Stone Cold Dead (13 page)

“Are you Susan Dobbs?” I asked. She looked up at me, mouth agape, sniffled, and said yes. “Mind if I talk to you about Darleen Hicks while we ride?”

Susan looked to her friends for guidance, but they just chewed their gum and shrugged.

“You’re that lady who threw up at the basketball game,” she said finally, smirking as she did.

“That’s right,” I said, smiling back. “And you’re the girls who stole my bottle of whiskey, aren’t you?”

Susan’s smirk disappeared.

“And you two?” I asked the other girls. “Which one of you is Carol Liswenski, and which one is Linda Attanasio?”

They didn’t like that I knew their names and that they had stolen my liquor. They identified themselves reluctantly.

“Darleen’s the one who took your bottle, honest,” said Linda Attanasio. “We told her not to.”

“I don’t care about the whiskey, girls. I want to talk to you about Darleen. My name’s Ellie. I work for the paper.”

“Are you a secretary or something?” asked Susan.

“I’m a reporter, working on a story about Darleen’s disappearance. I’m trying to find out what happened to her.”

The girls exchanged glances, mugged surprise, and probably didn’t believe me. Then the bus door closed, and the tired engine groaned to life. The bus lurched forward.

“What do you want to know?” asked Susan.

“First, there’s some confusion over whether Darleen was on the bus the day she disappeared. Did she ride the bus with you that day?”

All three girls insisted that Darleen was not on the bus when it left the school, despite what Gus the driver had initially told the police. There was an awkward silence.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked. They remained silent. “Okay, you’ve said very carefully that Darleen was not on the bus when it left the school. Was she on the bus before it left?”

Carol blurted out yes. “She was on the bus with us, waiting for the driver to get in, but she saw someone outside she wanted to talk to.”

“And she got off the bus,” said Susan.

“Who was it she wanted to talk to?” I asked, and the three girls shrugged. “You didn’t see? She didn’t say?”

“She always had an eye on someone,” said Susan.

“Or someone had an eye on her,” added Linda.

“What about Joey Figlio? I thought he was her steady.”

Again the shrugs.

“Were they going steady or not?” I repeated.

Carol volunteered that they had been going out, but Darleen seemed to have grown tired of him.

“Why was that? I asked. I weighed my words carefully for the next question. “Did Darleen have any older boyfriends?”

The three girls exchanged looks yet again, tacitly searching for consensus on their answer. Susan finally spoke.

“Sure, there were older fellows who were interested, but Darleen wasn’t tired of Joey for that. He was just a weirdo.”

“These older fellows,” I began. “Any names you might know?”

“We wouldn’t want to get into trouble for saying,” said Susan.

“Wow, sounds like it’s someone important. Like the mayor.”

They laughed.

“No, nothing like that.”

“You can tell me, you know. I don’t reveal my sources. Besides, I can’t print someone’s name without corroboration.” They looked confused. “I won’t tell anyone that you told me.”

“Well, there was someone who kept calling her,” said Susan. “He used to call her up and pester her. Ask her to meet him.”

“Do you know who that was?”

She shook her head. I tried to get them to say Mr. Russell’s name, but they wouldn’t rise to the bait. I hinted and led them by the nose, but his name just wouldn’t fall. Finally I asked outright if they’d heard rumors about him and Darleen.

“There was some talk about three months ago,” said Susan. “But Darleen said that was all guff. Of course, we didn’t exactly believe her.”

“Yeah, we all thought she was lying to cover up,” added Linda. “I always thought she was sweet on Mr. Russell. And he seemed sweet on her, too. Always calling on her in class. Always kind of looking her way. But Darleen said no.”

The bus rumbled over the Mill Street Bridge and began to climb the big hill, fan belt squealing and exhaust belching as it went. Once we’d reached the top, Gus Arnold pointed us west on Route 5S, into the gray gloaming of the late afternoon. I watched the white landscape drift by for a couple of minutes.

