Stone Cold Dead (16 page)

“Well, yeah,” she said, a tad defensive. “You know how it is with girls. They lie when it suits them.”

I thought about Carol and her reluctance to talk. Sure, I’d managed to get her to tell me about Mr. Metzger, but I sensed she was holding back on what happened in the parking lot the day Darleen disappeared. If she’d opened up to Darleen’s mother, why not to me? I resolved to corner her again and get an answer out of her.

“Is your husband at home?” I asked.

“No, he’s out in the fields. He’s an early riser.”

“Will he be back soon?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “Why do you insist on talking to him?”

“Can I find him outside somewhere?” I asked, ignoring her.

“He’s building a new shed for the horses and cows. Out by Rasmussen’s property line. He said he was pouring cement today.”

“In this cold? Isn’t that . . . The temperature . . . Sorry, but isn’t this the wrong time of year to be pouring cement?”

Irene Metzger shrugged. “Dick knows what he’s doing. I never question him on men’s work.”

“I was wondering if I could have a look at Darleen’s room. Would you mind?”

She pushed the butt of her cigarette into the astray and said sure. “I don’t know what you think you’ll find, but be my guest.”

She led me out of the kitchen, down a narrow hallway, to a set of stairs behind the kitchen.

“This way,” she said.

The steps groaned with each footfall, and I imagined flakes of dust, dried paint, and varnish falling like snow into the cellar beneath the staircase. I held the railing tightly as we climbed for fear that the whole thing might collapse under our weight.

At the landing above, a larger hallway opened up, and I could see four doorways, two on each side.

“That’s Darleen’s room,” said Irene Metzger, motioning to the first door on my right. “Dick—my husband—and I use that room there,” she said, indicating the door opposite and farther down the hallway. “That’s the bathroom over there,” she said, pointing to the door next to Darleen’s.

If Carol Liswenski was to be believed, that was where Darleen took her nightly baths under the watchful eye of her scary stepfather.

“What’s that room there?” I asked, motioning to the fourth door, the one directly opposite Darleen’s.

“We don’t use that room,” said Irene Metzger. “There’s nothing in there. We used to store Dick’s mother’s things in there, but we gave it all away to his elderly aunt a few years ago.”

“May I have a look?”

“See for yourself,” she said, opening the door to reveal an empty room. “Told you there was nothing there.”

We moved on to Darleen’s room. The small wooden doorknob, probably once a beauty, had been painted over white so many times that it now looked lopsided and large. Irene Metzger reached out and turned it briskly, pushed open the door, and we entered the bright room. The curtainless windows faced south, and lots of light was pouring in, even if the sun was weak. Above the flaking wainscoting, the walls were papered with a cream-and-gold-colored pattern of stripes and fleurs-de-lis. The floor was bare slats, the finish long since worn away, leaving a dull, soft surface. An old dresser stood between the two windows, and there was a writing desk, blistered and warped, with papers and books on top. Darleen’s narrow bed anchored the opposite wall, a threadbare, white matelassé cover stretched over the mattress, while a line of four naked Kewpie dolls sat listing in different directions on the single pillow.

I gazed out a window across the barren landscape. A virtual whiteout, the view was interrupted only by a dark line of fencing, a dilapidated barn, and a small, dark blot about a hundred yards from the house behind a copse of bare trees. A solitary figure moved stiffly around the dark spot, performing tasks that I could not identify from such a distance.

“May I look at Darleen’s things?” I asked, still staring out the window.

“I’ll leave you to it, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

I waited for her footsteps to recede down the stairs before beginning my search. I started with Darleen’s chest of drawers, pawing through her clothes: underwear and dresses, shoes and blouses. If she’d run away, she left with little to wear. I lifted the radiator cover near the window, but only found a radiator underneath. On the shelf over the desk, there were perhaps twenty books. I turned them over and fanned the pages, hoping something besides a bookmark would fall out. There was nothing. I stopped to look out the window at the frozen, tar-gray shingles of the porch roof. The window provided an ideal escape route for a rebellious teenage girl, I figured, but there was nowhere to hide anything out there.

