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

a hundred yards. Once I’d negotiated the tight passage, I gained speed as I headed toward the highway. But then I reached the dented mailbox with the black lettering, and I slowed to a stop. “METZGER.” I turned into the narrow road and drove to the gray clapboard house, this time determined to have a word with Dick Metzger.

It was almost six thirty when I rapped on the door. The man of the house answered, freezing me in place with his gaze. I stood transfixed, staring up at those pallid blue eyes. He waited there in his coveralls, chewing something that must have been the last of his supper, regarding me with a stony countenance. I thought he would make a fine poker player. From the kitchen, the rich aroma of meat, onions, and frying butter drifted past me and out into the night air.

“Well?” he said, low and hard. “What do you want?”

“I’ve come with some news,” I said.

Irene Metzger appeared from behind her husband and ushered me into the sitting room. I apologized for having interrupted their meal, but she waved me off.

“We already ate,” she said, motioning to the lumpy sofa. She took a seat in an armchair opposite me. Her husband just stood there in his boots, smelling of horses and dirt.

“I was wrong about Darleen,” I said. I couldn’t tell her about the bus ticket without the sheriff’s okay, but that’s what I was thinking. “I don’t believe she ran away after all.”

Irene Metzger stiffened, seemed to quell a frisson. “I told you she didn’t run off. I know my daughter.” Then she sniffed, almost as if she were satisfied.

“Your neighbor Mrs. Blaine telephoned the sheriff earlier this afternoon,” I continued, putting her inexplicable gloating to one side. “Her two boys were playing in the snow hills at the end of your road. They uncovered a lunch box a couple of hours ago.”

I paused, staring into her unblinking eyes. They sank into their sockets as the sum and substance of my words hit home. I saw the blood drain from her cheeks, and she uttered a soft and hollow “Oh.” Her husband flexed his jaw and clenched his right hand hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He noticed me watching him and stoked his smoldering glare.

“You said that Darleen had taken her lunch box the day she disappeared,” I said. “Can you describe it?”

She nodded. “It was dark-gray. A little beat up. And she had a red-and-black plaid thermos.”

“There was no thermos inside, but that’s the lunch box they found. Buried in the snow. Deliberately, it seems.” I swallowed hard. “As if to hide it.”

“So what does that mean?” asked Dick Metzger.

“Well, I know that Walt Rasmussen saw Darleen on the highway sometime around four that day.”

“On Five-S?” he asked. I nodded yes. “What was she doing there? Why wasn’t she on her bus?”

I glanced at Irene Metzger, who looked lost in thought. “She was climbing out of a taxi,” I said. “We know she’d missed her bus, so it appears she tried to reach home by taxi instead.”

“Damn it!” said Metzger through his teeth, tuning me out. “I told that girl if she missed the bus again I’d beat some sense into her with my belt buckle.”

He ran a hand through his oiled hair and paced back and forth. The violence of his reaction pushed me back in my seat.

“The taxi dropped Darleen about two and a half miles from here,” I continued. “Assuming she walked briskly, it would have taken her about a half hour to get home. But, of course, she never arrived.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Irene Metzger. Her husband was still steaming not far off.

“The snow hills are about a mile past here, aren’t they?” I asked.

She looked at her husband, and he nodded. “I suppose so.”

I thought on it for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible Darleen was never near the snow hills, that someone dumped the lunch box later on. But if the presence of Darleen’s lunch box in the snow means that she was in the hills, then someone must have picked her up in a car and driven her there. She couldn’t have reached the hills that day without having been seen.”

“How do you figure?” asked Metzger.

“The school bus,” I said. “It must have passed down this road around four fifteen. The driver and Darleen’s friends would have seen her.”

“Unless the girls were already off the bus when the driver reached her,” said Dick Metzger. “How do we know he isn’t a pervert who likes little girls? What do you know about him?”

I shrugged. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) “I suppose anything’s possible,” I said. “All I know is that he’s a retired garbageman. He lives by himself and drinks rye.”

Dick Metzger demanded the driver’s name. I could just picture him searching out Gus Arnold, finding him drunk, and beating him to death with a shovel. There was no way I was going to give him the name, even if I harbored my share of doubts about him, as well.

“I don’t know his name,” I said, and Dick Metzger seemed to accept it.

Irene Metzger asked me what would happen now.

“The sheriff and his men are searching the snow hills, but there are hundreds of tons of snow. If they don’t find her tonight, they plan to dig up all the snow and haul it away.”

Irene Metzger cast her eyes down to the floor. She sat there, quiet, miserable, but dry-eyed. In fact, I thought, I’d never seen her shed a tear from the moment I met her. I wasn’t judging her; I didn’t cry when my mother passed away, and I loved her dearly. That hadn’t been the moment for me to vent my grief. Not so soon after Elijah. But Irene Metzger was tearless for a very different reason: She was holding it inside. All the devastation, all her sorrow, was dammed up within her, pushing to get out, for sure,