Read Online What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online

turn the radio off.
    Then Ringo came on with the “No No Song” and her father did it for her, saying, “There’s only so much a man can take. When I think—”
    â€œWhat, Daddy?” Heather asked, playing up to him.
    â€œNothing. What do my girls have planned today?”
    And that’s when Heather said, “Sunny’s going to the mall.” She spoke with a lisping baby quality, a voice she had long outgrown, a voice shenever really had to begin with. When Heather petitioned for a new freedom for herself—permission to ride her bike to the shopping district in Woodlawn, for example—she spoke in her regular voice. But when she was trying to show up Sunny, Heather used this little-girl tone. Even so, their mother was onto her. Sunny had heard her mother tell someone on the phone that Heather was eleven going on forty. Sunny had waited to hear what her relative age was, but it hadn’t come up.
    Sunny added her dish to the stack her father had left on the drain board. She tried to come up with a rationalization not to do them now, but she knew that was unfair to her mother, who would be left with a pile of sticky dishes at the end of a long workday. It never even occurred to her father to wash them, Sunny knew, although he was liberated, compared to other fathers. The kids in the neighborhood called him the “hippie,” because of the shop, his hair, and his VW bus, which was a simple robin’s-egg blue, not anything remotely psychedelic. But although their father cooked—when he felt like it—and said he “supported” his wife’s decision to work as a real-estate agent, there were certain household chores he never attempted.
    If he had to wash the dishes every day, Sunny thought, scraping the leftover pancakes into the trash, he wouldn’t have been so dead set against putting in a dishwasher. She had shown him the ads for the portable models, explaining how they could roll it from the sink to the covered back porch when it wasn’t in use, but her father had said the machines were wasteful, using too much water and energy. Meanwhile he was always upgrading his stereo. But his study was a place of contemplation, he reminded Sunny when she complained, the place where he conducted the sunrise and sunset rituals known as the Agnihotra, part of the Fivefold Path, which wasn’t a religion but something better, according to Sunny’s father.
    â€œHave you been spying on me?” Sunny asked her sister, who was humming to herself and winding a lock of hair around her finger, lost in some secret joy. Their mother often said that their names should be switched, that Heather was always happy and bright, while Sunny wasprickly as a thistle. “How did you know I planned to take the bus to the mall?”
    â€œYou left the schedule out on your desk, with the departure times underlined.”
    â€œWhat were you doing in my room? You know you’re not supposed to go in there.”
    â€œLooking for my hairbrush. You’re always taking it.”
    â€œI am not.”
    â€œAnyway”—Heather gave a blithe shrug—“I saw the schedule and I guessed.”
    â€œWhen we get there, I go my way and you go yours. Don’t be hanging around me. Okay?”
    â€œLike I want to follow you around. The only thing you do is go to the Singer store and flip through the pattern books, when you all but flunked out of home ec at Rock Glen last year.”
    â€œThe machines there are all torn up, from so many kids using them. The needles are always breaking.” This was the excuse her mother had offered for Sunny’s poor grade in home ec, and she had been happy to take it. She just wished there had been excuses for her other not-great grades. Dreaminess was the kindest reason that her parents could muster. Does not work to ability, her homeroom teacher had written. “The shift dress I made at home, with Mom’s