A Ticket to the Boneyard Read Online Free Page B

called the police and told them what he had done. By the time a police cruiser arrived on the scene, Sturdevant was dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
    I looked up from the clipping. “Terrible thing,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you know him?”
    “No.”
    “Then—”
    “I knew her.”
    “The wife?”
    “We both knew her.”
    I studied the clipping again. The wife’s name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang. I looked at her, puzzled.
    “Connie,” she said.
    “Connie?”
    “Connie Cooperman. You remember her.”
    “Connie Cooperman,” I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. “Jesus,” I said. “How in the hell did she wind up in—where was this, anyway? Canton, Massillon, Walnut Hills. Where are all these places?”
    “Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far from Akron.”
    “How did she get there?”
    “By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago.”
    “How? Was he a john?’’
    “No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don’t know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them. And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her.”
    “And that’s what they did.”
    “That’s what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out of New York. She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you’d call a born whore.”
    “Is that what you are?”
    “No, I’m not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that’s all.”
    “What’s an NJG?”
    “A neurotic Jewish girl. It’s not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn’t hurt me that way.”
    “No.”
    “At least that’s what I think most of the time.” She gave me a brave smile. “Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those.”
    “Sure.”
    “It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies.”
    “And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her.”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    She shook her head. “He knew all along. She told him from the jump. It was very brave of her, and it turned out to be the absolute right thing to do, because it didn’t bother him and otherwise there would have been that secret between them. He was a pretty worldly guy, as it turned out. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Connie, and he’d been married twice, and while he’d lived all his life in Massillon he’d traveled a lot. He didn’t mind that she’d spent a few years in the life. If anything I think he got a kick out of it, especially since he was taking her away from all that.”
    “And they lived happily ever after.”
    She ignored that. “I had a couple of letters from her over the years,” she said. “Only a couple, because I never get around to answering letters, and when you don’t write back people stop writing to you. Most of the time I would get a card from her at Christmas. You know those cards people have made up with pictures of their children? I got a few of those from her. Beautiful children, but you would expect that. He was a good-looking man, you can see that from the newspaper