Pretty Girl Gone (Mac McKenzie #3)

Suzi smiled broadly.

“Still, we were both twenty-two, Monte and I, single and pretty and living away from home for the first time, and we couldn’t get a date with anyone who used vowels when they spoke besides eh! There was a sexual revolution going on out there and we were missing out. It didn’t bother me so much. I was excited to be a part of it all, the Seven, the resurgence of the town. Monte—at the end of the school year, she moved to Mankato.”

“Did you keep in touch?”

“Not at first,” Suzi said. “I heard she got married, had a child—heard that her husband was killed in Vietnam. We didn’t talk again until a few years later and I saw her name. Monte was conducting a seminar at a teacher’s conference. She had kept her maiden name, which was a radical thing for a married woman to do in those days, but she was always a bit of a feminist. I saw her name and looked her up and we’ve been fairly close ever since.”

“What about the other teachers that were here back then?”

“Gone. Some died. Some moved away. There weren’t that many of us. As far as I know I’m the only one from back then who’s still teaching.”

“Maybe you can answer some questions for me.”

“About the Seven?” Suzi asked.

“Yes, but mostly about Elizabeth Rogers.”

Suzi thumbed through the yearbook, found a page and turned the book for me to see. The photograph covered nearly the entire page. It was the same shot that appeared in the newspaper, only in color. There was a black border around the photograph and beneath it Elizabeth’s name was printed along with an epitaph.

God gives us all love. But someone to love he only lends us.

“Beth,” Suzi said. “She was what they used to call ‘a dish.’ ”

I hadn’t thought much about her when I first saw Elizabeth’s faded black-and-white photograph in the newspaper. Just a pretty girl now gone. It was only her death that had held interest for me. Yet seeing the photograph in color, that changed. Elizabeth’s face was smooth and gold tinted, her hair was a lustrous shade of gold that only nature could create, and her eyes—had they really been that brown, or was it merely a publisher’s trick, a mixing of ink?

Elizabeth had been seventeen at the time of her murder. It must have seemed to her that all the good things in life were hers for the taking. She had only to reach out her hand.

Did she date much? I wondered, suddenly. Date boys besides Jack? My mother didn’t have many dates when she was in high school. She told me most boys were afraid of her, afraid she would reject them. Or they had simply assumed she already had a boyfriend: someone who looked like her, of course she did. My mother had to wait for a man who was nearly a decade older than she, a man who had been with the First Marines at Chosin Reservoir in Korea, who wasn’t afraid of anything, including a beautiful woman. Did Elizabeth have that problem, too? What about the other girls? Did they resent her because she had such pretty eyes, like they did my mom? Did she ever have the chance to be anything but a girl with pretty eyes?

Suzi turned the book around and stared at the photo for a few moments.

“Poor Beth. I sometimes wonder what she was thinking when—when it happened. Did she know she was going to die? Did she think she would be saved at the last moment? She must have been afraid. Alone and afraid. Did she beg for her life? Did she pray? Did she . . . ?”

Suzi closed the book and set it on the sofa next to her.

“Life should be a pleasure for those people lucky enough to be born pretty. That’s what the poets tell us, and I believe it,” Suzi said. “Only it isn’t always so, is it? What did Shakespeare write? Alas, what danger will it be to us, Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.”

“I hadn’t thought that much about it,” I confessed.

“I have. Far too much. For months after Beth’s death, I took every compliment as a threat, every invitation as—It was years before I felt comfortable enough to walk the streets alone, even here in crime-free Victoria. Truth is, I don’t think I have really gotten over it. It was just too close to me.

“The sad thing, one of the truly sad things, is that we never really had the chance to mourn her. Excitement over the Seven took care of that.”

“Were you at the party?” I asked.

“The night she was killed?”

“Elizabeth was dating Jack Barrett,” I reminded the teacher.

“Beth. Everyone called her, Beth. Yes, she was dating Jack. Of course she was. The prettiest girl dates the prettiest boy. That’s the way it works.”