Read Online Death Storms the Shore (A Kate Kennedy Mystery Book 4) by Noreen Wald - Free Book Online Page A

Norton family. Why would Etta even suggest such a thing? Where was her sense of loyalty? Kate had cried in her grandmother’s arms after Marlene’s betrayal.
    “I will never speak to Marlene again.” Kate dropped her tea cup into the saucer. She wished she could invite Sophie. Would her father find her new friend too weird? What would Sophie think about Kate’s boring family?
    “You’re lucky that cup didn’t break.” Her mother sounded sad rather than angry.
    “Sorry, Mom.” Kate wiped up the spilled tea with her napkin.
    “Look, Kate,” her mother said, “you can’t stay here alone. Your father would have a fit. Would you like to ask someone else? Another friend? Maybe the girl you met yesterday at Miss Ida’s.”
    Kate couldn’t believe it. Had her mother read her mind? Sometimes Maggie Norton amazed her. Of course, Kate had talked a lot about Sophie over dinner last night.
    “Can I call her now?”
    An hour later, Sophie climbed into the black Buick’s backseat with Kate and Etta.
    As they drove along Woodhaven Boulevard, Kate felt grateful that her father wasn’t asking Sophie a lot of dopey questions. Instead, Mom and Sophie were discussing Kon-Tiki. Both were reading it; Sophie was further along. Etta chimed in about how much she liked Miss Ida, but didn’t get too far. Mom and Sophie’s book-review club lasted all the way to Belle Harbor. Kate, getting a little jealous, was about to change the subject when her father beat her to it.
    “What does your father do, Sophie?”
    “Do? I don’t understand, Mr. Norton.”
    “For a living.” Kate’s father spoke slowly, enunciating every word. “You know, what’s his line of work?”
    Kate cringed.
    “My mother goes to work. She’s a secretary.” Sophie also enunciated, as if crafting her response. “My father stays home.”
    Please God, make my father shut up. I’ll go to Mass every day for a month. I’ll never drink tea in a Wedgwood cup again. Just make him shut up.
    Miraculously, he did. Kate would be getting up for nine o’clock Mass for the next thirty days, but her father’s silence would be worth every hour of lost sleep.
    Still...Kate wondered why Sophie hadn’t mentioned her father’s graphs and charts. Boris Provakov had been working on something yesterday. They’d interrupted him.
    Twenty minutes later they were on Rockaway Beach, where Queens met the Atlantic Ocean.
    Her grandmother didn’t like the sun, but her parents and Kate loved it, basking in its rays from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
    Hopping in the hot sand, they spread out their blankets and set up their beach chairs at just the right angle. Kate and her parents would be rotating their positions every fifteen minutes to follow the sun.
    No matter how hard she tried, Kate never tanned. Too fair-skinned like her father. While her Mom took on a golden brown, Coppertone glow, Kate and her dad just got redder and redder. But she loved how the sun turned the hairs on her arms to gold and streaked her chestnut brown curls with blonde highlights.
    Etta sank into a folding chair, facing the boardwalk; she’d spend the day shifting away from direct sunlight.
    Kate’s father had brought his homemade brew of Lipton tea, Lanolin, and baby oil. He’d been using the smelly mix for years and, though the tea stained his skin to a red-bronze, he never tanned either.
    Sophie, wearing an old-fashioned, navy wool bathing suit, had dynamite color. “Tar Beach,” she answered when Kate’s mother asked where she’d gotten her beautiful tan.
    Kate’s parents and Etta laughed at Sophie’s response. Kate didn’t get the joke. “Where’s Tar Beach?”
    Her father laughed again. “On the roof, Katie. When we lived on the West Side, we went to Tar Beach all the time. Swam in the Hudson River too.”
    Never having lived in an apartment house or a tenement, Kate felt deprived. The only one never to have experienced Tar Beach.
    While her mother set up housekeeping—Maggie Norton liked