Under Cover by Caroline Crane Read Free Book Online Page A

a right to talk to his coworker. By the same
token, I had a right not to like it. And I didn’t, jealous bitch
that I was.
    Grandma and Jasper were on the sofa watching
a show about deep sea divers. I gave her back the keys and said,
“Why can’t somebody tell me?”
    She muted the TV and put on her innocent
look. “Tell you what, hon?”
    “The woman in that house. Mulvaney. Who is
she? And why is there somebody named Liam Penny? ”
    “You’re kidding me!” Grandma seemed genuinely
flabbergasted. “Honey, I don’t know any more than you do, I told
you that. Why didn’t you ask?”
    “Ask who? That’s as far as I got with Mei. I
thought Dad might have said something.”
    “I told you, he didn’t. I’ve hardly seen him,
except to get him there and then all he did was talk about
Borneo.”
    I tried a different approach. “Does the name
Ursula Mulvaney ring any sort of bell?”
    “Can’t say that it does. That’s whose house
he went to?”
    “I just told you. She has a son named Liam,
who might be Hey Buddy, because at the airport Dad asked, ‘Where’s
Liam?’ But she doesn’t look old enough to be dad’s mother.”
    Grandma shook her head. “Never heard of any
of it. Or them. But aren’t you ignoring another possibility?”
    It was there, in the back of my mind. I
couldn’t do anything except ignore it. “If she’s not his mother,
what is she?”
    “Honey, he never talked about his family. I
told you that, didn’t I? What’s with all the tough questions? Did
you actually go there and ring the doorbell?”
    “I might have.”
    “You’ve got more nerve than I do.”
    “Nobody,” I said, “has more nerve than you. I
took Mei out for ice cream. Dad wasn’t there.”
    “Did Mei explain who she is?”
    “I didn’t ask her,” I said. “It would have
been rude. Do you think Mom would know anything? I already tried
that when we got the letter.”
    “As far as I can figure,” Grandma said, “your
mom wanted to know as little as possible about your dad.”
    “Maybe that’s why he took off.”
    “Correction. It’s because he took off.
Not to change the subject, but I kind of remember the word ‘prison’
in that letter. Could be it has something to do with why they don’t
want to talk about it.”
    She might have a point there. As for the rest
of it, I could almost believe she didn’t know any more than I
did.
    “Sorry I interrupted you,” I said. She turned
the TV’s sound back on. I went upstairs to my room and sat down at
the computer. It stared back at me with its big blank eye. I was
hoping it would tell me where to begin.
    I booted up and typed in “Hudson Hills.”
    It gave me a lot of stuff about the murder,
stuff I’d seen in the paper.
    “Okay, then, what about it?” I asked the
computer. “If that’s what you want to talk about.”
    Hudson Hills was where Dad had gone, someone
Dad called Hey Buddy was in prison, and a kid named Johnny had been
killed. All those pieces. There just had to be some kind of
connection. I tried to see what else they had on Hudson Hills,
NY.
     
    Teen Questioned in Death of
Friend
     
    It was the same story I had read before. They
didn’t give any names except for the victim.
    A coat hanger. What a horrible way to die.
How could anyone do that?
    So, if Hey Buddy was in prison—unless Dad had
exaggerated—and the police were questioning a suspect, could they
possibly be the same?
    I tried a search for Liam Penny.
    Nothing.
    Mei could’ve gotten it wrong. I tried Ursula
Mulvaney.
    Still nothing.
    I called Maddie. I thought she’d seemed kind
of interested in the story. She might have followed it up.
    She hadn’t. “Cree, there are a lot of people
in Hudson Hills. Just because your dad knows someone there doesn’t
mean it’s the same person.”
    “I know that. It’s what I’m trying to find
out. He did mention prison in his letter.”
    She was unimpressed. “Being questioned by the
police isn’t the same as being in