The Boy in the Red Dress by Kristin Lambert

Author:Kristin Lambert [Lambert, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

18

TURNED OUT MARION was only slightly exaggerating about how little we’d need for this excursion. The crowbar I borrowed from its hook behind the bar Monday night as I was leaving work. We also needed dark clothes, so we wouldn’t stand out like sore thumbs at night, and we needed someone to drive us to the Garden District in the wee hours after the streetcar stopped running.

Most of the clothes, Marion scrounged up for us from Cal and Mama’s old vaudeville trunk while he waited for me to come home. The ride required Bennie Altobello. Again.

Luckily for me, he came by the club with a delivery and didn’t ask too many questions when I asked if he could pick me up at my place later and take me for a ride somewhere.

“I didn’t realize Marion was coming, too,” Bennie said when both of us slid into the truck with him, looking like the cat burglars we were apparently becoming.

“I mentioned it, didn’t I?”

Bennie shook his head with certainty.

“Oh, well, he is. And I need to warn you now that you’re going to be our getaway driver.”

“Your what?” He looked up and down at our mostly black outfits. “Is that why you’re dressed like that? Are you going to rob a bank or something? I don’t think—”

“Geez, Bennie, calm down. We’re going to sneak into a house, borrow a little old box with a diary in it, and pop right back out. No harm done.”

His thick eyebrows looked skeptical. They were loud even in the dark. “Whose house?”

I bit my lip and pulled my school beret down farther over my hair.

Marion leaned up and looked across me at Bennie. “Arimentha McDonough’s.”

“What?”

“Millie,” Marion said, giving me a chastising look, “you should’ve told him this when you asked him to drive us.”

“We were in a public place, for crying out loud! I didn’t want to shout it all over town.” I didn’t mention how Olive had been coming our way when I’d asked him, and I’d wanted to end the conversation before she heard me begging Bennie for yet another favor.

Marion sighed dramatically.

“You’re telling me we’re about to try to steal Arimentha McDonough’s diary?” Bennie said. “Why don’t the cops know about it?”

“They know it exists—” I said.

“They just don’t know where it is,” Marion finished.

“But don’t you think this is too risky?”

“Probably it is,” Marion said.

“But we’ve agreed it’s the only way to get a jump on the police,” I said. “This might give us some leads they don’t even know about yet.”

Bennie looked from me to Marion, then shook his head in defeat. “Why do I let you talk me into these things?” he muttered, but his hand moved to the gear shift, and soon we were chugging to a start.

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, Bennie,” Marion said, “but why do you do these things?”

I elbowed him in the ribs hard enough to elicit an oof.

But Bennie laughed. “This one time when we were twelve or thirteen, some bigger kids had me surrounded in an alley, and I was about to be dead meat.

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