Stone Cold Dead (25 page)

I paused, staring into her unblinking eyes. They sank into their sockets as the sum and substance of my words hit home. I saw the blood drain from her cheeks, and she uttered a soft and hollow “Oh.” Her husband flexed his jaw and clenched his right hand hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He noticed me watching him and stoked his smoldering glare.

“You said that Darleen had taken her lunch box the day she disappeared,” I said. “Can you describe it?”

She nodded. “It was dark-gray. A little beat up. And she had a red-and-black plaid thermos.”

“There was no thermos inside, but that’s the lunch box they found. Buried in the snow. Deliberately, it seems.” I swallowed hard. “As if to hide it.”

“So what does that mean?” asked Dick Metzger.

“Well, I know that Walt Rasmussen saw Darleen on the highway sometime around four that day.”

“On Five-S?” he asked. I nodded yes. “What was she doing there? Why wasn’t she on her bus?”

I glanced at Irene Metzger, who looked lost in thought. “She was climbing out of a taxi,” I said. “We know she’d missed her bus, so it appears she tried to reach home by taxi instead.”

“Damn it!” said Metzger through his teeth, tuning me out. “I told that girl if she missed the bus again I’d beat some sense into her with my belt buckle.”

He ran a hand through his oiled hair and paced back and forth. The violence of his reaction pushed me back in my seat.

“The taxi dropped Darleen about two and a half miles from here,” I continued. “Assuming she walked briskly, it would have taken her about a half hour to get home. But, of course, she never arrived.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Irene Metzger. Her husband was still steaming not far off.

“The snow hills are about a mile past here, aren’t they?” I asked.

She looked at her husband, and he nodded. “I suppose so.”

I thought on it for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible Darleen was never near the snow hills, that someone dumped the lunch box later on. But if the presence of Darleen’s lunch box in the snow means that she
was
in the hills, then someone must have picked her up in a car and driven her there. She couldn’t have reached the hills that day without having been seen.”

“How do you figure?” asked Metzger.

“The school bus,” I said. “It must have passed down this road around four fifteen. The driver and Darleen’s friends would have seen her.”

“Unless the girls were already off the bus when the driver reached her,” said Dick Metzger. “How do we know he isn’t a pervert who likes little girls? What do you know about him?”

I shrugged. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) “I suppose anything’s possible,” I said. “All I know is that he’s a retired garbageman. He lives by himself and drinks rye.”

Dick Metzger demanded the driver’s name. I could just picture him searching out Gus Arnold, finding him drunk, and beating him to death with a shovel. There was no way I was going to give him the name, even if I harbored my share of doubts about him, as well.

“I don’t know his name,” I said, and Dick Metzger seemed to accept it.

Irene Metzger asked me what would happen now.

“The sheriff and his men are searching the snow hills, but there are hundreds of tons of snow. If they don’t find her tonight, they plan to dig up all the snow and haul it away.”

Irene Metzger cast her eyes down to the floor. She sat there, quiet, miserable, but dry-eyed. In fact, I thought, I’d never seen her shed a tear from the moment I met her. I wasn’t judging her; I didn’t cry when my mother passed away, and I loved her dearly. That hadn’t been the moment for me to vent my grief. Not so soon after Elijah. But Irene Metzger was tearless for a very different reason: She was holding it inside. All the devastation, all her sorrow, was dammed up within her, pushing to get out, for sure, but subdued by a conscious sobriety, bordering on stoicism, in the face of her daughter’s demise. She was of simple and rugged stock, and her hard life had only taught her to be tougher; weeping was not a luxury she could permit herself.

“Do you think she’s in those hills?” she asked softly.

“It’s possible,” I said. “Likely. What with the lunch box having been found there.”

“And we just have to wait?” bellowed Dick Metzger, quite unexpectedly, as if the failure to find Darleen were my fault. “What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Since you ask,” I said, “it might help if you answered a few questions about Darleen for me.”

Irene Metzger expressed alarm. Her eyes darted to her husband, whose glare, aimed at me, suggested extreme animus.

“What do you want to ask me?” he more or less threatened.

“Well, for starters,” I said, retreating even farther into my seat, “where were you that day around five o’clock?”

His eyes opened wide, looking like two tiny blue marbles in a sea of white, and his face constricted, twisted, and flushed red. Almost purple. I thought his scalp was going to blow off his head. His wife jumped to her feet and grabbed his arm.

“You want to know where
I
was?” he hissed at me, incredulous.

“Yes,” I said, shrinking ever smaller. “If you don’t mind.”

“Hell, yes, I mind!” he roared, blasting a spume of saliva off his lips in my direction with his last word.

“I already told you that Dick doesn’t know anything about this,” said Irene Metzger, pushing herself between her rabid husband and me. “Now why did you have to go and ask him like that?”

I gaped at the two of them. Considering the circumstances, I thought my question was a natural one. Someone should ask him where he’d been, if only to find out if he’d seen or heard anything.

“If you are truly interested in finding out what happened to your daughter,” I said, “you should be eager to answer my questions. I’m trying to help, so I need to know who was where, what they did, and what they saw.” I turned to Dick Metzger, who was staring daggers at me. “Darleen was seen on Route Five-S around four. How did her lunch box wind up at the end of this road? She would have had to pass this very house to reach the snow hills. Were you here at the farm? Did you see or hear anyone drive past? Walk past?”

He just stood there glaring at me, huffing, but I could see the red starting to drain from his temples. He was struggling to maintain his indignation in the face of my logic.

“At the very least, you should want to help me,” I continued. “But instead, you’ve been avoiding me and stonewalling as if you have something to hide. Do you have something to hide, Mr. Metzger?”

He turned away and stalked to the window and back. I couldn’t be sure if he was about to strike me or confess to Darleen’s murder. He ran his hand through his oily hair again then stared me down.

