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

His professions of love exploded off the page, without shame or self-consciousness. Despite the bad spelling and lack of any sense of irony, Joey Figlio emerged a hot-blooded lover. I found it cute and dangerous at the same time.

I will lick the sweat off your skin and you will lick mine until we are united as one in spirit and sole. Two hearts beeting together as none have ever beet before. Yours and mine in sickniss and hell. I will hang myself for you, Darleen, even if you betray me and stole my rope. You are mine and be long to me.

And there were poems—truly bad ones—but not obscene as Mrs. Nolan had described them. And Joey had plans for the future. In September, he wrote of dropping out of school to get a job as soon as he was sixteen in May of 1961. Then he and Darleen could get married and move into an apartment in Jacksonville, Florida, with three older guys Joey knew. Wow, I thought. Every day a honeymoon.

In October, after Darleen joined the drama club, Joey was talking about running off with her to California. He had an uncle who worked as a custodian in Bakersfield and, Joey was sure, Darleen could be a famous movie star. To him, Bakersfield and Hollywood seemed interchangeable. In November, he was begging her to run off anywhere: Florida, California, Nevada. I had nothing in Darleen’s hand to indicate her state of mind vis-à-vis Joey Figlio. If she’d written any responses to his love letters, they would have been with him. But I did uncover a locked diary that looked to be a couple of years old. Irene Metzger was downstairs, so I forced the lock. The leather strap gave way without too much trouble, and I opened the diary to read. But there was nothing to see. Darleen had made the last entry three years earlier: musings on things like the Girl Scouts and what she wanted for Christmas and her birthday. Nothing about boys or running away. I spent a stray moment wondering why she had stopped maintaining a diary, but figured she’d lost interest and moved on to other things.

In the center drawer I found some travel brochures for California and Nevada. The Hoover Dam and Hollywood studio tours. Darleen had circled Paramount Studios and Disneyland on the cartoonish map. On the Nevada brochure, she’d marked the Sands, Tropicana, and Frontier casinos in Las Vegas. I wasn’t sure how a fifteen-year-old Darleen thought she could gain entrance to a casino, but clearly her tastes ran in that direction. I shrugged, admitting to myself that I, too, would have wanted to see the same places at her age.

I came across three worn folded-paper fortune-teller games, the kind young girls make with their friends to amuse themselves. Under the flaps were such oracles as, “You will kiss a boy” and “You will break his heart.” There was also, “You will lose your socks in gym class.” These fortune tellers, probably two or three years old, provided no clues to Darleen’s recent state of mind.

Then I found a brown envelope with a paper inside. I retrieved it and unfolded it, not knowing what to expect. It was a receipt for $43.20. A Trailways bus receipt for a ticket, one way to Tucson, Arizona. Ten more minutes of searching the room produced no bus ticket. I plopped down on Darleen’s bed and held the receipt before my eyes. I stared long and hard at the paper, running through all the scenarios its presence suggested. In reality there was only one. With no accompanying ticket, what else could I deduce but that Darleen had used it? What further proof did I need? She’d run off, just as the sheriff had said, just as I had suspected. But as sometimes happens when the truth presents itself, we can’t quite believe it. Still, I smiled, uneasily, knowing that this pointed to the best possible ending under the circumstances. Despite Irene Metzger’s assurances to the contrary, it appeared her daughter had skipped town, most probably with an older boy.

I made my way down the narrow stairs and rejoined Irene Metzger in the kitchen.

“Find what you were looking for?” she asked, glancing up from her mending.

“Maybe,” I said, taking a seat across the kitchen table from her. “Does Darleen know anyone in Arizona?”

Irene Metzger’s eyes narrowed and she glowered at me. “You’re back on the idea that she’s run off, aren’t you? I already told you there’s no way she did that.”

I produced the bus receipt and laid it gently on the table between us. She eyed it for a long moment, before glancing up at me. I could read the turmoil in her eyes. Was this good news? Or false hope? She was probably asking herself how well she knew her own daughter.

She took the slip of paper and pored over it, her eyes ranging back and forth over the print, twitching as she examined both sides. “Where did she get that kind of money?” she mumbled finally.

“Did she have an allowance?” I asked. “A part-time job of some kind?”

Irene Metzger shook her head in a daze. “We gave her forty cents a week for her chores. And even that was difficult. These are tough times on the farm.”

“That’s not a small amount,” I said. “Especially if times are hard.”

“That’s her doting father. He’s hard, but with a soft spot for his little girl. He insisted on raising her allowance from twenty to forty cents a week about three months ago.”

A regular Daddy Warbucks, I thought. Forty cents a week seemed extravagant for a farmer on the wrong side of luck. But even at that rate, it would have taken Darleen about two years to save up forty-three dollars. I, too, wondered how she had managed to accumulate such a sum.

Irene Metzger sat immobile, receipt in hand, staring dumbly across the room, struggling to make sense of it.

“Mrs. Metzger?” I asked.

She shook back to