Free The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines

“What’s wrong with your friend’sgrandma?”
    “They’re not sure. She’s coughing up blood and has stomach pain.” There was a bulge in Frank’s flogger. When I concentrated on it, I could make out a butt and a barrel.
    “She smoke?” asked Frank.
    “Only when she’s on fire.” I picked up a stack of files and aimlessly shuffled them. “Are you staying long? I only ask because I order out for lunch and I’ll want to make sure there’s enough for two. That half a doughnut left me peckish.”
    He grunted. “You’re an actress, right?”
    I stopped shuffling and tried to figure out what gave me away. If he’d been in the office before, it was possible Jim had said something about me. Either that or it was my impeccable posture and well-supported voice. “Let me guess: You’re a fan?”
    Frank shrugged. “You in movies?”
    “Plays.”
    He shook his head. “Never been to a play.” He leaned forward on the desk as if his back were bothering him. “So what do you do then—you pretend to be other people?”
    I roosted on a reception chair. “There’s a little more to it than that.”
    “Like what?”
    If he didn’t have Raymond Fielding’s blood on his hands, I would’ve told him to go climb his thumb. As it was, I fought to explain my craft in twenty words or less. “For starters, there’s training. You have to learn how to use your voice, how to move, how to belong to a play.”
    “I bet memorizing’s hard.”
    I gave him a tight smile. “You get used to it.”
    His eyes were glued on me. “How so?”
    “I don’t know—there are tricks to remembering words. Everyone has their own system.” Was he worried I’d seen or heard something I wasn’t supposed to and committed it to memory?
    “And crying,” he said. “I’ll never figure out how you do that whenever you want to. I bet you poke yourself in the eye when no one’s looking, right?”
    I decided it wasn’t worth teaching him the finer points of emotional recall. “That’s right. Lots of eye poking, but only when onions aren’t available.”
    He slapped his hands against his thighs to signal he was getting to his point. “So how does an actress become a gumshoe?”
    “I’m not a gumshoe, Frank—I don’t have a ticket. I’m just playing one for the moment because nobody else wants the job. That’s how I get most of my roles.”
    He stifled a cough with his hand. “I bet Jim taught you everything he knew.”
    “Depends on the topic. Jim was pretty close-lipped about a lot of things.” Our eyes met and we silently challenged each other. If he wasn’t going to tell me his reason for being there, I wasn’t going to offer him any more than the basics. Frank looked at his watch, frowned, and began to wind it. “You waiting for someone?” I asked.
    “Yeah.” He kicked his legs against the side of the metal desk. The office shimmied with the metallic boom. “’S cold outside. That’s why I’m here. Waiting.”
    High-heeled, panicked footsteps sounded in the stairwell. Frank swung his tremendous noodle toward the door and his hand flinched toward the bulge in his trench coat.
    “Easy, boy—it’s a friend of mine.”
    His hand returned to his side. “You’ve got a lot of friends.”
    “Only two that you know of. Even if we threw you into the mix, we wouldn’t have enough people for a party.”
    Jayne rushed into the office blind to Frank’s presence. For someone who’d intended to spend the day sitting by the phone, she was dressed to the nines. “Rosie! Thank goodness you’re all right.” She saw Frank and slowly spun around to face him. As his enormity became apparent, she shrank until I had to strain my eyes to see her. “Hello there,” she said.
    Frank rose from the desk as though he were remembering, after years of grandmotherly instruction, that this was what you did when a woman entered the room.
    Jayne tilted her head back and stared up at the big lug. “I didn’t know you had company.”