Free The Mourning Emporium by Michelle Lovric

with flowers and their favorite toys buried in their empty graves. With so many missing, the disappearance of Teodora Stampara rated only the barest mention. Teo noted indignantly, “All it says is that my funeral was conducted at municipal expense!”
    The Mayor had also succeeded in hushing up news of the kidnapping of the two scientists from the island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio.
    Fortunately, the Scilla’s sailors were too absorbed in their tasks and homework to notice when Teo stole away to a quiet part of the boat to wash and change in privacy. The heads had a door, so Teo was spared the dread embarrassment of the glass tube. She tried to keep her voice low. And she never, never cried, no matter how much it hurt when, with her native clumsiness, she got tangled in a bowline bridle or skidded on a slippery deck.
    The worst thing about keeping her cover was that she had to sleep in a hammock in the forecastle cabin putrid with snoring boys who were under no compulsion to wash their socks, and whose favorite after-hours conversations were about the stupidity, vanity and general uselessness of girls. Renzo, she noticed, never said anything to defend the species—or to help her out.
    “Sorry, can’t be gallant. You’re supposed to be a boy,” Renzo whispered, when she sprawled flat on her face in front of him after yet another mishap with a mop and a bucket of water.
    “Don’t need your help,” declared Teo. “Thank you very much all the same.”
    “For now,” remarked Sofonisba, who happened to be passing.
    On the fifth night in her hammock, Teo lay awake, trying to work out the tune for “Bobby Shaftoe” and a way to anchor her voice to the melody.
    That was how she came to hear what she would only later understand was the noise of a bullet meeting human flesh, just above her on the deck. And then a faint, low scream. She lifted her head and sniffed the air—what was that acrid smell like burning metal?
    “Cookie must be preparing something new for tomorrow,” she told herself. “Not one of his better efforts, I’d say. Hope there’s ginger cake for afters.”
    With that comfortable thought, sleep at last overtook her. And once more it happened, after the welcome peace of the past five nights: her dreams were invaded by that dreadful night-nagging voice breathing hotly in her sleeping ear.
    “Death and worse to all Venetians. Death to Venice. Blacken her very image. Death to her memory.”
    “I never met a child I didn’t want to slap.”
    Teo saw sharp staccato letters slashed in the air above the beautiful lady. It seemed impossible that such unpleasantness could issue from those rosebud lips. The woman’s skin was downy as a white peach. Her big brown eyes danced with pretty mischief under glistening curls piled high above her head.
    The beautiful lady now smiled like an angel. Then she reached out and slapped the nearest child, Alfredo.
    “Stop making those big, round, wet eyes at me. You look like a kitten on its way to the bucket.” An impish giggle intruded; then her voice flattened back to harshness: “No one cares. Do you understand?”
    Alfredo bowed his head and bit his wobbling lip.
    The smile sparkled like sunlight, but the cut-glass English accent was as cold as the frost on the Scilla’s rigging. The woman was dressed at the height of fashion in a sharp tailored jacket with naval trimmings. From her shell-like ears dangled earrings in the shape of tiny iridescent hummingbirds. Leg-of-mutton sleeves sprouted from her shoulders. Beneath the dress, her willowy body was encased in a corset that bent her back into an S-shape. Below the cruelly cinched waist, her skirt stuck out, rigid as a mountain.
    Professor Marìn was nowhere to be seen. Sofonisba crouched by the water barrel, swearing terribly at the interloper.
    “Miss Canidia Uish,” the woman introduced herself. “It is pronounced like ‘wish’ in English.”
    “As in ‘wish we’d never met you,’ ” muttered Teo