The evening sky was clear, and the mercury had fallen below freezing again. I chatted with Stan and Pat for over an hour while the search went on inside. Brossard had called a lawyer, Joe Murray, who was inside making sure the search was kosher. Deputy Spagnola showed up a while later with some coffee for his pals, and Stan offered me his. I told him I’d just had some before arriving, but I wouldn’t mind holding the cup for him. My hands were cold.
Finally, at eight o’clock, the sheriff and DA exited the apartment building with Joe Murray in tow. They made their way over to a red-and-white Chevrolet sedan and proceeded to unlock it with some keys the sheriff was holding. Using flashlights, two deputies climbed inside the car and scanned the floor and seats for evidence. They shoved their hands between the seat cushions, examined the glove box, and then popped open the trunk. They spent a good forty-five minutes going over the car, without any success. At least none that I could see from my distant vantage point.
In the end, Joe Murray was beaming, obviously happy with the results of the search. He bade the sheriff and the DA good night and went back inside to confer with his client. Frank and Don made their way over to me and the deputies.
“You boys can head back to the jail,” said the sheriff. “Don and I have discussed it, and I want you to release Ted Russell. We don’t have anything on him.”
“Just let him go?” asked Pat Halvey.
“Yes. And give him a ride home.”
“Let me guess,” I said once Stan and Pat had gone. “Nothing in the car.”
“Nothing,” said the sheriff.
“Well, what can you expect after four weeks?” said the DA. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think we’d find anything tonight. If he’s guilty, he’s had plenty of time to dispose of the evidence.”
“Do you think he’s guilty, Don?” I asked.
The Thin Man looked up at the sky and gave it a good think. “I’d put my money on him,” he said. “Proving it is going to be a lot harder, though. No witnesses and no physical evidence linking him to the girl.”
“And no indication that he even left the office early that day,” said the sheriff. “We interviewed the staff and his boss a couple of hours ago. No one can remember that at all.”
“So you think I’m wrong?” I asked.
The sheriff looked down at me and pursed his lips. “No, Ellie. I think you’re right. He’s your man. I spoke to the Hudson chief of police by phone this afternoon. He said Brossard was one of their top suspects. Had the girl in his office for some kind of detention after school that day. But there was another student. A boy, a senior, in the office with them as well. Brossard told the police he dismissed the girl first, but the boy said he was sent away first. Later, the kid changed his story to match Brossard’s, and the cops just couldn’t break their alibis.”
“My God,” I whispered. “That poor girl.”
“Yeah. So now we’ve got to figure out how to nab this guy.”
“You’re going to need some proof,” said the DA. “Because as things stand now, he walks.”
I arrived home a little past ten. I read and reread the AP article Norma had dug out of the archives. It was only twenty lines long, and there was no mention of Louis Brossard or the other student. Still, to no avail, I tried to wring some kind of clue out of that old story. Then I retraced in my head Darleen’s steps on the day she died, hoping for inspiration. But still nothing. Not even a couple of stiff drinks helped. Brossard was guilty, I was convinced. But I had no hope of proving it.
I switched on the television to clear my mind. What’s My Line? or This Is Your Life. I switched it off again, and the phone rang. It was after ten thirty on a Monday. Well past normal New Holland visiting hours.
“I’ve got to speak to you,” came a vaguely familiar voice from the other end. I couldn’t place it immediately. Shaking and vulnerable, the inflection was confusing me. Then he said it was urgent and called me “Miss Stone.”
“Where are you, Ted?” I asked.
“Fiorello’s,” he answered. “Please. I need to see you right away.”
“I’m in the upstairs apartment across the street. Number forty-six.”
Moments later, the bell rang, and I descended the stairs to open the newly installed door. Ted Jurczyk stood in the cold night air, breathing heavily, as if he’d just finished running line drills on the basketball court. When our eyes met, he started to cry.
“Come on in, Ted,” I said, wrapping an arm around him.