“What do you think happened to Darleen?” I asked the girls finally, as we eased to a stop on the side of the road to disgorge a smallish kid in a red-checked hunter’s cap. He slipped on the ice as the bus pulled away, and the kids roared with laughter. The poor boy’s lunch box opened and spilled his thermos into the highway. I watched him scramble to retrieve it as a big Chrysler bore down on him. The kids on the bus groaned in disappointment as the boy dashed to the safety of the shoulder, only to slip and fall again just as the Chrysler blew past him, leaving a cloud of snow in its wake.

“That was rather mean,” I said to the girls, referring to the laughter.

They shrugged. “Yeah, but it was hilarious. You have to admit.”

I thought about it. Had I grown too old to laugh at a harmless pratfall? The kid had looked pretty funny, twice landing on the seat of his snow pants. And he seemed unhurt, at least physically. Still, poor kid.

“Now, about Darleen,” I said. “Do you girls live near her place?”

“I get off two stops before Darleen,” said Susan. “About three miles away from her house. Linda and Carol get off at the stop before Darleen’s.”

“It’s about a mile from my house,” said Linda.

“Have you ever met her neighbor Bobby Karl?”

“That creep next door?” asked Susan. “Such a weirdo.”

“How so?”

“We had a sleepover about two months ago, the four of us. Darleen’s stepdad was building a bonfire for Halloween. Darleen said he did it every year, and it was fun. A big hay bonfire. But Darleen said he did it to burn all the garbage he was saving up all year.”

“And you saw Bobby Karl that night?”

“He was hanging around, gawking at us. Well, Darleen, mostly. And talking nonsense about calving and tractors. Who cares?”

“Was he weird in any other ways besides talking about livestock and farming machinery?”

“Not really.”

“Did he speak to Darleen that night?”

“No he just was hanging around, scratching his scabby arms.”

“And what about the other neighbor? Mr. Rasmussen? Did you ever see him at Darleen’s?”

“The giant?” asked Susan.

Carol laughed. “No, we decided to call him Gargantua, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” said Susan. “Darleen came up with that one.”

“Never mind that it’s not nice to call people names, did you ever see him while you were visiting Darleen?”

“Darleen said you could see him from space,” said Susan, and the other two girls giggled.

“Were you in space, or did you see him at Darleen’s?” I asked, a little less nicely the third time.

“We saw him maybe once or twice when he was plowing his field,” said Linda. “He never spoke to us, except once to say stay off his land.”

“Were you on his land?”

“No.”

“Okay, anything else you can tell me about your visits to Darleen’s place? Did she get along with her stepfather, Mr. Metzger?”

Susan shrugged and said they got along okay. “He was pretty strict with her, though.”

“How about you, Carol?” I asked. “What did you think of Mr. Metzger?”

“He was kind of scary,” she said, wincing and showing her braces.

Susan glared at her.

“What?” asked Carol. “He
was
scary, wasn’t he? I mean, I couldn’t even sleep after that.”

“Why don’t you shut it, Carol?” said Susan.

Once Gus Arnold had dropped Linda and Carol at their stop at the mouth of County Highway 58, he threw the bus into reverse and began to back out onto Route 5S.

“Wait a minute,” I called from the back. “Aren’t you going to drive your full route?”

I’d been timing the drive and didn’t want to guess at the total if he skipped Darleen’s stop.

“But there’s no more kids to drop,” he said, looking at me through a mirror above him. “I’m taking you back to the school to get your car.”

“No, I’d like to run the full route, please. It will only take a few minutes more.”

Gus Arnold scowled, I imagined, though all I could see were his eyes in the mirror. He made a big show of throwing the bus into first gear and wrestling the steering wheel back into place. We rolled through a large pothole, nearly knocking me out of my seat, then proceeded peaceably over a pack of mostly white snow toward Darleen Hicks’s house.

Five minutes later, the bus slowed to a stop in front of the rusting mailbox labeled “Metzger.” It looked frozen shut, the red flag bent down permanently or at least until spring and warmer temperatures would free it from the frost’s grip.

