The Underground Man by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

ma’am. It looks like she hit him over the head with that pickax.”
    “And buried him?”
    “He was buried when I found him.”
    “How could a girl do that?”
    “It was a shallow grave, ma’am. Girls can do about anything boys can do when they set their minds to it.”
    A whine had entered Kelsey’s drawl under the pressure of her questioning and the greater pressure of her fear. Impatiently she turned to me:
    “Mr. Archer, is my grandson Ronny dead?”
    “No.” I said it with some force, to beat back the possibility that he was.
    “Has that girl abducted him?”
    “It’s a good assumption to work on. But they may simply have run away from the fire.”
    “You know that isn’t so.” She sounded as if she had crossed a watershed in her life, beyond which nothing good could happen.
    I stopped the pickup behind my car on the driveway. Kelsey got out and offered to help Mrs. Broadhurst. She pushed his hands away. But she climbed out like a woman overtaken by sudden age.
    “You can park the truck in the carport,” she said to me. “I don’t like to leave it out in the sun.”
    “Excuse me,” Kelsey said, “but you might as well leave it out here. The fire’s coming down the canyon, and it may get to your house. I’ll help you bring your things out if you like, and drive one of your cars.”
    Mrs. Broadhurst cast a slow look around at the house and its surroundings. “There’s never been fire in this canyon in my lifetime.”
    “That means it’s ripe,” he said. “The brush up above is fifteen and twenty feet deep, and as dry as a chip. This is a fifty-year fire. It could take your house unless the wind changes again.”
    “Then let it.”
    Jean came to meet us at the door, a little tardily, as if she dreaded what we were going to say. I told her that her husband was dead and that her son was missing. The two women exchanged a questioning look, as if each of them waslooking into the other for the source of all their troubles. Then they came together in the doorway and stood in each other’s arms.
    Kelsey came up behind me on the porch. He tipped his hard hat and spoke to the younger woman, who was facing him over Mrs. Broadhurst’s shoulder.
    “Mrs. Stanley Broadhurst?”
    “Yes.”
    “I understand you can give me a description of the girl who was with your husband.”
    “I can try.”
    She separated herself from the older woman, who went into the house. Jean rested on the railing near the hummingbird feeder. A hummingbird buzzed her. She moved to the other side of the porch and sat on a canvas chair, leaning forward in a strained position and repeating for Kelsey her description of the blue-eyed blond girl with the strange eyes.
    “And you say she’s eighteen or so?”
    Jean nodded. Her reactions were quick but mechanical, as if her mind was focused somewhere else.
    “Is—was your husband interested in her, Mrs. Broadhurst?”
    “Obviously he was,” she said in a dry bitter voice. “But I gathered she was more interested in my son.”
    “Interested in what way?”
    “I don’t know what way.”
    Kelsey switched to a less sensitive line of questioning. “How was she dressed?”
    “Last night she had on a sleeveless yellow dress. I didn’t see her this morning.”
    “I did,” I put in. “She was still wearing the yellow dress. I assume you’ll be giving all this to the police.”
    “Yessir, I will. Right now I want to talk to the gardener. He may be able to tell us how that spade and pick got up on the mountain. What’s his name?”
    “Frederick Snow—we call him Fritz,” Jean said. “He isn’t here.”
    “Where is he?”
    “He rode Stanley’s old bicycle down the road about half an hour ago, when the wind changed. He wanted to take the Cadillac, but I told him not to.”
    “Doesn’t he have a car of his own?”
    “I believe he has some kind of jalopy.”
    “Where is it?”
    She shrugged slightly. “I don’t know.”
    “Where was Fritz this morning?”
    “I