While My Pretty One Sleeps by Mary Higgins Clark Page A

work. Maybe just as well. He’d made plans for Monday evening with the waitress at the bar across the street and hadn’t wanted to break them.
    As he turned to walk the dank, urine-smelling hallway back to his room, he thought, You won’t get to be another Monday’s child, Kearny.
    Monday’s child was fair of face. But not after a few weeks in the cemetery.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Monday afternoon was Neeve’s usual time to spend on Seventh Avenue. She loved the bizarre bedlam of the Garment District, the crowded sidewalks, the delivery trucks double-parked on the narrow streets, the agile delivery boys manipulating racksof clothes through the traffic, the sense of everyone rushing, no time to spare.
    She’d begun coming here with Renata when she was about eight years old. Over Myles’s amused objections, Renata had taken a part-time job in a dress shop on Seventy-second Street, just two blocks from their apartment. Before long, the aging owner turned over to her the job of buying for the shop. Neeve could still visualize Renata shaking her head no as an overeager designer tried to persuade her to change her mind about an outfit.
    â€œWhen a woman sits down in that dress, it will crawl up her back,” Renata would say. Whenever she felt strongly, her Italian accent would leap into her voice. “A woman should get dressed, look in the mirror to make sure she doesn’t have a run in her stocking, a drooping hem, and then she should forget what she is wearing. Her clothes should fit like a second skin.” Renata had pronounced it “skeen.”
    But she also had an eye for new designers. Neeve still had the cameo pin one of them had presented to Renata. She had been the first to introduce his line. “Your mama, she gave me my first break,” Jacob Gold would remind Neeve. “A beautiful lady, and she knew fashion. Like you.” It was his highest compliment.
    Today as Neeve wended her way from Seventh Avenue through the West Thirties, she realized she was vaguely distressed. There was a throbbing pain somewhere in her psyche, like an emotional sore tooth. She grumbled to herself, Before long, I’ll really be one of those superstitious Irish, always getting a “feeling” about trouble around the corner.
    At Artless Sportswear, she ordered linen blazers with matching Bermuda shorts. “I like the pastels,” she murmured, “but they need a dynamite something.”
    â€œWe’re suggesting this blouse.” The clerk, order pad in hand, pointed to a rack of pale nylon blouses with white buttons.
    â€œUh-uh. They belong under a school jumper.” Neeve wandered through the showrooms, then spotted a multi-colored silk T shirt. “That’s what I mean.” She picked up several of the T shirts in different color patterns and brought them over to the suits. “This with the peach; that one with the mauve. Now we’ve got something going.”
    At Victor Costa, she chose romantic boat-necked chiffons that floated on the hangers. And once again Renata drifted into her mind. Renata in a black velvet Victor Costa, going to a New Year’s Eve party with Myles. Around her throat she’d worn her Christmas present, a pearl necklace with a cluster of small diamonds.
    â€œYou look like a princess, Mommy,” Neeve had told her. That moment had been imprinted on her memory. She’d been so proud of them. Myles, straight and elegant with his then prematurely white hair; Renata, so slender, her jet-black hair piled in a chignon.
    The next New Year’s Eve, a few people came to the apartment. Father Devin Stanton, who was now a bishop, and Uncle Sal, who was still struggling to make his mark as a designer. Herb Schwartz, Myles’s deputy commissioner, and his wife. Renata had been dead seven weeks . . .
    Neeve realized that the clerk was waiting patiently at her elbow. “I’m