Read Online A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

the first light went on inside the house. I pushed the bell and she opened the door and looked out at me, the light behind her, child in her arms.
    “Mrs. Rorick?”
    “I’m Mrs. Rorick,” she said. Her voice was soft and warm and pleasant.
    “You were Cindy Kirschner then. I was a friend of Timmy Warden in prison camp.”
    She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Won’t you come in a minute.”
    When I was inside and she had turned toward the light I could see her better. The teeth had been fixed. Her face was fuller. She was still a colorless woman with heavy glasses, but now there was a pride about her, a confidence that had been lacking in the picture I had seen. Another child sat on a small tricycle and gave me a wide-eyed stare. Both children looked very much like her. Mrs. Rorick did not ask me to sit down.
    “How well did you know Timmy, Mrs. Rorick?”
    “I don’t think he ever knew I was alive.”
    “In camp, before he died, he mentioned a Cindy. Could you have been the one?”
    “I certainly doubt that.”
    It confused me. I said, “When I mentioned him you asked me to come in. I thought—”
    She smiled. “I guess I’ll have to tell you. I had the most fantastic and awful crush on him. For years and years. It was pathetic. Whenever we were in the same class I used to stare at him all the time. I wrote letters to him and tore them up. I sent him unsigned cards at Easter and Valentine Day and Christmas and on his birthday. I knew when his birthday was because once a girl I knew went to a party at his house. It was really awful. It gave me a lot of miserable years. Now it seems funny. But it wasn’t funny then. It started in the sixth or seventh grade. He was two grades ahead. It lasted until he graduated from high school. He had a red knit cap he wore in winter. I stole it from the cloakroom. I slept with it under my pillow for months and months. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
    She was very pleasant. I smiled back at her. “You got over it.”
    “Oh, yes. At last. And then I met Pat. I’m sorry about Timmy. That was a terrible thing. No, if he mentioned any Cindy it wasn’t me. Maybe he would know me by sight. But I don’t think he’d know my name.”
    “Could he have meant some other Cindy?”
    “It would have to be some other Cindy. But I can’tthink who. There was a girl named Cindy Waskowitz but it couldn’t have been her, either. She’s dead now.”
    “Can you think of who it could be?”
    She frowned and shook her head slowly. “N-No, I can’t. There’s something in the back of my mind, though. From a long time ago. Something I heard, or saw. I don’t know. I shouldn’t even try to guess. It’s so vague. No, I can’t help you.”
    “But the name Cindy means something?”
    “For a moment I thought it did. It’s gone now. I’m sorry.”
    “If you remember, could you get in touch with me?”
    She smiled broadly. “You haven’t told me who you are.”
    “I’m sorry. My name is Howard. Tal Howard. I’m staying at the Sunset Motel. You could leave a message there for me.”
    “Why are you so interested in finding this Cindy?”
    I could at least be consistent. “I’m writing a book. I need all the information about Timmy that I can get.”
    “Put in the book that he was kind. Put that in.”
    “In what way, Mrs. Rorick?”
    She shifted uneasily. “I used to have dreadful buck teeth. My people could never afford to have them fixed. One day—that’s when I was in John L. Davis School, that’s the grade school where Timmy went, too, and it was before they built the junior high, I was in the sixth grade and Timmy was in the eighth. A boy came with some funny teeth that stuck way out like mine. He put them in his mouth in assembly and he was making faces at me. I was trying not to cry. A lot of them were laughing. Timmy took the teeth away from the boy and dropped them on the floor and smashed them under his heel. I never forgot that. I started working while I was in