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

get my bus-ticket story down and into Composition before another hour had passed, but Norma squeezed my arm and said it was important. I dropped my purse on my desk and picked up an old memo to use as a prop for my visit to the steno pool.

“Why, you’re right, Miss Stone,” she said, holding my memo out at arm’s length, hamming it up for anyone in earshot. “That is quite a bad typo. I’ll redo it.” Then in a whisper, she told me it wasn’t safe to talk near her desk. “Let’s go downstairs to the alley for a smoke.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said once we were outside. It was still warm enough to leave my coat unbuttoned.

“I don’t. But I know that Mr. Reese comes down here when he wants to sneak a cigarette. He’s not fooling anyone, by the way.”

“So what’s the big secret?” I asked, lighting a cigarette for myself.

“I suppose you already know that Mr. Walsh is on a bus heading back to New Holland,” she said. “But what you and he don’t know is that he got a telegram from the army base in Arizona today. From the office of the base commander. I was the only one here at lunchtime when the boy from Western Union delivered it, so I signed for the wire. You may recall it was raining quite hard at that hour. Well, the boy said a car barreled past him and knocked him over with a tidal wave of slush. He fell into a great big pothole filled with water and mud.”

“How awful!” I said. “And the driver didn’t stop?”

“No. Imagine that,” said Norma, shaking her head in woe. “Anyhow, that’s not the point of my story. When the boy handed me the telegram, it was soaking wet from the dunking he’d just had. The paper was nearly mush, and I could read everything without even opening it.”

“What did it say?”

Norma peeked around the corner of the building to make sure no one was listening. Once she was confident we were alone, she turned back to me. “It said Wilbur Burch has gone AWOL.”

Back at my desk, I rolled some paper and carbon into the typewriter and set about writing the story I’d been thinking about since Frank Olney and I had discovered the unused bus ticket in Darleen’s locker. There are times when I struggle to string three words together, when distraction short-circuits the connection between what I want to say and the tips of my fingers on the keys. In those moments, I labor to type correctly, mashing keys clumsily and jamming the type bars into a frozen pileup. I disengage the bars, rub out the misspelled words with an eraser, smudging the ink then tearing the paper. But it’s all an unconscious manifestation of the reluctance to concentrate on ordering the thoughts in my head.

Then other times, I type like a Horowitz of the steno pool, a virtuosa graduate of secretarial school, fingers and mind in perfect accord, words materializing as if by magic on the page.

I’ve never considered myself a wordsmith, but I had managed to sand most of the rough edges off my writing during my three years at the Republic. Charlie Reese was a good mentor, and I’d had plenty of opportunities to make dull-as-ditchwater stories sound interesting. From school-board meetings to Kiwanis Club Man-of-the-Year banquets to demolition derbies up in Fonda (actually, those are kind of fun), I’d had my share of stinkers to clean up and make presentable for the twelfth page of the second section of the paper. I’d learned to write those with my eyes closed. But when something that mattered to me came along, I pressed to make the piece perfect. It was often a slog. This day was different. With George Walsh’s imminent return, I felt the motivation more keenly than usual. I wrote fast and, in less than an hour, I had my story, which I thought, despite my haste, had turned out well—organized, logical, and succinct—and I was confident I’d written one of my best pieces.

I led with a dramatic headline: “Missing Girl No Runaway: Cash and Ticket Found Unused.” The public knew already, of course, that a lunch box had been found, but that didn’t prove conclusively that she hadn’t run off. There was no proof it was hers. And even if it was, perhaps she’d tossed it from a car window as she and an accomplice roared out of town for parts unknown. But the unused ticket—and even more telling—the wad of cash found in her locker, put to bed any reasonable doubts that Darleen Hicks had left town of her own volition.

My story traced the history of the evidence trail. I connected the dots on the timeline, from the December 21 disappearance to the discovery of the receipt in the Metzger home, which had led authorities to hope for the best. But the bus ticket and cash in her locker made it likely that the girl had met with foul play. And then, shortly after, the dramatic reappearance of the lunch box buried in the snow convinced the sheriff of the worst. I found myself painting a positively heroic portrait of Frank Olney, perhaps out of affection for him, but more likely out of guilt. My description, while somewhat embellished, was not far from the truth; the sheriff was carrying out a careful and thorough investigation, even if it hadn’t gotten off to the fastest start.

As I tore the final page from the typewriter, I knew it was good, that Charlie, and even Artie Short, would recognize my fine work. I pictured my byline and headline anchoring the front page in the upper right-hand corner. I had a photograph in mind as well: a low-angle shot of Sheriff Frank Olney, looking rugged and in charge under the floodlights at the snow hills. I’d taken it the evening the lunch box was found. But the best thing about the