Read Death Storms the Shore (A Kate Kennedy Mystery Book 4) for Free Online

Mrs. Kennedy.”
    She did, primly, her back straight, keeping her knees together like the Catholic schoolgirl she’d once been.
    His eyes, dark and angry, met hers. Then he picked up a sheet of paper and waved it in her direction. “Out of the past, Mrs. Kennedy.” Parker sounded angry. And something more. Cruel. “We’re all the sum total of our past lives, aren’t we?”
    Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been anything like this. Had Parker gone mad?
    She held his gaze, saying nothing.
    Parker pushed back his heavy oak chair, walked to the front of his desk, then stood, towering over her. He shifted the piece of paper from one large hand to the other. “Tell me about the summer the year you turned thirteen, Mrs. Kennedy.”
    She shivered and, though she tried not to, she looked away, staring down at the terracotta tile.
    Kate had few secrets. Her life was an open book...except for a brief chapter in the summer of that year.

Eight

      
    Thursday, June 29, Fifty-Six Years Ago

      
    “Come on, Mom, please. I’ll be the only girl at Marlene’s house without a bra. You can’t do this to me. I’ll die of mortification.”
    Her mother smiled. Kate hoped that was a twinkle in Maggie Norton’s blue eyes. Though she could wheedle almost anything out of her mother, this would be a tough sell. Maggie had been a flapper and prided herself on never having worn—or needed—a bra. And even worse, her mother still thought of Kate as a child.
    “Mortification, huh? That would be an awful way to go.” Maggie sipped her chocolate ice-cream soda, then dipped her long spoon into the tall glass, scooping up the last of the foam.
    They were finishing lunch at the counter in the restaurant on the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s, Kate’s favorite department store. She hated it when her mother shopped downtown at Orbach’s or Klein’s, embarrassed that they had to carry the lower-priced stores’ shopping bags onto the subway.
    She’d overheard her mother telling her grandmother, Etta, that Kate was a snob. Her grandmother had just laughed, the way grandmothers, easier-going than mothers, often seemed to do.
    “Etta thinks I’m ready for a bra,” Kate whispered to her mother in the crowded elevator. Thank God her father, really strict and almost never easygoing, would not be consulted about anything so intimate as a bra.
    “Maybe, maybe not,” her mother said as they rode down, passing the fourth and third floors with none of the passengers getting off.
    “Second Floor: Ladies Lingerie,” the elevator operator announced, sounding a lot like the announcer on her favorite radio show. He opened the brass gate. A woman in a blue straw hat with a white feather, standing in front of Kate, stepped out.
    Her mother poked her in the back. “Get off, Kate, before the gate closes and I change my mind.”
    Marlene and Kate had been forever friends since they were six. And Marlene, always the more daring, had been wearing bras for at least three months. She now owned a collection of five, including a pointy black lace-and-nylon concoction. No wonder Pete Blake, Kate’s new neighbor and current crush, seemed so interested in Marlene. If she kept flirting with Pete, Marlene might be in danger of losing her forever friend.
    After ten minutes of browsing with her mother, Kate figured she didn’t have a prayer of bringing home an exciting or even a pretty bra, but anything would be better than her undershirt. Even the plain white cotton triple-A bra her mother was inspecting.
    Her father had ordered an oil burner to replace their coal stove. To celebrate the last heat to emanate from the old furnace, Kate would love to have a bonfire of undershirts. She’d throw in her seven-days-of-the-week underpants too. Not to mention her scapular.
    On this, her thirteenth birthday, to her amazement and delight, Kate got to pick out her own presents. Very much a woman of the world, like her namesake, Katharine Hepburn, in Adam’s Rib