Stone Cold Dead (24 page)

In spite of the satisfaction I felt at the prospect of the fool’s errand Georgie Porgie was about to embark upon—at precisely 2:15 local time, by the way—I was humiliated by the public flogging I’d endured at the hands of the publisher. I sequestered myself for twenty minutes in a stall in the ladies’ room before my eyes were dry and white enough to face the world. Charlie and Norma were sure to notice anyway.

I wandered into Charlie’s office, curious to know how George Walsh and Artie Short could be so careless not to have contacted Wilbur Burch. Had they done so, they surely would have known that Darleen had never used the bus ticket he’d sent her. I asked Charlie as innocently as I knew how if George had spoken to Wilbur.

“He wired his CO,” said Charlie, distracted, as he wrote a note to himself. “It seems Wilbur and his unit are finishing some week-long survival training hike, so George hasn’t been able to reach him yet.”

“Bad luck for George,” I said.

“Listen, Ellie,” said my boss, looking up from his desk. “I don’t want to do this, but Short is insisting. He wants you to take over the Society Page for a couple of days, just while Mrs. Stevens is visiting her sister in Rochester.” (Wow. Artie Short just kept kicking, whether I was down or not.) “Promise me you won’t blow your stack and get yourself fired over this. It’s just temporary, and I need you.”

“Okay,” I said calmly, which seemed to upset Charlie even more.

“Are you okay, Ellie?”

“I’m fine. Just tell me what to do.”

The Society Page’s staples were engagement announcements and wedding photos. January was off-season for weddings, though, so I only had two engagements, three ugly babies, and seven confirmations to report. These were mindless tasks that I performed with my eyes half closed.

Mary Ellen Wikowski and Glenn Stanich were planning a June wedding and honeymoon in the Poconos. They were both twenty-one. Glenn was an electrician’s apprentice to Mary Ellen’s dad.

Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Dawson were proud to welcome their first child: an eleven-pound, eight-ounce bouncing baby boy named Gordon Jr. Eleven and a half pounds! Good God, that’s the size of a bowling ball.

And then there were the confirmations. Little kids dressed in ill-fitting white suits and dresses, with bad haircuts, missing teeth, and hands pressed together in pious prayer. All I needed to do was get their names and churches right, and I was laps ahead of Mrs. Stevens.

“What can I do next?” I asked Charlie as I handed him my piece around four in the afternoon.

“You’ve finished already? That didn’t take two hours.”

“It wasn’t that hard, Charlie. The wedding of the season, Baby Huey, and a conclave of Catholic kids.”

“Okay,” said Charlie. “Come with me. I’ve got to have a smoke, and I don’t want to do it here. Doreen will tell my wife.”

I followed Charlie downstairs, where we stood in the alleyway between our building and Wolfson’s Department Store. It was such a nice evening, so unseasonably warm, that we each smoked a second cigarette as we talked.

“As you can see, Charlie, I’m being a good girl,” I said. “What’s my next assignment?”

“You’ve got your pick: there’s a PTA bake sale at Clinton Avenue Grammar School . . .”

“Hmm, tempting. What else have you got?”

“Well, there’s also the big polka concert at Janakowski Hall. You could interview a big star and enjoy an evening of music at the same time.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, Ellie. It’s the Al Stoyka Orchestra. They play all over the country.”

“Isn’t there a pencil-sharpening contest I could cover instead? Next.”

“I could make you do it, you know,” he mumbled, and he flipped his cigarette butt into the gutter. “Okay, how about the new firehouse they’re inaugurating? Or the SPCA? They’re holding a fundraiser. And you told me you like cats.”

Oh, God, I thought. What sins had I committed in a previous life to deserve this? Then I realized that my present mess could well be punishment for the sins of this life alone.

“I’ll take the firehouse,” I said. “Maybe I’ll meet Mr. Right.”

We made our way back upstairs to Charlie’s office. I stood there waiting as my boss wrote out the details on the firehouse event for me on a pad of paper. I stared off into space, cursing my life and the bed I’d made for myself. Then something wonderful happened. Charlie’s phone rang.

“Reese,” he said into the receiver. I watched as his eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. He ran a hand through his silver hair. “Yes, she’s here, but . . . I thought you said . . . All right. I see.” He tore away the top sheet of paper from his pad, wadded it in his palm, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. So much for my firehouse story. He scribbled something new into the pad before him. “Okay, we’re on it,” he said and hung up the phone.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That was Artie Short,” he said. Now I was worried.

“Am I through?” I asked.

“The sheriff just phoned looking for you while we were downstairs,” he explained. “No one could find you. He said it was important, so the switchboard tried to find me. Then they put him through to Artie.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“They just found a lunch box near Darleen Hicks’s house. Artie wants you to get out to the Metzger farm right now. You’re off the bench.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

George Walsh was on a Trailways bus, probably just past Syracuse, incommunicado, with “Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kaempfert playing over the bus’ speakers for seventy-two hours straight. (Perhaps not, but a girl can dream, can’t she?) And he had orders not to waste time or money phoning home, so he would be in Arizona before he realized he was on a wild-goose chase. Artie Short was already painfully aware of that fact.

I pulled to a stop a few yards behind the last of the county cruisers. Up ahead, a diesel generator was roaring, supplying power to the four sets of floodlights the sheriff had aimed at the snow hills at the end of County Highway 58. This was the place where Gus Arnold had turned the school bus around the day I’d hitched a ride to speak with Darleen’s friends.

