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

blue-green shed was as busy as a maternity ward when Nurse Winkle arrived to begin her part-time job; there were so many orders stacked up that the manager, a pleasant young man named Dean Corll, was running the assembly line on two full shifts, from early morning till after midnight,and was hiring all the extra help he could find to supplement his standard work force of five women. The plant made divinity, pralines, pecan chewies and the other simple confections that are lumped together in the South and Southwest under the classification “Mexican candies,” although they are no more endemically Mexican than Latvian or Ugandan.
    From the first day, Mrs. Winkle found her part-time boss a fascinating study. “He was like a man that had nothin’ on his mind but success. The lights were on many a night, all night. I got to feelin’ sorry for him, that the job was too much for a poor kid like him maybe in his mid-twenties. His mother seemed to be involved in the business, but she really wasn’t much help. Her name was Mary West, and she used to come in there flashin’ her diamonds and her furs. She was determined to get married. Seems like her latest husband was some kind of a nut and she’d divorced him. She met him through a computer dating service, and now she was goin’ back to the computer lookin’ for another one. I couldn’t figure her out. She had a big smile and a wonderful personality, a little plump but a nice figure, too. She was an attractive woman of maybe fifty, but looked younger. Why’d a person like that have to go to a computer for a husband?”
    Sometimes Mary West gave the appearance of pushing her son. “She’d want to know why he hadn’t done this or done that,” Gerry Winkle said. “I never did get the story straight, but one of her ex-husbands had a candy company nearby and she wanted to beat him. That’s what drove Dean so hard, I guess.”
    Young Corll had another facet to his personality, according to Mrs. Winkle. “He was crazy about children; he’d let them walk all over him. Every afternoon that doorbell would ring and there’d be a gang of little kids from the Helms grammar school, beggin’ for broken candy. Then Dean put a pool table in the back and the boys used to knock at all hours. ‘Can we play pool?’ When I found out Malley was goin’ there after work, I told him to cut it out. Notthat I had any feelin’ that Dean was doing wrong. I just felt that he shouldn’t be disturbed. He worked awfully hard and I respected the man for it.”
    While Geraldine Winkle slowly adjusted to the loss of Malley, just as she had adjusted to the loss of her sailor husband years before, the Hilligiests were refusing even to consider the possibility that their own son might be gone forever. No clue, no hint, no rumor, no wild idea was too outlandish to be taken seriously. Sometimes they would drive a thousand miles on weekends, searching. They ran up high telephone bills that completed the destruction of the family budget. The window-trimming job that had been interrupted by David’s disappearance remained undone through the summer, the paint cans from Sears unopened. The vacation to Kerrville was called off, and never mentioned, not even by the other children. “Everything stopped,” said Dorothy Hilligiest. “Everything.”
    A friend took the parents to a seer who reported in a quavery, astral voice that David was with someone “adult in size but not in age,” that he was being kept “in a grassy area around water, but not a beach or river,” that he was wearing cutoff blue jeans and was adequately clothed and well fed, “but he cries often, and he wants to go home.”
    “It sounded just like David would act,” Mrs. Hilligiest said, “and it really upset us. Now we felt like that something was holding him and preventing him from coming home.”
    A psychic named Clifford Royce arrived in Houston to make a public appearance at a motel, and the Hilligiests paid their six