Gus Arnold slouched against the steering wheel, disinclined to face me as he awaited instructions. I joined him at the front of the bus and asked him how long he usually paused at Darleen’s house.

“What?”

“Do you wait here or do you drive away once she’s off the bus?”

“I drive away, what do you think?”

“Then let’s move.”

Gus Arnold shook his head in disgust. I don’t know what hold I had over him, but he was doing as I asked. He released the clutch, and we jerked into motion.

“You go straight from here?” I asked, leaning on the back of his seat as I looked out the windshield.

“No room to turn around here,” he said. “Metzger’s road is too narrow.”

“I saw a no-outlet sign back there. How do you get out of here?”

“There’s an opening about a mile ahead. It’s big enough to turn the bus around.”

We drove for about three minutes over the bumpy road, through an ever-narrowing alley of thick pines, until we reached a cul-de-sac. The trees had been cleared and the ground leveled about a hundred yards deep into the woods. But there was barely thirty yards available for the bus to turn around due to the mountains of snow dumped into the dead end by county plows. Like ridges of a true mountain chain in miniature, some of the snow banks rose as high as fifteen feet, their peaks rugged, speckled with dirt, salt, and gravel. The snow hills stretched nearly eighty yards deep and forty yards across. They looked like a paradise for little children to play in, ripe for adventure and filled with fantasy.

“Are these snow hills here every year?” I asked to make conversation.

Gus grunted as he twisted the big steering wheel around to complete his one-eighty. “County’s been dumping snow here for years,” he said, and the bus rumbled back onto 58.

“The sheriff says you took a nap here after finishing your route the day Darleen Hicks disappeared. Is that true?”

He seemed unnerved. “Well, not exactly here,” he said. “On the other side of the hills. That way,” and he pointed past the snow toward the woods beyond.

“How do you get to the other side? There’s no road.”

“You got to drive back to the highway and turn west. There’s a turnoff about a quarter mile past here.”

“Do you take naps there often?” I asked.

He drove on, shoulders hunched as he leaned over the steering wheel. “I like the quiet. No one there to bother me.”

We passed Darleen’s house again, and I watched it melt into the dark behind us. I turned forward to take in the view through the windshield, looking past the driver. Ahead, on the side of the road, a giant figure stooped to grab the post from his mailbox. We rolled past him just as he righted himself. Walt Rasmussen glared through the bus’s windows; he was almost tall enough to look me in the eye and give me a fright. It was as if he’d recognized me in the dark.

I sat quietly for the ride back into town. The giant had spooked me. Gus Arnold dropped me off at the junior high school at 4:47. The bus depot was perhaps ten minutes farther. That made for about thirty-five minutes from the end of his route back to the depot. I knew he hadn’t changed a flat tire that day. And if he’d finished his route at four twenty, then snoozed for thirty minutes, he should have been back at the depot by five thirty. That left nearly an hour of his time unaccounted for.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I put my feet up on the ottoman and hoisted a stack of newspapers onto my lap: the ones that Norma had collected for me. My feet were stinging from the exposure to the cold that morning. I wriggled my toes, trying to urge some warm blood into my feet. I squirmed in my seat, searching for a comfortable position for my sore bottom. It felt as if I’d been kicked by a mule. I cursed Joey Figlio again then reached for my drink on the end table.

The television was humming quietly; the second act of
Hong Kong
was just beginning after a commercial. I didn’t know much about the show, but I kind of had a thing for Rod Taylor, and I liked the exotic setting. Better than
Wagon Train
, which aired opposite it. From the top of the pile of papers on my lap, I unfolded the
Canajoharie Courier Standard
from Wednesday, December 21. The front page proclaimed, “First Day of Winter” and “Christmas Decorations Pageant Lights up City.” There was a dark photo of Main Street with garlands and festooned streetlights. And there was a second photo accompanying the “First Day of Winter” story: a view of the Mohawk River, completely frozen over, from Lock 12 in Tribes Hill.