The Girl Is Murder (8 page)

BY THE TIME SATURDAY rolled around, I was having second thoughts. What if Paul thought this was a date? What if Pearl wasn’t part of the “we” he was talking about? I considered not showing up, but the rudeness of the act outweighed my discomfort. If private school had taught me nothing else, it had made it clear that it was better to be uncomfortable than impolite.

Pop was thrilled that I had plans with people from school. “I’m glad you’re keeping busy tonight,” he said.

What did that mean? “It’s no big deal,” I said, not even willing to let him feel joy at my burgeoning social life. “It’ll probably be boring.” No, it definitely would be. Pearl had taken a vow of silence from what I’d seen, and Paul was clearly flat.

But at least I’d be out of the house for a while and not forced to continue my stalemate with Pop.

Paul had asked me to meet him at their house at eight. Pop wasn’t thrilled that a young man would expect me to escort him rather than the other way around. He insisted on walking me to the address, two blocks over, and waiting on the sidewalk while I rang the bell and waited for someone to answer. As I stood on the porch, smelling the remnants of their family dinner, I noticed a flag with a single gold star winking from the window. This was a gold star house, meaning someone in the family had been killed in the war. Before I could contemplate its significance, the front door opened and Paul greeted me with a lopsided grin.

“You made it.”

“I told you I would.”

I waved at Pop to let him know I was at the right place and wasn’t about to be mugged or murdered. He waved back and strolled away.

“Was that your father?”

“Yes.”

He stared after him. I wondered if we had violated some code of behavior. Should Pop have come onto the porch? Met Paul’s parents? But then if we were going to be strict about it, shouldn’t Paul have met me at my house? “What’s with the limp?” asked Paul.

So that was what drew his attention. Boy, howdy—and to think I was the one who was worried about being thought rude. “He lost his leg at Pearl Harbor.”

I expected an “I’m sorry” or “Gee, that’s rough,” but Paul wasn’t the kind of person to descend into sentimentality. Or manners. “That must’ve been something, being right there at the start of the war.”

I was feeling disagreeable. Pop being hurt was hardly something to brag about. “The war had already been going on for years before then.”

“You know what I mean.” He pointed his thumb toward the window. “We lost my brother four months in.”

Now it was my turn to be trite. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “On the bright side, I can’t go.” He pointed at his chest. “Asthma.” He turned his head and hollered into the house at a volume that made me question how bad his lungs really were, “Pearl! Let’s make tracks!”

We walked side by side, Paul in the middle, to the fire hall that the Jive Hive operated out of. Pearl was silent, her attention focused more on her feet than on the air in front of her. Paul rattled on about the Princeton-Navy game that afternoon, wrongly assuming that I cared about football. I tried to feign interest, but my mind was already counting down the minutes until I could fake a headache and go home.

We arrived at the fire hall and went down to the basement, where the Jive Hive was in full swing. Frank Sinatra, fronting the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, sang from the phonograph as we entered the large, low-ceilinged room. To the right was a table loaded with refreshments: cookies, cupcakes, punch, and Royal Crown Cola. To the left, card tables were set up with checker and chess sets and decks of cards. In the center of the room was an impromptu dance floor, where two couples clutched each other and swayed to Frank’s request to “be careful, that’s my heart.”

I recognized some of the faces from P.S. 110, though it was hardly a fair sampling of the crowd I encountered every day. Everyone here was white and clean-cut. Either Suze and Tom Barney and the rest of their crew hadn’t arrived yet or they weren’t welcome.

Before we were allowed to enter, we had to sign in. A stern girl in cat’s-eye specs scrutinized my information after offering Paul a much warmer welcome. She ignored Pearl entirely. In fact, she made such a point of not looking at her that I was embarrassed at her rudeness.

And then something interesting happened: Pearl spoke.

“Iris is new. This is her first time here.”

The stern girl offered me a tight smile and passed me a sheet of paper. “Welcome, Iris. These are the rules. Make sure you follow them.”

I scanned the sheet. No pickups was the first rule. No gambling the second. Dates must be registered in advance. The rest were a litany of dos and don’ts related to behavior. Most everything on the list seemed designed to keep the room clean and adults at bay.

Paul was greeted by a blonde who wore her hair in tight pin curls. Without looking my way, he took her by the hand and joined her on the dance floor. I was prepared to disappear into a corner to wait out my time when Pearl spoke again.

“That’s Denise Halloway. Paul’s girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t think you were his date, did you?”

“No,” I said, too quickly.

