The Girl Is Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked it, like there were spies about whom she didn’t want to clue in to what Pop did for a living. Usually I enjoyed people being impressed by what Pop did, but coming from Betty it annoyed me.
    “Nope, he went to the bank. And the post office.”
    “Probably for a case, huh?” She picked up the photo of Mama that sat on the radio. The glass had been broken out of it months before and we still hadn’t replaced it. “She was so pretty,” she said.
    “Yes,” I said, because what else was there to say?
    “You’re going to look just like her.”
    I shrugged. What was the point in agreeing with her when I knew it was a lie?
    “I never thought to ask you. Do you speak German, too?” she asked.
    “Nope.”
    “Such a shame. I’ve been dying to find someone to practice with. Ma refuses to help me until I learn to speak Polish, and that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. And you can’t just break out the German with any old person without seeming suspicious, you know?”
    The office phone sang its shrill song.
    “Oh, don’t let me keep you,” said Betty. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
    I left her and answered the phone with a chipper “AA Investigations.”
    “Iris?” It was Michael Rosenberg. I settled into Pop’s chair and again worked the picklocks. As I listened to Michael apologize for not calling sooner, I could hear Betty flipping through magazines, fiddling with the radio dial, tapping her nails on the side table, humming along to the music underplaying a Chock Full o’ Nuts commercial. It unnerved me. Why? Betty was a perfectly nice person. She had every right to visit her mother as often as she wanted.
    “Anyways,” said Michael, “the group was very enthusiastic about you helping, especially since two more of them received letters today.” I put aside the picks, got out pen and paper, and jotted down notes as he told me about what he’d learned at the meeting.
    There were now four people who’d received the anti-Semitic notes: two boys and two girls. Two of them had found them in their lockers after lunch, and both Michael and the most recent victim had found them at the end of the day. They had been pushed through the locker vents, so anyone could have placed them there. The notes were similar in content, except for the most recent one, which included a newspaper clipping with the headline “Slain Polish Jews Put at a Million. One-third of Number in Country Said to Have Been Put to Death by Nazis.”
    “Is that true?” I asked after he’d read me the headline.
    “Yes,” he said, a note of disbelief in his voice. “The number might actually be much larger.” How had I not known that? “So what else can I tell you?” he asked.
    It was hard to concentrate with the image of all those dead people dancing in my head. “Were all of the notes on the same kind of paper?”
    “Yes. Lined, with no distinguishing marks.” In other words, the same paper every high school student used.
    “And the handwriting and ink color?”
    “Identical.”
    I forced myself to focus. “What about the locations of the lockers? Are the people who received the notes near one another?”
    “No. Two of us are in the upperclassman hall, two in the lower.”
    “Then I guess the next steps are to interview the other three people who got the notes and do a stakeout on the lockers of those who haven’t gotten any.”
    Michael gave me the names of the as-yet-unaffected members and hung up.
    I called Pearl and gave her the scoop. She’d used her time in the attendance office that afternoon to identify where each federation member’s locker was located. She suggested we do our first stakeout before school started the next day.
    “Meet me at a quarter after seven, okay?” she said.
    I promised her I would.
    As I hung up the phone, the front door opened and I heard the unmistakable sound of Pop entering the room. His wooden leg always lagged, creating a momentary drag that was like the walking version of a