Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (great novels of all time txt) 📕

her and left her pregnant. Brossard got really angry, refused, and advised her to pray to Jesus for guidance.

Darleen continued to mark the visits from her stepfather with sickening regularity. By the end, she would simply write, “Again” and nothing more.

I threw the diary down on the end table and hung my head. In the gloom of my apartment, the night had closed in around me as I read the wretched account of what he’d done to her. Two hours had passed. Two hours of revolting accounts of the worst crimes I could imagine against a child. What dies inside a man to make him do such things? How far from decency must he turn to lay his hands on a girl that way? How black must his soul be? I could imagine all manner of cruelty and selfishness and even understand them to a degree when compared to molesting a child. Dick Metzger was a monster. My instinct about him had been right all along. And right behind him was the despicable Wilbur Burch. Child molesters, both of them. Base and worthless human beings. I would be happy to do my part to help send them both away forever.

I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. And when I dozed off, terrible nightmares invaded my head. Horrible visions that I won’t repeat. Dreams that twisted my insides until I tore at my pillow, gnashed at its cover with my teeth, and wept for Darleen Hicks and Geraldine Duffy. I promised justice for them both. And that’s when I realized how confused and emotional I’d become. I was hunting two different fiends, and I didn’t know what to think, whom to accuse, which to hate more. Dick Metzger was a lowlife child molester. I had proof of that. But now I needed to prove that either he or Louis Brossard was a killer as well.

I took two hours to write the article that would blacken Dick Metzger’s name with the foulest tar I could conjure. Even if he never faced prison for his crimes, he would forever be known as a monster who’d molested his daughter. My heart raced as I detailed his abuse of a pubescent girl. For obvious reasons, the paper would never publish the ugly words I wanted to write. But I made sure the perversion and depravity came through in every sentence.

Once I’d finished, I photographed several of the more telling passages, including Darleen’s plans to escape with Joey and Wilbur. I made sure to document many of the nauseating entries about her stepfather. I might even find one or two where the language was moderate enough to be printed along with my article as powerful visual evidence.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1961

It was six. I showered and dressed. By seven, I was sitting outside Frank Olney’s office, waiting for him to arrive. In my purse was the diary. In my head, I was turning my facts and theories over and over, looking for the answer that was so elusive. It seems trite, but I compared the impasse to the hardest crossword puzzles I’d ever solved. I recalled how they’d stumped me, then suddenly a crack appeared, giving way to a trickle, then the flood gates opened, and the game was won, as suddenly and unexpectedly as a dam bursting. But this was no crossword puzzle. The clues had not been devised to lead to an eventual solution. Quite the opposite. There was a dearth of clues, and the killer was more interested in burying evidence than engaging in an intellectual game.

Frank finally lumbered into the office at eight fifteen. He hung his coat on the stand and looked at me.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, his expression betraying a premonition that I had a very good reason for the early start.

“Can we talk inside?”

I laid out the diary on his desk, and he eyed it with dread.

“I see you took the liberty of breaking the lock,” he said, reaching for it. “Okay, give me the abridged version.”

“Darleen planned to run off with Joey Figlio. She collected money from various people.”

“That’s nice,” he said, thumbing through the first few pages. “But we already knew that. What’s the punch line?”

“Dick Metzger had been molesting her for two years.”

The sheriff groaned as I filled him in and showed him some of the more telling passages. He turned green as he read the chilling, almost nonchalant descriptions written in Darleen’s hand. “Last night he made me do it again,” was the one that prompted Frank to slam his right hand down on his desk and rise to his feet. He grabbed his coat and hat from the stand, then reached into his desk for his gun.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going to haul that son of a bitch in here.”

“Why are you taking your gun?”

Frank stared at me, face impassive. “Because I’m hoping he gives me a reason to shoot him.”

It was ten o’clock when I presented Charlie Reese with my story and the photos I’d rushed through the lab moments earlier. He read my copy carefully, then examined the photos one by one. When he’d finished, he pushed back in his chair and sighed.

“The world is a terrible place for people like Darleen Hicks,” he said. “I’ve never understood how a human being can be so rotten as to do that to a child.”

“Then you’ll print it?” I asked.

Charlie looked up at me. “No, Ellie. We can’t print this. Not in this form anyway. Ours is a family newspaper. We can’t write that her father made her do . . . Oh, God, it makes me sick to think about it.”

“How would you write it then?” I demanded, my hackles rising.

“Well, if the sheriff arrests him, we can say what the charges are. But we can’t give this kind of detail.”

“Can we at least print a photograph of the diary? Here, where she says, ‘He came to my room again last night.’”

Charlie gazed