I made him some hot chocolate and waited for him to compose himself. Something had knocked him for a loop. Finally, he wiped his eyes and drew a restorative breath.
“Tell me. What happened?” I asked.
He looked up at me, eyes and nose red, lips chapped. “She’s gone,” he said, and more tears spilled over his eyelids. “I can’t believe she’s really dead.”
I put a hand on his and let him talk.
“I was still hoping, you know. Just hoping she’d left like she said she would.”
“She told you she was leaving?”
He nodded. “The day she disappeared. I met her by the bus. I’m sorry I lied to you that night at the gym,” he said. “I was so scared. I was sure you would try to pin the whole thing on me.”
“I wasn’t gunning for you, Ted.”
“I know that now,” he said, wiping his nose on a napkin.
“What did Darleen say to you that day?” I asked. “It must have been pretty important to risk missing her bus.”
Ted Jurczyk reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a brown paper bag. He placed it on the kitchen table.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Darleen’s diary.”
“She gave this to you?” I asked, picking up the bag. “The day she disappeared?”
Ted nodded. “She told me she had a secret to tell me. She said she was running away for good with Joey Figlio. She wasn’t sure when, but soon, she said.”
“Why did she give you her diary?”
“She said she didn’t want her father to find it. That would spoil everything. She told me not to read it, but to keep it until she sent for it.”
“So, have you read it?” I asked.
“No. I gave her my word.”
“Then why have you brought it to me?”
Ted looked down into his hands. “Because she’s gone. Someone needs to read what she didn’t want her father to know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
I drove Ted home. It was a school night, and he was out late. As things stood, he was sure he’d be grounded if his father caught him sneaking back in. I pulled to a stop outside the darkened duplex on Polack Hill.
“I just couldn’t read it,” he said. “I didn’t want to know.”
“I won’t lie to you, Ted. It still might have to come out.”
He nodded one last time and popped the door open. He climbed out and disappeared into the dark pathway alongside the house.
Back home at midnight, I tore the cover off the diary; the lock didn’t stand a chance. I poured myself a long drink and settled in on the sofa. The diary took up where the one I’d found in her room had left off more than three years earlier. The months drifted by without anything of interest; Darleen was eleven and twelve at the time, and the entries were about games, friends, and farm animals. But somewhere in the fall of 1958, when she was about to turn thirteen, she started writing about boys. First there was Edward, who, she wrote, was in love with her. She liked Edward very much, but like a brother. Still, it was flattering to have a boy carry your books, send you notes, and buy you sodas in the cafeteria. Darleen got braces on her teeth in September of that year. She liked her dentist, who was a handsome married man. Then she started writing about “crazy Joey Figlio” who was in her seventh-grade homeroom. “He’s in love with me,” she wrote. “I sure do get a lot of attention from boys all of a sudden.”
In October 1958, her entries stopped for three months. Then they resumed tentatively, with short
, almost impersonal details. What she wore to school, who she sat with at lunch, what movie she saw. Finally, in the middle of February 1959, her reticence broke wide open. I gasped when I read the matter-of-fact entry: “Dad made me do it again.” Again three weeks later, another brief mention: “Again. I wish he’d leave me alone. I don’t like it, but he goes away if I do what he says.”
The next eighteen months catalogued a string of late-night visits to her room by her stepfather. He watched her bathing, made her “do things” to him, “did things” to her, and threatened her to keep quiet. As the months passed, the frequency of his visits increased, but she was no more descriptive in her accounts. Just the same vague words like “again” and “things.” I found at least sixty distinct occasions in the diary where she wrote about his visits. She described how he talked of “lying” with her as soon as she was old enough, but for now, he was satisfied with the “disgusting things he made me do.”
