The Girl Is Trouble (26 page)

And now Rhona was on her way to Pearl’s house.

I ran upstairs and threw on some clothes. When I returned to the parlor, Pop was waiting for me. “Whoa, where’s the fire?”

“I forgot about a test,” I said. “That was Pearl on the phone. She wants to study.”

“Can’t you study here?”

Was he still being overprotective? Seriously? “Pearl’s babysitting her cousin,” I said so fast that I didn’t have time to register the lie. “She’s kind of trapped at home.”

He looked at his watch. “Back by five, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, then I grabbed my coat and ran out the door.

CHAPTER

22

I RAN ALL THE WAY
to Pearl’s house, trying to make sense of my conversation with Suze and Rhona the whole way there. Surely they’d gotten something wrong. This had to be a silly rumor that had gotten legs when Benny couldn’t be found that morning. Or maybe it was a prank, albeit a strange one. I banged on Pearl’s door, momentarily worried that Rhona was already inside, doing her worst. But after ten seconds, the front door creaked open and Paul appeared.

“Hey, Iris—”

I cut him off before he could say anything else. “I need to talk to Pearl. It’s kind of important.”

“She’s in her room.”

“If anyone else comes by looking for her, tell them she’s not here.”

“Why—?”

“Just do it, Paul,” I barked. I blasted past him and took the stairs two at a time. The Levines lived in half of a narrow brownstone. Paul’s and Pearl’s bedrooms were upstairs, as was the house’s only bathroom. Pearl was on her bed as I entered her room, reading a book amid a tangle of unmade sheets and yesterday’s clothes. As I arrived she looked up with a grin that quickly vanished when she saw the look on my face.

“Rhona and Suze are on their way over here. They said you had Benny expelled.”

“They expelled him on a weekend? Wow, I didn’t think they’d do that.”

I wasn’t expecting her to confirm it. “You really did turn him in? Why?”

“Because, like you said at your aunt and uncle’s: the right person needs to be punished, no matter how much it hurts.”

That’s
what she’d been getting at? “But Benny couldn’t … he wouldn’t…”

Pearl removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Dark circles made moons in the flesh beneath them. “I’m sorry, Iris, but I saw him putting letters in the lockers. In fact, I was so bewildered by it that I fished the letter out of Judy Cohen’s locker to make sure it wasn’t something else that he was leaving her. But it wasn’t.”

“Maybe he was doing the same thing you were doing, looking at something someone else had placed there.”

“This was the second time I saw him do it. The first time was the day you two went to Yorkville. He was slipping a note into Saul’s locker that morning.”

“But you have to be mistaken—”

“The handwriting matches.” She opened her bedside drawer and pulled a folded page from it and passed it my way.

Iris,

Sorry I had to run off the other day.

Can I make it up to you this weekend?

Benny

So that was what his pantomime had meant when I was leaving school on Friday: Did you get my note?

“He gave this to you to give to me?” I asked as I took in the scrawl that I recognized from the locker notes.

Pearl nodded. “If I had any doubt, any doubt at all, I wouldn’t have turned him in. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

I sank onto the bed beside her. I knew she was telling me the truth, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less. “But I don’t understand why he’d do it.”

“I don’t either, but you said he seemed strange when he found out you were Jewish.”

Did he? Looking back, it wasn’t my being Jewish that seemed to bother him, but the fact that I knew about the letters that the federation had been receiving. And why would he be upset about that unless he was the one who was sending them?

Pearl closed her book and shifted until she was sitting cross-legged. “The Rainbows have a reputation for a reason. They start fights, they steal, they skip class.”

“But that’s gossip. Maybe this is the first time Benny’s done anything wrong.” I knew that wasn’t true, though. I’d seen evidence of petty theft with my own eyes.

“You probably don’t want to hear this,” said Pearl, “but Paul told me that Michael caught Benny stealing food from the A and P a couple of weeks ago. Michael swore Paul to secrecy, but you know my brother.”

