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

sounds dangerous,” I said, wondering how Darleen hadn’t disappeared earlier.

“You think I don’t know that?” she asked. “I tell her the same thing all the time, but she’s stubborn. And her stepfather said he’d beat her silly if she missed the bus again. But girls are girls.”

(Stepfather. . . . And a beater besides.)

“Do you have any other children?” I asked, making a mental bookmark to return to the stepfather.

She shook her head.

(Black Jack gum. I was sure I’d heard that recently. It was itching my brain, but not germane to the matter at hand. I pushed it to one side.)

“What about neighbors? Any men living in the area?”

“Why, sure, there are men around. It’s farm country.”

“Any of them close by?”

“Walt Rasmussen owns the next farm over. He’s a giant. Must be six foot nine or ten. And as unpleasant as he is tall. He’s about sixty-five. Then there’s Mr. Karl and his wife on the other side. They have a son, too. Bob Jr. About twenty-five years old.”

“Nice enough people?”

She shrugged. “Suppose they are. Walt Rasmussen had a disagreement with Dick over the property line a few years ago. He said our fence was a couple of feet on his side, but Dick don’t make mistakes like that. He’s careful that way. We’re not friendly with him, but I don’t know that he’s ever talked to Darleen.”

“Anyone else in the area?”

“There’s Pauline Blaine and her two boys who live not too far. She’s a widow.”

“How old are the boys?” I asked.

“Small. Maybe the older one’s ten.”

“Is Dick your husband?” I asked, shifting gears, and she nodded. “Tell me about him.”

“Dick? What do you want to know about him for?”

“I want to know about everyone Darleen knows, starting at home.”

Irene Metzger didn’t much like it, but she explained that Dick Metzger was her second husband. She’d lost her first, Gene Hicks—Darleen’s father—in the closing days of the war in the Pacific. Dick was fortyfive, a simple, dirt-under-his-nails, hard-working Joe, struggling to make something of his small dairy farm. He had borrowed money from every bank in town, each to pay the last, enough to hold off foreclosure at least until spring. He had a plan to buy some good cows from a neighbor, and things would turn around soon. I didn’t see it.

“How long have you been married?”

“Fourteen and a half years,” she said. “Dick and Gene were childhood friends. When Gene was killed in action, Darleen wasn’t even born yet.” She paused then explained that Darleen was born December 9, 1945, the consequence of her husband’s last furlough in February of that year. Irene Metzger wanted to be sure I understood the timeline. “Gene was home in February, you see. Nine months earlier,” she said, punctuating the math with a sharp tap of her finger on the table. “Anyways, when Gene was killed, I was six months along. A war widow, living on aid. Then Dick come back from overseas and stopped by to see me. He helped me out, and we got married a year later.”

“How is he with your daughter?”

“He’s a good father to her,” she began then suddenly caught on. She frowned at me. “I don’t know what you’re driving at, but you got the wrong idea about Dick. He loves Darleen like she was his own. Always treated her like his own daughter. He’s sick about this thing. Drove me over here at one in the morning and is waiting downstairs in the truck. That’s how much he cares.”

“He didn’t adopt her?”

“Of course he did,” she said.

“But she didn’t take his name?”

“I wanted her to, but Dick thought it wouldn’t be right for Gene’s memory. Like I said, they were fast friends, and Dick wanted Darleen to keep her father’s name.”

“Why don’t you invite him up?” I asked, wanting to have a talk with him. “He must be freezing.”

“No, he don’t want to come up,” she said, draining her glass and stubbing out her cigarette. She’d smoked the whole thing right down to her brittle, yellowed fingertips, wasting none of it. “He wouldn’t be any help in this; he don’t know about girls.”

I regarded her with suspicion, and she picked up on it right away.

“Look,” she said, “Dick is a good husband and father. Why do you have to go suspecting him?”

“I don’t suspect him,” I lied. Of course I suspected him. He might well be Father of the Year, but other stepfathers before him had put a bull’s-eye on his back in cases like this. “I’d still like to talk to him. He might know something.”

“Don’t waste your time,” she said simply.

I sighed, poured a short drink for each of us, and asked if Darleen had a boyfriend.

“She took up with a boy last spring. Joey Figlio.” She pronounced it FIG-lee-oh. “He’s in Darleen’s class, I think. Lives near the hospital on the West End. I had to stop her from seeing him last month because things were getting too serious all of a sudden.”

“And you don’t think Darleen might have bucked and taken off for a while with him?”

“Nope,” she said, lighting another cigarette and sucking half of it down in one gasp. “I told you, she didn’t run away.”

I must have appeared skeptical, because she offered more without my asking: “She couldn’t have run off with him because he’s up to Fulton over in Johnstown. Locked up in reform school since the beginning of December. He snuck out, though, and Dick found him hiding in our barn the night Darleen disappeared. You see, he was waiting for her to come home, too.”

“Okay, so she didn’t run away with her boyfriend,” I said. “Does she have any friends?”

“There’s a couple of girls she rides the bus with. Susan Dobbs, Carol Liswenski, and Linda Attanasio. And there’s Edward, a boy who’s had a crush on her since the seventh grade.”

I stood and fetched my grocery pad and pencil from the counter near the icebox. I wrote down the names. I also noted the neighbors, Rasmussen and