Dating is Murder by Harley Jane Kozak

Author:Harley Jane Kozak
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385515122
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Generally, I see stopped traffic as an opportunity for manicure touch-ups, eyebrow tweezing, and the cleaning out of glove compartments and purses. Today I was preoccupied with failed math tests, missing boyfriends, jealous German girls, and blue-eyed men. If Britta had sold out Annika, reported her outdated Führungszeugnis to the agency, why hadn’t the agency reported it to the Quinns? Had Marty Otis blackmailed Annika? I pictured him calling her, scaring her, saying, “We’re on to you,” and Annika in her attic room, circling the date on her Führungszeugnis, thinking, I have to run. But why? How bad had it been, her trouble with the German police? And what could Marty Otis want from her? It’s not like she had money. And what did any of it have to do with Biological Clock? Or Rico’s disappearance?

Traffic inched toward Forest Lawn, whose inhabitants moved more slowly than we on the freeway only because they were dead. I noticed my mail scattered on the seat next to me, retrieved from my box on my way to the math test. I picked it up, sorted through bills and catalogs, then tossed it aside and picked up Annika’s pink file. On the back of her application, as Maizie had noticed, was another girl’s, this one from Thailand. Nootjaree “Noot” Chanaboon. She was adorable. I imagined Gene Quinn happily downloading au pairs from the Internet . . .

Uh-oh.

It was the woman at Miss Grusha’s music class who’d put this in my head. I didn’t want to be thinking this, about someone cheating on Maizie, a mom who made her own bread. And I didn’t want to think of Annika in an adulterous relationship. With her employer. The HMO doc. A man twice her age.

Grown men lusting after nubile babysitters is a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they happen so often. Gene Quinn could’ve had the hots for Annika without her encouragement. In fact, this scenario might have given her another reason to disappear.

I pulled the Führungszeugnis out of the pink file, stuffed it in my backpack, and called the Quinn house.

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