“But Suze said he wouldn’t do something like this,” I said.

“Suze is his friend. Of course she’s going to say that. And he’s just been expelled. It’s not like he’s going to jail or something.”

No, but he could be facing a much worse fate. If he were still in school, at least he could avoid being drafted for a few months, not to mention how his father was likely going to take the news.

“We have to be missing something here, Pearl. We’ve got to have this wrong.”

She leaned back on her arms. “This isn’t like your mom, Iris. Sometimes rumors about people are true.”

*   *   *

I LEFT PEARL’S HOUSE
and started down Delancey, hoping the cold winter air might clear my head enough to either accept Benny’s guilt or come up with a way to exonerate him. I couldn’t be mad at Pearl, even though I desperately wanted to be. Given the information she’d gathered, Benny was the obvious culprit. I would’ve thought so, too, in her shoes. But that was the point: I wasn’t in her shoes, I knew him better than that.

Or I thought I did. Was I becoming one of those people who became blind to the wrong happening right around them because they so desperately wanted to believe that someone they cared about was good?

“Iris!” called a voice. Nuts. It was Rhona. I quickened my pace. “I see you, girl detective. Don’t you think you can outrun me.”

I stopped and turned toward her.

“Where’s Pearl Harbor?” she said. Suze and Maria were with her, pleading with her to slow her pace.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Did you talk to her?”

“No.” I fought to keep my voice calm. “She wasn’t home.”

Rhona squared her shoulders and stood directly in front of me. She was taller than me and sturdy in a way that I hadn’t yet become. I had no doubt she could hurt me if she really wanted to.

“Step off, Rhona,” said Suze.

“You’re both going to pay for this,” said Rhona. “This is on you, too.”

“Let me talk to her,” said Suze. Maria pulled Rhona away while Suze did the same to me. “You’ve talked to her, haven’t you?” Suze asked in a hushed voice once there was half a block between Rhona and us.

I nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“What’s the news, baby girl?”

“There were witnesses,” I said.

“More than one?”

I shrugged, unable to lie to the one person who’d always been nice to me. “Do you think Rhona will really hurt Pearl?”

“She’s upset. She’s protective of Benny. You know that. And she’s already lost one boy who meant the world to her. Just get to the bottom of this, okay? No one even knows where Benny is. We don’t need another Rainbow disappearing.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, though I knew they weren’t going to be happy with any of the answers I turned up.

Rhona was starting to raise her voice again, though I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“You better scat, pussycat,” said Suze.

While Suze and Maria distracted Rhona, I ducked into the A&P. There, behind a display of Bisquick, I hid until I could no longer see them through the front windows.

“Iris?” said a male voice. “What are you doing?”

It was Michael Rosenberg. He had on a white apron that was smeared with juice from fresh produce.

“Hiding,” I said.

He looked amused. “I think the coast is clear.”

“Benny isn’t working today, is he?”

“He’s off. But don’t worry—Pearl’s already taken care of everything.” So he thought I was there to interrogate Benny.

I moved away from the Bisquick toward a pyramid of canned peas. “I guess they’re going to expel him, huh?”

“Believe it or not, they already did. Judy Cohen’s father called Principal DeLuca last night and demanded that something be done immediately.” So that explained why swift action was taken. “And at tomorrow’s convocation DeLuca’s going to formally apologize to the federation.”

That was good news for the federation, though I hated to think how the gossip mill was going to twist and turn this story come lunchtime.

“I know this must be hard for you,” said Michael. “Paul told me you two were close.”

“Not that close, apparently.” As sick as I was at the thought of Benny taking the rap for this, I couldn’t help but want to divorce myself from him. The federation could think what they wanted about my level of devotion, but I couldn’t stand the thought that they might assume I shared any of the sentiments in those letters. “Just so you know, I had no idea—”

Michael raised his hand to stop me. “Of course you didn’t. No one thinks that.”

