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

. . . The temperature . . . Sorry, but isn’t this the wrong time of year to be pouring cement?”

Irene Metzger shrugged. “Dick knows what he’s doing. I never question him on men’s work.”

“I was wondering if I could have a look at Darleen’s room. Would you mind?”

She pushed the butt of her cigarette into the astray and said sure. “I don’t know what you think you’ll find, but be my guest.”

She led me out of the kitchen, down a narrow hallway, to a set of stairs behind the kitchen.

“This way,” she said.

The steps groaned with each footfall, and I imagined flakes of dust, dried paint, and varnish falling like snow into the cellar beneath the staircase. I held the railing tightly as we climbed for fear that the whole thing might collapse under our weight.

At the landing above, a larger hallway opened up, and I could see four doorways, two on each side.

“That’s Darleen’s room,” said Irene Metzger, motioning to the first door on my right. “Dick—my husband—and I use that room there,” she said, indicating the door opposite and farther down the hallway. “That’s the bathroom over there,” she said, pointing to the door next to Darleen’s.

If Carol Liswenski was to be believed, that was where Darleen took her nightly baths under the watchful eye of her scary stepfather.

“What’s that room there?” I asked, motioning to the fourth door, the one directly opposite Darleen’s.

“We don’t use that room,” said Irene Metzger. “There’s nothing in there. We used to store Dick’s mother’s things in there, but we gave it all away to his elderly aunt a few years ago.”

“May I have a look?”

“See for yourself,” she said, opening the door to reveal an empty room. “Told you there was nothing there.”

We moved on to Darleen’s room. The small wooden doorknob, probably once a beauty, had been painted over white so many times that it now looked lopsided and large. Irene Metzger reached out and turned it briskly, pushed open the door, and we entered the bright room. The curtainless windows faced south, and lots of light was pouring in, even if the sun was weak. Above the flaking wainscoting, the walls were papered with a cream-and-gold-colored pattern of stripes and fleurs-de-lis. The floor was bare slats, the finish long since worn away, leaving a dull, soft surface. An old dresser stood between the two windows, and there was a writing desk, blistered and warped, with papers and books on top. Darleen’s narrow bed anchored the opposite wall, a threadbare, white matelassé cover stretched over the mattress, while a line of four naked Kewpie dolls sat listing in different directions on the single pillow.

I gazed out a window across the barren landscape. A virtual whiteout, the view was interrupted only by a dark line of fencing, a dilapidated barn, and a small, dark blot about a hundred yards from the house behind a copse of bare trees. A solitary figure moved stiffly around the dark spot, performing tasks that I could not identify from such a distance.

“May I look at Darleen’s things?” I asked, still staring out the window.

“I’ll leave you to it, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

I waited for her footsteps to recede down the stairs before beginning my search. I started with Darleen’s chest of drawers, pawing through her clothes: underwear and dresses, shoes and blouses. If she’d run away, she left with little to wear. I lifted the radiator cover near the window, but only found a radiator underneath. On the shelf over the desk, there were perhaps twenty books. I turned them over and fanned the pages, hoping something besides a bookmark would fall out. There was nothing. I stopped to look out the window at the frozen, tar-gray shingles of the porch roof. The window provided an ideal escape route for a rebellious teenage girl, I figured, but there was nowhere to hide anything out there.

Darleen’s desk presented a jumble of odds and ends. Marbled composition books, loose sheets of homework, schoolbooks, a pack of letters, jacks, and Black Jack gum wrappers woven into long chains. Putting those to one side for the time being, I ducked my head below the desk and examined the underside, looking for hidden notes or mementoes. Aside from several globs of hardened, black chewing gum, still no luck.

I picked up the packet of letters from the desk, untied the ribbon binding them together, and shuffled through them. Some were insipid notes from her friends, Susan, Carol, and Linda, chronicling their daily activities, crushes, gossip, and homework assignments. Other letters had been written by someone named Edward, short, but spelled correctly with proper punctuation and unexpected vocabulary.

“I saw you and Linda walking to social studies after study hall,” read one from two years earlier. “How was Mr. Bellows today? He looks like an endomorphic walrus with those whiskers, don’t you think? See you.”

There were two unsigned letters that seemed out of place. Written by an adult hand, they, too, were short, but lacked Edward’s attention to the inessential.

“Meet me tomorrow in the usual place after the drama club meeting before you catch your bus. Make it look accidental.”

The other one said simply, “Saturday at the agreed place and time.” Neither was dated.

Inside one of the small desktop drawers was another pack of letters. Scrawled by a juvenile hand and seemingly spelled by a caveman, these were written by Joey Figlio. The ardor surprised me, though I might have expected it after my conversations with him the day before. As I read the raw missives, I reminded myself that fifteen-year-olds could be just as passionate, if not more so, than adults. Their emotions rage without the perspective and rationale that come with experience. That doesn’t make them any less potent. Joey’s love wheeled and careered out of control, spinning like a palsied top, erratically, without boundaries or proportion. He was pure id, like a cat, and with the claws.