The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed

Charles Runyon

• Publisher: Prologue Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781440539022
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura poliziesca e gialli

Accidents happen, but the town of Sherman seems to have more than its fair share of the fatal kind. Someone falls into a well, another drowns, another is killed by an exploding stove. Curt Friedland comes back to town to clear his brother of murder, convinced there is more to all these deaths than mere coincidence. Enlisting the aid of Velda, whose sister was supposedly murdered by Curt's brother, the two of them gradually begin to attract the attention of a very ingenious killer, a man well versed in the game of Death.

CHAPTER ONE
Velda’s Game

When you see a stranger in our town, you know he’s come here, he’s not passing through on his way to somewhere else. Sherman is the end, the jump-off. At the east side of town there’s a sign reading: State Maintenance Ends. From here west the gravel roads dwindle away into a wilderness of limestone ridges they call the Brush Creek Nation. Ten miles west the ridges slope down into Lake Pillybay, but tourists always approach it from the other side on Highway 30.

That’s why I stared at the man who came into the store just after I’d opened. A blond beard hid the lower part of his face; his deep tan was a rarity in late March. I watched him wipe mud from calf-high rubber boots and walk toward the counter. He was young, I could tell from the springy sureness of his walk. He was married; I saw the gold wedding band as he lay his palms flat on the counter. A deep bass voice asked for a can of Velvet and I set it in front of him. He opened it, gouged the tobacco with a long forefinger, and raised it to his nose. He squinted at me over the can and said:

“Velda Groenfelder?”

I shook my head. “Velda Bayrd. I married Louis Bayrd.”

His sun-whitened eyebrows rose. “Ah, you’ve risen in the world. A flatlander by marriage.”

I frowned at him, looking for a familiar face beneath the beard. Only a native would speak of flatlanders with that peculiar taunting inflection.

“You used to live in the Nation?” I asked.

He nodded. There was movement behind the foliage as though he might be smiling, but I wasn’t sure. I tilted my head so I could see his face in better light. That mat of beard darkened from yellow on his cheeks to a coppery black beneath his chin. A deep tan gave his blue eyes a piercing brilliance. He might have looked mean but I didn’t feel it because of the intelligence in his eyes. Hate and intelligence don’t go together.

I shrugged and smiled. “I can’t place you. Come out from behind the bush.”

“Curt,” he said. “Curt Friedland.”

My knees went soft at the sound of the name. My smile stuck in place and my cheeks felt like old leather. His eyes drove into me like blue steel rivets. He was leaning across the counter, making me hear it, making me like it. I saw something in his eyes I’d missed the first time I’d looked; a hard reckless indifference. I knew the grin was there now, but it was a twisted taunting thing that said I could think and do what I liked because he didn’t give a damn.

I took the can of tobacco and set it on the cash register.

“They sell tobacco in the tavern,” I told him. “It’s fresher. You’ll like it better.”

He shook his head slowly. “After fifteen years, Velda? I didn’t even think you’d know me.”

“I knew your family. Your brother.”

He leaned back, still smiling in a way that didn’t reach his eyes, smiling like I was a little doll doing all kinds of funny tricks.

“My brother Frank,” he said. “Your sister Anne. She’s been dead twelve years and Frankie’s serving life. And what’s all that got to do with you and me?”

“You know damn well what it’s got to do with us.”

“Code of the hills? The pride of the clan?” He shook his head. “I’m a long time away from cornbread and hominy grits, Velda. I’m surprised you aren’t.”

I felt hot blood burning my cheeks; I didn’t like the way he made my words sound. “They held a trial. The verdict was guilty.”

“You believe it?”

“ — Yes.”

“All right. Stick to it. Don’t even think about it.” He reached past me and picked up the tobacco; I could have stopped him by grabbing his hand, but I couldn’t make myself touch him. He dropped a quarter on the counter and walked away. I was surprised to see that he was over six feet tall and heavy in the shoulders. I remembered him as being thin and pale … but then he’d only been sixteen when he left.

My hand touched the quarter and I started to ring it up. A sudden impulse made me throw it toward the front of the store. It clanged against the window and went spinning off, leaving a tiny starburst on the plate glass. Curt paused an instant, then turned around.

“I suppose Frankie killed Bernice Struble too.”

“Bernice? Why … that was an accident. The coroner’s jury — ”

“Keep believing it, Velda. The authorities are never wrong.”

He smiled and walked out. I watched him climb into a mud-caked Ford with a Florida license. His smile was gone now. He backed out and drove away without looking back.

I went into the bathroom and bathed my face in cold water. I put my hand to my breast and breathed slowly, wishing I’d inherited a little less of the Groenfelder temper. I should have been dignified and haughty with Curt: Really, Mr. Friedland, did you expect to be met by a brass band?

