Free The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead by Hampton Stone Page A

be enough, but I can’t understand it. I’ll never understand it.” Gibby nudged him back to the track of his narrative. The Korean War was a long time over and he had told us he had never been in New York before.
    He explained that. It had been his first idea that he would ask for his discharge at a camp somewhere near New York so he could see Ellie as soon as he came home, but he had applied for college admission back in River Forks. He told us about the college. It was one of those little denominational institutions that are so numerous out there. The timing worked out badly. The army was going to be turning him loose just in time to start school and coming to New York would have meant losing a whole semester. He had already delayed this higher education of his for many years but he had been ready to delay it again. He had been that concerned about Ellie.
    It had been little sister again who had been the practical one. She was hungry for a sight of him and for River Forks and home. She could take the time. She had told him to get his discharge near home and she had gone to River Forks to be there to meet him. She had done more than that. She had arranged with the people who were renting the house so that they let him have his old room. It had been a fine arrangement. He’d had room and board with a fine family and right in his own home and it had just come off the rent they were paying for the house.
    So that had been it. She had come home to River Forks, and New York hadn’t changed her at all. She was as pretty and as sweet and as obviously a nice girl as she had always been. She had, of course, grown up. She knew how to handle money and she was so smart and practical that she made him feel like the child. He had stopped worrying about Ellie and had buckled down to the job of getting his degree.
    She had wanted to help him with money but he had insisted on standing on his own feet. It hadn’t been hard even though he had made her take half the rent money on the house every month because it was half hers. He had done all right what with the GI Bill and a part-time job and all the money she had saved for him out of his army pay. It had been fine. Vacations he had always had a job and Ellie had come home to River Forks on visits a couple of times a year. There had been no reason for him to take the time off from school or work and to spend the money on coming to New York.
    The past June he bad been graduated and he had a teaching job coming up right there at the old school. He had already started on his Master’s in summer school and he had had a summer job, and there was Joanie. They were to be married just before the fall semester opened and they were going to live in his room at the old house. Ellie had wanted him to take the whole house and let her help him for the year or so before he would be earning enough with his teaching really to swing it, but he had refused that.
    “We were still arguing about it,” he said sadly. “We’d reached the place where she said anyhow she wouldn’t take her half of the rent money any more. She was giving us her half of the house for a wedding present. I hadn’t agreed to take it. It was too much, but that was one of the things I was going to do while I was here, really find out how she was fixed for money, make sure she was all right. She was going to go back to River Forks with Joanie and me for the wedding. We had it all planned.”
    And that was his whole story. Gibby dug hard for more but he got nothing. He very much wanted some sort of a lead to who her associates in New York might have been—friends, business acquaintances. Bannerman, aside from being confident that she had had many friends, insisted that he knew no names, had no clues. He didn’t even know what modeling agency she had worked with. For that matter he didn’t even know what a modeling agency was.
    “Men friends?” Gibby asked. “Marriage plans? Anything like that? She must have confided in