The Girl Is Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

description of the man his wife was keeping time with. No wonder Pop had failed. Even if he had been able to follow Mr. Wilson’s wife, he would’ve drawn attention to himself. A man with an obvious limp could expect two responses: pity or a rude attempt to ignore him. Either way, Mrs. Wilson had to have noticed him the first time he appeared on the scene.
    What Pop needed was someone who could blend in, whose age and appearance meant they were easily ignored. Someone who could sit in a hotel lobby looking like a bored little rich girl waiting for her parents, and nobody would think twice about her.
    Uncle Adam was right when he told Pop he couldn’t go it alone. But maybe it wasn’t his help Pop needed—maybe it was mine.
    By the time Mrs. Mrozenski called me into dinner I had a plan: I was going to help Pop.

CHAPTER
     
    3
     
    TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER I was on my first stakeout, outside the Wilsons’ Upper East Side apartment building. I’d passed it a thousand times in my former life, had even been inside it once while visiting a friend after school. Now I took up space on a bench across the street. Just as I took on the posture of a bored, privileged young woman, familiar voices rang out: Bev and Bea, or—as they were usually referred to in the halls of Chapin—the twins. Blondes with blue eyes and perfect ski-jump noses, they were identically clad in Chapin’s plaid skirts and white blouses. As they headed for home they were exchanging the day’s gossip, their voices rising and falling with amusement as they relayed who said what to whom. I slouched down on the bench, hoping they wouldn’t notice me.
    “Iris?” said Bea.
    I straightened up as though it wasn’t them that had caused me to slouch, but exhaustion they’d just shaken me out of. “Bea? Bev? It’s so great to see you.”
    If they found it strange to find me loitering on a bench at twilight, they didn’t admit it out loud. Instead, they surveyed me for a moment as though they weren’t certain what to say next. Compliment my clothes? Nope, no hope of that. Tell me they missed my witty comments during English Lit? Doubtful.
    I decided to help them out of the tight spot. “I’m waiting for my aunt,” I said. “We’re having dinner.”
    “How lovely,” said Bev. “Isn’t this funny—we were just talking about you today.”
    “Oh, really?” I stood up. For some reason I wanted to be on the same level as the two of them. Even though we were all the same height, I felt smaller. Maybe it was their school uniforms. Strange as it seemed, I missed the brief skirt and scratchy blouse and how they magically made me one of them rather than the outsider I felt like now. Wasn’t it funny how a uniform, which was designed to create conformity, could make me feel so special? I bet Pop must have felt the same way when he shed his military duds and rejoined life as a civilian.
    “Yes,” said Bea. “We were just asking Grace if she’d heard from you.”
    In the weeks after we’d moved to the Lower East Side, some of the Chapin girls had attempted to stay in contact with me, chief among them Grace Dunwitty, my former best friend. She called me every other day and invited me to spend my weekends at her apartment, where I could forget the Orchard Street house while we passed our time pasting pictures of Deanna Durbin into our scrapbooks and slept beneath Grace’s pink canopy.
    The visits meant I had to endure Grace’s endless questions about our new life. She must have thought years of sharing lunches and sleepovers meant I owed her something: Do you miss having money? (I guess.) What’s it like to have a father with only one leg? (I’m not sure I know what it’s like to have a father, period.) Do you miss your mother? (What do you think?) They were logical questions, ones I might’ve asked myself if I had the courage, but—boy, howdy—I resented how easily Grace asked them, how she made no attempt to hide her curiosity, how different she