Read Online Where Is Janice Gantry? by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

his life and he is nearing retirement age. Of the nine kids, six of the boys are married—with only two of the married ones still living in the area. The youngest boy is still in high school and lives at home. The next to the youngest is at Florida State, and working on a shrimp boat out of Tampa summers.
    Mrs. Gantry answered the phone and when I told her who it was, she said, “Oh.” She put a world of meaning into that single flat monosyllable. She had guessed the relationship I had enjoyed with her widowed daughter, and she had resented it and cherished the hope it would blossom into marriage, and had blamed me when we broke up.
    “Sis hasn’t showed up here yet, Mrs. Gantry.” I listened to a silence that promised to continue indefinitely. “Is she home?”
    “No, Mr. Brice.”
    “Well … do you know where she is?”
    Her worry overwhelmed her strong feelings about me. “No, I don’t, and I wish I did. She didn’t come home all night. She got a phone call last night a little before eight o’clock and she went out without saying who phoned her, and she just … hasn’t come back. I phoned Mr. McAllen but he hasn’t seen her. And I … phoned your place a little while ago but there was no answer.” I knew what it had cost her to make that call, and to tell me she had made it.
    “She didn’t pack a bag or anything, as if she was going on a trip?”
    “Oh, no! She didn’t do anything like that. She practically didn’t change a thing to go out, so I knew it wasn’t very important. We were watching television when she got the call. She kept on the same dark red halter top and just changed from shorts to some gray slacks and put on some sandals and … said she’d see us later. I didn’t even know she hadn’t come home until I looked into her room this morning. I keep wondering whether to tell the police.”
    “Maybe it would be a good idea, Mrs. Gantry.”
    “Are you hinting about something you’re not telling me?”
    “No. She’s a reliable gal. It isn’t like her to go off on impulse, is it?”
    “No, it isn’t …”
    “And she would have phoned so you wouldn’t be worried.”
    “Yes, I guess she …”
    “If she should phone the office or if I learn anything, I’ll let you know right away, Mrs. Gantry.”
    “Thanks, Mr. Br … Sam.”
    After I took care of twenty minutes of desk work, I drove to Boca Grande and made it in a little less than fifty minutes. An insured from New Jersey had clipped a column and brought a large chunk of the roof of an old hotel garage down onto the top of his Chrysler Imperial. I had made an appointment with a local builder to meet me at the scene, and we went over his estimate with the owner. The column was powdery with dry rot up under the eaves where it had snapped. The warp of fifty seasons had pulled the rusty old spikes out of the roofing timbers. The owner got too greedy. He thought he had a brand new two-car garage coming. He yammered too long and too loud about my plan to prop the sagging roof up on a new column and reshingle the corner area. It could have been done for about two hundred dollars.
    The owner cheered up when I told him I’d changed my mind and I was willing to call it a total loss. I asked the contractor what he thought the structure was worth before the car smote it.
    “Maybe fifty dollars,” he said.
    “Put it in writing, and I’ll get another estimate.”
    The second estimate was seventy-five dollars. I told the owner I would approve a check to him for sixty-two dollars and fifty cents for a total loss and he would receive it in due course.
    He was still roaring at me as I drove away. I wished I could have continued the argument indefinitely. It was one way of being able to stop thinking too clearly about Sis Gantry. But alone in the car, traveling on roads too familiar, I had to endure the torment of my own worry, my special concern.
    “Stupid broad!” I said, and hit the heel of my hand on the steering wheel.