Go, Ivy, Go! Read Online Free PDF

invisibility is all bad. I’ve found that it can come in rather handy at times.
    Eric tucked my hand under his arm, and we headed for the door. “You want to come with us?” he called back over his shoulder to Tam/Tasha.
    “Sure. I don’t have to leave for work yet.”
    So we tromped back down the street to my house, short, dumpy me between these tall, blond specimens of youthful magnificence. At the back door I said, “Thanks for walking me home. I’ll be fine now. I’ll just wait outside for the police to arrive.”
    “We can wait with you,” Eric said.
    “You really think someone will come?” Tam/Tasha asked Eric over my head.       
    “I think they have to check out everything,” Eric answered, also over my head.
    “No matter how implausible it sounds?” I tossed in.
    Guilty expressions flooded both their faces, and finally Tam/Tasha said gently, “You have to admit finding a body in your bathtub does sound unlikely. Maybe what you saw was just, oh, you know, rags and stuff someone dumped in there.”
    For a moment her comments made me doubt myself. Had I made a mistake and seen dead toes that were really only . . . what? What else looks like blackened, shriveled, dead toes? What else smells like death ?
    No, I wasn’t mistaken. Dead toes. Attached to a dead body. But I felt a little defensive. “I’ve found dead bodies before.”
    Eric and Tam/Tasha exchanged glances over my head again, and she patted my shoulder. “Don’t you just hate days like that?”
    They didn’t believe me, but I resisted an impulse to march them upstairs and prove there really was a dead body in the bathtub. If it was a crime scene, strangers shouldn’t be wandering through.
    Hey, not a crime scene just because there was a dead person in the bathtub, I instantly reminded myself. Perfectly normal deaths probably occurred in bathtubs all the time. No doubt there were government statistics on that somewhere.
    “Would you like to come out to the motorhome and sit down while we wait for the police?” I suggested politely.
    “I’m just going to run upstairs and take a look around, okay?” Eric said. “Maybe we’ll discover this is all a misunderstanding and we can call 911 again and cancel—”
    I tried to interrupt with my concerns about contaminating the scene, but before I could finish the sentence, Eric had already disappeared into the house, his flip-flops flapping. Tam/Tasha sat on the back steps..
    She patted the worn step beside her. “We can sit here. I’ll stay with you.”
    I sat down in the approved spot. “Okay. Thanks.” I decided this would be as good a time as any to nose around for information. “Quite a few houses here on Madison Street appear to be vacant. And a lot more rentals than there were when I was living here.”
    “Yeah, it’s kind of going downhill, isn’t it? But we still like it. We’ve saved up some money, and we asked about buying the place we’re renting. But some out-of-state company owns it, and, like I said, they seem to be buying up everything they can get hold of. We’ll probably have to move again once they get everything bought.”
    “What does this company intend to do with the houses?”
    “We’ve heard all kinds of rumors. One is they intend to build a new shopping mall. Or maybe a high-end condo complex or retirement home. Or the buyer is a survivalist billionaire who’s going to build a mansion-fortress where he’ll be safe from nuclear or zombie attack, whichever comes first.”
    Any of which involved destruction of my old house. I squirmed around to look back at it. I loved this old place. Even with sagging window screens and a dead body in the bathtub , I loved it. I changed the subject.
    “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure about your name. Is it Tam or Tasha?”
    “Well, uh, both. I mean my real name is Tammy Ockunzzi but my professional name is Tasha Tremaine.”
    Before I could speculate about what kind of profession, she added, “I’m an actress.