Pretty Little Dead Girls

CHAPTER ONE

A Body is Found

Bryony Adams was the type of girl who got murdered.

This was always so, and it was apparent from the way men looked at her as she adjusted her knee socks, to the way women shook their heads in pity when she rode by on her bicycle.

“I made you a present, Mrs. Lopez,” she said, dragging her backpack over to the desk. A vivid orange poster hung on the wall, demonstrating how to tie shoes. Bryony was well versed in tying her shoes, and could even double knot, but that was because she and her father worked very, very hard on it at home. Now she was working on counting to one hundred and was almost there, although sometimes she got lost while wandering around in the ever elusive eighties.

“Oh, did you? What a sweet girl you are. What did you make?”

Bryony pulled the gift out of the backpack, and set it on the desk. A bookmark, made of bright construction paper with cheap sequins glued to it. A cockeyed Mrs. Lopez was painstakingly drawn in crayon, her smile extending beyond the circle of her face. She had purple hair and a star sitting on one shoulder. Mrs. Lopez’s eyes stung. She clutched the girl to her, and as she felt the thin bones and coltish knees, she thought, Run away, little girl. Run from everything that is going to befall you. Just run, Bryony. Run.

What she said out loud was, “It’s very beautiful, Bryony. I have a special fondness for purple sequins, too.”

Kindergarten did not kill her.

Mrs. Lopez cried as Bryony pranced across the school’s tiny stage to receive her diploma. She hugged her teacher and gravely shook the hand of the principal, and then waved wildly to her father who sat in the second row.

“She’s yours now,” Mrs. Lopez whispered to Mr. Egan, the first grade teacher. “Watch over her, Larry. Keep her safe.”

“Oh heavens, that little girl is going to die in my care,” Mr. Egan muttered back.

As soon as the kindergarten graduation ended, he went directly home to pour himself a drink, and then several drinks. When he awoke the following morning, with a pounding head and heavy tongue, he decided then and there that he wouldn’t drink again. He needed his wits about him if he was going to help the Star Girl live.

And live she did, all through the first grade.

She painted ceramic ducks for a class project and watched baby chicks hatch for Easter, and lost her first tooth without mishap.

“Thank you for being my teacher,” Bryony said to Mr. Egan on the last day of school. “I enjoyed this class so very much.”

“It was a pleasure,” he answered honestly, and breathed a sigh of relief and trepidation. Although she had not been murdered nor even really threatened that year, not once, it only meant she was prolonging the inevitable. Surely the time was nearing.

When Bryony was in the second grade, a tiny body was found half buried under the desert sand. The coyotes had gotten to her, but not too badly, thanks to Patty Farlan. Patty, the high school druggie ringleader, was out partying with his friends nearby, and the bonfire scared the animals off. Patty and his flavor-of-the-week girlfriend, whose name nobody cared about or would remember, least of all Patty, stumbled across her.

“Patty,” said Flavor, “will you love me forever? Really, true?”

“Sure, sure,” said Patty, and then, “Oh my (these words shall be forever censored) what the (censor censor) is that?! It looks like a (censor) body out in the (censored for the sake of children) desert!”

It took a while for everybody at the party to sober up and come down, and after they did, Patty gave the police a call.

“Hey, man. There’s a body out in the desert. I found it when I was, uh, studying the desert nightlife, man. I think . . . I think it’s a little girl.”

Immediately the receptionist thought of Bryony. Poor girl, it had happened. It was time. She snuffled a little and pressed the magic red button on the station’s telephone.

“What?” said the voice on the receiver.

“Tim,” she said. Not Mr. Tim or Captain Tim or any of the other formal titles that he had garnished in his illustrious career. No, they were small town born and small town raised, and Tim was Tim. Thirty years from now when Tim would become President of the United States, he would shirk at being called President Lowry, but he would do it for the good of the country, dragging his feet all the while. But for here and now, he is Tim, and Tim is who he is, and being Simply Tim is good enough for everybody.

