Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) Read Online Free Page A

horizons. She found channels she’d never seen before. She discovered soft porn.
    Out went having her friends over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. In came big-screen events for Ma and the other ladies, every night there wasn’t bingo at the church.
    At first, Leo saw it as harmless. On those movie nights when he wasn’t staying at Endora’s condo, he worked in his basement office, willing to dial up the volume on his bossa nova CDs to drown out the excited Polish chattering and occasional stomping of an orthopedic shoe or metal walker leg just a few feet above his head.
    Then Ma’s tastes in videos expanded even more. She discovered hard-core, pay-per-view. Suddenly, she was witnessing twosomes and threesomes and foursomes interact in ways she and Pa Brumsky, rest his soul, never would have imagined in the dark beneath their goose down comforter.
    Out went the tame romance novels from the library; out went the Polish-language newspapers. Out went words in general. Daytime hours were now for rest, so that she could be fully alert and observant far into the night.
    Leo became concerned.
    â€œA healthier body can lead to a healthier mind,” Leo said again, working his lips as though mumbling an incantation, as he pulled into the Home Depot.
    He had me wait in the truck. Fifteen minutes later, he came out pushing a contractor’s cart. On the cart were long lengths of metal tubing and a box filled with metal parts. After strapping the pipes onto the truck rack, we started back toward Rivertown.
    â€œWhat’s with the pipes?” I asked, ever the ace investigator.
    â€œSurely it’s obvious.”
    â€œA fence?”
    â€œSome detective.”
    When I pressed him, he offered up a sly smile and changed the subject to an exhibit Endora was curating at the Newberry Library. “Female literary provocateurs of the 1920s,” he said.
    â€œEndora is no mean provocateur herself.”
    â€œAmen to that.”
    He parked in the alley behind his house. We carried the poles, hardware, and my tools through his back porch, past Ma’s cases of diet soda, cheese curls, and All-Bran, and down the basement stairs.
    Where I stopped, stunned, at the bottom.
    Through its unfinished door opening, Leo’s office was as it had always been, a mismatched medley of cast-off furniture and state-of-the-art magnifiers, enclosed by untaped, unpainted drywall. The rest of the basement, though, had been ruined.
    Leo’s basement had always been a jumble of the artifacts of the Brumskys—the fake, small Christmas tree they used to shake off and put on the television, before the big screen; boxes of old dinnerware, some bought, most liberated by Ma from one restaurant or another; the model train layout on green-painted plywood I’d helped Leo put together in grammar school, on one of those many afternoons when I’d sought sanctuary at his house instead of trudging to whatever aunt’s apartment I’d been assigned for the month. As a child, I’d envied Leo his basement clutter of family things. As an adult, I envied him his clutter more, because it showed good in his past.
    No longer. The basement had been cleared out. Ruined.
    â€œWhat did you do with all of your nice things?” I waved my arm at the newly denuded space.
    â€œI rented one of those big storage spaces. That’s where I got the truck.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œI decided Ma and her friends need an exercise room,” he said simply.
    â€œAnd less movies?”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    I touched the toe of my shoe to one of the pipes we’d just set on the floor. “So these are…?”
    He pointed up to the ceiling. He’d chalked eight circles on the wood joists. One for each of the pipes he’d gotten at the Home Depot.
    â€œFor stretching, kicking,” he said.
    I looked down, then back up. An outrageous image had blown hot into my head.
    â€œNo,” I