Pauline Blaine, the widow who lived near the Metzger farm, had phoned the authorities when her two boys arrived home from school around four p.m. with a lunch box they’d found in the melting snow while playing in the hills.

“Hiya, Frank,” I said, once I’d located the sheriff at the center of the command post.

“There you are,” he said. “For a while I thought Artie Short wasn’t going to send you. What did you do to get him so riled up?”

“I wore a skirt,” I said. “What’s the story here?”

“A couple of kids found a lunch box in the hills where Brunello’s standing over there,” he said, pointing to his deputy about thirty yards away. “Buried pretty deep. The boys were digging and uncovered it.”

“Are you sure it’s Darleen’s?” I asked.

Frank nodded. “Pretty sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“There was a note inside, addressed ‘Dear Darleen.’”

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“‘I’ll meet you near the buses before you go home.’” said Frank in a monotone as he read from a scrap of paper.

“Any idea who wrote it?”

The sheriff folded the paper, secured it in his breast pocket, and motioned for me to come closer. He whispered in my ear, “Ted.”

I flushed. The sting was sharp, but I couldn’t let on to Frank. “Can I get a picture of it?” I asked, wanting desperately to compare the handwriting to the love note Frankie had brought to me.

The sheriff shook his head. “This is evidence, Ellie. I can’t risk our case by showing it to you. And, by the way, I don’t want any news of the note in the press for now. Same as with the bus ticket.”

“But, Frank, what am I going to write?” I asked. “You’re not leaving me much.”

“No mention of the note, okay? You can say we found a lunch box that may or may not belong to Darleen Hicks. There’s no name on it, so it could be anyone’s.”

“Except for the note.”

“Right. Which remains a secret for now.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering when I had stopped working for the
New Holland Republic
and signed on with the sheriff. I distracted myself from my self-recrimination by plotting how I might make Ted Russell pay for his crimes. In a moment of painful honesty, I wondered if I wanted to punish him for having debauched Darleen or for having taken me in. I shook the thought from my head. I still had a job to do.

“Can you tell me what’s going on here now?” I asked Frank.

“We’re searching as best we can all through this area,” he said, indicating the snow hills with a wave of his hand. “So far we haven’t turned up anything.”

“So what’s next?”

Frank pulled his cap off and scratched his head. I could see the perspiration on his scalp. The weather wasn’t exactly tropical, but it was still in the low fifties, even with the sun down.

“I’ve decided to have the county haul this snow out of here starting tomorrow if we don’t find anything tonight.” He paused, looking out over the tons of snow. “That girl is in there somewhere, and we’re going to find her.”

I took some pictures of the lunch box. It was one of those plain, dark-gray, workman’s lunch boxes, scuffed, with some dents, and a metal buckle to snap it closed. Inside was some crumpled waxed paper, a chilling reminder that the missing girl had used the lunch box just three weeks earlier—that she had eaten from it, and evidence of her last meal remained. I wondered what she had drunk to wash down her lunch. Perhaps a couple of swigs of whiskey on the bus to Canajoharie. But, of course, the whiskey had never left her locker. And there was no thermos found with the lunch box.

I thought about how little separated us in time and space. On December 21, Darleen had been in the very spot I was standing in now. The time of day had been the same as well, give or take an hour. And there was more that we shared, Darleen and I. A penchant for poor judgment and ill-advised adventures with older, slippery men. The same man in this case, I feared. Two similar girls with two very distinct outcomes.

I drove away from the snow hills beyond the Metzger farm, leaving the sheriff and his men to their task. If they didn’t recover the body by morning, the trucks would come to cart off the tons of snow. The sheriff intended to scrape the ground clean if necessary until he’d found the remains of a young girl.

The road back to the Metzger farm was crowded with official vehicles and a few gawkers for about a hundred yards. Once I’d negotiated the tight passage, I gained speed as I headed toward the highway. But then I reached the dented mailbox with the black lettering, and I slowed to a stop. “METZGER.” I turned into the narrow road and drove to the gray clapboard house, this time determined to have a word with Dick Metzger.

It was almost six thirty when I rapped on the door. The man of the house answered, freezing me in place with his gaze. I stood transfixed, staring up at those pallid blue eyes. He waited there in his coveralls, chewing something that must have been the last of his supper, regarding me with a stony countenance. I thought he would make a fine poker player. From the kitchen, the rich aroma of meat, onions, and frying butter drifted past me and out into the night air.

“Well?” he said, low and hard. “What do you want?”

“I’ve come with some news,” I said.

Irene Metzger appeared from behind her husband and ushered me into the sitting room. I apologized for having interrupted their meal, but she waved me off.

“We already ate,” she said, motioning to the lumpy sofa. She took a seat in an armchair opposite me. Her husband just stood there in his boots, smelling of horses and dirt.

“I was wrong about Darleen,” I said. I couldn’t tell her about the bus ticket without the sheriff’s okay, but that’s what I was thinking. “I don’t believe she ran away after all.”

Irene Metzger stiffened, seemed to quell a frisson. “I told you she didn’t run off. I know my daughter.” Then she sniffed, almost as if she were satisfied.

“Your neighbor Mrs. Blaine telephoned the sheriff earlier this afternoon,” I continued, putting her inexplicable gloating to one side. “Her two boys were playing in the snow hills at the end of your road. They uncovered a lunch box a couple of hours ago.”