The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Read Online Free Page B

reliable instinct was to touch Shelby, to physically move her child two steps back from Bet Clemmens’s story of the drowned uncle. She reached for Shelby’s arm and saw a line of red and rust on the shoulder of her daughter’s lime green T-shirt. It was shaped like a finger.
    Laurel pulled her hands back and turned them over in the light to see the palms. Her right hand, the one she’d placed on the back of Molly’s neck to tilt her head back, was streaked and flecked with drying blood. She rubbed at it, but she succeeded only in marking her other hand as well. She felt a scream building, and then a small, strong hand encircled her wrist, catching it before she could wipe her hand down her damp pajamas.
    A brunette in a tailored brown pantsuit was standing beside her. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail. “Detective Moreno,” she said by way of introduction. “You touched the body?”
    “I touched Molly,” Laurel said. “We did CPR.”
    Moreno looked around and then flagged down a passing man in a jumpsuit. Laurel saw that the detective’s ponytail was perfectly centered on the back of her head, and it narrowed evenly to a point at the end. It was such a mathematically exact ponytail that under normal circumstances, she would have pointed it out to David. Its symmetry would have pleased him.
    “I need a tech to look at your hands, mm-kay?” Moreno handed Laurel’s wrist over to the man in the jumpsuit as if it were an object. Laurel closed her eyes.
    As Moreno walked away, Laurel heard her saying, “You need to get these people out of my crime scene. The skies could open up anytime.”
    But it wasn’t her crime scene. It was Laurel’s yard, where things like this were not allowed to happen.
    She smelled the tang of rubbing alcohol and felt the cool tip of a swab running down her palm. She opened her eyes.
    The tech said, “You can wash up after this,” and his voice was kind. “We’re going to take you over to your neighbors’ house.” He tilted his head toward the Coes’. “We’ll need your daughters’ T-shirt, too. She can change at your neighbors’. We’ll take you there now, okay?”
    “Who did this?” she said to the tech, but he was putting the swab into a little tube and labeling it.
    Laurel wasn’t sure what she was asking, anyway. She’d thought of waiting half an hour after eating, of signs that said NO L IFEGUARD ON D UTY and SWIM AT Y OUR O WN R ISK . She’d assumed Molly was here because of some violation of the careful, basic safety rules of childhood. But drowned people don’t bleed. Blood meant bullet holes and violence. Blood was Uncle Marty on his last hunting trip. Her teeth buzzed, as if she’d bitten tinfoil. Time sped up, and too many people milled around, moving things. Her family became some of the things that they were moving. A uniformed woman was telling them all to follow her, please, and Shelby was looking down at her stained shirt, saying, “What? What?” to the tech.
    “This won’t come off,” Laurel said, holding her bloody palm up to David as they passed through the wooden gate and crossed their lawn, walking toward the Coes’ house. Shelby led the way between Bet Clemmens and the tech who wanted the T-shirt.
    Out in the cul-de-sac, Laurel and David’s neighbors stood in clots between the emergency vehicles. Edie Paintin, Laurel’s other close friend, stood on the edge of Mindy’s yard with her husband, and in between the cop cars and the wasted ambulance she saw the Simpsons, the Decouxs, and the Rainwaters in a huddle. The Prestons and another woman, maybe Julie Wilson, stood farther back, almost lost in the shadows.
    Trish Deerbold, the thin lines of her overplucked brows raised and her mouth curling, was across the cul-de-sac in front of her house. She stared hard as Laurel passed, as if Laurel were an exhibit. Laurel saw Trish poke one elbow into Eva Bailey and then lean toward her, whispering. All her neighbors’ eyes were on her. She