A Stone's Throw by James Ziskin (best sci fi novels of all time .TXT) 📕

he turned on the charm as if opening a fire hydrant and asked Joyce what she would have. She said she didn’t want anything. Normally Fadge would have thrown her out. He had no tolerance for stragglers who bought nothing. But as strict as he was about his buy-something-or-get-out policy, he was also a man and a fool when it came to pretty girls. He flashed his sweetest smile and withdrew.

“I’m worried about Miche,” said Joyce.

“I thought she was in Montreal.”

“That’s what Brenda says, but I’m not so sure. She had a boyfriend a while back who was very controlling. She broke it off with him, but he kept coming around. So we came up with a standard lie that she was visiting her mother in Canada.”

“When did you see her last?” I asked. “The truth this time.”

“Last Friday afternoon.”

“Had she packed a bag for a trip?”

“No. She was getting all dolled up for her date.”

“Her date with Johnny Dornan,” I said to clarify.

She averted her eyes, glancing at her hands. “Yes.”

“Did she know Johnny already, or was he just another appointment set up by Jimmy Burgh?”

“Yeah, she knew Johnny. But only through Jimmy. She thought he was fun. She met him last year when he was racing at Saratoga. And this year she saw him once before last Friday.”

“What about you? Did you ever meet him?”

“Once. He was okay. A little full of himself and too short for my tastes. But he had cash and was willing to spend it on Miche.”

“Did he ever tell you where he was from? Or how he got into racing?”

“No, but Miche once said he was a fellow Canadian.”

That was news to me. I made a mental note to check into the Manitoba angle again, this time asking for Johnny Dornan’s name.

“Did she say where they were going Friday night?” I asked.

“Just that it was another date with him. I knew what that meant.” She paused, possibly going over some tragic scenario in her head. “Do you think it was Miche in that barn?” she asked at length.

“The sheriff’s still not sure. And I think it’s someone else altogether. Where might Micheline have gone?”

“That’s just it, Ellie,” she said, her eyes pleading with me for help. “I don’t know. I’ve asked at the Safeway, her old boyfriend, even Jimmy. No one knows where she is.”

“How well do you know Jimmy Burgh?” I asked as Fadge materialized again, this time bearing a small hot-fudge sundae.

“For the pretty young lady,” he said to Joyce. “On the house.”

I gave him my most disapproving shake of the head. Where was my ice-cream sundae? “Pathetic,” I mouthed to him. He harrumphed and delivered the treat to Joyce, who smiled appreciatively at the big lug.

“Forget about Jimmy for a moment,” I said, once her knight in spattered apron had pushed off. “Tell me about Robinson.”

Her face twisted like a screw. “Who’s Robinson?”

“You don’t know anyone by that name? Maybe an acquaintance of Micheline’s?”

Joyce insisted she didn’t. “Sounds like a Colored name. I don’t know any Negroes.”

I almost asked her if that was by choice or happenstance, but I didn’t have the time or patience to explore Joyce Stevens’s prejudice. Instead I asked if Micheline had a car.

She shook her head. “Brenda has an old DeSoto if we absolutely need a car. I borrowed it to come here tonight. But Miche and I take the bus mostly. Or cabs, if someone else is paying.”

“Someone like Jimmy Burgh?”

She averted her eyes again. “Yeah.”

“So here’s my question to you. If Micheline isn’t the woman in the barn—and I’m almost certain that she isn’t—how is she getting around without Brenda’s DeSoto?”

I called my editor from the phone at the back of the store and filled him in on my Johnny Dornan story. He approved it and said he’d arrange things with Composition at the paper.

“I want this on the front page,” he said. “Upper-right-hand corner.”

“What about the cosmonauts?”

“We’ll find room for the Red space monkeys somewhere else.”

I agreed to meet Fadge at Scafitti’s restaurant on East Main Street after he closed the store. In the meantime, I rushed to the office and handed in my stories and photos to old Mr. Rayburn, the Linotype operator.

“Is Mr. Reese okay with these?” he asked, peering through his horn-rimmed glasses.

He still wasn’t used to the girl reporter. Probably thought I was the worst thing since lady drivers. Or women voters.

“I spoke to Mr. Reese twenty minutes ago, and he approved them both. In fact, Composition is redoing the first page for the fire story.”

“I haven’t heard anything about that.”

Just then the aptly named Norm Belcher from Composition rolled into the room like a freight car. “Hiya, Ellie baby,” he said, his voice rattling with characteristic mucus somewhere deep beneath one of his several chins. He’d recently taken to making suggestive comments about my posterior whenever his boss wasn’t around.

“Where have you been hiding that sweet little derrière of yours? I haven’t seen anything that round since the last full moon.”

He cackled and slapped Mr. Rayburn on the back, presumably to invite him to share in the laugh, but instead knocking the glasses clean off the old man’s head and into the guts of the Linotype machine. It took Belcher three minutes on his hands and knees to extricate the spectacles. I took advantage of his disadvantage to snap a couple of photos of his sofa-sized rear end on full display. I intended to make several prints and post them around the office in the morning.

“Charlie wants us to redo the front page,” Belcher said sheepishly to Rayburn as he handed him back his spectacles. Then he scurried off without another word to me.

Old Mr. Rayburn rubbed his eyeglasses with a handkerchief and shook his head. “That man is an ass.”

Over drinks and a pizza at Scafitti’s, Fadge asked me about my attractive friend.

“Where’ve you been hiding her?”

“Park your tongue, you pig,” I said. “She’s a roommate of the girl who