Design for Dying Read Free Page A

to wait. From his bedroom he retrieved a scuffed jewelry box.
    â€œBefore your mother passed, she gave this to me for safekeeping. She said to give it to you when you became a young lady.” His face held its usual smile, but his eyes were fogged with memory. “I think you’ve become a fine young lady indeed.”
    I opened the box, the lid snapping as if new. The brooch felt weighted and warm in my hand, like it had been recently worn. All at once my mother was there with us, a presence in the tiny kitchen that smelled of ham steaks and turnips.
    I fetched a pale blue scarf and tied it around my neck. With his thick fingers, Uncle Danny pinned on the brooch. “Very elegant,” he said, and at that moment I didn’t feel like a girl anymore. I never made it to Peggy’s house that night. I sat drinking milk and eating graham crackers while Uncle Danny told me stories about his spirited sister Maureen. The mother I remembered only as a jolly laugh, a snatch of lullaby, a whiff of lavender.
    I never wore the brooch, but after moving to Los Angeles I would take it out and gather my few recollections of my mother. On one of those long, lonely nights I didn’t hear Ruby coming down the hall. Staggering tipsily to her bed, she caught an eyeful of the brooch. “Where’d you get that bauble?”
    â€œJust a family heirloom. Not much of one at that.” Feeling silly, I tucked the brooch back in my drawer under some clothes.
    A week later I was putting away some freshly washed stockings when I felt ritually for the box and discovered it wasn’t there. I tore our room apart searching. I looked in jacket pockets, inside shoes, the unlikeliest places. Then I went through all of Ruby’s things. The brooch was gone.
    Devastated, I waited up until Ruby tottered home. She bristled at my touching her possessions, said she didn’t even remember the brooch, and fell asleep. She stuck to that story over oatmeal the next morning, swearing up and down that she hadn’t taken it, hurt that I thought she could have.
    I knew she was lying. Ruby had picked up a few tricks in her acting classes, but she couldn’t fool me. She’d borrowed the brooch without permission then decided she liked it. Or maybe she dropped it while fumbling with Tommy in the backseat of his car. That was what upset me the most, not the possibility that the only memento from a woman I had never known was lost forever but that it had disappeared in so cavalier a fashion. I wouldn’t let the matter rest, finally telling Ruby I’d forgive her if she’d misplaced it as long as she admitted she’d taken it.
    â€œWhat do you keep going on about it for?” she said, exasperated. “Maybe you misplaced it. Maybe somebody else who lives in this dump helped themselves to it. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
    Uncle Danny once told me you couldn’t truly hate someone unless you’d liked them first. You had to let them under your skin.
    I avoided Ruby as much as possible after that, giving her the silent treatment whenever I couldn’t. When I heard about the open apartment nearby I jumped on it, the salary I’d been squirreling away now a godsend. I never said anything to Ruby, but my packing had to be a dead giveaway. On my last morning in the boardinghouse we sat at opposite ends of the breakfast table without a word to each other.
    Friendships in Hollywood never last, Ruby once advised me. Another valuable lesson. At least she’d given me fair warning.

 
    3
    â€œSHE SOUNDS LIKE some piece of work, this Ruby.” Morrow holstered his notebook inside his jacket.
    â€œShe wasn’t all bad.”
    â€œComing between a girl and her mother’s memory? Did other girls in the house have items go missing?”
    â€œThe ones who’d roomed with Ruby before me had the same problem.” I frowned. “A little advance notice would have been