Deadly Blessings Read Online Free PDF Page B

silly venture on my part. What was I going to do? Find
some key piece of information and hand it over to this new guy
Fenton? Not a chance on that.
    But what other options did I have? In my
personal fantasy, I would walk in with some great human interest
angle on the story of Milla’s murder and demand that Bass return
the story to me. Once he saw the in-depth investigation I’d done,
he’d have no choice but to give in, and I’d be looking at a shot at
the coveted Davis award.
    The girl handed me one of those oversized
hardbound books. Not a lot of pages, but every single one had some
gorgeous model looking impossibly fabulous in a wacky hair
style—the kind that if I wore them, would make small children
shriek with laughter and think I was about to make a little doggie
for them out of balloons.
    I sighed; the magenta-streaked blonde said,
“You like it?”
    I had turned to a page featuring a stunning
redhead with hair piled up on her head, a lot like the style
mom-types wore in the fifties for a night on the town. This
redhead, whose photograph was so close up that her pores should
have come up the size of dimes, had the most flawless complexion
I’d ever seen. The hairstyle was awful, but on her it looked
great.
    “ Yeah,” I said, with a
laugh, “if I looked like her, I suppose I would.” The girl grinned,
which I took for comprehension and a sharing of the joke, but when
she returned to the phone, she spoke only Polish.
    Little did she know, with my dark hair and
freckles, that I could understand every word, as she discussed
schedule conflicts and trading days off.
    Most of the girls were pretty, all with that
indefinable quality that let me know that they were foreign, even
before they opened their mouths to speak in heavily accented
English. I found it interesting that there was this cache of Polish
folk in this snazzy area, and they were making a go of it.
According to the information I’d gleaned, the Hair to Dye For Salon
had been in business under the same owner for the past seven
years.
    At a movement to my immediate left, I looked
up. A slim, dark-haired girl stood, her head half-bowed. Wearing
fashionable too-short black flare pants and a tight black silky
shirt that exposed her navel, she was one of those “goth” types
that I thought had gone out of style in the last decade. No
apparent piercings other than her ears, but the dark lipstick did
nothing for her pale face.
    She lifted her right hand in a way that let
me know she wanted me to follow her. No smile, not a word. She was
a few inches shorter than my five-foot six, which made her pretty
tiny. The hair, a page-boy in a deep maroon, was obviously
dyed.
    “ Hi,” I said, “are you my
stylist?”
    She turned and shrugged in a way that let me
know she not only didn’t understand English, but that she was not
about to start a conversation. This was one shy chick.
    I was about to try again when, with another
little hand movement, she gestured me into a chair by the wash
sinks. And then she was gone.
    I’m hair-challenged. Always have been. My
idea of accoutrement is a rubber band. I like my hair pulled off my
face, out of my way. For a while, in my early twenties, I went
through this period of hair-worry, investing in hot rollers, two
different barrel-size curling irons, and a whole battery of goop to
make my hair look natural. I gave up when it took me longer to
“style” in the morning than it did for me to commute. Plus the fact
that any wind, any rain … heck, even the thought of rain, made my
locks go straight and lifeless.
    Right now, my hair, chestnut brown, was just
past shoulder length. Perfect for rubber-banding in place. If I was
going somewhere fancy, I simply side-parted it and let it hang.
Someone once told me that I should go shorter, and that bangs would
help camouflage my high forehead, but I liked it simple. And my
hair was exactly that. Despite Gabriela’s insistence that I could
use a new look, I wasn’t willing to