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

tell me you’re interviewing suspects here,” and he chuckled. Teddy gave a visible start. “Anyway, how about we catch a bite to eat somewhere after the game?”

I really wanted to cast my eyes downward and beg off demurely or somehow discourage his advances. But I didn’t. I didn’t even answer him. I was too busy studying the horrified look on Teddy Jurczyk’s face. The color had drained from his red cheeks, his mouth hung ajar, and his troubled eyes betrayed a roiling agitation within.

“Ellie? Uh, Miss Stone?” said Ted, perhaps realizing for the first time that I didn’t want to broadcast our acquaintance publicly, at least not in front of a subject I had to interview later on.

“Ted, I’m sorry but I’m covering the basketball game here,” I said a little too sharply. “Please.”

He looked wounded, but got the hint. He apologized for the interruption and wished Teddy good luck for the game.

Teddy picked up a towel and wiped his brow, still not quite in control of his emotions.

“Teddy,” I said to him. He looked at me. This kid needed a pat on the back. “Teddy, you can do it,” I said. “Go out there and win this game for us.”

“I hate that name,” he said, almost in a whisper, then turned and dragged himself out to center court.

CHAPTER TEN

I watched the carnage from my seat behind the New Holland bench. Teddy Jurczyk put on the worst performance of his brief career. Two points, one of nine shots made, two double dribbles, a walk, and all three free throws missed. The visitors took full advantage of Teddy’s troubles and raced to a 34–16 halftime lead. The hometown crowd went from boisterous anticipation of a victory at tip-off—a win would lift the Bucks into a tie with Albany for first place in the Class A league—to dismal and surly silence by halftime. And some of the discontent was directed at me.

“That girl was talking to Teddy just before the game,” said a man a couple of rows behind me. “She said something to upset him. Probably from Schenectady.”

“Why doesn’t she sit on their side?” asked a woman near him.

I tried to shrink into my seat, but the people near me inched away. I made a big show of standing and reloading my camera, displaying my press badge prominently, and yelling encouragement for the home team when the players appeared on the court for the second half. Teddy didn’t fare much better after the intermission, though, finishing with just seven points in a crushing defeat, 59–37. Though it was my assignment, I had little interest in torturing the poor kid by rehashing his dreadful performance with an interview about basketball. But judging by his reaction to Ted Russell’s comment, I wondered how well he might know Darleen Hicks. Even if I thought the case was settled, I like my stories to be complete, and I felt the need to have one more answer from Teddy Jurczyk.

Teddy evaded me temporarily when the final whistle blew, disappearing into the locker room before I could grab him, but I’m not so easily discouraged. I parked myself outside the locker room, endured the snide remarks of a couple of high-school boys, who joked about me waiting for my boyfriend to finish showering. They laughed, thinking they were clever, congratulating each other for their wit.

“Yes, I’m waiting for my boyfriend,” I said. “Where are your dates?”

Their mirth soured, and they slunk away.

Just then the locker room door swung open and Coach Mahoney stepped out. He walked right past me without noticing my presence. It was too much to expect that he might recognize me as the reporter who’d interviewed him four times in recent weeks about the team’s progress. I was just a skirt in the corridor. Then Teddy emerged, shuffling, eyes cast down to the floor, a small canvas gym bag in his hand. He didn’t see me until I called to him. He stopped, looked back at me, and nearly ran. But what was he running from?

“May I speak to you, Teddy?” I asked. “Nothing about the game. We all have off nights.”

He didn’t know what to say. He was just a fifteen-year-old boy, after all. Little artifice, no sophistication, and a reluctance to talk to strange girls.

“I don’t know what happened to Darleen,” he volunteered.

“Tell me about her,” I said.

“What’s to tell?” he asked, setting his gym bag on the floor. “She’s a swell girl. In my homeroom since seventh grade.”

“Did you see her the day she disappeared? Maybe in the parking lot near the buses?”

He shook his head. “No, she was on a field trip that day.”

“She came back to the school to catch her bus,” I corrected. “And if you and Darleen were in the same homeroom, you must have gone to Canajoharie, too.”

He stood silent. His crew cut, still wet from his shower, glistened in the fluorescent light of the corridor. He wanted to go, run, put as much distance between him and me as possible. But he was too polite for that.

“Did you go to the Beech-Nut factory that day?” I asked.

Teddy didn’t answer right away. He just stared at me, chewing his lower lip. Finally, he nodded.

“Yes, I went to Canajoharie that day,” he said softly. “But I didn’t even talk to Darleen on the bus or at the factory. And I didn’t see her after that, either.”

I must have looked skeptical, because he repeated his story. Then he said he had to go.

“I can’t talk here. Some of the fellows are still in the locker room. They’ll be out any minute.”

“Can you meet me at Fiorello’s later tonight?” I asked. “Around eleven. We can talk privately there.”

Teddy didn’t like the idea, but he nodded okay.

I walked briskly toward my car, parked on the southeast side of the lot outside the high school. The weather report called for warming temperatures the next day, an end to the brutal cold spell we’d been under the past three weeks.