Stone Cold Dead, James Ziskin [best ebook reader android .txt] 📗

Fadge nudged me from my thoughts. “Anyone home?”

“Sorry,” I said, putting the memory aside. “Do you suppose that girl was actually Darleen Hicks?”

“Kind of a long shot, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. But she was chewing that awful gum. About the right age . . .”

“Wasn’t that after she disappeared?” asked Fadge.

I shook my head. “No, the basketball game was the sixteenth, a Friday. Darleen Hicks disappeared on Wednesday the twenty-first.”

“Could have been, then,” shrugged Fadge.

“Wait a minute. Her mother left me a photograph.”

I jumped from the sofa and scooted to the kitchen, where I grabbed the envelope and pulled out the picture. A teenage girl, smiling, with hair falling off her shoulder. There was something impish in her eyes. Just a bit naughty perhaps. Her lips were open just so, and you could detect the braces underneath. She was pretty. And she was the girl who’d held my hair and stolen my whiskey.

MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 1961

My New Year’s lethargy flowed into the next day. I was still on the sofa, still wrapped in my robe, watching the Rose Bowl and working my way to the bottom of a bowl of Chex Mix. Okay, to be honest, it was just some stale Wheat Chex cereal from the box. No nuts, no pretzels, just cereal. I love football, but even I realized that any self-respecting fan should have already showered, breakfasted, and dressed for the game. Down from the highs of my New Year’s revelry with Eddie Robeleski, and sullenly aware of the letter I was avoiding, I felt deflated and withered, filled with selfreproach for wasting another day doing nothing. And still I had no spark to drag myself to the bath. Then something strange happened.

Washington was leading Minnesota 17–0 at the half. I watched with eyes half shut as the Huskies’ cheerleaders began to lead a typical flip-card routine with their fans on the Washington side. Black-and-white squares spelling out inanities for the edification of the opposite side of the stadium and the national TV audience. I was about to take a snooze when I noticed the Washington student section was holding up some kind of funnylooking, bucktoothed creature. Looked like a beaver. Then, on command, they flipped their cards and spelled out “SEIKSUH,” Huskies spelled backwards. (I’m quick with anagrams and word puzzles.) The roaring crowd seemed to lose some of its volume, no doubt thrown off stride by the funny beaver and the backward spelling. But the next stunt silenced everyone inside the Rose Bowl, including the television announcers, Mel Allen and Chick Hearn. For some obscure reason, the Washington fans were showing their school pride by spelling out “CALTECH” for all the world to see.

I sat up, confused at first, leaned closer to the set to see better, then burst out laughing. Caltech didn’t even have a football team, but they had just won the Rose Bowl. The prank lifted the fog I’d been under since I’d sent Eddie Robeleski packing New Year’s Eve. Skipping the second half (Washington won 17–7), I showered and dressed in a hurry. It was a Monday, after all, even if it was a holiday. If a gang of Caltech eggheads could infiltrate the Rose Bowl and steal the halftime show on national television, I could get off my duff and start asking some questions.

CHAPTER THREE

My company car, a 1955 red-and-black Dodge Royal Lancer, sat cockeyed in the street in front of my apartment, its right front tire mashed against the curb, where it had skidded to a stop New Year’s Eve. Not my best parking effort. A glaze of frost, spotted like lichen on a rock, dappled the black hood, windshield, and roof. It was cold. A sunny, biting cold that sears your nostrils with every breath. Your mouth moves like a ventriloquist’s, as if you’ve been punched in the lip and shot full of Novocain. I jumped inside the car, praying it would start, and turned the key. Not always first at the post, the engine roared to life this day, eight cylinders thrumming under the hood as I pumped the gas pedal for encouragement. It took a full five minutes before the heat finally made some headway with the frost on the windshield. The wipers swept a halfthawed patch of glass clear so I could see. I shifted into gear and pulled away from the curb, heading down Lincoln toward Market Street, where I turned south. At the bottom of the hill, past DeGroff’s TV and Radio Repair, the New Holland Hotel, and the Masonic Hall, the Mill Street Bridge spanned the Mohawk, connecting New Holland proper with its South Side. A steel truss affair, the gray bridge arched like a behemoth’s spine above the icy river fifty feet below. Like New Holland itself, the Mill Street Bridge was grim and industrial, form and function as one, with little thought for trimmings or frills.

On the opposite end of the bridge, the Coezzens Broom Factory anchored the west side of Mill Street, and the Mueller Linseed Oil Company held down the east. I drove up the hill, past the armory and the home of a fellow with whom I’d had a brief, ill-fated fling two years earlier. His mother didn’t appreciate the finer points of my “Jewiness,” to use her word, and my forward behavior eventually proved too much for his conservative sensibilities. He broke it off via telegram. Funny how guilty he felt after the sin, not while we were breaking the commandments (number seven, in particular). It was just as well; as sinners go, he was fairly passive. A girl doesn’t want to do all the heavy lifting herself.

At the top of the hill, I turned west on Route 5S, heading toward the open farmland of the Town of Florida. My first stop was a gray clapboard house, set back about a hundred yards from the road on a solitary stretch of County Highway 58. A fine powder of dry snow had blown into