In May 1960, Darleen wrote that she’d met an older boy who liked her a lot. Wilbur Burch was eighteen and had a car. “Wilbur’s a simple boy,” she wrote, “but he’s going to get me out of here. He’s going into the army in Arizona. I sure would like to see Arizona.” Darleen went on to explain that Wilbur was crazy for the “tricks” she did with him. She wrote that he fell head over heels for her after that.
I put the diary down and downed another drink before I could continue. Drawing a deep breath, I resumed. Later that summer, Joey Figlio emerged as Darleen’s steady and best hope for escape. She wrote that he was “a little weird,” but he loved her and “had a plan” to take her away from the farm and her stepfather. Wilbur had turned out to be “a dud” and “kinda slow.” By all accounts, Darleen had never shown her “tricks” to Joey, who seemed to love her anyway. She wrote that they planned to run away and get married.
But in September, Darleen forgot all about Joey Figlio and gushed for weeks about Mr. Russell, the dreamy music teacher. She fantasized about marrying him and moving out of her nightmare and into his dream. There was nothing in the diary to suggest that Ted Russell shared any of her interest. In fact, after about a month and a half, Darleen pronounced herself over Mr. Russell, who was kind of boring and had a way of wrinkling his mouth that “looks dumb and annoys me.” I knew what she meant. Ted Russell had a funny habit of pressing his lips together on the left side of his mouth for no apparent reason. Darleen was right. It did look dumb, and it annoyed me, too.
From that point to the end, Joey Figlio was her man.
“I guess I love Joey,” she wrote in early December 1960. “He loves me, and I’d rather marry him than that dolt Wilbur Burch.”
She even mentioned Louis Brossard. In reference to the rumors about Darleen and Ted Russell, the assistant principal interviewed her to find out if something was going on. She told him there was nothing between her and the music teacher.
“Mr. Brossard is kind of gross. I don’t like talking to him. But he’s been nice to me.”
In early December, Darleen related her attempt to get money from Ted Russell and Louis Brossard. Russell caved immediately when she threatened to say he’d had his way with her and left her pregnant. Brossard got really angry, refused, and advised her to pray to Jesus for guidance.
Darleen continued to mark the visits from her stepfather with sickening regularity. By the end, she would simply write, “Again” and nothing more.
I threw the diary down on the end table and hung my head. In the gloom of my apartment, the night had closed in around me as I read the wretched account of what he’d done to her. Two hours had passed. Two hours of revolting accounts of the worst crimes I could imagine against a child. What dies inside a man to make him do such things? How far from decency must he turn to lay his hands on a girl that way? How black must his soul be? I could imagine all manner of cruelty and selfishness and even understand them to a degree when compared to molesting a child. Dick Metzger was a monster. My instinct about him had been right all along. And right behind him was the despicable Wilbur Burch. Child molesters, both of them. Base and worthless human beings. I would be happy to do my part to help send them both away forever.
I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. And when I dozed off, terrible nightmares invaded my head. Horrible visions that I won’t repeat. Dreams that twisted my insides until I tore at my pillow, gnashed at its cover with my teeth, and wept for Darleen Hicks and Geraldine Duffy. I promised justice for them both. And that’s when I realized how confused and emotional I’d become. I was hunting two different fiends, and I didn’t know what to think, whom to accuse, which to hate more. Dick Metzger was a lowlife child molester. I had proof of that. But now I needed to prove that either he or Louis Brossard was a killer as well.
I took two hours to write the article that would blacken Dick Metzger’s name with the foulest tar I could conjure. Even if he never faced prison for his crimes, he would forever be known as a monster who’d molested his daughter. My heart raced as I detailed his abuse of a pubescent girl. For obvious reasons, the paper would never publish the ugly words I wanted to write. But I made sure the perversion and depravity came through in every sentence.