“Tim,” she said, “Patty is on the line.”

“Is he seeing dragons at the grocery store again?”

“No, he said that he was out in the desert looking at the animals,” (there was a barely audible snort from Tim, but his restraint can only be admired) “and he came across . . . well, Tim, Patty says that he found a body.”

“A body?” Tim snapped to full attention.

The receptionist took a deep breath. “A . . . little girl, he says.”

There was silence, and then Tim said, “Has anybody contacted Bryony’s father yet?”

“Of course not. The call just barely came in.”

Simply Tim was already pulling his jacket over his stooped shoulders. They were not stooped a moment ago, but suddenly the air above them weighed more than he could bear. “Get the crew. I’ll check in on Stop Adams when we know more. Heaven knows that man has been dreading this visit all of his life. Poor Stop. Poor Bryony, rest her pretty little soul.”

The Sergeant and his crew somberly made the drive out to the desert.

The coyotes howled in sorrow over their loss.

Heavy boots crunched over frozen sand, now thawing in the tentative light of morning.

There she was, tiny fingers curled, slightly bloodied at the tips. Her left arm, shoulder, and head stuck out of the ground, while the rest lay quietly beneath. They took pictures, carefully brushing the sand free.

The girl was much too big to be Bryony. The areas behind her knees were pillowy, and she had dimples at her elbows. The bruises across her face darkened her eyes like drugstore shadow, making her look years older.

“Samantha Collins,” the deputy said to Tim. The shock had straightened his voice out, erasing the freewheeling cadence that he usually exhibited. The deputy’s oldest girl often babysat for the Collins family. Stocked fridge, cable, well-behaved kids, she said. They paid well but not exorbitantly. Nice, middle class people.

“Huh. Who would have thought?” said Tim, rubbing his face. “She doesn’t seem to be the type.”

He wasn’t quite sure if the deputy would understand what he meant, but the deputy nodded earnestly. “I know what you mean, Tim. Who would have thought that somebody would kill Samantha?” After all, Bryony lived just around the corner.

Samantha was buried in a simple pink casket with very little ceremony. A sweet girl, a quiet girl. A devastatingly average and unmemorable girl. The town came out and sat through the mundane, unimaginative funeral.

“That was . . . inspiring,” a woman in black commented halfheartedly. This, of course, made her a liar, but it was a gentle lie with sweet intentions, and she was forgiven, nay, raised in the general esteem because of it.

“Yes,” said her sister. “It was very . . . appropriate.”

Indeed, it was. Appropriate and perfectly suitable. In the best of taste; a quiet, humdrum type of funeral for an obedient daughter. No scandal at all except for the shocking fact of her murder. The “Who?” and “Why?” of it didn’t even come close to the real question that was on everybody’s mind: “Why not Bryony?”

In fact, the only emotion that anybody really felt at the funeral was a quick, deviously delicious thrill that occurred beforehand as family and friends filed past to look at the body. Samantha was quite lovely, as luck would have it, painted and powdered and hardly looking murdered at all. Her limbs had snapped back into place wonderfully, the punctures and black bruising covered artfully with clothes and makeup.

Bryony paused by the small casket longer than was custom, and the people behind her began to feel ill at ease for her, this strange, almost mystical girl who dared throw off the flow of the viewing line. Bryony studied Samantha carefully, delicately moving away the ruffled collar to see the thin wound that ran all the way around her throat.

Bryony leaned with her face uncomfortably close to that of the corpse, who was not a corpse at all to Bryony, but her dear friend Samantha. And then she said what ears pricked to hear her say, the words that coursed like wildfire through the funeral crowd and down phone lines mere seconds after she uttered them.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. It should have been me.”

Nobody, not one person, soothed the bitter tears of that guilty child. Not a word was spoken, not a hand ran down her pale hair or patted her bony back comfortingly.

Because she was right. They knew it and now she knew it, and nobody else understood what had happened, either. Somebody made a mistake. Somebody had taken the wrong child.