Dead for the Money by Peg Herring

solitude to the presence of people who disapproved of her. But Scarlet asked her to remain in the house, and she obeyed, lying on her bed and watching tiny white clouds drift by her window like passing ships.
    Brodie considered Gramps half of her life, and that half was gone. The other half she divided among Scarlet, Shelley the cook, and her husband Briggs, the handyman. Everyone else she imagined as outside an invisible circle. There were times when she had to speak to those outside people, but she had as little to do with them as possible. They made her feel like a misfit. They spoke louder than normal when they talked to her, and something in their eyes conveyed discomfort at her presence.
    Just because she’d set one tree on fire.
    It had been an accident. She’d been a kid then, and she’d taken it into her head to build a fire in her tree house and roast marshmallows. The stupid thing wouldn’t go, and she used up all but one of her matches on it. Finally, she had a brilliant idea: gasoline would make it burn. But how to get some up into the tree? She had hit on an idea she thought was clever. Using a narrow tube, she sipped some gas from the can Briggs kept in the barn into her mouth and climbed carefully back up to the tree house. Lighting her last match, she spit the gas on the kindling she’d amassed. That was pretty much all she could recall for a while. When it was all over, she had no eyebrows, a receding hairline, and a reputation as a budding arsonist to add to her other crimes. When she thought about it, she could still taste the gas in her mouth. Stupid.
    Scarlet knocked softly on her bedroom door. “Brodie? Can you come downstairs? There are things we have to discuss.”
    Dragging herself off the bed, Brodie made herself presentable, knowing Scarlet would send her right back upstairs if she did not wear shoes and comb her hair. No doubt funeral arrangements were being made. They would bury Gramps, then what? Would they send her away? Put her in some snobby girls’ school so nobody had to deal with her? She was pretty sure nobody wanted the ugly, crazy girl around. Nobody ever had except Gramps. Briggs and Shelley were good to her. So was Scarlet. But it was their job.
    When she’d come to the Dunbar house, Brodie ate only what she could manage with her hands. It had felt natural for food to go from her fingers to her mouth. Her caregivers would put her to bed in her lovely room only to find her asleep on the couch in the family room the next morning. Over time, she had adapted to society’s simple demands. She ate with a fork, combed her hair once a day, and learned to sleep in a bed. Although not as wild as she had been, at twelve years of age Brodie still refused to go to school, associated only with a few people she was used to, and would not eat meals in company. A long line of nannies, caregivers, and tutors had been endured with very little grace. Each was tested, most beyond their ability to withstand it. Brodie considered it a kind of duty.
    Then, a little less than a year ago, Scarlet came. Brodie had learned, through her usual spying, that the new tutor came on Bud’s recommendation. Since Bud did not like Brodie, she decided the woman would be horrible. Gramps had disagreed. “Give her a chance,” he’d urged. “Most people are okay if you treat them well.” Brodie did not buy it. Best to find out right away what a person was like when she was angry. Anger told you a lot.
    On her first day, Brodie had waited for the new girl to try to befriend her, as all those before her had done. But Scarlet did not even come looking for her. Instead she sat down in the back yard in an Adirondack chair shaded by a large maple tree. It was a spot Brodie herself favored. Idly she paged through an oversized book with a medieval castle on the cover. Brodie watched from her favorite hiding place, a spirea bush that drooped branches onto the ground, making a space for a slightly undersized girl to hide,