The Murderer's Daughters Read Online Free PDF

up, rubbing her back. She kicked out her feet and sobbed. I watched jealously as he crooned to her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll get you to see your Daddy. I promise.”

    Three months later, Merry’s hand trembled in mine as we walked up the steps to the Duffy-Parkman Home for Girls. I tried to act strong and unconcerned as we climbed the endless granite staircase, listening to our feet thudding. Uncle Hal opened a scarred wooden door, and we stepped into a large hallway surrounded by frosted-glass doors. Scuffed marble lay under our feet. The building seemed so old I thought princesses might once upon a time have roamed the halls.
    “This will be okay, girls,” Uncle Hal said.
    Sure thing, Uncle Hal.
    Not only would it not be okay, it was going to be hideous. I expected zombie schoolgirls in long gray dresses to shuffle out from behind a door any moment, but the hall remained empty and silent. It was a Monday, and I supposed all the girls were in school. Uncle Hal had taken a day off from work, canceling all his dental patients, to bring us here. Aunt Cilla stayed in bed with a wet cloth on her head, pretending we were as dead as Mama and Mimi Rubee, who’d had a stroke and died four weeks ago. We’d lived with Aunt Cilla and Uncle Hal since then.
    “Please, can’t we go to Grandma Zelda’s?” Merry whispered as Uncle Hal steered us toward a door marked ADMINISTRATION in thick, sinister letters.
    “She can’t take care of us and you know it, so stop asking,” I whispered back when Uncle Hal didn’t answer.
    “When will she take me to see Daddy again?” Merry asked.
    Grandma Zelda had taken Merry to see Daddy once before Mimi Rubee died, and now it had become Merry’s mantra.
Take me to see Daddy, take me to see Daddy.
Each time she said it I hated it more, and I wanted to pinch her until I pinched the desire to see Daddy right out of her soul.
    “She’ll take you when she takes you,” I said. “Now shut up or they won’t let us live here. You know what will happen then?”
    Merry shook her head.
    “We’ll end up living in the gutter, stealing food and clothes,” I said. “That’s what.”
    I waited for Uncle Hal to shush me, but he just stared at the dusty paintings of Indians hanging on the wall, between a clock and a series of framed quotations stitched in blue thread on yellowed muslin.
    Maybe we would end up living in the gutter. Maybe they wouldn’t keep us here if we weren’t good enough. Maybe Aunt Cilla would open up the
Daily News
and see that the police had found our frozen bodies lying in the street.
    I won’t have Joey’s girls living here. Not in my house.
That’s what I’d heard Aunt Cilla say after the funeral. “They’re black marks on my sister’s memory, a dark shadow on my mother’s name. Having them here is ripping out my
kishkes,
” she’d hissed at a collection of relatives we’d never met. “My mother’s dead, my sister’s dead, all because of that man. And now I have to look at the two of them every day?”
    Merry and I had listened to Aunt Cilla from the doorway of her spotless kitchen, the best-behaved girls in Brooklyn, ready to go in and offer our assistance in bringing out the platters of cold cuts and sliced brisket, the baskets of bagels, the lox spread out in an oily orange pinwheel. Could we take the cookies out from the many white bakery boxes tied with string and arrange them on Aunt Cilla’s silver trays? we’d planned to ask politely, proving what good girls we were. With Mimi Rubee dead, and Grandma Zelda too sick to care for us because she had the sugar, we weren’t sure where we’d live.
    Maybe if we were very, very good, Aunt Cilla would change her mind about us.
    I looked Merry over, making sure she’d stayed clean between leaving Aunt Cilla’s and arriving here at the Duffy Home. Then I avoided looking at Uncle Hal by turning to the stitched warnings admonishing me from the wall. I only had time to read “A Joyful And