I touched up my lips and brushed hack the red-blonde hair above my ears. Then I walked back into the empty store, through the warm smell of oranges and floor wax and leafy vegetables. I looked at the calendar: March twenty-third. I pulled a pencil from above my ear and circled it. It’s a habit of mine; my husband says I try to hold back time by putting little traps around the dates. I saw that I’d also circled February tenth, the day Bernice Struble fell in the well….

Or was pushed? Oh no, I thought, I won’t let Curt Friedland’s evil seed take root. The coroner’s report had said she died by drowning. Hair and pieces of scalp had adhered to the bricks where she’d scraped her head going down. It was assumed she’d slipped on the ice and fallen in; fingernail scratches on the curbing indicated that she’d tried to catch herself and failed.

I’d been in Franklin that day, watching my daughter Sharon roller-skate. We’d just gotten home when the line ring came about Bernice. You can’t mistake a line ring: the insistent zzzt-zzzt-zzzt goes on until presumably everybody picks up their phone to learn what the emergency is. Half the time the operator announces that school is closed or the Eastern Star meeting is canceled, but often it’s real tragedy. It rang on April 17, 1947, the day the tractor turned over on Marston and crushed his chest. That date will never be anything else for me, just as June twelfth will never be anything but the date we were supposed to get married. It rang when Marvin Jobe drowned, when Tom Groner’s little gal Lotte burned to death on a haystack, and the morning Audrey and Jim were found in their car poisoned by carbon monoxide. It rang on February 4, 1954, the night Jerry Blake burned to death along with his store. It rang on July 18, 1951, while I sat at home sewing a dress for Sharon’s fourth birthday. I lifted the receiver to hear that my sister Anne had been found dead in her car outside the Club 75 and that Frankie Friedland had been shot trying to escape —

Gladys Schmit came into the store with her overshoes flopping, uncoiling a woolen scarf from around her neck. She pulled off her embroidered mittens, remarked how nice it was to see a thaw after three weeks of snow and ice, then with a birdlike jerk of her head she asked:

“Who was that young man with the beard?”

After thirty years of teaching school, Gladys treated the entire community as though they’d never left her fifth and sixth grade room.

“Curt …” I said, and the last name stuck in my throat. “Curt Friedland.”

Her eyes went round behind silver-rimmed spectacles. For a moment her lips pursed in a childish disappointment which reminded me that Gladys was, after all, pushing sixty.

“I didn’t know he was coming back.”

I fingered the ball-point pens in the rack and said nothing. Gladys peered at me with a look of bright interest: “What’s he going to do?”

“You’ll have to ask him, Gladys. I don’t know.”

“You knew him, didn’t you?”

“He was four years younger than I. You couldn’t say I knew him.”

“Oh.” She was frowning, obviously trying to get in touch with her memory. Then, giving an abrupt jerk of her head, she picked up a loaf of bread and brought it to the counter. “He was the youngest of the four, I remember now. His brothers were so rowdy and athletic. Nobody thought there was brains in the family until they brought that intelligence test in, and Curt made the highest score in the state. People were amazed, he was always so shy and polite….”

I thought: Gladys, are we talking about the same one? I remembered seeing Curt fight a larger boy on the playground; Curt had seemed to back away, trying to flee in panic, and my heart had gone out to the kid because I thought he needed help. He backed against the barbed-wire fence which ran between the playground and a cornfield; the other boy lunged, flailing his arms. Curt sidestepped abruptly and the boy crashed into the fence. Curt turned and began hammering with his small fists; when the other boy tried to defend himself he ripped his arms on the sharp barbs. The other boy had finally run away crying. with blood streaming from the gashes on his arms and dripping off his fingers. He’d had twenty stitches taken and Curt hadn’t a bruise. The boy’s parents had wanted Curt punished, but there was nothing to he done; Curt hadn’t cut the boy, the boy had cut himself. Only those of us watching realized that Curt had deliberately maneuvered the boy into the fence. I’d stopped feeling sorry for Curt at that moment; from then on I’d pitied those who were deceived by his quiet manner.

Gladys was telling how, as alumni secretary, she’d kept Curt’s address up-to-date in order to send him invitations to the alumni banquet. In five years she’d traced him around the world: “Germany, France, Italy, Tangier, Morocco, Mexico. Japan. Hong Kong. Hawaii. Haiti. Costa Rica. I sent him questionnaires for the school paper and he filled in occupations like opium peddler, beachcomber, ship’s cook, taxi driver, things like that. I was so relieved when he settled down and got a college degree, then got a job with that research firm. When he started his own firm I thought, Well finally one of the Friedlands will amount to something. Then six months ago his questionnaire came back from the West Indies. He’d listed his occupation as fisherman. Now he’s here.” She pulled on her mittens and tucked the bread under her arm. “Well, Curtis wasn’t like his brothers. He won’t cause trouble.”

She went out with her overshoes flopping and I thought, No, he won’t unless he wants to, but I think he wants to….

I didn’t mention him to my husband that night; I didn’t want to get involved with ...