Darleen’s desk presented a jumble of odds and ends. Marbled composition books, loose sheets of homework, schoolbooks, a pack of letters, jacks, and Black Jack gum wrappers woven into long chains. Putting those to one side for the time being, I ducked my head below the desk and examined the underside, looking for hidden notes or mementoes. Aside from several globs of hardened, black chewing gum, still no luck.

I picked up the packet of letters from the desk, untied the ribbon binding them together, and shuffled through them. Some were insipid notes from her friends, Susan, Carol, and Linda, chronicling their daily activities, crushes, gossip, and homework assignments. Other letters had been written by someone named Edward, short, but spelled correctly with proper punctuation and unexpected vocabulary.

“I saw you and Linda walking to social studies after study hall,” read one from two years earlier. “How was Mr. Bellows today? He looks like an endomorphic walrus with those whiskers, don’t you think? See you.”

There were two unsigned letters that seemed out of place. Written by an adult hand, they, too, were short, but lacked Edward’s attention to the inessential.

“Meet me tomorrow in the usual place after the drama club meeting before you catch your bus. Make it look accidental.”

The other one said simply, “Saturday at the agreed place and time.” Neither was dated.

Inside one of the small desktop drawers was another pack of letters. Scrawled by a juvenile hand and seemingly spelled by a caveman, these were written by Joey Figlio. The ardor surprised me, though I might have expected it after my conversations with him the day before. As I read the raw missives, I reminded myself that fifteen-year-olds could be just as passionate, if not more so, than adults. Their emotions rage without the perspective and rationale that come with experience. That doesn’t make them any less potent. Joey’s love wheeled and careered out of control, spinning like a palsied top, erratically, without boundaries or proportion. He was pure id, like a cat, and with the claws. His professions of love exploded off the page, without shame or self-consciousness. Despite the bad spelling and lack of any sense of irony, Joey Figlio emerged a hot-blooded lover. I found it cute and dangerous at the same time.

I will lick the sweat off your skin and you will lick mine until we are united as one in spirit and sole. Two hearts beeting together as none have ever beet before. Yours and mine in sickniss and hell. I will hang myself for you, Darleen, even if you betray me and stole my rope. You are mine and be long to me
.

And there were poems—truly bad ones—but not obscene as Mrs. Nolan had described them. And Joey had plans for the future. In September, he wrote of dropping out of school to get a job as soon as he was sixteen in May of 1961. Then he and Darleen could get married and move into an apartment in Jacksonville, Florida, with three older guys Joey knew. Wow, I thought. Every day a honeymoon.

In October, after Darleen joined the drama club, Joey was talking about running off with her to California. He had an uncle who worked as a custodian in Bakersfield and, Joey was sure, Darleen could be a famous movie star. To him, Bakersfield and Hollywood seemed interchangeable. In November, he was begging her to run off anywhere: Florida, California, Nevada. I had nothing in Darleen’s hand to indicate her state of mind vis-à-vis Joey Figlio. If she’d written any responses to his love letters, they would have been with him. But I did uncover a locked diary that looked to be a couple of years old. Irene Metzger was downstairs, so I forced the lock. The leather strap gave way without too much trouble, and I opened the diary to read. But there was nothing to see. Darleen had made the last entry three years earlier: musings on things like the Girl Scouts and what she wanted for Christmas and her birthday. Nothing about boys or running away. I spent a stray moment wondering why she had stopped maintaining a diary, but figured she’d lost interest and moved on to other things.

In the center drawer I found some travel brochures for California and Nevada. The Hoover Dam and Hollywood studio tours. Darleen had circled Paramount Studios and Disneyland on the cartoonish map. On the Nevada brochure, she’d marked the Sands, Tropicana, and Frontier casinos in Las Vegas. I wasn’t sure how a fifteen-year-old Darleen thought she could gain entrance to a casino, but clearly her tastes ran in that direction. I shrugged, admitting to myself that I, too, would have wanted to see the same places at her age.

