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

“That was Artie Short,” he said. Now I was worried.

“Am I through?” I asked.

“The sheriff just phoned looking for you while we were downstairs,” he explained. “No one could find you. He said it was important, so the switchboard tried to find me. Then they put him through to Artie.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“They just found a lunch box near Darleen Hicks’s house. Artie wants you to get out to the Metzger farm right now. You’re off the bench.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

George Walsh was on a Trailways bus, probably just past Syracuse, incommunicado, with “Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kaempfert playing over the bus’ speakers for seventy-two hours straight. (Perhaps not, but a girl can dream, can’t she?) And he had orders not to waste time or money phoning home, so he would be in Arizona before he realized he was on a wild-goose chase. Artie Short was already painfully aware of that fact.

I pulled to a stop a few yards behind the last of the county cruisers. Up ahead, a diesel generator was roaring, supplying power to the four sets of floodlights the sheriff had aimed at the snow hills at the end of County Highway 58. This was the place where Gus Arnold had turned the school bus around the day I’d hitched a ride to speak with Darleen’s friends.

Pauline Blaine, the widow who lived near the Metzger farm, had phoned the authorities when her two boys arrived home from school around four p.m. with a lunch box they’d found in the melting snow while playing in the hills.

“Hiya, Frank,” I said, once I’d located the sheriff at the center of the command post.

“There you are,” he said. “For a while I thought Artie Short wasn’t going to send you. What did you do to get him so riled up?”

“I wore a skirt,” I said. “What’s the story here?”

“A couple of kids found a lunch box in the hills where Brunello’s standing over there,” he said, pointing to his deputy about thirty yards away. “Buried pretty deep. The boys were digging and uncovered it.”

“Are you sure it’s Darleen’s?” I asked.

Frank nodded. “Pretty sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“There was a note inside, addressed ‘Dear Darleen.’”

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“‘I’ll meet you near the buses before you go home.’” said Frank in a monotone as he read from a scrap of paper.

“Any idea who wrote it?”

The sheriff folded the paper, secured it in his breast pocket, and motioned for me to come closer. He whispered in my ear, “Ted.”

I flushed. The sting was sharp, but I couldn’t let on to Frank. “Can I get a picture of it?” I asked, wanting desperately to compare the handwriting to the love note Frankie had brought to me.

The sheriff shook his head. “This is evidence, Ellie. I can’t risk our case by showing it to you. And, by the way, I don’t want any news of the note in the press for now. Same as with the bus ticket.”

“But, Frank, what am I going to write?” I asked. “You’re not leaving me much.”

“No mention of the note, okay? You can say we found a lunch box that may or may not belong to Darleen Hicks. There’s no name on it, so it could be anyone’s.”

“Except for the note.”

“Right. Which remains a secret for now.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering when I had stopped working for the New Holland Republic and signed on with the sheriff. I distracted myself from my self-recrimination by plotting how I might make Ted Russell pay for his crimes. In a moment of painful honesty, I wondered if I wanted to punish him for having debauched Darleen or for having taken me in. I shook the thought from my head. I still had a job to do.

“Can you tell me what’s going on here now?” I asked Frank.

“We’re searching as best we can all through this area,” he said, indicating the snow hills with a wave of his hand. “So far we haven’t turned up anything.”

“So what’s next?”

Frank pulled his cap off and scratched his head. I could see the perspiration on his scalp. The weather wasn’t exactly tropical, but it was still in the low fifties, even with the sun down.

“I’ve decided to have the county haul this snow out of here starting tomorrow if we don’t find anything tonight.” He paused, looking out over the tons of snow. “That girl is in there somewhere, and we’re going to find her.”

I took some pictures of the lunch box. It was one of those plain, dark-gray, workman’s lunch boxes, scuffed, with some dents, and a metal buckle to snap it closed. Inside was some crumpled waxed paper, a chilling reminder that the missing girl had used the lunch box just three weeks earlier—that she had eaten from it, and evidence of her last meal remained. I wondered what she had drunk to wash down her lunch. Perhaps a couple of swigs of whiskey on the bus to Canajoharie. But, of course, the whiskey had never left her locker. And there was no thermos found with the lunch box.

I thought about how little separated us in time and space. On December 21, Darleen had been in the very spot I was standing in now. The time of day had been the same as well, give or take an hour. And there was more that we shared, Darleen and I. A penchant for poor judgment and ill-advised adventures with older, slippery men. The same man in this case, I feared. Two similar girls with two very distinct outcomes.

I drove away from the snow hills beyond the Metzger farm, leaving the sheriff and his men to their task. If they didn’t recover the body by morning, the trucks would come to cart off the tons of snow. The sheriff intended to scrape the ground clean if necessary until he’d found the remains of a young girl.

The road back to the Metzger farm was crowded with official vehicles and a few gawkers for about