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

Ted nodded. “She told me she had a secret to tell me. She said she was running away for good with Joey Figlio. She wasn’t sure when, but soon, she said.”

“Why did she give you her diary?”

“She said she didn’t want her father to find it. That would spoil everything. She told me not to read it, but to keep it until she sent for it.”

“So, have you read it?” I asked.

“No. I gave her my word.”

“Then why have you brought it to me?”

Ted looked down into his hands. “Because she’s gone. Someone needs to read what she didn’t want her father to know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

I drove Ted home. It was a school night, and he was out late. As things stood, he was sure he’d be grounded if his father caught him sneaking back in. I pulled to a stop outside the darkened duplex on Polack Hill.

“I just couldn’t read it,” he said. “I didn’t want to know.”

“I won’t lie to you, Ted. It still might have to come out.”

He nodded one last time and popped the door open. He climbed out and disappeared into the dark pathway alongside the house.

Back home at midnight, I tore the cover off the diary; the lock didn’t stand a chance. I poured myself a long drink and settled in on the sofa. The diary took up where the one I’d found in her room had left off more than three years earlier. The months drifted by without anything of interest; Darleen was eleven and twelve at the time, and the entries were about games, friends, and farm animals. But somewhere in the fall of 1958, when she was about to turn thirteen, she started writing about boys. First there was Edward, who, she wrote, was in love with her. She liked Edward very much, but like a brother. Still, it was flattering to have a boy carry your books, send you notes, and buy you sodas in the cafeteria. Darleen got braces on her teeth in September of that year. She liked her dentist, who was a handsome married man. Then she started writing about “crazy Joey Figlio” who was in her seventh-grade homeroom. “He’s in love with me,” she wrote. “I sure do get a lot of attention from boys all of a sudden.”

In October 1958, her entries stopped for three months. Then they resumed tentatively, with short, almost impersonal details. What she wore to school, who she sat with at lunch, what movie she saw. Finally, in the middle of February 1959, her reticence broke wide open. I gasped when I read the matter-of-fact entry: “Dad made me do it again.” Again three weeks later, another brief mention: “Again. I wish he’d leave me alone. I don’t like it, but he goes away if I do what he says.”

The next eighteen months catalogued a string of late-night visits to her room by her stepfather. He watched her bathing, made her “do things” to him, “did things” to her, and threatened her to keep quiet. As the months passed, the frequency of his visits increased, but she was no more descriptive in her accounts. Just the same vague words like “again” and “things.” I found at least sixty distinct occasions in the diary where she wrote about his visits. She described how he talked of “lying” with her as soon as she was old enough, but for now, he was satisfied with the “disgusting things he made me do.”

In May 1960, Darleen wrote that she’d met an older boy who liked her a lot. Wilbur Burch was eighteen and had a car. “Wilbur’s a simple boy,” she wrote, “but he’s going to get me out of here. He’s going into the army in Arizona. I sure would like to see Arizona.” Darleen went on to explain that Wilbur was crazy for the “tricks” she did with him. She wrote that he fell head over heels for her after that.

I put the diary down and downed another drink before I could continue. Drawing a deep breath, I resumed. Later that summer, Joey Figlio emerged as Darleen’s steady and best hope for escape. She wrote that he was “a little weird,” but he loved her and “had a plan” to take her away from the farm and her stepfather. Wilbur had turned out to be “a dud” and “kinda slow.” By all accounts, Darleen had never shown her “tricks” to Joey, who seemed to love her anyway. She wrote that they planned to run away and get married.

But in September, Darleen forgot all about Joey Figlio and gushed for weeks about Mr. Russell, the dreamy music teacher. She fantasized about marrying him and moving out of her nightmare and into his dream. There was nothing in the diary to suggest that Ted Russell shared any of her interest. In fact, after about a month and a half, Darleen pronounced herself over Mr. Russell, who was kind of boring and had a way of wrinkling his mouth that “looks dumb and annoys me.” I knew what she meant. Ted Russell had a funny habit of pressing his lips together on the left side of his mouth for no apparent reason. Darleen was right. It did look dumb, and it annoyed me, too.

From that point to the end, Joey Figlio was her man.

“I guess I love Joey,” she wrote in early December 1960. “He loves me, and I’d rather marry him than that dolt Wilbur Burch.”

She even mentioned Louis Brossard. In reference to the rumors about Darleen and Ted Russell, the assistant principal interviewed her to find out if something was going on. She told him there was nothing between her and the music teacher.

“Mr. Brossard is kind of gross. I don’t like talking to him. But he’s been nice to me.”

In early December, Darleen related her attempt to get money from Ted Russell and Louis Brossard. Russell caved immediately when she threatened to say he’d had his way with