Once I’d finished, I photographed several of the more telling passages, including Darleen’s plans to escape with Joey and Wilbur. I made sure to document many of the nauseating entries about her stepfather. I might even find one or two where the language was moderate enough to be printed along with my article as powerful visual evidence.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1961
It was six. I showered and dressed. By seven, I was sitting outside Frank Olney’s office, waiting for him to arrive. In my purse was the diary. In my head, I was turning my facts and theories over and over, looking for the answer that was so elusive. It seems trite, but I compared the impasse to the hardest crossword puzzles I’d ever solved. I recalled how they’d stumped me, then suddenly a crack appeared, giving way to a trickle, then the flood gates opened, and the game was won, as suddenly and unexpectedly as a dam bursting. But this was no crossword puzzle. The clues had not been devised to lead to an eventual solution. Quite the opposite. There was a dearth of clues, and the killer was more interested in burying evidence than engaging in an intellectual game.
Frank finally lumbered into the office at eight fifteen. He hung his coat on the stand and looked at me.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, his expression betraying a premonition that I had a very good reason for the early start.
“Can we talk inside?”
I laid out the diary on his desk, and he eyed it with dread.
“I see you took the liberty of breaking the lock,” he said, reaching for it. “Okay, give me the abridged version.”
“Darleen planned to run off with Joey Figlio. She collected money from various people.”
“That’s nice,” he said, thumbing through the first few pages. “But we already knew that. What’s the punch line?”
“Dick Metzger had been molesting her for two years.”
The sheriff groaned as I filled him in and showed him some of the more telling passages. He turned green as he read the chilling, almost nonchalant descriptions written in Darleen’s hand. “Last night he made me do it again,” was the one that prompted Frank to slam his right hand down on his desk and rise to his feet. He grabbed his coat and hat from the stand, then reached into his desk for his gun.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to haul that son of a bitch in here.”
“Why are you taking your gun?”
Frank stared at me, face impassive. “Because I’m hoping he gives me a reason to shoot him.”
It was ten o’clock when I presented Charlie Reese with my story and the photos I’d rushed through the lab moments earlier. He read my copy carefully, then examined the photos one by one. When he’d finished, he pushed back in his chair and sighed.
“The world is a terrible place for people like Darleen Hicks,” he said. “I’ve
never understood how a human being can be so rotten as to do that to a child.”
“Then you’ll print it?” I asked.
Charlie looked up at me. “No, Ellie. We can’t print this. Not in this form anyway. Ours is a family newspaper. We can’t write that her father made her do . . . Oh, God, it makes me sick to think about it.”
“How would you write it then?” I demanded, my hackles rising.
“Well, if the sheriff arrests him, we can say what the charges are. But we can’t give this kind of detail.”
“Can we at least print a photograph of the diary? Here, where she says, ‘He came to my room again last night.’”
Charlie gazed at the picture for a long time. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll have to run it by Artie.”
At noon, I phoned Frank Olney for an update. He told me that Dick Metzger was cooling his heels in a cell downstairs on suspicion of statutory rape, sodomy, corruption of a minor, and child molestation.
“What about Wilbur Burch?” I asked.
“He’s still in city jail,” said Frank. “But I spoke to the DA. He says that Burch is under nineteen, and, therefore, is considered an underage offender. Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to pay for this.”
This was crazy. The newspaper refused to publish the salient details of Dick Metzger’s crimes against nature, and the state considered a nineteen-year-old child molester underage. Plenty of folks were looking out for the rapists and the molesters, but no one seemed to care for the fifteen-year-old girl.
“Did Don say anything about Metzger?” I asked.
“You’re not going to like it,” said Frank. “He said that the diary alone probably isn’t enough to charge him.”
“What?”
“The language in the diary is too vague, he says. The girl never actually spelled out what he was doing to her or what he was making her do. And Don says the diary is hearsay anyway and inadmissible as evidence.”
I swore at Frank down the line, and he urged me to calm down. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “I’m on your side here. And, though I shouldn’t be telling this to the press, I took the opportunity to bang Metzger’s head into the doorframe of my cruiser when I was putting him inside.”
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