The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen Read Free Book Online

didn’t go to the police to bitch about the man,”he said. “All we wanted was some he’p. We were pleased with the detective; he done a good job at a fair price. Even after he was off the case, he kep’ in touch, called me whenever he got a clue. The police must have spent a thousand dollars prosecuting him. It hurt me real bad that they would take so much time and money to get a fella that was out there he’ping me look for my son, but they wouldn’t spend a nickel to he’p look for David theirse’ves.”
    Assisted by Mrs. Winkle, the Hilligiests resumed their patchwork search. They had hundreds of posters printed, showing pictures and descriptions of the two boys, and offered a thousand-dollar reward, which Fred was prepared to borrow, if need be, with the greatest of pleasure. Gerry Winkle asked if it would be acceptable for her to pay back her half of the reward money on a weekly basis, and the Hilligiests told her not to worry; if the boys were found, they had no intention of making the poor woman pay. Gerry’s two brothers were cross-country truck drivers and they circulated the posters out of state, while neighborhood friends helped to tack them on telephone poles and tape them to store windows.
    After the flyers had been distributed, Fred and Dorothy extended their personal search to Arkansas and West Texas and Louisiana, visiting churches and YMCA’s and runaway homes and halfway houses, without result. At home, Dorothy would jump out of bed five or six times a night, chasing wisps of noise, hoping that she was hearing David’s footfall at last, shy and tentative on the back porch, where she had seen him last. Outside the house, there was a stop sign on Ashland Street, and she had to discipline herself not to run to the porch and check every car. “I would keep thinking maybe it might be him,” she said. “I’d think, ‘Maybe somebody threw him out on the lawn.’ You just cain’t imagine the wild things that go through your mind.” The remains of a scrawny teen-age boy were found at a nearby lake, with skull missing, and the Hilligiests spent panicky moments inspecting the belongings: rings, keys, and forty-three cents. They were not David’s.
    By the time Christmas had come and gone, Geraldine Winkle had accepted the possibility that her son might be gone forever. “Deep down inside I asked myself a true question and I answered it truthfully. I knew Malley wouldn’t run away and I knew David wouldn’t either. There’d of been a note, there’d of been somethin’. Why, I have thrown away a dozen thousand notes from Malley, but not a single word after he disappeared. What else could he be but dead? I made the mistake of sayin’ that to Miz Hilligiest one day, and it was the wrong thing. She was like a woman runnin’ around in a trance. A nervous trance. She couldn’t face the truth.”
    In their search for a clue or a plausible theory, the families had picked over the details of their sons’ lives—their behavior, their habits, every incident and happening in their short spans. They set up every conceivable hypothesis and either checked it out or shot it down. The Hilligiests wondered for a time if David might have offended somebody, but this seemed remotest of all possibilities. He was, as his mother explained, “a clowny kind of boy, but he never carried a joke too far or hurt anybody’s feelings. He’d always do li’l things like—Well, he knew how much I wanted the neighbors to think we were a respectable family, so when we’d drive up in the car David would stagger out and fall on the ground and roll around, pretending he was drunk, and then his brothers would imitate him. David knew this would get me, because we had two very dignified neighbors across the street. I’d say, ‘Oh, what are they gonna think? David, stop that!’ That’d just set the fire under him, and he’d go crazy, rolling around and all. It was so funny, I just couldn’t keep from fifing. Now who’d