“That’s good. You could do so much better than my brother.” She paused and examined her thumbnail. “So why did you come out with us? Are you hoping to use him again?”

“What?”

“Like for the 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 that?”

“They don’t like me. They think I’m a cold cut.” She cocked her head again and met my eyes, obviously daring me to disagree with their diagnosis.

“That’s a terrible thing to call someone.” I knew it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but I also wasn’t sure I was ready to tell her people were wrong about her. My eyes unconsciously circled the room, looking to see who, if anyone, was watching us talk. Weird was contagious. I knew how it worked. Just sitting next to Pearl would set me up in people’s minds as someone just like her.

And yet she’d gotten me the photos.

She picked up another cookie and shoved it into her mouth. There was only one left on the plate, and I realized that she hadn’t gotten them to share with me; her intention, all along, had been to eat them herself. Maybe she assumed I wouldn’t stick around long enough to enjoy them. “Paul says it’s my own fault,” she said.

“That doesn’t seem very fair.”

“It’s probably why he invited you out with us that first day. He thinks I need friends.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I had them. They’re the ones who couldn’t cope.”

I’m not sure how I knew what had happened—maybe it was intuition, or maybe my weeks of observation were paying off—but I suddenly realized that when Pearl said they started calling her Pearl Harbor “after,” she wasn’t referring to December 7, 1941. Her brother’s death had started all this. Her friends couldn’t stand the doom and gloom that descended on her when she’d lost someone she’d loved. And she wasn’t strong enough to fight the changes the grief had made in her.

I knew that change. Last year I’d been a completely different person. What did I worry about back then? A new pimple that blazed on my cheek the day class photos were taken. The way last year’s waistbands strained against this year’s waist. Whether or not my breasts would ever fill my brassiere.

I didn’t worry about war. I didn’t think about my father, serving in someplace called Pearl Harbor. In fact, I rarely thought about Pop at all. As for Mama, she flitted around the edges, always smiling, and convincing me that I would be all right as long as there was the two of us. It had been just the two of us for so long.

And then it was all gone. Mama dead. Pop returned, but different. And the house, the school, the friends—all traded for a dingy brownstone on Orchard Street that smelled of Mrs. Mrozenski’s cabbage rolls. And why the change? The war, of course. It ruined everything. Including me.

We were alike, Pearl and I. And she knew it, which was why she was telling me all this.

I looked back toward the front door of the club, where the girl with cat’s-eye specs had been joined by another girl, this one in pearls and a plaid blazer. They caught me looking at them and quickly turned away. Former friends of Pearl’s, I’d bet, wondering how it was that she’d found a new friend to spend the evening with.

“You’re interesting, though,” said Pearl. “I kept hoping you’d come back to the newspaper office.” She lifted the last cookie. Instead of sending it to her mouth, she extended it my way. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.” I looked at the checkerboard. I was being slaughtered. It was a matter of minutes before the game was over and she was declared the victor.

“So what do you think of P.S. 110?” she asked.

“It’s different.”

“I always wanted to go to a private all-girls school.” She knew that about me, too. How? She must’ve seen the question in my eyes. “I work in the office during study hall, helping with attendance. Anyhow, that’s how I know you went to Chapin.”

I nodded, not feeling as reassured as she thought that news might make me. “So you work for the newspaper and the office?”

“I don’t really work for the paper. I just hang out there with Paul in the morning so I don’t have to talk to anyone. He hates it, but he hates typing more, so he lets me stay if I agree to help type up the articles. Do you miss Chapin?”

Slowly, I nodded. Whatever I said to Pearl would be safe. She wouldn’t repeat it to Paul, who clearly didn’t think much of his sister. And there was no one else for her to confide in.

In some ways, it made her the perfect friend. At Chapin, I never knew what Grace might repeat to someone. This girl, on the other hand, was a locked box.

“I feel like such a square here,” I said. She nodded, encouraging me to go on. “And going to school with boys is … strange.”

“They’re better than most of the girls. Believe me. It was so much easier here before they started to enlist, and if the draft passes, it’s going to be even worse. The girls gang up on you around here.”

“That happened at Chapin, too.”

She didn’t seem convinced. But I’d witnessed it often enough to know it was true, even if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of those attacks. “Have you made any friends?”

She had to know the answer was no, but I hated to admit it out loud. “There’s one girl I’ve talked to a few times who seemed nice. Suze?” I realized I didn’t know her last name. Claiming her as a friend when I didn’t know that one simple fact made it seem like even more of a lie.