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

the unused bus ticket, this news hit me harder than I’d expected. This was the confirmation, the finality, the end. The girl who’d helped me when I was sick in the bathroom, the one whose risks mirrored mine at her age, that one: she was dead, dashed and buffeted against the cold steel of a mechanical lock by a raging river. “That poor girl,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks with my gloves.

“Take it easy, Ellie,” said Stan, handing me a handkerchief. “Come on over here and have a seat in the car.”

“No, I’m all right,” I said, pushing past him. “I want to talk to Frank.”

Stan tried to stop me, but Fred Peruso saw me and signaled it was okay. I reached him, and we stepped away from the others to speak privately.

“You always seem to appear when a body turns up,” said Fred, puffing on his pipe.

“I’ve been following this one,” I said. “I was at the paper when someone called with the tip. What can you tell me?”

“Looks like it’s the Hicks girl. Adolescent female, between thirteen and sixteen, I’d say.”

“Braces on her teeth?” I asked.

Fred nodded solemnly.

“Can I have a look at the body?”

“You don’t want to see it. Trust me. This isn’t like Jordan Shaw,” he said. “She was badly beaten up by the water. It’s not a pretty sight.”

I looked over Fred’s shoulder to the hearse, its back door still open, but the contents dark and invisible from my position.

“The body is remarkably well preserved,” he continued. “That tells me she’s been in the river since shortly after she died. Very little decomposition. Temperatures under forty degrees prevent most decay for extended periods. Imagine meat in your refrigerator. This is about the same thing.”

“But the weather’s been so warm,” I said, still trying to see inside the hearse.

“The river was frozen over until a couple of days ago. She was surely trapped in the cold water near the bottom for three or four weeks. Then when the ice began to melt and move, the fast currents must have dislodged her and carried her here.”

“Unless she was here all along,” came a voice behind us. Frank Olney. “Ellie,” he nodded to me.

“How do you mean, she was here all along?” asked Peruso.

“Just that,” said Frank, looking back west past the lock. “The most logical conclusion is that whoever killed her dumped her in the river somewhere back there. Not too far, I’d say.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Remember I asked you to keep that information about the bus ticket quiet?”

I frowned. “Yes. Too bad you didn’t ask the same of George Walsh.”

“What do you mean?” asked Frank.

“Georgie Porgie stole my story and printed it. There’s a special edition of the Republic this morning. Front page.”

Frank swore.

“What’s the difference now anyway?” I said. “Tomorrow the whole world will know Darleen Hicks was pulled out of the river dead. No need to keep it quiet anymore.”

I stewed, while Fred Peruso packed his pipe with tobacco and lit it. The sheriff glowered at the ground, then the river, then me.

“What makes you so sure the body went into the river near here?” asked Peruso, breaking the silence.

“Like I was saying,” began Frank. “I asked Ellie not to print some information that made it clear Darleen Hicks never left town when she disappeared. We found her bus ticket in her school locker. Unused.”

Peruso nodded.

“Well, I didn’t want her to print the story and tip our hand to whoever killed her.”

“What did you hope to gain by that?” asked the doctor.

“You never know,” said Frank. “Maybe nothing at all. But sometimes the killer will do something to reveal himself. No need to arm him with everything we know.”

“So, again,” pushed Peruso. “What makes you think Darleen Hicks went into the river here and not upstream somewhere?”

Frank turned and pointed to the hills to the north, just on the other side of Route 5.

“The guy I’ve had my eye on just so happens to live three hundred yards over there.”

“Ted Russell?” I asked, nearly gasping. The proximity was indeed compelling. I’d been in such a rush to reach the scene, I hadn’t even thought that Ted Russell’s house was so close. If not for the thick trees on the hill, it would have been clearly visible from our position near the river.

Frank nodded. “We’re looking for him right now. He wasn’t home when we went visiting a while back. We’ll get him.”

“So how do you think he did it?” I asked. “Just dumped the body in the river three and a half weeks ago?”

“Maybe. Or maybe more recently than that. We found her lunch box and gloves in the snow hills out near her house in the Town of Florida. I think he buried her there, then went back to dig her out later on.”

I considered Frank’s scenario. It seemed solid. The presence of the lunch box and the gloves in the snow hills, together with Walt Rasmussen’s sighting of Darleen around four p.m. on Route 5S on December 21, proved that she had been alive in the vicinity of her home that afternoon. The sheriff's theory that she’d been buried for some time also made sense. And it would explain the preservation of the body after twenty-four days. It was impossible to say how long the body might have been in the snow, but even if it had only been for a day or two, Fred Peruso said that interment in a snow bank would retard decomposition just as well as three weeks at the bottom of the river. Probably better.

In addition to this physical evidence, the sheriff had a handwritten love letter signed “Ted,” as well as a note signed with the same name discovered in Darleen’s lunch box. I hadn’t actually seen the latter, but Frank had described it well enough. Of course, I was convinced Ted Jurczyk had written those, but what if I was wrong? Standing on the banks of the raging Mohawk River, I had