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

“I’ve heard that.”

Finally, the sheriff’s county car rounded the corner onto Lincoln and accelerated toward my salvation. When he pulled to a stop at the curb next to me, I cranked down the driver’s side window.

“Follow me, Ellie,” he said.

“Are you in trouble, dear?” called Mrs. Giannetti as Frank gunned the engine. I rolled up the windows and shifted into gear to follow him. The air was bitter cold as we cruised along Route 5 at sixty-five miles an hour. Blasts of dry, needle-sharp snow streaked past the windshield, and the defroster struggled to keep the glass clear. The frozen rubber of the wipers rattled back and forth, skittering over the ice, occasionally dislodging a small chunk and sending it hurtling over the roof into the frozen darkness behind me.

Route 5 runs east to west along the north side of the Mohawk, from Albany past Buffalo to the Pennsylvania state line. We were heading east toward Schenectady, but we weren’t going that far.

About four miles past the city limits, an old inn sat on a hill just above the highway. Recently restored by an ambitious transplant from Florida, the Kasbah was a fanciful interpretation of a North African souk, complete with turrets with onion-shaped domes, like an old Russian church. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the new owner had decided that Russian was exotic enough to pass for North African, and the Kasbah was born. I’d had drinks there twice with a handsome engineer from General Electric.

Just below the Kasbah, perpendicular to Route 5, the tiny village of Cranesville climbed Cranes Hollow Road into the hills above the Mohawk. Consisting of perhaps two dozen homes, Cranesville was a sleepy hamlet where nothing ever happened. Until now.

Sheriff Frank Olney pulled off to the side of Cranes Hollow Road, turned right, and crawled up a narrow lane that snaked through the trees above Eva’s Kill, a trickle of a stream that ran down from the hills into the river. Three of his men were already there, sitting quietly in the warmth of their darkened cruisers. When Frank arrived, they popped their doors and climbed out. I saw Vinnie Brunello, Stan Pulaski, and Pat Halvey.

I left my car twenty yards farther down the hill, as the width of the road prevented me from finding a spot closer to the sheriff’s. Narrow enough in summer, now the little road barely allowed one car to pass in either direction due to the mounds of snow and ice encroaching onto the pavement.

I grabbed my camera from the backseat, slung it over my shoulder, and climbed out of the car. Having forgotten about the frozen door, I slammed it shut only to see it bounce back open with a metallic thunk. I sighed, thinking some wicked thoughts for Charlie Reese, and pushed the door gently closed. It held.

Frank was dispensing instructions to his deputies when I arrived, ordering them to fan out around the house at the end of the lane. He wanted them to beat the bushes and locate Joey Figlio.

“Ellie and I are going to talk to Ted Russell,” he said. “You boys come find me there once you’ve finished.”

The modest clapboard house was a one-story dwelling, painted red, with a plume of smoke rising from its single chimney pipe. Frank knocked at the door. A hand pulled back the shirred curtain in the sidelight, and I could see Ted Russell’s eyes peering out. He opened the door and invited us in.

“Thank you for coming, Sheriff,” he said, taking our coats. “And what a nice surprise to see you again, Miss Stone.”

“So, a neighbor said she saw someone prowling around outside,” said Frank once we were seated in the parlor around the Franklin stove, opposite an upright piano draped with multicolored Christmas lights. “What about you? You see anything?”

Ted Russell glanced my way, blushed a bit, then cleared his throat and nodded. “I was having my supper and heard something out by the garage. I looked out the kitchen window and saw someone dart into the woods. I can’t be sure, but I think it was Joey Figlio.”

“When was this?” asked Frank.

“About an hour ago. A little past seven.”

Frank looked at his wristwatch. “Do you always eat so late?”

I had to smile to myself. Coming from New York City, I was not accustomed to the early dinnertimes in New Holland. Seven was indeed a late supper for these parts, where most folks ate around five or five thirty.

Frank questioned Ted Russell for thirty minutes more, leaning back in the chair he’d been offered, lazy and patient, but calculated. Without his host’s noticing, he brought the subject around to Darleen.

“Funny, though, that Joey Figlio would think you were interested in Darleen Hicks,” he said from his seat.

Ted Russell cleared his throat again and dismissed the idea. “Just idle gossip, Sheriff,” he said. “A single teacher is vulnerable to such accusations. Kids say terrible things about teachers.”

“So no fire with all that smoke?” asked Frank, then he glared at Russell a good while, making him squirm in his chair.

“What do you think, Ellie?” Frank asked me. “Were there stories like this when you were in school? Or is Mr. Russell here a particularly attractive target.”

Ted Russell looked at me, probably wondering what I was doing there, and if that was good or bad for him.

“My teachers were mostly old maids,” I said with a smile.

“But she was a student of yours, along with this Joey Figlio, wasn’t she?” asked Frank, turning back to our host. “Did you notice anything about their relationship? Were they going steady?”

“I suppose they might have been,” said Russell. “I don’t normally pay attention to ninth graders’ love lives.”

“Not normally,” mocked Frank.

“No, sir.”

“When did you last see Darleen Hicks?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Russell. “It must have been the week she disappeared.”

“Wasn’t she in your music class?”

“Yes.”

“Then surely you saw her the day before she disappeared: Tuesday. Unless you saw her the next day.”

He shook his head adamantly.