The Girl Is Murder Read Free Page B

circulate from one room to another during the winter. I kneeled near the opening and watched the agitated client as he paced in front of the desk. Usually, Pop just dealt with missing persons—it was his specialty, or so he claimed in the advertisement he took out in the phone directory. But this didn’t sound like a missing person case to me.
    I heard Pop open his desk drawer and riffle through it. “Here’s the entire retainer.”
    “I’m disappointed in you, Arthur. You said you could help and I believed you.”
    “I still can. I just need more time.”
    “I should’ve gone to your brother’s agency, but I wanted to give you a chance.”
    Even with the door between us, I could imagine Pop’s expression at the mention of Uncle Adam. Detecting is in my family’s blood. My uncle’s in the business, too, only he has his own agency, uptown, under the family’s original name, Ackerman. At the beginning of summer, after those first rough weeks in our new home, a home they’d begged us not to take, Uncle Adam and Aunt Miriam had stopped by with a pot roast, a plant, and a plan. Pop could work with Uncle Adam at his agency, strictly desk work, mind you, but Adam would give him a fifty-fifty split. Pop had refused the plant and the plan. He wasn’t crazy enough to turn down one of Aunt Miriam’s pot roasts, though. Especially with rumors of a meat ration already on the horizon.
    “I don’t want your help,” he’d told Uncle Adam. A rift had grown between them in the months since Pop’s return. When I asked about it, Aunt Miriam dismissed it as a momentary difference of opinion.
    “Come on now—it’s not charity,” said Uncle Adam. “I’ve seen you do amazing things with nothing more than a phone at your disposal.”
    “I’m doing this on my own, Adam.”
    “Art—this is foolish. You can’t do this on your own. Your leg—”
    “Is the least of my problems.”
    “I’ve got a name and a reputation. It will take you years to build that up.”
    “Your name isn’t my name anymore, remember?” Pop had changed our surname years before, when he’d first joined the military and didn’t want to stand out.
    “You know that doesn’t matter.”
    “God damn it—I said no!”
    Everything in the room stopped. I thought Aunt Miriam’s bulging brown eyes were going to launch right out of her head. Instead, she turned her gaze toward me as though focusing on the child was the balm she needed to survive this moment.
    “Go to your room, Iris,” she said. She wasn’t a woman you said no to even if there wasn’t pot roast involved. I slinked away, up the stairs and presumably out of earshot, though really I lingered just beyond the turn of the hallway wall, unseen to anyone downstairs. To increase the realism of my exit, I stomped my feet on the wooden floor, then stretched a leg across the hall and kicked a door closed to further simulate that I was safely shut in my room.
    “Think of Iris,” said Aunt Miriam after she was sure I was gone. “She was so happy at her school. There’s no reason to uproot her now.”
    I fought a grin. Thank God for Aunt Miriam, I thought. There was still hope. There was no reason I had to stay with Pop. I could live with Adam and Miriam, attending classes at Chapin as though nothing had changed.
    “I am thinking of her. She’s not your child; she’s mine.” Pop had paused, the breath in his chest rattling. Even though he’d been in New York since January, his injury still seemed fresh in those days, the pain warranting a series of pills he kept stashed on his bedside table. He hadn’t yet given in to the prosthetic leg. His pants leg hung empty and he hobbled around the house on crutches, only moving when he absolutely had to. “I want you both out of this house.”
    “You must be reasonable, Arthur,” said Aunt Miriam. “You can’t rely on Ingrid’s inheritance to last forever.”
    Pop laughed. It wasn’t a joyful sound. Like a burned marshmallow, it was so