Free Femme Fatale and other stories by Laura Lippman

Fee,” her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.
    â€œSomeone has to ask you first,” Sofia said, pretending not to be impressed by her own reflection.
    â€œOh, it’s okay to go with a group of girls, too,” her mother said.
    Sofia didn’t know any girls, actually. She was friendly with most of them, but not friends. The girls at school seemed split about her: some thought her love of football was genuine, if odd, while others proclaimed it an awfully creative way to be a tramp. This second group of girls whispered that Sofia was fast, fast in the bad way, that football wasn’t the only game she played with all those boys in the vacant lot behind Gordon’s Tavern. What would they say if she actually danced with one, much less let him walk her home?
    â€œI’d be scared to wear this out of the house,” she said, placing a tentative finger on the large amethyst. “Something might happen to it.”
    â€œYour aunt would want you to wear it and enjoy it,” her mother said. “It’s an heirloom. It belonged to Aunt Polly, and her aunt before her, and their grandmother before that. But Tammy didn’t have any girls, so she gave it to me a few years ago, said to put it away for a special birthday. This one’s as special as any, I think.”
    â€œWhat if I lost it?”
    â€œYou can’t,” her mother said. “It has a special catch—see?”
    But Sofia wasn’t worried about the catch. Or, rather, she was worried about the other catch, the hidden rules that were always changing. She was trying to figure out if the necklace qualified as a real gift, one that her father couldn’t reclaim. It hadn’t been purchased in a store. It had come from her father’s side of the family. And although it was a birthday gift, it hadn’t been wrapped up in paper and ribbons. She put it back in its box, a velvety once-black rectangle that was all the more beautiful for having faded to gray. Where would her father never look for it?
    Three weeks later, Sofia awoke one Saturday to find her father standing over her guitar. Her father must not have known how guitar strings were attached because he cut them with a pocketknife, sliced them right down the middle and reached into the hole to extract the velvet box, which had been anchored in a tea towel at the bottom, so it wouldn’t make an obvious swishing noise if someone picked up the guitar and shook it. How had he known it was there? Perhaps he had reached for the guitar again and felt the extra weight. Perhaps he simply knew Sofia too well, a far more disturbing thought. At any rate, he held the velvet box in his hand.
    â€œI’ll buy you new ones,” he said.
    He meant the strings, of course, not the necklace or the amethysts.
    â€œBut you can’t sell it,” she said, groping for the word her mother had invoked so lovingly. “It’s a hair-loom.”
    â€œOh, Fee, it’s nothing special. I’ll buy you something much better when my luck changes.”
    â€œTake something else, anything else. Take the guitar.”
    â€œStrings cut,” he said, as if he had found it that way and believed it beyond repair. “Besides, I told this fellow about it and he said he’ll take it in lieu of … in lieu of debts owed, if he finds it satisfactory. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of pawning it.”
    â€œBut if you don’t pawn it, we can’t ever get it back.”
    â€œHoney, when did we ever redeem a pawnshop ticket?”
    This was true, but at least the pawnshop held open the promise of recovering things. If the necklace went to a person, it would be gone as Shemp. Sofia imagined it on the neck of a smug girl, like one of the ones who whispered about her up at school. A girl who would say: Oh, my father bought me this at the pawnshop. It’s an antique. My father said the people who owned it