A Pinchbeck Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

of unicorns, in resin, bisque, and pewter, some with glitter sprinkled on their horns. A heavyset girl with auburn hair was leaning on some pillows on the floor in a corner, at work on a book of sudoku. She spoke first. “Hello. I don’t give
interviews
. I don’t care to speak to any more reporters about poor Genevieve. If you have any questions, I suggest you contact the police.”
    “I’m not a reporter, I promise.” I stepped inside without being invited. The room was a double but with one bed, at the far left, stripped, and one desk equally barren. “I worked with Genevieve at Mingo House. We ate lunches together and hit the thrift shops. I was actually the person…who found her.”
    She stopped doing her sudoku. She indicated a squishy blob of a chair. “How awful for you. How awful for all of us.”
    I sat.
    “Genevieve was such a sweet person. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Wouldn’t
have
.”
    I said I wanted to know of any service that was happening, as did “her friends” at Mingo House. She seemed to be assessing my trustworthiness. “Do you have any idea who could have done such a thing? Did Genevieve have any enemies, any former boyfriends who were bothering her?”
    “Did she ever.” She replaced the classical CD with Green Day. “That idiot Zack who almost killed her on the Jamaicaway. In the motorcycle crash. Her leg was torn up, it was hideous.” Perhaps that was why Genevieve favored peasant dresses and vintage clothing—the lower hemlines.
    I would wait for her to confirm the name. “Zack…?”
    “Zack Meecham.”
    “Has he bothered her lately?”
    “Not at all.” She actually smiled. “He’s dead, he was killed in the accident. Oak tree one, Zack zero. It’s horrible to say, but that was one of the best things that happened to her—Zack checking out.” She continued, how Zack had been insulting, controlling, condescending. He was a graduate student at Harvard. They had met when she taking a course at the Extension School. At first he seemed a mentor of sorts. “But then he became totally toxic. I mean he was a regular Superfund site, they should have put him on an EPA hit list. He tried to take over her life. She almost went to the police.”
    “So why was she riding on his motorcycle? If she considered him a dangerous man, that seems like a dangerous thing to do.”
    “They had been to a party. She needed a ride home, to the dorm. He was the only person left who was sober. She needed her sleep. She had exams the next day.”
    Peggy was the robust type who plays field hockey or maybe softball, with an intelligence that made me want to earn her respect.
    “How did it happen?”
    “He swerved to avoid a jaywalker. It was on a bad curve. He slammed into a tree and died instantly. Her leg was a mess.”
    “It’s so awful, her surviving all that—”
    “And then this horrible thing.”
    She set down her book of sudoku. “Why do you think she was murdered
at Mingo House
?”
    “I have no idea.” But that wasn’t quite true. Mingo House had somehow figured in her death. Was it tied somehow to the “little something for school,” the project? Probably not.
    “Why was she killed there and dressed that way?” She was glancing at the collection of unicorns when she added, “It’s perverse.”
    Perverse, yes, exactly the word. “This Zack. He was much older?”
    She stood and took a neat stack of books from her desk. “I’ve got a final coming up.” She focused on my eyes with an opthamologist’s precision. “Why are you doing this? This investigation? Were you in love with her too?”
    It was a bold question, but a sound one. I’d gotten in life-threatening trouble before, and of my own volition. “There was something compelling about her…We had a kind of connection. Nothing sexual.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably gay.”
    Why, for a moment, was I insulted? I didn’t respond.
    “She had every straight guy panting after her.”
    The books under