CHAPTER 18: The Trackers

Summary

Flora Baumbach now braids Turtle's hair regularly while Turtle reads The Wall Street Journal. She reads aloud a news piece that Julian R. Eastman, the newly elected chairman of the Westing Paper Products Corporation, has announced from London that earnings are expected to double next quarter. Turtle decides to sell all their stocks and put all the money into Westing. Turtle tells Flora she likes when she calls her Alice but that Turtle needs to call Mrs. Baumbach something different after the bomb scare. Turtle suggests Mrs. Baba and Flora shortens it to Baba. Turtle asks Baba about her daughter Rosalie but this only makes her angry.

In apartment 4D, Sandy is writing notes on Flora Baumbach: about the death of her retarded daughter Rosalie last year which prompted her to sell her bridal shop, and how her Westing connection was as Violet Westing's wedding dressmaker. He then looks at the data the private investigator has on Otis Amber and starts laughing. On the way to school, Theo Theodorakis stops Doug Hoo and asks who lives in the apartment next to his; Doug says it's Crow. Theo doesn't tell Doug about what happened with Crow last night, nor of the letter she gave him but which was......

Notes

Flora's braiding of Turtle's hair shows she has completely supplanted Grace Wexler as a maternal figure. We have the first mention of Julian Eastman in a news piece - the same means by which news of Sam Westing's death was made public, and thus controlled by Sam Westing as part of his master plan. Turtle reciprocates her fondness for Flora by giving her a pet name - thus, the two have names for each other that no one else knows. However, the same problem she faces in her actual family - a rivalry with a "sister", in this case.......

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