Escape Route (Murder Off-Screen Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

then.”
    Doofus grinned and trotted away, led by the man with a bony finger hooked through the collar. They stopped while Abbott levered the fat man out of the ornamental shrub, and the three of them disappeared around the World War Two memorial statue.
    I fished another tissue from my pocket and blew my nose. Since Aunt B wasn’t here, I scolded myself. “Get a grip. He wasn’t your dog.”
    And he wasn’t Abbott’s dog. Or Costello’s, either, my inner-self blared in that part of my brain that knows stuff. The same part of my brain that didn’t utter a blooming word when it came to Jeep.
    I folded Doofus’s damp tissue neatly in quarters and slipped it ceremoniously into the pocket of my shorts. Even I recognized this as ridiculous. I also recognized a crossroads when I saw one. Either keep sinking into the doldrums that made me cry if a bug met its demise on my windshield, or a dog’s owner turned up ...
    Or.
    Get my winter-white self down to Puerto Rico. I secured Doofus’s stick in my wire basket, just in case, and pedaled home.
    Most definitely time for a sea cruise. Like that old song.

CHAPTER 6
     
     
    Gertie was getting in her half-hour of cardio on the front porch rocker when I bumped up over the curb. “You’ll bust the rims on that contraption, Miss Hollywood.” She’d been calling me that since I got home last week. I was sure it would pass. Hoping it would pass.
    “Then you’ll have to chauffeur me around, Miss Gertie.” I gave a nod to her red-and-white Corvette convertible. The car was vintage, too, but it didn’t have the snazzy bell. “The top’s down. Didn’t you have your hair done yesterday?”
    “Toilet paper,” she hollered over the railing. She spritzed an invisible can of hairspray around her head. “At night. A turban of Charmin’ and a quart of Aqua Net. This hair will be here long after I’m dead and buried.” And the ozone layer is a paragraph in the history books.
    I knocked the kick stand into place. “Where’s Aunt B?”
    “In the kitchen. Putting away the dessert bowls and spoons.”
    “How’d she know I had ice cream? Wait, how did she know I don’t have ice cream?”
    Gertie opened the screen door and waved me through. “Your Aunt B knows everything. You should know that by now. Poor baby with no parents.”
    I am used to that being part of my name—poor-baby-with-no-parents—like a nick name. The town has stopped short of calling me Little Orphan Jaqie.
    I don’t remember my parents, but every registered voter in Oakley Beach does, so my memories are second hand. I write each one down. Maggie and Sean Shanahan. I’m on my seventh memory book. Notes and photos and snippets taped on the pages.
    Twenty-two years after the car wreck I survived because I was strapped in ‘tight as a street walker’s drum,’ according to Doc Gilford.
    Aunt B and Uncle Frank folded me into their childless world like air into meringue. That’s her metaphor, not mine. Mine would run more toward teddy bear hugs and warm, woolen mittens.
    But if I ever meet a street walker with a drum, I intend to ask about that.
    “Get in here and look at this moron.” It was Aunt B from the kitchen. Uncle Frank was on his way home from Bub’s, so I knew she wasn’t tagging him as the moron in question. Willie Nilly, the sheriff’s impaired brother, came to our house every Wednesday and—even at twenty-eight—needed a lot of supervision, but this was Tuesday, and, besides, she loved Willie and would not label him a moron. That left storm chasers, UFO aficionados and politicians.
    The kitchen counter TV was on. It was a six-inch square black-and-white contraption that only worked if a nickel was taped inside the circle Aunt B had drawn with a silver marker. A six-inch tall man in a suit stood behind a podium clutching the edges like he might never let go. Behind him was a forest of flags. They were varying degrees of black, gray and white so I couldn’t be sure what sections of the