Page 27 of Pretty Dead Things

“I’m excited to meet up with everyone else on the volunteer committee. If you don’t mind pointing some of them out?”

Kennedy Claire scrunches her nose. “Oh, honey, you know I talked to some of the ladies, and I don’t think they’re going to have much use for you. They’ve got everything covered. But they did appreciate the offer.”

I’m a little taken aback. “Are you sure?” Yesterday, she was chomping at the bit to have an extra set of hands.

Kennedy Claire rests the clipboard on her chest and looks down her nose at me. “Oh, and Cat, next time you have a problem with one of my children, I’d appreciate if you’d just call me. You have my number. I mean, really,” she laughs in a way that sends prickles down my scalp, because I don’t know what she’s talking about. “There’s no reason to call the sheriff.”

“The sheriff?” I say, but then I realize, blood draining from my face so fast it makes me queasy. The ball cap boy from last night, the one who called me a cunt. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize he was your son.” I put a hand to her elbow. “Otherwise, of course, I would have called you. It’s just dangerous. That’s all. With all this construction going on, they really shouldn’t be out there drinking.”

“My Kayden wasn’t drinking,” she says.

I let out a puff of a laugh, but her face is a steely mask. She looks down at my hand on her elbow, like I’ve just wiped ketchup on her white dress, and she slides her arm away.

“If you’ll excuse me.” She turns and walks toward the front of the room. Conversations begin to die down and everyone finds a seat. Melanie is half standing, waving me over to the chair she’s saved for me in the front row, and I slink over, like a dog with her tail between her legs.

And all the glimmering potential of this morning has drained from me, and I feel heavy as a wet bag of sand as I drop into the seat beside Melanie.

Because—for Olivia’s sake—the last person I wanted to make an enemy of right now was Kennedy Claire Preston.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREEINGRID

I’m snapping candid photos of the Miss Lone Star Princess orientation, just like Kennedy Claire wanted. A mother tucking her daughter’s hair behind her ear as they wait to talk to one of the judges. Two contestants laughing beside the juice bar. Sheriff Ryan kissing his granddaughter on the cheek.

When I first arrived, I chatted with Melanie, her welcome folder tucked under one arm. Mom’s doctors say she’s doing well—her weight is up, her incisions are healing—and Melanie promised to walk me through the post-op care tomorrow, to make sure I can handle what comes next.

But for now, I’m behind my camera. Someone in this room sent me that invitation. That’s what I keep thinking as I focus each face in my lens. It would make the most sense. Sheriff Ryan interviewed all our friends back then. Everyone but Ben, of course, who refused to speak to police, who lawyered up and then left town.

Had they seen Izzy that day? When had they spoken to her last? Did they know where she might go if she was in trouble? Did they know of anyone who would want to hurt her?

But teenagers lie.

Someone knows something now that they didn’t tell the sheriff back then.

Sheriff Ryan interviewed me as well, in our living room, as I satbeside my mother, mugs of tea growing cold on the coffee table. I had never once before seen my mother make hot tea. She brewed sweet tea constantly, always kept a pitcher chilled in the fridge, but she didn’t make cups of steaming chamomile. The scent was floral and unfamiliar. I imagined her digging to the back of the pantry to find a forgotten box, dusty and stale. She was on autopilot, and this was what a person did, it seemed, when one daughter was missing and the other was being interviewed by police. To this day, I can’t stand chamomile.

Sheriff Ryan didn’t bring a notepad or a pen. He didn’t take me down to the station or sit formally across from me at our dining room table. He hung his hat by the door then sat on the sofa, in the same spot where he always sat when he came over to watch football with Dad.

Now, Ingrid, sweetheart, can you tell me anything at all about the last time you saw your sister?

Izzy had left the house that afternoon to study at the library for her calculus exam, and then she was supposed to meet Ben for a date. Dinner up on the square.

She was planning to break up with him, I told the sheriff. We were weeks from graduation, about to leave for Texas Tech to share a dorm six hours away. She wanted a clean start. Didn’t want to drag a long-distance relationship behind her, didn’t want to be tied to who she’d been for all of high school. Plus, and only I knew this, she had a crush on the upperclassman at Tech who had given us our tour, and she had been exchanging emails with him all semester.

She’d been talking about breaking up with Ben for months but dragging her feet.I don’t want to hurt him, she told me.

And Ben would be hurt. We both knew that. In his mind, they’d get married. They’d build a house on the Sherman land. They’d stay in this town forever. And even though Izzy loved him too, she didn’t want that.

In the end, that’s the motive everyone gave him. That’s the version they believed. The one I eventually believed too: that Izzy broke his heart that night. And Ben killed her for it.

My eyes keep wandering to the windows to watch the excavation. Sherman Ranch is almost eight hundred acres. So much space to hide something you don’t want found.

Three men in hard hats stare down into a freshly dug pit, and I hold my breath. I picture a rib cage packed with dirt. Not scattered bones, but neat, the way a chest would fall apart if left long enough. Soft tissue breaking down—skin, fat, muscle, organs—until nothing is left but bone. Soil settling into the hollows.

One of the men waves an arm at the driver, and the digging continues.

Everyone takes their seats, and Kennedy Claire begins her presentation at the front of the room. She is upselling the various vendors, making her spiel complete with a PowerPoint projected onto a portable screen.

“Of course,” she says, “contestants are welcome to do their own hair and makeup, but for an additional fee, you can be pampered by the best.”