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

the right thing? It was the right thing, after all. If a few days of silence from my side could help nab a kidnapper or a murderer, then it was my duty as a citizen to go along with the law. Why, then, did I feel that I was betraying my profession? Torpedoing my own career? I wanted to break this story.

“Ellie?” he asked, rousing me from my thoughts.

“Of course, Frank,” I said. “I’ll keep this quiet for now.”

He nodded in satisfaction. “I need you to give a statement on the bus receipt you found at the Metzger place. And I’m going to need that love note.”

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting across from Deputy Pat Halvey, dictating my account of how I’d found the receipt in Darleen Hicks’s room. After a couple of minutes of watching Pat hunt and peck at the keys, I elbowed him to one side and assumed control of the typewriter, completing my own statement while Pat fetched me a cup of tea. Once I’d finished, the sheriff packed me off with Stan Pulaski, who had orders to retrieve the receipt from Darleen’s room at the Metzger farm, as well as the love note from my place on Lincoln Avenue. Stan waited in my kitchen, hat in hand, as I made several photographs of the crumpled note in the other room. I watched Stan drive off, thinking about the packed bag I’d left upstairs. The trip I had planned would have to wait for now.

It was after eleven by the time I walked into the City Room. Norma Geary looked distraught, her face ashen as she caught my eye. Then Charlie Reese strode in.

“Where have you been, Ellie?” he demanded, his voice tight and impatient. “I called you five times yesterday, and now you show up three hours late for work, and on a Monday morning. You know how Artie Short feels about tardiness after the weekend.

It was true. The publisher had met a statistician from the university in Albany who espoused a theory that employees ditched work, pretending to be sick, on Mondays and Fridays, thereby extending their weekends and defrauding their employers. That set Artie Short on a crusade to prove we were all slackers. He collected his evidence over the next six months then called a general meeting with the staff to present his findings.

“People,” he began, frowning, clutching a few sheets of paper in his right hand. “I stand before you today to report that I have been concerned about absenteeism in this place for quite some time. So concerned, in fact, that I have compiled data from the past several months.” He held the papers up for all to see, crushing them in his tight, sweaty grip. Then he cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and continued. “You will be interested to know that the staff of this publication seems to think it normal to take things easy, play hooky, and shirk its working responsibilities, on Mondays and Fridays in particular.” The crowd of employees glanced about at each other in confusion. This was news to me as well; my attendance had been nearly perfect for two and a half years. “The statistics do not lie,” he continued. “Eighteen percent of all absences occur on Mondays,” he announced, reading from the wad of paper in his hand. “Eighteen percent!” he said, shaking the document at us. “And fully sixteen percent of absences are recorded on Fridays.” He paused to glare at his audience.

I raised my hand. Artie Short took notice and gave a start. He actually looked stunned that anyone, let alone I, would interrupt him in the middle of an all-hands chewing-out. His mouth hung open, and his eyes betrayed both anger and surprise. He stared at me for a long moment, saying nothing. Bobby Thompson, standing at my side, inched away from me.

“What is it?” hissed Short at length.

“Excuse me, sir. You said that sixteen percent of absences occur on Friday?” I asked. The publisher gaped at me but said nothing. “And eighteen percent on Monday?”

“That’s what I just said, yes. What is your point, Miss Stone?”

“Just that Friday and Monday account for forty percent of the workweek, yet only thirty-four percent of the absences. It seems to me that Tuesday through Thursday are the real problem.”

Artie Short recoiled, twitched, then huffed, looked around, searching perhaps for someone to contradict my math. When no one volunteered, he throttled the papers one last time, shaking them at the employees.

“Precisely my point, Miss Stone,” he said with an unconvincing nod. “The shirking is a problem all week long. Correct it immediately, people. I will be monitoring your absences.”

“I was home,” I said, returning to Charlie Reese’s question. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

He gave me a knowing look, but didn’t dare suggest I had been drinking.

“What’s the big crisis anyway?” I asked.

“George Walsh has been nosing around your story,” said Charlie. “He’s got a big scoop, and Artie Short has pulled you off, in part because we couldn’t locate you yesterday for your input on what George found.”

“Off the story? He can’t do that.”

“He already has,” said Charlie, waving a hand at me in frustration and turning to face the window.

“What does George have that I don’t?”

“Read it and weep,” said Charlie, tossing some pages onto my desk. “This will be in this afternoon’s edition.”

I snatched the story off the table and read. It only took seconds to realize what kind of scoop George had landed. Mine. His article told the tale of Darleen Hicks’s bus ticket. “Missing Girl a Runaway” he led. A receipt for a one-way fare to Tucson, Arizona, had been found in her bedroom. She was thought to be in the company of an enlisted man at the nearby Fort Huachuca army base, and the Republic was spearheading the effort to locate the wayward girl there and bring her home “to the bosom of her modest, salt-of-the-earth, loving mama and papa.”

“Charlie, this is my