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

the road, stretching its long fingers to reach the other side. You could see the wind at play in the drifts, sculpting and brushing its handiwork in the bitter cold. The gentle hills, lit by a low winter’s sun, spread out for miles to the west, buried in white from the recent snowfalls. A dented tin mailbox on the side of the road read “W. Rasmussen.” Beside that stood a Republic newspaper box, leaning to the side about thirty degrees short of perpendicular.

I turned into the narrow drive, tires crunching over packed snow and gravel, and approached the gray house. A giant man in coveralls, work boots, and a red-checked hunting jacket emerged from the adjacent barn before I’d even reached the house, as if he’d been standing sentry, waiting to ward off trespassers. Fresh from some heavy exertion in the barn, the big man glared at me as I climbed out of the car. Steam rose from his ruddy head, shorn close to the skin like a spring sheep. He looked to be in his sixties or seventies. He was at least six feet eight and burly, easily three hundred pounds: the biggest man I’d ever seen. A small, bloody ax dangled from his right hand. I nearly lost my nerve, but I’d come this far.

“Well?” he said, as I pulled my wool overcoat tight about my neck. The late-afternoon sun was blazing behind him, and I squinted through the glare to see him.

“Mr. Rasmussen?” I asked, eyes fixed on the ax. No response. Just a frozen, iron face staring back at me. “My name is Ellie Stone. I’m a reporter with the Republic.”

Still no reaction.

“I see you’re a subscriber,” I continued, referring to the newspaper box I’d seen at the head of the drive.

“I don’t much like the idea of girl reporters,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I hope you won’t cancel the paper over it.”

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“I came to ask you about Darleen Hicks.”

“Who?”

“Darleen Hicks,” I repeated. “Dick Metzger’s daughter.”

Rasmussen sauntered over to the porch where he stood before a frozen tree stump. He flipped the ax into the air like a juggler, catching it again by the handle once it had completed a single rotation. If he wanted to intimidate me, he’d succeeded.

“Why ask me?”

“She disappeared two weeks ago. Do you know anything about her?”

“Nothing,” he said, weighing the ax in his hand.

“Never met her?” I asked, trembling as much from the cold as from fear. My God, I wanted to run. “Never laid eyes on her?”

“Sure, I seen her a couple of times,” he said. “Couldn’t describe her, though.”

“Have you seen her recently? Maybe with someone else? A boy? A man?”

He shook his head.

“Do you have any family here, Mr. Rasmussen?”

“My wife died eight years ago.”

“You don’t have any children?”

He shook his head once, then took a step toward me. His huge, windburned face twisted quizzically. “Are you that girl reporter who wrote about Judge Shaw’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

He considered my answer for a moment then repeated that he didn’t like the idea of girl reporters.

I didn’t know exactly how to respond to that, so I asked him about his dispute with Dick Metzger. Rasmussen cocked his head to one side.

“So I’m supposed to have killed his daughter ’cause he put a fence a couple of feet on my property?”

“Who said she was dead?”

Rasmussen clapped the ax into the frozen stump with a sharp chop. He glared at me, eyes smoldering. Clearly he was not used to girls talking to him this way.

“I mean, why do you think she’s dead?”

“She’s been missing without a word for two weeks,” he said. “She’s dead, and you know it, too. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think I had something to do with it.”

“What’s in the barn?” I asked, marveling at my audacity. This guy had a bloody ax, for God’s sake.

“What’s that?” he asked, easily as surprised as I by my effrontery.

“You came out of the barn with a bloody ax in your hand. I was wondering what you were doing in there.”

“You come snooping around on my property uninvited, accusing me of killing a little girl . . .” He shook his head woefully. “Why don’t you go home and bake some cupcakes?”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Rasmussen,” I said, my breath freezing in the sunny air.

“You’ll leave my property now.”

In the rearview mirror, I could see the giant man watching me from the porch until I’d turned back onto 58 and lost sight of him.

A half mile farther down the road, I rolled to a stop at a rusting mailbox. The name “Metzger” was stenciled on the side in rough block letters. I sat inside the car staring up the long, unpaved drive. The house was not visible from the road, hidden by a small hill and tall trees. The sun was still hovering over the horizon to the west, but I was parked in near darkness. I could feel the outside temperature dropping along with the waning daylight. The exhaust from my Royal Lancer billowed white in the air, rode forward on the wind, passing over the entire car, and scattered somewhere beyond the nose of the long black hood.

This was where Darleen Hicks had waited for the school bus, where she had climbed aboard for the last time on December 21. I made a mental note to find the driver and interview him about that day. Why had Darleen missed the bus that afternoon? Maybe he would know something.

For now, though, I wanted to meet the other neighbors: the Karls. Their house was another three-quarters of a mile past Dick and Irene Metzger’s farm. It was dark when I turned down the road that led to their place. Another weathered, blistered clapboard farmhouse, this one a pale blue color. Languishing half buried in the snow, the carcasses of three fossilized vehicles—a long-dead tractor and two old pickups—welcomed visitors. No Negro lawn jockeys here. The