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

time to drink it. Then I must have fallen asleep for a bit. I thought I heard a car arrive, but I never looked. And I didn’t hear any voices or anything funny.”

This was a dead end. I was getting nowhere with the most recalcitrant, least reliable witness I could imagine. Just then, Carol Liswenski climbed into the bus. Wanting to get her away from her friends, I convinced her to let me give her a lift home.

“I’m sorry about Darleen,” I said as we pulled away from the school. “It must be a difficult time for you.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I kind of already accepted that she was gone. One way or another. But it’s sad to know that she’s really dead. And that someone killed her on purpose.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“I figured you would.”

“Are you and your friends on the outs? Susan and Linda?”

Carol looked away. I took that for a yes.

“Did Darleen ever talk to you about her stepfather?”

“How do you mean?”

“Did she ever tell you anything really personal about him? Like secrets?”

Carol watched me from her seat. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, in part because I had to keep my eyes on the road. She finally said that Darleen had told her and Susan and Linda about her bath time.

“She said he sometimes barged into the bathroom without knocking. She said she didn’t like that, especially if she was undressed.”

“Anything else?” I asked. “Maybe even something more secret, more personal?”

“Like what?”

I needed Carol to give me information without my putting words or ideas into her head. It had to come from her, and I had already tried to steer her to the answer. I changed gears.

“What about other men?” I asked. “Did Darleen ever tell you about men? Older men, not boys.”

Carol shrugged. “Sure. We talked about men sometimes. Elvis, Bobby Darin . . . Darleen had a real thing for Anthony Perkins for a while.”

“No, I meant men from around here.”

“You already know the stories about Darleen and Mr. Russell.”

“Yes, and I don’t believe they’re true. Anyone else?”

“Wilbur Burch,” she said.

“Not old enough. Try again.”

She shrugged once more. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know of anyone else. Oh, except Paul Newman. Darleen was in love with him after we saw Exodus. As a matter of fact, it was just a few days before she disappeared.”

I pulled over to the side of the road. We were approaching Carol’s house on County Highway 58, and I still needed some answers.

“Carol,” I began, “did Darleen give you a package to hold for her?”

She looked at me, startled.

“Did she give you money to hold for her?”

Carol looked down, her eyes darting from side to side as she searched for an answer.

“That’s how you got the sweater and the hairdo and the charm bracelet, isn’t it?”

Still nothing.

“And that’s why your friends are giving you the cold shoulder. How much money was there?” I asked.

“Twenty dollars,” she said suddenly. “I wouldn’t have spent it, honest, but she was dead. I just knew she was dead.”

“When did she give you the money?” I asked.

“It was the day she disappeared. In Canajoharie at the factory. She gave me an envelope and said to keep it for her, just for a while. She said she was leaving, and she didn’t want her father to find the money.”

“Why not put it in her locker?” I asked.

“Because Mr. Russell gave it to her in the parking lot that morning. Right before she got on the bus.

So much for Ted Russell telling me everything. I still didn’t think he’d killed Darleen, but I wondered why he’d lied to me about not having seen her that day.

Putting that coward’s lie to one side, I had little to go on, other than Mike Palumbo’s sighting of Louis Brossard on the Mill Street Bridge. And I needed more than that to prove he was Darleen’s killer. I tried to imagine what kind of physical evidence might have been created or left behind by Brossard, but I couldn’t come up with anything that would still be present four weeks later. And the sheriff had searched his car already. It was clean. Where else could the evidence be?

I stopped in to see Fadge and have a look at the paper. My story on Darleen’s diary had made the front page after all. Upper right-hand corner. I could get used to this. Charlie had made several edits, removed all references to the molestation except the most clinical descriptions I had managed. But my boss’s one brilliant stroke bowled me over. He included one of the photographs—in fact the one with the most chilling passage I could remember: “Last night he made me do it again.” You could read the date, a few details about her day at school, and the beginning of the heartrending line. Charlie had the lab blur the second half of the sentence, leaving only “Last night he . . .” It was even more powerful without the offending words, as if the reader would make the crime worse in his own mind. In moments like this, I realized how much I still had to learn about the newspaper business.

“When are you going to wrap this up?” asked Fadge, taking a seat with me.

“I don’t know if I will,” I said, shaking my head.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something that’s no longer there.”

I spent the evening thinking about Darleen Hicks. For the thousandth time, I reviewed the details in my head. And I thought about the girl I had grown to know so well in the past weeks. None of it helped me break the logjam.

Having polished off three glasses of whiskey and several crossword puzzles, I trudged off to bed. Within minutes, I was asleep, dreaming of the first time I met Darleen Hicks in the girls’ bathroom at the high school. The particulars were different. She was older, with no braces on her teeth, and we were best friends, planning to steal