There are two types of people in this world. The first are the people who’d love to go back to high school if they could, those were their glory days, that’s when they peaked.
The other type is made up of people who’d like to forget those four years completely.
Spengler had always fallen firmly into the second category. She’d grown up poor, raised by a single parent who constantly struggled to make ends meet. She looked different than everyone else, had a mother who didn’t speak English well, couldn’t afford the little things all teenagers want to have. Marion Spengler was doomed to be a high school loser from the moment she was born, and once she graduated she’d never expected to set foot inside one again.
But here she was.
“We’ve all been friends with Marie so long, the news of what happened was such a shock,” one of the women said. “Detective, could you hand me that seashell? No, not that one. The curvy one. Yes. Thank you so much.”
Book club, running club, volunteer work at the hospital and library—all of those things in Marie’s life led back to a particular group of women: the PTA at Taft High School. They’d be happy to assist any way they could, Spengler was told when she reached the school’s front desk—they were spending all day at the high school decorating the gym for the upcoming dance, but she was welcome to join them. The theme was Under the Sea, and when Spengler came in it looked like an ocean reef had thrown up. It was corny, but she’d seen worse.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” one of the women asked, sighing as she gazed around. “I wish I’d been so lucky to go to dances like this in high school.”
Personally, Spengler thought the kids wouldn’t give a damn about the decorations, but she kept that opinion to herself. Ten years from now, this event would be nothing but a vague blip on the high school memory time line. She had a feeling it meant more to the PTA than it did the students.
“Who’s running the PTA?” she asked the woman.
“No one is, now that Marie’s gone. We’re planning another election, and I’d guess Alice Schottelman will win. Alice and Marie always had a kind of rivalry.”
“Which one is Alice?”
“The one over there. In the yoga pants.”
“Everyone in here is wearing yoga pants.”
“Oh, right. She’s the one with the short blond hair. It’s a good salon job, but you can see her roots if you look close enough.”
Catty, Spengler thought. The women in the gym—about twenty of them, maybe more—were a tight-knit group, but they played with their claws unsheathed. Their kids had grown up together, they all lived in the same neighborhood and played Bunco and shared cocktail recipes. They were a group of women drawn together because their husbands had money; they had big houses, they had big diamond rings on their fingers that were definitely the real deal. These women were the modern-day Stepford Wives, but as it usually happens, they didn’t see it for themselves.
Walking through the gym in her blue jeans and boots, Spengler was reminded of a video she’d found online not too long before. It was eight minutes long, and there were no actual people in it, only a single female mannequin wearing a sleek blond wig and dressed in exercise gear, posed in different positions for each changing shot, sometimes moving with arms and legs hooked up to wires and pulleys. A robotic voice had been dubbed over the whole thing, distorted and harsh, chanting the same words again and again.
I am good and fine.
Eight minutes of this, 480 seconds of shaky camcorder footage of a pale plastic figure and that chanting robot voice, it was one of the creepiest things she’d ever seen, and she wasn’t exactly sure why these women reminded her of that video and that creepy, weird mannequin—maybe it was their perfect, unlined skin or their rail-thin bodies, or maybe it was because these women had taken themselves and slapped a thick coat of shellac on top and called it good.
And by all accounts, Marie had been the leader of them all.
“Alice?” Spengler asked, tapping the shoulder of the blond woman who’d been pointed out to her. “Alice Schottelman?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Marion Spengler.” She flashed her badge. “I’m here asking questions about Marie Evans.”
“Oh, god,” Alice said, putting a hand to her chest. “I was torn to pieces when I heard what happened. Marie and I were best friends.”
“Then you’re exactly the person I need to speak with,” Spengler said. “Is there somewhere private we can go?”
“Of course,” Alice said. Her glossy lips parted in a glittering smile. “And I’ll grab a few of the other girls. They wouldn’t want to miss this.”