The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,99

so she could not imagine Bet stepping a little closer, a little closer, all the way to the edge of the pool, to look down at the small body drifting silent for an endless span of time.

It must have been hypnotizing, so powerful, to do nothing, to watch water fill Molly and emptiness take the place she used to occupy. Bet stood there until she heard Laurel howling from the window, banging on the glass.

All at once, Bet felt terrified. She was the shadow Laurel saw melting into the darkness as she ran for the house. She scurried inside to reset the alarm with trembling fingers. There wasn’t time to get upstairs. She scuttled into the kitchen, crouching behind the low counter. She peered over the top to watch first Laurel and then David go tearing out into the night.

As soon as they were out, she dashed upstairs. She’d seen Laurel at the window of a dark room, hollering. Surely Laurel had seen her, too. Bet began frantically stuffing her clothes into her Hefty bag, readying to run. But then Shelby was there, at her door, Shelby’s little living paw on her arm, pulling her down the stairs to see what was happening. Shelby went outside and Bet trailed behind, her Hefty bag clutched to her chest, numb. She was dreading the moment when Laurel’s gaze would come to rest on her face.

Laurel’s finger would point, and she would say, “It was her. By the pool. She saw. She saw.”

“I fell asleep in the rec room. Me and Bet were watching TV,” Shelby lied, and Bet, surprised, could say only, “Do what?”

Then Laurel looked at Bet, and her eyes barely focused as they skimmed over her body, her bag, her flip-flops. That must have felt like Laurel’s normal look to Bet, and she’d relaxed into a passive state, adrift, waiting to see what would happen next.

Later, when Laurel was hell-bent on getting Thalia and digging up what really happened that night, Bet ghosted around on her cat feet, listening. Bet, Laurel was certain, had her ear at every cracked door. No doubt she eavesdropped when Laurel went downstairs to tell David that they needed Thalia. Laurel imagined Bet pressing down the intercom listen button and leaning one ear against the speaker. At the theater with Thalia, Bet must have taken off the headphones as soon as Gary went back upstairs, sneaking to the door to hear Laurel tell Thalia all her theories.

Bet had been covering her tracks ever since. She’d seen. She’d let it happen. Now she’d finagled Shelby into going with her to DeLop, the least safe place on Planet Earth.

Thalia and David were still volleying harsh words back and forth, but Laurel heard none of them. She willed David’s phone to ring, for the police dispatcher to say they had Shelby at a rest stop off 65, not half an hour away, waiting for Laurel, safe and angry.

This far down 29, the strip malls had given out. They’d left Pensacola. Flat Florida grassland dotted with loblolly pine trees filled the long spaces between BP stations and truck stops. The phone didn’t ring. Her child was still moving headlong into danger.

Out of the wash of hard words, Laurel caught this sentence: “Until you gave her that big ‘you light up my life’ speech in the foyer—”

Laurel’s head jerked around to stare at her sister. “You heard that?” she said.

Thalia paused. She had the rearview mirror angled so that she could glare back through it at David, but she glanced at Laurel and said, “Yes, Bug. Bet’s not the only one who can glide around the house in sock feet,” and Laurel blanched. It was as if Thalia had been reading her mind. But Thalia wasn’t finished. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, per se. I came down to talk to you, and he was in the middle of it. I’m glad the whole ‘you make me want to be a better man’ thing worked for you, but then after, in the glow, in the endless hours the two of you were secluded in David’s pit downstairs, I have to know, little sister, what fleas were you putting in his ear?”

Laurel shrugged, already losing interest. She leaned forward in her seat, pressing her hands in to the dashboard as if pushing the car forward. “Let it go.”

“What did you tell him?” Thalia asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Maybe she should try Sissi’s house again. Sissi must have a cell phone, too, or maybe Bet had gotten