Read Online The Girls Are Missing by Caroline Crane - Free Book Online Page A

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    Christmas card from Daniella and you didn’t send her one. What’s the matter with you?”
    “Just didn’t think of it,” Carl answered with a smile.
    Joyce said, “I would have sent her one, but I didn’t know her address.”
    “Is that why you don’t write?” Olivia asked. “You lost her address?”
    “I have it someplace,” he replied.
    “And you used to be so close.”
    Joyce said, “I think we ought to keep in touch. We might like to visit her sometime. I’ve never seen the Southwest.”
    Carl asked in astonishment, “What on earth do you want to visit Daniella for?”
    “They used to be so close,” Olivia repeated, “after their father and I were divorced. It’s a shame.”
    A reversal of her earlier thesis.
    “How old were they?” Joyce asked. She really knew very little about Carl’s early life.
    “Let’s see. Carl was four, I think, when we separated, and Daniella was nine. No, wait, it was later. I married again two years later, you know.”
    “I knew you’d married again.” Only because Olivia had a different last name. “But what do you mean ‘it was later’?”
    “The time I’m talking about. It was after I remarried. I was with Carl a lot in those two years in between—he was so little—then I married again. Daniella was eleven. She took over for me then. She was almost a mother to him. But I suppose he grew up after a while and didn’t need a mother.”
    Joyce glanced at Carl and found him watching Mary Ellen.
    His coffee cup began to rattle in its saucer and he set it down. “Haven’t you anything decent to wear?” he demanded of his daughter.
    Mary Ellen’s jaw dropped. “This is decent. What do you want me to do, wear a blanket? Honestly, Daddy.”
    “Carl, really, it is hot,” Joyce reminded him, and her words sounded familiar. They had been through all that the other day.
    Tight-lipped, he replied, “It’s the way she was bending over.”
    “Well, I’m sorry I don’t have a bra,” Mary Ellen sulked. “I’m sorry I can’t stay six years old forever.”
    Joyce reached out to pat her arm. “You don’t want to be six years old forever.” How fortunate that Mary Ellen accepted her own maturing process, even if her father did not.
    Furiously he hissed, “Joyce, mind your own business.”
    She was silent, chastened. This was between father and daughter—but so irrational. It would only hurt Mary Ellen, and Carl, too, in the long run.
    I’ll get her some bras, she decided. If Barbara can’t be bothered, I can.
    She thought again of the murder and how helpless it must make him feel with a growing daughter, a phenomenon men never seemed to understand or take for granted.
    Olivia watched them all with a forced little smile.
    11
    Mary Ellen was enchanted by her young brother, if not by anything else in the household. She leaned over the bathinette watching him kick, and held the spray hose while Joyce soaped his body.
    “He’s so tiny,” she exclaimed. “Was he even smaller when he was born?”
    “He was scrawnier,” said Joyce. “They usually are. But actually he was rather big for a newborn. Eight pounds, three ounces.” She lifted Adam from the bathinette and wrapped him in a towel. Downstairs, the telephone rang.
    “Can I hold him while you answer it?” Mary Ellen asked.
    Joyce picked up the phone in the bedroom. Immediately Barbara’s agitated voice sputtered over the wire.
    “Listen, I just heard on the radio they found a second body right where you are. A second body. I didn’t hear anything about a first one.”
    “Another? I didn’t—When was this?”
    “Yesterday. You mean you didn’t know?”
    “About the first one, yes. But not—Where was it? Did they say?”
    “Just ‘in the same area.’ Now, what first? Was it anywhere near you? Was it one of those missing girls?”
    “Yes, the older one. It was in the newspaper, Barbara.”
    “I was away for the weekend. Now tell me, how near you?”
    “Not right here. Maybe half