“Good.” I didn’t know what else to say to Michael. I was embarrassed, not just about what Benny had done, but that Pearl was the one who discovered it. “I guess your pop’s going to fire him, huh?”

“No,” said Michael. “We’re keeping him on.”

“Seriously?”

Michael cleared his throat and leaned toward me. “My old man believes that everyone deserves a second chance.”

“Does he know how awful those letters were?”

“Look, I know this may not make sense, but he likes Benny. In fact, I like Benny. I’m not sure why he did it, but the last thing we want to do is retaliate. If he really thinks badly of Jews, we want to see if we can’t change his mind by showing him a little kindness.”

“That’s generous of you.”

Michael pushed his glasses up in a way that reminded me of Pearl. “I don’t know how much you know about Benny, but the kid’s had a hard life. His dad got canned for being a drunk and now Benny is the only one bringing in money. He needs this job, now more than ever. I couldn’t sleep at night if we took that away from him.”

I have to say, Michael’s charity impressed me, even if I wasn’t convinced we had our man.

“Of course,” Michael continued, “you only get one second chance. If he does something like this again, I doubt we’ll be so forgiving.” He eyeballed the pyramid of peas and adjusted a can so that its label faced forward. “Speaking of second chances: I told everyone that Pearl’s been helping you with the case. Believe it or not, some of them actually thought she could be the one writing the notes.” I stopped myself from saying that, according to Paul, Michael had been one of those pointing the finger at her. “Anyways, I think there’s a good chance that we’re going to let her back into the federation.”

“That’s swell,” I said.

“And while I know you’re not interested, the invitation is extended to you as well. In my opinion, you don’t have to demonstrate your faith outwardly to be devout. What we do when we know no one is watching is more important than what we do when they are.”

“That’s a good philosophy.” It was such an interesting way of describing faith, not just in God, but in people. “Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time believing Benny is capable of doing something like this: I’d never witnessed him do something bad. He just never let me see that side.”

“Or maybe you just never wanted to see it.”

Ouch. As hard as it was to hear, it was certainly possible that it was the truth.

A woman knocked her shopping basket into the pea pyramid, sending cans tumbling to the ground.

“I’d better go,” I told Michael. “It looks like you have work to do.”

*   *   *

I LEFT THE A&P
and headed toward Benny’s building. If Suze was right and no one knew where he was, there was a good chance he was hanging out in the air-raid shelter. The temperature fell as I walked, the sky rippling with snow flurries that seemed determined to fall by the most circuitous route possible. I’d rushed out of the house without gloves, and now I shoved my frozen fingers in my pockets and forced them to bend to increase my circulation. As the temperature dropped, so did my spirits. I might have been wrong about Mama and Uncle Adam doing bad things, but that didn’t mean I was wrong about Benny, too. Like Pearl said, he had a history of misbehavior that I was well aware of. Doing something like this wasn’t out of character.

I arrived at the air-raid shelter and found the door closed. From inside came the gasp of the Aladdin heater. I knocked four times: two short, two long.

Benny opened the door a crack. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“I wanted to hear the truth from the horse’s mouth.”

He pushed the door open wider and I took in his father’s handiwork. His left eye was hidden in a mass of purple bruises. His right cheek was stained yellow and brown.

“Did you write the notes?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

I thought of what Pearl had said. She wouldn’t have come forward if she wasn’t certain. “I think if you did, you must’ve had a good reason for it.”

He pulled his pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “So you think I’m guilty, too?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” He lit a cigarette and shoved the crumpled pack back into his pocket.

“What happened to your face?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Principal DeLuca visited us this morning. The old man doesn’t like surprises.”

It was funny how both he and Michael called their pops “the old man,” and yet, based on their descriptions, they couldn’t be more different.

“He must be pretty steamed that you were expelled.”

“Nah, otherwise he would’ve blackened both eyes. I’ve still got a job, right? That’s all that matters to him.”

I tried not to stare at the damage to his face, but the bruises were so vivid that it was impossible to look at anything else. “Can I get you something for your eye?”