All The Pretty Dead Girls. John Manning

      “What’s going on?” Sue asked, looking over at a couple of girls beside her.

      “I don’t know,” one of the girls replied, raising her eyes to look at the group in the hallway.

      Sue took a few steps toward the excitement, as the chattering of the girls just outside the lounge grew louder. She could see the first girl now. She was tiny. She looked like she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds soaking wet, and her long brown hair tumbled over a WILBOURNE COLLEGE sweatshirt. She had apparently brought some news to the group.

      “Yes, you do know her,” the tiny girl was telling one of her friends. “She was in our lit class last semester—remember, she was the blond chick with the thick Brooklyn accent?”

      “Oh, right,” said the other girl. “She didn’t like Jane Austen. I thought Dr. Michalak was going to have a stroke.”

      “So she skipped out on the welcome ceremony?” another girl was asking. “How did she get away with that?”

      “Tish Lewis signed her in,” the tiny girl told her. “You know Tish, don’t you? I can only imagine how much trouble she’s in.”

      Sue gulped down the rest of the contents of the cup. “Excuse me,” she said into the group. “But I need to get to class.”

      “Honey,” said one girl, “I’m not sure there are any classes at the moment.”

      Sue looked at her oddly. “Why not?”

      The girls all looked back at the tiny girl in the sweatshirt. She gave Sue a quizzical look.

      “And who are you?” she asked.

      “I’m Sue Barlow. A freshman.”

      The girl’s face softened. “Okay. Chrissy Hansen.” They shook hands. “Welcome to Wilbourne. But I hope you don’t go running right back to wherever you came from.”

      Sue smiled. “Why would I do that?”

      “Something’s happened to one of the students. They think she may have been attacked.”

      “Attacked?” Sue gasped.

      Chrissy nodded. “Her name was Bonnie Warner. I was just out jogging, and down by the front gate there are police cars everywhere.”

      The girl to Chrissy’s left shuddered. “This freaks me out.”

      “The campus is safe,” Chrissy insisted. “Bonnie was attacked off campus.”

      “But right outside the front gate!” another girl chimed in.

      “When did it happen?” Sue asked.

      “Sometime last night. They found her bike this morning.”

      Sue looked at Chrissy intently. “They found her bike? Where is she?”

      Chrissy took a deep breath. “That’s just it. No one knows. All they found was her bike and her baseball cap.” Her face had turned pale. “And a whole hell of a lot of blood.”

      “Blood?” Sue asked, her knees suddenly weak.

      Chrissy nodded. “Everywhere. On the road. On her bike. But no sign of Bonnie anywhere.”

      “What—what do the police think happened to her?” The coffee was churning in Sue’s stomach, and she was struggling to keep on her feet.

      Chrissy shrugged. “No idea.”

      Another girl came bounding off the elevator just then. “Classes have been postponed until noon today,” she blurt out. “Bonnie Warner is missing and they found her bike with a lot of blood—”

      “We know!” Chrissy yelled. For such a little thing, she sure had a loud voice.

      Sue staggered away from the group, feeling light-headed and queasy.

      One of my dreams last night was about a blond girl on a bicycle.

      13

      Lebanon started its day early, around five A.M. as alarms went off in darkened houses all over town. Lights flickered to life, and sleepy-eyed people staggered into their days. Coffeemakers perked, margarine melted in frying pans, teeth were brushed, showers got the blood pumping. School-age kids heard their parents’ alarms faintly through their dreams, and knew their turn to rise and shine would soon be here. In the big bus barn behind the high school, the yellow buses with LEBANON SCHOOL DISTRICT printed across their sides were fueled up. The New York Times truck rolled over the back roads to throw bundles of papers out in back of the Lebanon Herald office, where at around quarter to six, Jimmy Madsen, thirteen, and his mother would arrive in their SUV to pick them up. All the newspapers would be delivered in time for Jimmy to be at school when the first bell rang at eight.

      In his apartment above the Yellow Bird, old Wally Bingham heard the Times truck rattle by. Almost time to get a move on, he told himself. Wally could set his clock by that truck, even though he didn’t need to. He woke every morning right at five on the dot. Even after being out of the Army for almost thirty years, it was a habit he couldn’t seem to break. No matter how late he stayed up, no matter how much he drank, no matter what kind of sleeping pill he took, every morning his eyes opened as the digital clock on his night-stand switched to 5:00.

      The apartment was empty and silent, except for the sound of his coffeemaker brewing in the kitchen. Wally lay there in the bed for a few moments more, relishing the sound of the silence. After his wife Lena died ten years earlier, he’d thought about marrying again—but then he’d gotten used to the notion of being alone, for the first time in his life, and he liked it. He’d been the youngest of seven kids, had gone into the Army straight out of high school, and after he finally decided not to re-up and “retired,” there had been Lena. They’d never had kids—they tried when he was still in the Army, but Lena never could get pregnant. “God just doesn’t seem to want to bless us that way,” Lena said whenever someone brought up the subject of their childlessness. Wally admired her ability to publicly shrug off a question he knew caused her great pain. No one knew how many nights Lena had cried herself to sleep over her inability to conceive, his arms holding her until her body stopped shaking.

      They had talked about adopting halfheartedly, but nothing ever came of it—and then came the illnesses, one right after another, until Lena finally just quit fighting and died. Wally thought he’d be lonely without her, but he wasn’t. Not really. It seemed almost disrespectful that he liked the quiet, liked being alone. But it’s not, he reminded himself as he stared at the ceiling, Lena wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and neither am I. And if people think it’s strange I didn’t marry again, they can go to hell. It’s none of their goddamned business.

      He got out of the bed and did his morning routine: two hundred push-ups and two hundred sit-ups, before getting a cup of coffee and heading into the bathroom to shave and shower. Now that he was past sixty, his body and joints ached more than they used to, and the mornings were getting harder for him. The winters and cold weather were getting rougher—some mornings when it was cold he woke up with his joints so stiff, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get up. He was dreading the onset of the coming winter—he didn’t look forward to shoveling the sidewalk in front of the café, or digging his car out of snowdrifts, and the apartment didn’t seem to warm up quite as much as it used to. The weather was going to start turning cold in another month or so—and as he shaved, Wally looked at himself in the mirror and thought the magic word that had gotten him through the last two winters: Florida.

      The thought brought a smile to his face. He was closing the café for two weeks at Christmas, flying down to Pensacola, renting a car, and driving all over the state until he found the place he was going to settle in when he’d had enough of the winters and the snow. He wasn’t sure where yet in Florida it would be, but this year he was going looking for it. He’d last in Lebanon maybe another year or two, and that was it. He wanted to head south while he could still get around and spend his mornings fishing and enjoying the sun. I’m still in pretty good shape, he