Free The Girl Is Trouble by Kathryn Miller Haines Page B

Orchard and Delancey the next morning. Her cheeks were red from the cold, her hand shivering as she struggled to hold her umbrella steady. Snowflakes danced between the raindrops, a hint of the weather to come. The first snow of the year used to excite me, but this year it was depressing. Winter was here. A year had passed since everything had gone so terribly wrong. And what did we have to show for it? A whole year without Mama. A whole year of doing nothing while the trail to her killer might’ve gone cold.
    “There was another note,” said Pearl by way of greeting.
    “I know. Michael called me last night. How did you know?” I closed my umbrella and joined her beneath hers.
    “Paul, of course. He couldn’t wait to tell me that you and I had missed another one. Was Michael mad?”
    “Not really.” Was he? I was so distracted for most of the conversation, he could’ve been busting my chops and I’m not sure that I would’ve noticed. “I told him we’d stake out the lockers this morning and I’d talk to Saul as soon as I could.”
    Pearl had spent the evening looking at her maps of where the lockers were and trying to pinpoint where the note-writer would most likely strike next. There was no clear pattern. He wasn’t alternating male then female or lowerclassman then upper. Nor could Pearl find any other connections that might make his next attack easy to predict.
    “I think the best thing for us to do is to split up: you take the upperclassman hallway and I’ll take the lower,” she said, passing me the map of the lockers for my designated spying location.
    “All right.”
    For the first time since we’d met at the corner, she took me in. “Are you okay?”
    “I still have yesterday on my mind.” I could tell she was embarrassed that she hadn’t thought to ask me about it since launching into her theories about the lockers. “I’m starting to think that Pop has moved on and doesn’t care what happened to Mama.”
    “Why?”
    As we passed onto school property, I told her about the note that was plaguing my household. “I think Pop is seeing someone. Romantically.”
    “Who?”
    “Betty Mrozenski.”
    Pearl knew Betty. She used to babysit Paul and her. “Wow. Betty’s … um…”
    “Awfully young,” I said.
    “Nice, I was going to say nice.”
    Yeah, I thought, but I knew what you were thinking.
    “How do you feel about it?”
    “Not good. Mama hasn’t been dead a year. And for all we know, her killer is still out there.”
    “Just because he’s seeing someone doesn’t mean he’s given up on her,” said Pearl.
    “I’m not so sure about that.” I took a deep breath, worried that if I didn’t pause for a moment, I would find myself in the same dark place I’d been early that morning. “I think our next step is to go to Yorkville and visit the hotel where she died. I have to talk to the chambermaid who found her. Anna Mueller. I have to find out if the lie started with her.”
    “Who says this Anna Mueller even works there anymore? This was a while ago.”
    Two men struggled to bring a ladder into the front doors of the school, maneuvering their way through the morning crowd. Michael appeared and helped to direct them down a clear path. We squeezed past them and watched as a third man joined them, toting a large box. “We won’t know until we go there, will we? Besides, I want to see the place with my own eyes.”
    “We can’t go there,” said Pearl.
    “Why not?”
    “We just can’t.”
    “That’s not enough of an answer.”
    “We can’t because … there are Germans there.”
    “My mother was German.”
    “Not that kind of German. You know what I mean.”
    I did, unfortunately. Pearl wasn’t willing to travel, as a Jew, into a predominantly German neighborhood, where certain ideologies lingered in the shadows like rats looking for homes inside walls. Where someone like our note-writer would feel at home.
    “We’ll go during the daytime,” I said.
    “That