Sawyer felt all the air leave the room. She knew Maggie was dead. She knew that she had killed herself in a horrible way, but the idea of her being dead and buried left a burning hole in Sawyer’s gut.
Maggie was really dead.
“I just wish Mr. Rose had decided to add some color to the dresses. The cut is so nice, but the black is so drab.”
Sawyer began to focus on the dresses—the rack of plastic-wrapped garments and Mr. Rose’s sheer joy over them. Anything not to think of Maggie buried.
“The sashes are red,” Sawyer heard herself mumble.
“Sashes?”
Sawyer made a motion around her waist. “The dresses have a big red sash that goes around the waist.”
Mrs. Gaines’s eyebrows pressed together as she chewed on her bottom lip. “There was no sash on Maggie’s dress. It was still in the plastic bag when we—when we—” Her words dissolved into tears, and Sawyer patted her shoulder, unsure how to comfort a woman who had lost her child.
“Maybe it just fell out at school or something,” she said, feeling inadequate and dumb.
Mrs. Gaines swiped at her tears again and steadied her shoulders. “You know who would love to see you? Olivia. She’s around here somewhere.” Mrs. Gaines started to crane her neck, and Sawyer laid a soft hand on her arm.
“I’ll go find her,” she said softly.
Olivia was sitting on the bottom stair, balancing a paper plate heaped with untouched ham and a congealing macaroni salad of some sort on her lap. She was holding a biscuit in her hand, tearing absently at it, the crumbs littering her plate, her pinched-together knees.
“Olivia?” Sawyer was surprised when the girl looked up at her. She had grown into her freckles and big ears and was nearly the spitting image of her older sister. She had Maggie’s eyes, the gentle sweep of her nose. Her hair was a slightly paler version of her sister’s, worn in the same long, layered style.
“Sawyer?” There was a faint shimmer of light in Olivia’s eyes, and she dropped the hunk of bread she was holding and reached out to hug Sawyer. “What are you doing here?”
Sawyer sat down next to the girl. “Maggie was my friend.”
Olivia started working the biscuit again. “She hated you.”
It wasn’t a surprise or a shock, but Sawyer still felt the sting of Olivia’s words.
“After the whole Kevin thing,” she finished.
Sawyer nodded. “It was a big misunderstanding. I wish Maggie knew—could have known—that. I just wanted to pay my respects.”
Olivia nodded without answering, staring at the blank white wall in front of her. “I found her, you know.”
“What?”
“Maggie. I found her in the closet. We were fighting the day before. I was wearing a pair of her jeans. She swore at me, told me never to touch her stuff. I was going in to put the jeans back…and there she was.” Tears pooled on Olivia’s bottom lashes. “There she was. Only, she wasn’t.”
Sawyer began to tremble, tears rimming her eyes. “My God, Olivia, I’m so sorry.”
“I thought she was just being silly. She used to say if I kept taking her stuff without asking, bad things would happen.” Olivia shook her head. “I thought she meant to me.”
“Oh, Olivia, no.” Sawyer slid an arm around the girl’s shoulders and pulled her into her.
“How could she do that?”
“I—I—” Sawyer stammered, then felt the question burning her lips. “Was there a note?”
Olivia turned to look at her, her eyes glossy. “You mean like a suicide note?”
“Yeah.”
Olivia swallowed and shook her head slowly. “No, nothing. And the weird thing is, she seemed fine—totally fine that day, that week.” The girl shrugged, a fresh torrent of tears wobbling over her pink cheeks. “She never seemed like anything was bothering her.”
“What is she doing here?”
Sawyer’s head snapped up as the nasally voice cut through the din in the room.
“You, her!” Sawyer looked up to see Libby, one of Maggie’s henchmen, pointing right at her. Libby’s eyes were as tear-drowned as everyone else’s, but anger bloomed a bright red on her cheeks. Sawyer blinked at her, at the crowd that was craning to see.
“Libby, I—”
“You what?” Libby spat. “You wanted to make sure you’d finished the job?”
Sawyer felt herself gape. “What? What are you talking about?”
“You’re the reason Maggie’s dead. You—you tortured her, like, every day. You stole her boyfriend and then flaunted it in front of her. Maggie was so nice, and all you did was act like a bitch to her. And this is what happened. Maggie was so desperate to be friends with you again, but you kept right on bullying her.” Libby sniffed, tears raking over her cheeks.
“No, no, that’s not true. That’s not how it was at all.” Sawyer’s heart started to pound, the blood behind her eyes a painful throb.
“You hit her the other day. You attacked her and knocked her down.”
Sawyer stood up so quickly that Olivia’s flimsy paper plate flipped off the girl’s lap, spilling barely touched food on her lap and the staircase. Libby glared at the mess and then at Sawyer, crossing her arms as if that said it all.
Sawyer pointed to the plate. “That was an accident. And so was the fight in the hallway. Maggie picked the fight with me.”
Libby’s eyes were spitting fire. “Convenient.”
“What’s going on here?”
Maggie’s mother pushed through the crowd—who were all staring at Sawyer—and looked up at Sawyer, her red eyes questioning.
“Go ahead, Sawyer, tell Mrs. Gaines how you treated poor Maggie. What you did right before she died.”
Sawyer felt a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth as heat engulfed her. The crowd in front of her started to shimmer as tears pooled behind her eyes and raked down her cheeks. “I didn’t,” she squeaked, her eyes locked on the anguish in Mrs. Gaines’s eyes, “I didn’t do anything to Maggie.”
It was a croaked whisper while Sawyer backed through the crowd to the front door. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t…” Her words were lost in Libby’s last screams, in the coos and whispers of the crowd that tried to defend and calm. She had her hand on the doorknob, the stares around her accusatory, seeming to suck the breath out of Sawyer’s lungs. “It’s not my fault,” she whispered.
Even she had a hard time believing it.
Her cheeks burned, and her stomach seemed to collapse in on itself as she stepped out of the house.
Could this—Maggie—be the message her admirer was talking about?
No. No.
Maggie did this to herself. She—But even in her own head, Sawyer couldn’t form the words. Maggie killed herself.
Sawyer couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see as tears flooded her eyes, and that was why she slipped on the porch step and fell, chest to chest, against Cooper.
“Oof!” he groaned.
Sawyer stepped back, Cooper’s muscled arms holding her taut and upright.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
His dark eyes took her in from head to toe. “Same thing you are, I suppose.”
Sawyer noticed Cooper’s black suit, crisp white shirt, and simple tie. Had he been dressed this way for any other occasion, she would have complimented the way his broad shoulders looked under the nicely tailored jacket.
“I didn’t even know you knew Maggie.”
Cooper shrugged. “She was in a few of my classes. I just thought it would be nice to…”—his eyes went around Sawyer, to the closed door behind her—“pay my respects, I guess.”
Sawyer nodded. “Me too.”
“It’s nice that you came here. I mean, I remember you told me about what happened between the two—or, three, I guess—of you.”