STRANGE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OMNIBUS by Benson Grayson Read Free Book Online Page A

the cheek.”
    Despite this tender age, Jimmy recognized the awful meaning of those words. “You mean I will never see them again?” he asked, seeking to confirm his understanding. “Not until you meet them again in Heaven,” his grandfather answered. Jimmy began to sob, and then abruptly stopped. The happy memories of his parents he had from his early childhood days in Ohio were crowded out by the loathing he had felt toward the Washington move. Added to this was the attitude his parents had displayed toward him about that thing in the cellar.
    Under the benevolent care of his grandparents, Jimmy grew to be a fine young, very devoted to them and regarding them as his real parents. When he grew a bit older, Jimmy asked his grandfather to tell him what really happened to his parents. The older man answered that had only been informed that the entire family had been found murdered in their home, that no motive had ever been ascertained and that the killings were still kept on the books by the Washington police as an unclosed case
    Jimmy graduated from high school and left the farm to attend college. He initially planned to major in agriculture and return to help run and eventually inherit has grandfather’s farm. However, he did so well in English that several of his professors suggested he switch his major and go into writing as a career. After some consideration and recalling that his father had enjoyed being a reporter, he decided to do so.
    Upon graduating from college, Jimmy worked for a year to live with his grandparents, working in the nearby town as a teller in the bank to save enough money to pay for graduate work in journalism. With his savings and part time work, he was able to complete journalism school and took a job at a local Indiana weekly. From there he moved as a reporter to the Indianapolis paper, where he was considered a top reporter and was considered, but did not win, a Pulitzer Prize for a highly-praised series of stories on corruption in some state agencies.
    Jimmy’s reputation was so good that he received an offer from the “New York Times” to join its staff, and he thereupon moved to New York. He married an attractive, intelligent young woman from the Mid West who worked in the paper’s business office, and they had two children. Everyone who had a chance to observe Jimmy’s behavior toward his children remarked that he was the most attentive, caring father they had ever seen.
    Some years later, the newspaper asked Jimmy to go down to the nation’s capital for a few weeks to assist in its Washington Bureau. He normally would have been reluctant to go notwithstanding the opportunity this afforded to have him permanently assigned to work there because of his reluctance to be apart from his wife and children. However, his wife was planning to go with the children to stay for a short time at her parents’ beach cottage so that the short assignment in Washington would not constitute any real hardship.
    His arrival in Washington marked the first time he had returned to that city since his leaving it with his grandfather as a child. For more than a week, he worked out of the Times Washington Bureau, enjoying the experience very much. One day, when he happened to be passing the offices of the “Washington Post,” he decided to go in and check the old files of the paper to see if it had published account of his parents’ murder. He had earlier tried to do so with the microfilm copies of the “New York Times” issues for the period but could find no mention. This he didn’t regard as unusual, after all the Times would not normally cover a murder in a city some two hundred miles away from New York.
    Since he had a general idea of the date his grandparents had first told him about his parents’ fate, it was not too difficult for Jimmy to find and read the story. It was rather a long one on the first page of the section dealing with city events. He learned that the police had discovered the