Read Online The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead by Hampton Stone - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t among strangers. The man she worked for, for instance, Frank Hamilton, he’d been a friend of Pop’s. He’d known her from a baby. He was like an uncle to us, or something. See what I mean?”
    “What made her come to New York?”
    “A girl she had known at high school had been in a beauty contest and had been Miss Ohio. This girl had gone to New York and was working as a model. She had invited Ellie to spend her vacation in New York. More than that she had urged her to pack and come. Modeling was wonderful and she was sure Ellie could get a job and even if she couldn’t, she could certainly get a job as a typist-stenographer and in a job like that she would be making three times what she made in River Forks.
    “That’s what sold Ellie,” Bannerman said. “She wrote me all about it, a real grown-up letter. It didn’t make sense for her to stay in River Forks working for so little and using up my savings when I could use them after I got back home. We owned the house free and clear. Pop had left it to us that way and there was this housing shortage and she was getting a wonderful rent for it. So with that and the money she could make in New York she wouldn’t have to touch any of my savings and she didn’t think she would even have to use any of my allotment money. She was going to try to save that up for me too. She had it all figured out just as though she was some fifty-year-old banker or something.”
    “And she wasn’t quite eighteen,” Gibby said.
    Not quite eighteen. He repeated it after Gibby and there was the little sad-eyed smile again. He had worried himself half-crazy about her but the letters had kept coming regularly, at least as regularly as letters did come to combat units in Korea. She had stayed with the beauty contest winner for a couple of weeks and had found a stenographer’s job right away. After the first two weeks she had gotten herself a room at the YWCA. Then a couple of months later she had found a little apartment for herself.
    “Not this one,” he said. “It was some place called Queens.”
    “Yes,” Gibby said. “Probably cost a lot less than anything over here.”
    Bannerman looked at the one room with its kitchenette and bathroom appendages.
    “This can’t cost much,” he said. “There’s little enough of it.”
    Gibby had no intention of letting the thing channel off into a discussion of New York rentals.
    “The friend that got her to come to New York,” he said. “Do you know her name?”
    “Williams,” Bannerman answered. “Grace Williams. That isn’t her name now. She married somebody. It was just about the time Ellie got that first apartment. I don’t know his name. Anyhow she married him. He was here in the navy, I think. He shipped to the West Coast and she followed him out there. Ellie wrote me all about it.”
    “I thought if we could find some of the people who knew her here in New York,” Gibby said, “they could help us.”
    “She had a lot of friends,” Bannerman said.
    “Any you know?”
    “No. I’ve never been here before, but from her letters I could understand she had a lot of friends. Ellie would. People always liked Ellie. She was so pretty and sweet. You just looked at her and you could see what a nice girl she was.”
    He had still been in Korea when she had begun sending him money. She had given up the typing and she was working as a model. There was far more money in modeling and she was doing wonderfully. She didn’t even need the money that came in every month from the house out in River Forks and she was banking all the allotment money for him. He had always wanted to go to college and it had only been because of her that he hadn’t gone. Now he would have his chance. When he got back he could go on the GI Bill and it wouldn’t even be hard going because he’d find quite a lot of savings she was piling up for him and if he needed more, she would always be able to help him. Meanwhile she didn’t want him going