The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman Read Online Free PDF

shouted, “Aha! ” and pounded on the table hard, hard enough to make the ice-cream spoon dance in its bowl. Bethesda’s dad, startled, pushed back from the table. “Honey?”
    “Come on!” Bethesda ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. She was thinking about all those boring stories her dad had told her about his past, from before he met her mother. About growing up in Brooklyn, and about the navy—and about his “punk rock” days. All the silly pictures, the torn jeans and the pierced ears and the spiky black hairdo. And what did he always say, whenever he finished some silly story about those years? “But that was another time,” he’d say. “Another life.”
    They were in her parents’ bedroom, in her dad’s closet.
    “What are we doing up here, cheese potato?”
    “Show me your record collection.”
    A huge smile appeared on Bethesda’s dad’s face. “Really? You want to see my records? I’m honored. Seriously. I always knew—”
    “Hurry up!”
    “Okay, okay.”
    They dug out the stack of records, the musty black disks in their shiny paper sleeves, and Bethesda riffled through the stack, looking for … well, what exactly she was looking for, Bethesda wasn’t totally sure.
    Until suddenly, there it was.
    “Oh, man,” said Bethesda’s dad from over her shoulder. “I haven’t heard
that
in yonks.”
    Bethesda examined the record more carefully. It wasn’t a full-sized LP. It was what she had heard her dad call a seven-inch, a small record with just one or two songs on each side. She read the faded yellow sticker, which was printed in a messy font designed to look like handwriting. On the top it said the name of the band: Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings. At the bottom, in tiny type, it said North Side Sounds. “That’s the record company,” her dad explained. And in the middle, dead center, were the song titles. There was just one song on the A side, called “Allergy Emergency.”The B side was called “Not So Complicated.”
    Bethesda’s eyes opened wide. She grabbed her spiral notebook and reexamined the mysterious code she had cribbed from Ms. Finkleman’s desk drawer. There it was, the seventh line: (e?)
NSCOMP.
    NSCOMP.
    “Not So Complicated.”
    And the first line: AGY EGY
    “Allergy Emergency.”
    “Oh my god, Dad,” Bethesda said, her eyes widening. “This isn’t a code! ” “It’s not?” he said. “It’s a set list.”
    Which is how it came to be that at precisely 9:42, when Bethesda Fielding’s mother got home from Mackenzie Magruder McHenry, the downtown law firm where she practiced appellate litigation (and often had to work on Saturdays, because she was, as Bethesda’s dad liked to say, “a big shot”), she found her husband and daughter dancing around the living room to a band she hadn’t heard, or so much as thought of, in fifteen years.
    “Good lord,” said Angela Fielding with a laugh. “What’s going on here?”
    “C’mon, gorgeousness,” hollered her husband. “Dance party! ”
    Bethesda whirled past, clapping her hands and leaping to the beat. “Guess what, Mom?” she shouted. “I solved a mystery! ”

7

MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 20 IN D MINOR
    On that
same night—at that very same moment, in fact—in a high-rise condominium on the other side of town, an unremarkable brown-haired woman was fixing herself a cup of Sleepytime tea. In fuzzy slippers she padded from the kitchen into the living room. The unremarkable brown-haired woman sank down in her armchair, put her feet up on the matching ottoman, and exhaled. Before she had her first sip of tea, Ida Finkleman slightly raised her mug of Sleepytime and murmured a single sentence. It was a sentence that would have struck most who knew this most unremarkable woman as rather remarkable indeed.
    “The agouti,” she intoned softly, “lives on.”
    Agoutis are tiny brownish rodents who populate the verdant jungles of South and Central America. IdaFinkleman had never