I came across three worn folded-paper fortune-teller games, the kind young girls make with their friends to amuse themselves. Under the flaps were such oracles as, “You will kiss a boy” and “You will break his heart.” There was also, “You will lose your socks in gym class.” These fortune tellers, probably two or three years old, provided no clues to Darleen’s recent state of mind.

Then I found a brown envelope with a paper inside. I retrieved it and unfolded it, not knowing what to expect. It was a receipt for $43.20. A Trailways bus receipt for a ticket, one way to Tucson, Arizona. Ten more minutes of searching the room produced no bus ticket. I plopped down on Darleen’s bed and held the receipt before my eyes. I stared long and hard at the paper, running through all the scenarios its presence suggested. In reality there was only one. With no accompanying ticket, what else could I deduce but that Darleen had used it? What further proof did I need? She’d run off, just as the sheriff had said, just as I had suspected. But as sometimes happens when the truth presents itself, we can’t quite believe it. Still, I smiled, uneasily, knowing that this pointed to the best possible ending under the circumstances. Despite Irene Metzger’s assurances to the contrary, it appeared her daughter had skipped town, most probably with an older boy.

I made my way down the narrow stairs and rejoined Irene Metzger in the kitchen.

“Find what you were looking for?” she asked, glancing up from her mending.

“Maybe,” I said, taking a seat across the kitchen table from her. “Does Darleen know anyone in Arizona?”

Irene Metzger’s eyes narrowed and she glowered at me. “You’re back on the idea that she’s run off, aren’t you? I already told you there’s no way she did that.”

I produced the bus receipt and laid it gently on the table between us. She eyed it for a long moment, before glancing up at me. I could read the turmoil in her eyes. Was this good news? Or false hope? She was probably asking herself how well she knew her own daughter.

She took the slip of paper and pored over it, her eyes ranging back and forth over the print, twitching as she examined both sides. “Where did she get that kind of money?” she mumbled finally.

“Did she have an allowance?” I asked. “A part-time job of some kind?”

Irene Metzger shook her head in a daze. “We gave her forty cents a week for her chores. And even that was difficult. These are tough times on the farm.”

“That’s not a small amount,” I said. “Especially if times are hard.”

“That’s her doting father. He’s hard, but with a soft spot for his little girl. He insisted on raising her allowance from twenty to forty cents a week about three months ago.”

A regular Daddy Warbucks, I thought. Forty cents a week seemed extravagant for a farmer on the wrong side of luck. But even at that rate, it would have taken Darleen about two years to save up forty-three dollars. I, too, wondered how she had managed to accumulate such a sum.

Irene Metzger sat immobile, receipt in hand, staring dumbly across the room, struggling to make sense of it.

“Mrs. Metzger?” I asked.

She shook back to life, her face white, and fumbled for a cigarette from the crumpled package on the table. It was empty.

“Damn it,” she whispered.

I produced one from my purse. Not her brand, but she wasn’t about to beg off.

“So,” I asked as she inhaled deeply. “Does Darleen know anyone in Arizona? Perhaps someone with forty-three dollars?”

I could see that she was rattled.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It was last spring,” she began carefully. “Before Darleen took up with that Joey Figlio.”

She looked straight ahead, fixing her gaze somewhere between her nose and the stove against the wall. “There was this boy,” she continued. “Wilbur Burch. His family has a farm in Fort Hunter, back in the woods near the old Erie Canal lock. He was older than Darleen.” She paused to draw on her cigarette, still looking at nothing in particular.

“How much older?” I prompted.

She shrugged. “Eighteen or nineteen.”

“You didn’t mind that Darleen was seeing a grown man?”

“Of course I did,” she said. “And Dick went through the roof when he heard and put an end to it right away. He said Wilbur wasn’t good enough for Darleen and threatened to kill him if he didn’t stay away from her.”

“So he’s in Arizona now?” I asked.

“He’s stationed there at some big army base. There was a notice in the paper about four months ago.”