The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,92

with a muffled thump, while the tea cart caught in the drapes and jerked them off the wall. It wrapped the drapes around itself as it rolled into Stan’s house.

“Holy shit!” said Thalia, impressed, but David was already following the tea cart through the hole, folding himself almost in two and stepping carefully over the spikes of smashed glass jutting up from the bottom of the window frame.

Laurel followed him. Inside, she could hear running feet upstairs, pounding across the ceiling.

They were in Stan’s formal living room. He still had Cookie’s old furniture in there, plush pink chairs and an overstuffed sofa fraught with climbing roses. The furniture was sprinkled with glittery bits of glass and splinters of wood. The drapes and the tea cart lay in a heap, and the sweetheart chair had slammed into an ottoman and tipped it over into the coffee table. It looked like a small bomb had gone off in the center of the room.

“Shelby!” Laurel called as Thalia clambered inside after her.

The living room was open to the foyer with the main staircase. Stan Webelow came bounding down, holding a baseball bat. He was naked except for a minuscule pair of black underpants. He recognized them and stopped on the bottom stair, lowering his bat and staring at them, his jaw hanging open, eyes wide. “What the hell?” he said.

David stepped forward and, with the same economy of motion, put one arm out, fast, in a straight line. He had a fist at the end of his arm, and it smacked neatly and decisively into Stan’s cheekbone. Stan went down, making a surprised yelping noise and dropping the bat.

Laurel could still hear someone moving around above them, so she pushed past David. Stan lay where he had fallen, holding his face, and she scrambled over and around him, tearing up the stairs. David and Thalia pounded up stair by stair behind her.

“Shel?” Laurel cried.

She knew every floor plan in Victorianna; in this house, the master bedroom was upstairs, opposite the garage, above the living room. The door was shut, and as she ran toward it, the hall seemed to get longer and longer.

She cried out Shelby’s name again but got no answer.

Thalia passed her on the right and got to the door first, flinging it open.

“I’m calling the cops,” Stan Webelow yelled below them.

Thalia was already in the room, but she’d come to an abrupt stop inside the doorway. Laurel hurried in behind her, running into her sister’s back, and David pulled up short right behind Laurel. Laurel grabbed Thalia’s shoulders to steady herself.

On the other side of the bed, Trish Deerbold, makeup smudged, hair humped up into wild tufts, was struggling into her lime-green bra. She had on a matching pair of lacy panties, and the rest of her clothes were scattered on and around Stan Webelow’s bed. The bed was a leftover from Cookie, too, high white wicker, but Laurel was willing to bet Cookie had never put black satin sheets on it.

All four stared at one another, speechless.

“Oh,” said Laurel.

All the adrenaline went draining out of her, and her legs became rubbery and worthless underneath her.

Trish Deerbold yanked up her bra straps and grabbed a pillow, holding it in front of her body.

They could hear Stan Webelow stamping down the hall. “Are you people insane? You broke my house,” he was yelling.

David stood boggling at Trish, and the strange, immediate grace that took over his body in a crisis leached out of him in two heartbeats. Then he didn’t seem to know where to look.

Stan muscled his way past all of them to the back of the room, where his pants were lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Laurel let go of Thalia’s shoulders and took two steps back. There was a chair coated in peach and yellow check fabric by the door, and she sank down into it. Thalia stepped back the other way, over by the wall, where she leaned insouciantly against the wicker dresser.

“You’re paying for my damn window,” Stan said.

“Sure thing,” Thalia said as Stan fished his pants off the floor and started easing into them. His cheek was already swelling up under his eye. It looked like he was winking at them. “Although, once we heard that screaming, we had to bust in.”

“What screaming?” Trish said.

Thalia turned to Trish and continued, her voice earnest. “Well, it was a little muffled by that black leather zipper mask you’re wearing, Trish, but still, we heard