Free The Girl Is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines Page A

photographs.”
    My back went rigid. “I wasn’t—”
    She cut me off. “Sure you weren’t. Want to play checkers ?”
    It felt strangely like a threat: play checkers with me or I’ll let everyone know what you were up to in the newspaper office. Was I reading her right? I couldn’t be sure, so I said yes and followed her to one of the tables.
    She disappeared long enough to claim two sodas and a plate of cookies for us. As she sat across from me, I noticed for the first time how pudgy she was. The top button on her skirt was left open to accommodate a roll of fat that hung over the waistband. Her blouse strained at the buttons. Either Pearl shopped for the figure she one day hoped to have or her weight gain was recent.
    We started the game in silence. I couldn’t tell if Pearl was terrified of people or simply preferred silence to conversation. I wondered how Grace would’ve dealt with her, assuming she had no choice but to spend time in Pearl’s presence. She probably would’ve chattered away, insisting on creating conversation where there was none. Chapin girls weren’t known for loving silence. It was, they believed, rude.
    “Paul told me about your brother. I’m really sorry.”
    She tilted her head to the left, like she had water in her ear. “Thanks.” She picked up a cookie and put the whole thing in her mouth. Frosting oozed out of the corner of her lips. She pressed it back inside with a practiced gesture and studied the checkerboard.
    I wanted to ask more, like what was his name and where had he died and did they know how, but common sense prevailed and I kept my yap shut. What made me think this quiet girl wanted to talk about a tragedy that was so raw that the mere mention of it made her shove an entire cookie (no, make that two—she’d moved on to the second one) into her mouth?
    I felt like I owed her something, a wound of my own for her to pick at. I didn’t want to tell her about Mama, so I offered her the next best thing. “My pop lost his leg at Pearl Harbor.”
    She shook her head. What did that mean? Was it a quiet acknowledgment of Pop’s loss or a way of silently saying that what I’d experienced wasn’t even close to what she’d experienced, and how dare I think otherwise?
    “Is he still in the military?” she said when she’d swallowed the cookie.
    “No. He’s a private detective now.”
    She nodded with more enthusiasm. While her tragedy may have trumped mine, I’d at least offered her an interesting tidbit. “Does he let you work on cases?”
    “Sort of.” I wasn’t in the mood to explain about the disagreement between Pop and me. And I had a feeling that her thinking I worked for him made me a lot more interesting than if she thought I didn’t.
    She jumped one of my black checkers with one of her red and claimed the captured piece. “I’ve seen you watching people at school. I guess that’s why you do it, huh?”
    I nodded, embarrassed that I’d been caught. Hadn’t I learned anything from tailing Mrs. Wilson?
    “Is that what the photos were for? A case?”
    Another nod.
    “Thanks for that, by the way,” I said. “You know—getting me the pictures.”
    “Paul would’ve flipped his lid.”
    “So he didn’t see them?”
    “Oh, no. You didn’t want him to, right?”
    “Right.”
    “So I figured.” She studied the checkerboard. “Was it an affair?”
    “Yeah. The husband paid us to follow the wife.” Us. So it wasn’t the complete truth, so what?
    “I figured that was the case from the look on her face. What did he want?”
    “A divorce.”
    She nodded again. The record was changed and Sammy Kaye begged us to “remember Pearl Harbor.” I squirmed in the uncomfortable metal folding chair. Did they really need a song to convince us not to forget something like that?
    “They call me that, you know,” said Pearl.
    Had I missed part of the conversation? “What?”
    “Pearl Harbor. It started last year, right after.”
    “Why do they call you