Free Stone Cold Dead by James W. Ziskin Page B

parking lot. An orange-and-black metal sign read “New Holland School District Vehicle Depot.” Inside, dozens of yellow school buses, spattered with the frozen brown-and-gray residue of slush and salt, huddled on the uneven ground in the bitter cold.
    I parked at the curb and waited in the warm car, working up the courage to open the door to the cold. Just to mock me, the radio played “Theme from a Summer Place.” I smoked a cigarette and waited. It was just five, already dark, when an empty bus rumbled up to the gate, negotiated the bumpy bit of cracked sidewalk between the street and the parking lot, then juddered its way toward the other buses. A stocky man, dressed in a red-checked hunter’s cap (flaps down), blue dungarees, and a dark-green field jacket, emerged from the bus. Lugging his gray lunch pail in his meaty hands, he trod off to the dispatcher’s cabin next to the garage. I switched off the radio and climbed out into the cold.
    “I’m looking for Gus Arnold,” I announced to the two men inside. One was a slight man, about thirty, with slicked-down wavy hair and a thin, tired mustache. He was seated at a heavy wooden desk with a nameplate that identified him as “S. Pietrewski, Dispatcher.” The other man was the bus driver I’d just seen pull into the parking lot. Both stared at me. I could see their frozen breath in the cold room.
    “Gus Arnold?” I repeated.
    “That’s me,” said the driver. His broad face was red from the cold, and his bulbous, pocked nose betrayed a fondness for drink.
    “My name is Eleonora Stone. I’m a reporter for the Republic .”
    “What do you want with me?”
    “I’m investigating the disappearance of Darleen Hicks. I believe she rode your bus.”
    “Yeah,” he said hesitantly. “I already talked to Sheriff Olney about that. He said she ran off.”
    “Would you mind answering a few questions for me?”
    He looked at the dispatcher, who didn’t seem to like the idea of one of his drivers mixed up in a story like this. He squinted at me through the low light.
    “Do you remember seeing Darleen that day?” I asked, ignoring the dispatcher’s scrutiny.
    “Yeah, I seen her get on the bus in the morning like usual.”
    “What about that evening? The sheriff said you remembered seeing her on the bus.”
    Gus Arnold twitched, wiped his nose with his hand, then shook his head. “I must have remembered wrong. She didn’t get on the bus that afternoon.”
    “Are you sure?” I asked.
    He frowned and whined at me that there were a lot of kids, wearing heavy coats and winter hats. He couldn’t be expected to remember every one of them every day.
    “But the sheriff said you were certain Darleen was aboard the bus that afternoon. Then you changed your mind. What would make you doubt your memory now?”
    “I seen her in the morning, but not in the afternoon,” he repeated.
    “Did she have friends on the bus?” I asked, moving on. “Who did she sit with?”
    “There was a couple of girls, I guess. They got off at the same stop. The one before the Metzger farm. There’s the Dobbs girl and the Liswenski girl. I don’t know their first names.”
    “And you dropped those girls off that day?” He nodded. “What time was that?”
    “Same as always,” he fidgeted. “I finish my run around four twenty or so.”
    “I can show you the log from that day if you don’t believe him,” volunteered the dispatcher. “Right here,” and he flipped back several pages in his ledger to the date in question.
    I ran my finger down the column, searching for G. Arnold. It was there. Route number 17, bus 63, South Side and the Town of Florida.
    “It says here you returned the bus to the depot at six eighteen p.m.,” I said, and Gus Arnold blanched.
    “Let me see that,” said the dispatcher, rising from his seat. He scanned the ledger then looked to Gus for clarification. “That’s right, you got back late that day. Where were you?”
    Gus Arnold looked terrified,