Ingenue by Jillian Larkin

look for her; she and Evan hadn’t found accommodations yet. She scratched out the line and began again.
I’m staying in the city, and I will go wait under the clock in Grand Central from noon to two every Saturday until you show up .
    Your loving and worried sister, Vera
    This was not the best plan for finding Jerome and Gloria. But it was the only lead Vera had.
    She folded the note up and tucked it into the envelope, casually watching the customers in the post office. Who knew how often Jerome and Gloria checked their mail? Would they come together? Or would Gloria waltz in like the redheaded woman who’d just entered, glanced around nervously, and gone over to one of those tiny mailboxes—
    Vera realized she wasn’t looking at a Gloria look-alike: it was Gloria. She was a lot thinner and was wearing a cheap blue dress that old high-society Gloria wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot swizzle stick, but it was definitely her.
    Vera was just about to call out Gloria’s name when she saw that Gloria had been followed.
    A woman in a dark gray dress and a large hat had entered the post office right on Gloria’s heels and was standing at the bulletin board as though interested in the WANTED posters. But her head was clearly tilted in Gloria’s direction. The woman wore large sunglasses and kept one hand hidden in her handbag.
    Between the hat and the sunglasses, Vera couldn’t see much of the woman’s face. She was young, for sure, with slender legs and arms and a pretty bow mouth.
    And then Gloria passed between them with a rectangular package in her hands and disappeared through the door.
    A second later, Sunglasses followed.
    And a moment after that, Vera followed Sunglasses. Gloria’s bright red hair was about twenty feet away. That girl stuck out like a bonfire in the dark. Bobbing along ten feet behind her was Sunglasses’ large hat.
    The woman was definitely following Gloria. Vera’s heart tightened. What should she do? If she yelled Gloria’s name, would Gloria be happy to see her? Or would she run away?
    Calm down , Vera told herself. Right now she needed to get this creepy woman away from her brother’s girlfriend.
    Vendors’ stalls lined the sidewalk, selling cheap jewelry and hats and other things—the sorts of things that made walking fast difficult. Vera stepped into the street, put her head down, and rushed past the stalls. Within a few minutes, she had overtaken both Gloria and the woman. When she got to the corner, she doubled back.
    A scarf vendor’s tiny cart was parked right near the intersection. The vendor—an older black man with disordered hair—had stepped away and was busy smoking and talking with another man outside the delicatessen on the corner.
    Vera pretended to study a set of sparkly headbands. Gloria passed, with Sunglasses a dozen feet behind. Vera slipped behind the cart, counted to three in her head, grabbed the cart by its bottom, and put all her strength into tipping it over.
    It made a satisfyingly loud noise when it hit the ground. The woman’s shriek that accompanied the crash was even more satisfying. The cart had found its target.
    Vera ducked low behind an old Model T and hoofed it around the corner and out of sight behind a van on the far side of the street.
    The vendor had set his cart upright again and was standing in front of Sunglasses, pointing his finger at her. “What, you think that’s funny? Messing with a man’s livelihood?”
    The woman said something, and the vendor threw up his hands.
    Vera looked in the direction that Gloria had been walking in. Gloria’s bright red hair and bold blue dress were nowhere to be seen.

GLORIA
    Gloria pretended to study a glass-topped table.
    Had she gotten the address wrong? The sign read SAUNDERS’ FURNITURE , but that couldn’t be right. Could it?
    She should have known that this job—which seemed practically tailor-made for her—was too good to be true.
    As she examined an ugly old maple bookcase, she felt