The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen Read Free Book Online Page A

harm a clowny child like that?”
    They re-examined his relationship with Malley. There had been two and a half years’ difference in the boys’ ages, but only a few hundred feet separating them geographically, and for a time they had played together almost daily. At first, Malley had come over to David’s; the cautious Hilligiests had an unbendable rule thattheir children could not leave their own property until they reached the second grade, and then only at specific times and on specific request. David was never allowed to wander at will, even up to the time of his disappearance.
    One day when David was eight and Malley eleven, the two boys had played at Malley’s house and David was late getting home. “Where’ve you been?” Dorothy asked.
    “We went someplace to visit,” the child answered.
    Mrs. Hilligiest spoke sternly. “David, you know you were supposed to stay at Malley’s! Whenever you go to somebody’s house to play, that’s where you’re supposed to stay.”
    “Well, Malley knows this man that has a candy factory behind the school on Twenty-second, and he’s real nice. He has a pool table and everything. He give us candy, and there wasn’t nothing wrong with it.”
    Dorothy had been annoyed, but she was not the type to fly into tantrums in front of her children. “Son,” she said evenly, “I don’t want you going there ever again. That man has a bidness to run, and you’re supposed to play wherever I give you permission, and no place else.”
    A few years went by, and once again David failed to come home on time. Mrs. Hilligiest cruised the neighborhood, and in front of the candy factory behind Helms Elementary School, six blocks from the house, she spotted two familiar bicycles. She rang the bell, and a young man—“average size, mild-mannered”—opened the locked door.
    “Is my son in here?” she asked. “I understand that boys come over here to play pool. His bicycle’s out here. Would you get him?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” the man said politely, and produced Malley and David from a back room. Slightly ill at ease, Mrs. Hilligiest offered to buy some candy. The man sold her a small box of pralines and divinity for a dollar, “and it was right good candy, I can still taste how delicious it was.”
    She was disturbed by the situation, but not displeased with thenice young man. “I’d appreciate it,” she said diffidently, “if you wouldn’t let David come over here. I know you run a bidness, and he’s got no reason being here.”
    As though to reassure her, the man said, “Well, I’m a friend of Mrs. Winkle. She works here part-time, and so does Malley.”
    “Well, that’s up to the Winkles, but I’m just speaking for my own son.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Well, I’ll comply with your wishes then.”
    By the time David was eleven and Malley into his teens, the elder Hilligiests advised their son that Malley was roaming too far and too fast for their own peace of mind and the relationship would have to end. After that, Malley sometimes played with David in the Hilligiest yard, but the boys saw less of each other. The parents had been relieved, and the incident with the candyman was pushed to the backs of their minds. Reliving it now in the light of David’s disappearance, they could see no connection whatever. They drove by the old candy factory, but it was closed and locked. Another business had moved into the shed, and the man with the candy was nowhere to be seen.
    Geraldine Winkle had her own memories of the little candy factory, but she too saw no significance in them. One day in the mid-sixties, when Malley was about ten or eleven years old, he had come home and announced that the candyman had offered him a job sweeping up pecan scraps and peeling caramel off the floor and washing stainless-steel cooking vats. When Mrs. Winkle had checked out the place herself, she was offered a part-time job, dipping pralines on a piecework basis.
    The small factory in its overheated