Page 20 of Broken Things

“Mostly squirrels,” Mrs. Ball responds, without taking her eyes off Mia and me. She lashes her dish towel around the railing and humps a little closer to us, squinting, like she wants to be sure she hasn’t mixed us up for someone else. Or like she’s hoping she has. “What are you doing here?”

Mia swallows so hard I can hear it. I bet when she decided to start playing detective, she forgot all about the awkward middle chapters. I let her sweat it out. “My name is Mia Ferguson. And this is Brynn—”

“I know who you are.” For someone so old, Barbara Ball sure has some volume in her. “What are you doing here?”

“We were hoping to talk with you and Mr. Ball....”

“You were hoping to talk to us?” She saystalk toas if it really meansbludgeon. “What in God’s green you want to talk about?”

Mia looks to me for help. But I just shrug. This was her idea. Make a bed, lie in it, blah blah.

“About—about Summer,” Mia says.

Mrs. Ball squints again, like she’s trying to make us out througha hard fog even though she’s no more than a few feet away from us.

“Anything we had to say about that child, we said it a long time ago,” Mrs. Ball says. It’s strange to hear her describe Summer that way, as a child—she was the leader to all of us, in all things. But of course she was a child. We all were. “I think you should go now.”

Mia shoots me a helpless look. And now an old, dark anger starts poking my chest. Unfair. “She was our friend,” I blurt out. “She was our best friend, and all we ever wanted was to make things right for her—”

“Let it go, Brynn,” Mia says, in a quiet voice.

But it’s too late. “—and everyone treats us like we’re some kind of disease—”

“Look.” Abby cuts me off before I can say something that’ll get us booted off the Balls’ property for sure, possibly on the wrong side of a rifle. “Mia and Brynn have been doing some spring cleaning. The memorial coming up, and everything. You understand. Good time to let bygones be bygones, turn over a new leaf, et cetera, et cetera.”

Mrs. Ball looks at Abby as if registering her for the first time. Her eyes linger on Abby’s skirt, on her fake eyelashes and carefully drawn lips. She looks suddenly uncertain. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Who are you?”

Abby doesn’t even blink. “Abby Bluntich. Abby B, to my fans.”

She actually says this. Out loud.

“Fans?” Mrs. Ball repeats faintly.

“You might recognize me from Beautycon, or from my YouTube tutorials and my Insta partnership with Howl Cosmetics....”

Mrs. Ball nods dazedly, looking like she’s just been hit by the blunt side of a shovel—I doubt she’s ever even heard of YouTube.

“Anyway, what Mia and Brynn meant to say is that they turned up some old stuff that might have belonged to Summer. Spring cleaning, remember? Most of it’s trash. But if there’s anything you want...”

It’s a brilliant tactic. The Balls are obviously pretty damn late on their spring cleaning.

“What kind of stuff?” Mrs. Ball addresses Abby directly. It’s like Mia and I have disappeared entirely.

Abby shrugs, all casual. “There were some old notes, a tube of lip gloss—we trashed that, becauseyuck—and a mouthpiece for some kind of instrument. Summer was in band, wasn’t she?”

I can’t imagine why it matters: the mouthpiece we found made its way into the shed only recently. But when I shoot her a look, she ignores me.

“When we could convince her to go,” Mrs. Ball says. “But she played the drums.” And then, a second later: “My husband fixes old instruments, though. He has quite a collection of old horns. She might have... borrowed it by accident.”

A wind lifts through the trees and touches the back of my neck. Could Mr. Ball have been responsible all along? I can’t remember now why the cops never treated him seriously as a suspect. It makes a horrible kind of sense: how he monitored her emailsand social media, how he forbade her to date, even rifled through her stuff while she was out of the house—at least, according to Summer.

The eye I saw, peering at me through the keyhole.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ball,” Mia says. Surprisingly, her voice is steady. “We knew all about her borrowing. We knew her, remember?”

It’s the funniest thing: Mrs. Ball looks at her for a second, her mouth working soundlessly, her body all coiled up with tension. And then, in a split second, she collapses. She lets out awhooshof air, like she’s been holding her breath this whole time. Her face loses all its suspicion, all its confusion, all its anger, and cracks open along little fault lines of sadness. She ages another ten years right in front of us.

“Yeah,” she says. Even her voice sounds tired. “Yeah. I guess you did.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of a footpath through the antique debris that winds around the house. “Hank should be around back in the workshop. You can go on and ask him yourself.”

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