this morning, I’m done with being too scared to find out.”

“Aunt Moff woulda known straight off. But maybe you’re more like Della. It always takes Dell time to sort things into sense.” Now Bet was looking sideways out the window. “She saw don’t mean what you might come to think.”

Laurel leaned toward her, drawn in, and said, “If you know something—anything—I wish you would say it.”

Bet muttered something under her breath. Laurel couldn’t make it out, but it seemed like Bet was talking to herself, deciding. Laurel’s hands trembled a little, and she squeezed them together, hard.

“Don’t be afraid. Whatever it is, Bet, you can tell me,” Laurel said. “I won’t be angry.”

Bet looked up at Laurel, wary, but she had come to a decision. “I tole a story on you.” That was DeLop-speak for a lie.

“That’s okay,” Laurel said, keeping her voice calm, not too eager, trying hard not to spook the kid. “You can tell me the truth now.”

Bet’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I tole that I saw Molly go in that orange house? I said I didn’t know if Shelby saw, but that was the story. Shelby saw, awright. She made me swear not to tell no one. That’s what that Ouija meant, I bet.” Bet’s whisper fell lower, so it was little more than breath. “Shelby saw Molly with that man, going in his house. I think that there is a real bad man, and I done seed me enough of ’em to know.”

It was the last piece Laurel needed, the one she’d thought she’d have to do without when she sent Thalia away. She saw the pattern come whole and all the pieces fit. She’d known since the first day she’d touched his soft, moist hand that Stan Webelow was something wrong, unwholesome. She’d felt it in her gut, where she knew all the things that were truest.

Now even the Ouija’s message made a kind of sense she could accept. Shelby had seen Molly with Stan Webelow, and she was feeling guilty for keeping Molly’s secret, strong friendship mated with piss-poor teenage judgment. No doubt Molly had sworn her to secrecy. For Molly, Stan Webelow was probably a cross between a father figure and a forbidden love affair; Molly would be wholly unaware of all the damage that was being done to her. Thalia had learned that Chuck was filing for divorce;