“Get your pretty little behind off my sofa and out of my house,” he said in an eerily soft voice. He sneered, revealing his long teeth, stained brown from chewing tobacco and coffee. My knees were shaking.

His wife grabbed him from behind and yanked him off to the side, where she scolded him in an excited whisper. He tried to pull away, ranting that he wanted me gone, but she wouldn’t let go of his arm.

“No one else will help us, no one else cares,” she hissed through her teeth. “Don’t chase off our only hope of finding out what happened to our Darleen.”

I wanted to leave, but I didn’t dare move with the beast blocking my path to the door. He seethed, pouted like a child, but finally quieted down after a long minute. Once his respiration had returned to normal, his wife released his arm from her grip, but not her eyes from his. I could see the silent communication, built on years of living together, passing from one to the other, as she willed him to calm down. He turned and approached me slowly, his hard, cold glare fixed on me. He stopped a few feet away from the sofa, towering over me.

“I did not harm that girl,” he said determinedly, slowly, punctuating each word with a jab of his finger. “I have nothing to hide.”

I stared up at him, willing myself to appear strong, to show no weakness. He was so close that he could have reached out and wrung my neck without taking a step closer.

“If that’s so,” I said softly, “you won’t mind answering my questions.”

He clearly hadn’t expected that, but he didn’t lay a hand on me. He drew a deep sigh instead and shook his head.

“So go ahead and ask me,” he said.

“Where were you that day around five o’clock?”

He nearly blew up again but contained his anger. Had he really expected me not to repeat my question?

“I can’t remember exactly,” he said. “I was out in the field or in the barn somewhere.”

“Did you hear any cars or see anyone on the road?”

“No.”

“Were you near the Karl’s property line, by any chance? Did you see Bobby Jr.?”

“No. I don’t remember when I seen him last, but it wasn’t that day.” He paused to think. “Besides, it was dark by then. I wouldn’t have seen nothing.”

I weighed my words carefully, debating whether to ask or not. In the end, I had to. I had to put the question to him.

“Can you describe your relationship with your daughter?”

He looked confused. “My . . . relationship? I’m her father.”

“I mean, do you get along with Darleen. Are you affectionate? Stern? Indulgent?”

“I’m her father,” he said. “I don’t know how else to tell you.”

“Are you a doting father? Is Darleen Daddy’s little girl?”

He gaped at me. “What?”

If he was too dim to answer delicate questions, I’d have to be blunt: “Did you beat Darleen?”

“No!”

“Didn’t you say you would beat her with your belt buckle if she missed the bus again?”

“Well, yeah,” he granted. “But that’s just discipline. Didn’t your father ever beat you for not minding him? He should have.”

I ignored his question and opinion. We were talking about him, not me. And now I braced for the big one: “Have you ever kissed Darleen on the lips?” I asked.

I was lucky that Irene Metzger got to me before her husband did. She pushed me to the door, holding Dick Metzger off with a straight arm as she screamed like a harridan. She managed to run interference long enough for me to get out in one piece.

“Don’t ever show your face around here again!” he yelled after me, and he meant it. But angry or not, he still managed to steal a long, healthy look at my “pretty little behind” as I hurried to my car.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 1961

At seven thirty the next morning, I was parked on Division Street, opposite the junior high school. A growing stream of kids arrived on foot as the time for the first bell approached. The students milled about on the sidewalk, enjoying the warm weather, chatting and laughing as they awaited the start of another dreary school day. In the alley next to the cigar store, a dozen or so toughs leaned against the brick wall, smoking cigarettes. They were all of fifteen. Then the buses chugged into the parking lot and disgorged their loads. I wasn’t looking for children this day. I was waiting for bus number 63 and the man who drove it.

Gus Arnold was not happy when he saw me climb the stairs into the bus. He’d probably wanted to steal a nap or a drink somewhere, and I was a stone in his shoe.

“You?” he asked, positively shaking at the sight of me. “What do you want now?”

“I want to know what you did after you dropped off Carol Liswenski the day Darleen Hicks disappeared.”

His large, gray face, jowled and unshaven, froze in place. He didn’t know what to say. I helped him out.

“Darleen Hicks’s lunch box was found in a snowbank yesterday afternoon,” I said. “Right where you turn the bus around on County Highway Fifty-Eight. The sheriff must have missed you by minutes there yesterday, just after you finished your run around four thirty.”

He ran his tongue over his lips. “That’s right,” he said. “Four thirty like always. I drove straight back to the depot.”

“But not so on December twenty-first. You made an extra stop that day, didn’t you?”

“I already told you. I had a flat tire.”

“That’s what you told the dispatcher, but not what you told the sheriff.”

“What, are you keeping score? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“Let’s make a deal,” I said. “You show me where you took your nap that day, and I won’t tell your dispatcher you punctured the spare to cover for yourself.”

He was trapped. He wiped his brow and then his whole face with a yellowed handkerchief.

“I can’t drive out there now,” he whined. “They keep track of the gas and miles.”

“My car’s just over there,” I said. I had him.

Gus Arnold was no conversationalist. He sat slumped against the passenger door, staring at the mileposts whizzing by. With the bench seat set so far forward, his long legs were bent and touching the dashboard.

We passed the turnoff for County Highway 58, and my passenger grumbled directions. “Take the next right,” he said. “Slow down or you’ll miss it.”

It was a narrow, unpaved track that ducked into the woods, almost invisible if you were driving too fast or not looking out for it. I turned off Route 5 and crunched over the gravel path. Gus Arnold told me to continue straight for about a quarter mile. Then the road came to an end in a large clearing, about fifty yards wide, amid the same high pines that bordered County Highway 58 on the other side of the mountains of snow. I rolled to a stop and pulled the brake.