Read Online The Puzzle King by Betsy Carter - Free Book Online Page B

same disoriented sensation she’d felt when she’d taken a spill in her kitchen back in Germany years earlier. Her mother had asked herto reach up to a shelf in the cupboard and bring down the jar of flour she needed to make pastry dough. She’d picked the jar from the shelf and had taken a step backward. Somehow, she lost her balance, and her feet went out from under her. The fall seemed to take forever—long enough for her to anticipate that she’d be hurt, and probably badly. When she landed on her tailbone, the glass jar smacked against the kitchen floor and splintered. One of the jagged pieces gashed Flora’s right leg from behind her knee down to her calf. She remembered sitting on the floor, blood and flour and broken glass all around her. She felt nauseated and faint from the pain in her tailbone, and she remembered little else except her father shouting at her not to move. He’d lifted her out from the bloody mess on the floor and carried her into the bathroom, where he put her down into the tub and began washing her wounds.
    Right after that, her father got sick. Her mother said it was influenza, but Flora was convinced it was her blood that had infected him. Three months later he was dead, and though she never told anyone that she carried this guilt, every time she looked at the scar that ran like a scimitar down her leg, she could see her father’s taut face and feel the gentleness of his hands as he swooped her up on that day and cleaned out her cut.
    Unconsciously, she rubbed her hand down her right leg as the train slowed down and slid into the tunnel under Grand Central Station. All around her was darkness. The cars shuddered and clacked, and she could smell the sulfurous smell of metal wheels grinding against metal track. Even though she was seated in her rattan chair on a train coming into New York City, Flora felt as if she were back in her old house in Germany. She could feel herself falling. Falling and wondering how bad it would be.
    She gathered her matching red-and-white valises and stepped off the train. Flora studied the crowds of people milling around the emptying train. The Negro man was gone, but she saw women in muslin dresses so sheer that she could make out the shapes of their breasts underneath. She watched as porters unloaded crates filled with oranges and bolts of satin, and down at the end of the vast platform, she could make out the form of an organ grinder with a monkey on his head. The monkey wore a banana hat strapped under his chin and jumped about collecting silver coins from anyone who would pay. New York. Already it was as exotic as she hoped it would be.
    With all that was going on around her, Flora almost forgot to search for her sister, although Seema would be hard to miss in any crowd. At nearly five-foot-ten, she towered over most other women and an awful lot of men. With her long black hair (“shiny like a seal” was how their Uncle Paul described it) and green eyes with gold flecks, Seema was the most striking of the three Grossman sisters. Margot, the youngest sister, had the makings of a real beauty: full lips, soft almond-shaped eyes, and the grace and swiftness of a fawn. But years of worry had weighted her down and drained her complexion of its natural rosiness.
    What Seema didn’t have naturally, she made up for with her flair and elegance. She was lean and angular, with lips that sloped and peaked like sand castles. Her poppy-red lipstick was vivid against her creamy white skin, and though Seema laughed it off when her friends nicknamed her Seamless, that pretty much summed her up. Flora was heading toward the organ grinder when she heard a familiar smoky voice calling behind her. “Hey Chatterbug, where are you going?”
    When Flora first came over to live with her aunt and uncle,Uncle Paul nicknamed her Chatterbug because, he said, she’d talk to anyone, even the ladybugs who lived in the backyard. He called Seema CeCe and, although his wife’s name was