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

But that was small consolation this night; it was freezing. I saw groups of kids huddling in the dark, smoking, joking, waiting. One girl caught my eye. Susan Dobbs was holding court with Linda Attanasio and four other girls. She was in charge, that much was clear, as the girls focused their attentions on her.

I thought about stopping to ask a question, but then remembered the bus receipt and told myself it was too cold to tie up loose ends. Then a dark station wagon rolled up to the group, blasted the horn, and Susan waved goodbye to her friends. I could see the man at the wheel, surely her father. About forty, with a hunter’s cap on his head and several days’ stubble on his chin, he lit a cigarette as Susan and Linda climbed in. Never even looked at them. And Susan didn’t look at him. He just threw the car into gear and drove off. Susan waved out the window to her friends as they went.

I slipped into my car and emitted a long shiver that rose from deep inside of me. Then I loosed a scream and lunged for the door. There was someone else in the car.

“It’s okay, Miss Stone,” came a girl’s voice from beside me in the darkness of the passenger seat. “It’s me, Carol Liswenski.”

“Oh, my God,” I panted. “You gave me such a fright! I thought you were someone else. What are you doing in my car?”

“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish smile. “It was just so cold waiting for you, I thought I’d wait in here. Your car door is broken, by the way. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I was aware of that,” I said, my breathing slowly returning to normal. I wasn’t sure my heart would ever recover. The specter of Joey Figlio, juvenile-delinquent car thief, lying in wait for me in my car, ready to take me on another joyride, terrified me more than I would have expected. He was just a kid, after all. Yet he had happily left me to freeze to death on the side of the road, then tried to do it again, all in one day. I thought with dread of the lax security at Fulton Reform School, the ease with which Joey routinely slipped his bonds. When would he come for me again? What was stopping him?

“Are you all right, Miss Stone?” asked Carol. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s just that I lost my ride. Could you drive me home?”

“What happened to your ride?”

“Susan Dobbs and I came to the game with her boyfriend, Pete Keppler. He’s sixteen and has a car.” She said it to impress me. Didn’t work. “Then they had a fight, and she left with Rick Stafford.”

“And Rick didn’t give you a ride home?” I asked, certain that the man driving Susan away was not her new boyfriend. “She ditched you?”

Carol shrugged. “Yeah, well, she was sorry about it, but you know how it is.”

No, I didn’t know how it was. I had forgone a few trysts with some dreamy boys in my younger days to look after a friend: Janey Silverman on one of our boozy nights cruising lounges on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Janey didn’t hold her liquor as well as I did, and there were plenty of men all too eager to take full advantage of an underage girl. We were scarcely older than Carol Liswenski and Susan Dobbs, yet I never abandoned my friend for a guy. And to top it all off, I had to figure out why Carol was lying to me about Susan.

“Fine, I’ll take you home,” I said, starting the car. “But you’re going to have to help me out with something.”

“I will if I can,” she said. “Mind if we listen to the radio?”

By the time we’d reached the Mill Street Bridge, I’d suffered through Dion and the Belmonts, the Hollywood Argyles, and Andy Williams. Carol loved them all. Then, when Brook Benton and Dinah Washington came on, finally giving me something I could enjoy, she turned her nose up at “A Rockin’ Good Way” and changed the station. I switched off the radio.

“You said you would help me,” I said. “I need you to tell me who Darleen spoke to when she got off the bus the day she disappeared.”

Carol was having none of it. “I already told you I didn’t see who it was.”

We’d reached the top of Mill Street, and I turned west on Route 5S. I sensed something fishy about the entire conversation, but this was no time to stop. I wanted to see how much more information—truth or lies—I could get from her.

“Do you know Wilbur Burch?” I asked as we gathered speed along the highway.

Carol jerked her head to look at me. “Why do you ask about Wilbur?”

“Just something I heard about him and Darleen. Weren’t they getting serious about five months ago? Before he shipped out for the army?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, turning away to the window.

“They didn’t stay in contact after he left? By mail, perhaps?”

Carol scoffed then said Darleen didn’t read or write letters. “She didn’t bother with that kind of thing.”

The paper was quiet at ten, except for Composition and Bobby Thompson in the photo lab. As the Republic was an evening paper, the presses in the basement wouldn’t be active until the following morning. I handed a roll of film from the game to Bobby to develop. Nothing too exciting— we weren’t the Schenectady paper after all—and I left a note for Ralphie Fisher, sports editor, to choose any two shots he liked. I sat at my desk and rapped out my story in record time. Try as I might, there wasn’t much I could embellish about the home team’s performance. The Red Raiders had dominated from the opening tip-off to the final whistle. Gerald Washington, Mont Pleasant’s six-foot-four-inch center, scored nineteen points and pulled down seventeen rebounds. He also