Night of the Toads by Dennis Lynds Read Free Book Online Page B

wouldn’t know. We never knew him, and she never mentions him. You don’t think she’s gone to him? That’s crazy.’
    ‘You mean your whole family never knew him?’
    There was a nasty kind of sigh. ‘We never even met him, and we didn’t care. She ran off, my Daddy tore up her letters. She wrote three in a year, she never liked to write, she was in seventh grade when she ran off. After a year she stopped writing.’ The was a pause. ‘Anne’s three years younger, Mr Fortune. I should have married first! She left me to help Ma along. I didn’t care about her. Four years ago I found out she was up here. I came up why not? Down home all the decent boys were married while I helped Ma. She never mentioned Boone Terrell, I didn’t ask. We didn’t get along here anyway.’
    ‘Ted Marshall?’ I said.
    Silence. ‘Not just him. She keeps away from me.’
    ‘Do you know what she does weekends?’
    ‘Does? Sells herself in her night clubs.’
    ‘Yeh.’ I said.
    ‘Do you have some idea? You sound—’
    ‘I’ll know more after I’ve been back to her apartment.
    I hung up before she could ask me more. All I had was an off-beat suspicion. I told Marty to wait an hour. If I wasn’t back, Joe would put her into a taxi. She understood.

Chapter Seven
    There was nothing like police outside Anne Terry’s building. The stream of homecomers had thinned to solitary stragglers as the last purple light faded. The street door was open, and I heard noise in the basement. I went up, hoping the lock on her door hadn’t been fixed. It had been. I listened for a full five minutes. That can be a long time alone in a corridor. There was no sound inside. I took a breath, opened the new lock with one of my master keys.
    The police had done a routine search now, but the place hadn’t changed. It was still warm, comfortable, and just beginning to have that feel of emptiness deserted apartments get after a time. Or that could have been me—looking all day for a girl who wasn’t anywhere. Only she had to be somewhere.
    I started, again, with the closets—every pocket, the linings, the floors, the shelves. One concrete hint of a second home was all I needed. I didn’t get it. The chests-of-drawers were no better. Books are often good for addresses, other names. Hers weren’t: no inscriptions, no pieces of paper, no bookmark envelopes. I had hopes for the bathroom—drugstores use name-labels, and with luck she would have bought some medicine at her other place. She hadn’t.
    The desk was next. It took an hour, the silence of the apartment growing heavy on me with distant voices all around from other buildings. Over an hour, but when I found it I got all at once. A sales slip from Macy’s. Among all her paid bills; a grain of sand if I hadn’t been looking for it. I didn’t fault the police, I had seen it once myself. But now I knew what I wanted. A sales slip for a bathrobe, with her name and the Tenth Street address—and an address for the robe to be sent to: Terrell, 1977-A Steiner Street, Long Island City, Queens.
    I took the subway. There was no pot of gold in this. Northbound from Eighth Street it wasn’t crowded until we got to Forty-second Street, and I had a seat. By Rockefeller Centre I sat dark in a valley of humanity hanging from hand-holds. They rocked with the train, adapted to it after long years. Some read. Some stared. Some muttered to themselves. Some hung with their eyes closed, asleep standing. The late ones who worked long hours, whipped.
    In Queens I found the right bus. It let me out in one of those neighbourhood business sections that fill the boroughs of New York. A thousand ‘downtowns’ like Chinese boxes, the smaller inside the larger from the centre of Manhattan out to Little Neck. The ‘New York’ the world knows is only the heart of Manhattan, the rest a series of main streets a lot like Peoria.
    The main street was crowded, the stores open late where profit hung by a fingernail. Twenty yards