Deadly Welcome Read Online Free Page B

still there with its broad porches, but the stores across from it had been torn down and replaced by a chain supermarket set well back, a big parking lot, orange parking lines vivid against asphalt, in front of it. Cars dozed in the sun. A pregnant woman walked tiredly toward a dusty station wagon, followed by a boy in a soiled white apron pushing a supermarket cart containing two big bags of groceries. A grubby little girl sat on the curbing in front of the telephone office, solemnly licking a big pink icecream cone. Cars were parked diagonally in the sun on either side of Bay Street, noses patient against the curbing. There was a new bright plastic front on Bolley’s Hardware. Where Stimson’s Appliance had been there was a big shiny gas station where two fat red-faced men stood drinking Cokes and watching an attendant check the oil on a Chrysler with Ohio plates.
    He read the lawyer names and the doctor names on the second-floor windows of the Gordon Building, and a lot of them were different, but a lot of them could be remembered.
    The Castle Theater was closed, boarded up. There was a new dime store. And now they had parking meters.
    He looked at Ducklin’s Sundries. It was bigger. It had taken over the feed store, and the whole front was an expanse of cream and crimson plastic and big windows. He parked in front of it. Getting out of the car and walking in was one of the most difficult things he had ever done. It was frigidly air-conditioned. An old man who looked vaguely familiar stood by a big magazine rack mumbling to himself as he read a comic book. Two young women sat at the counter with their packages, eating sundaes. There was a pimpled young girl in a yellow nylon uniform behind the counter, scraping the grill with a spatula, slowly and listlessly. A young man sat on his heels by a center counter, taking items out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. Alex Doyle knew no one.
    He walked to the counter and slid onto one of the red stools. The pimpled girl glanced at him and dropped the spatula, wiped her hands on her apron and came over.
    “Coffee,” he said. “Black.” When she brought the coffee he said, “Is Joe or Myra around?”
    “Joe? Myra? I don’t get it.”
    “Mr. or Mrs. Ducklin,” he said.
    “They don’t own it any more,” the girl said. “You want to see the owner, it’s Mr. Ellman and he isn’t in.”
    The young housewives had apparently overheard the conversation. “Pardon me, but Joe Ducklin died a long time ago. Oh, ten years anyway. She ran it for a while and then she sold out, a couple years later I guess it was. It’s kinda creepy, somebody asking for Joe. Pardon me. I mean it just sounded creepy. You know.”
    “I used to live here.”
    She was a heavy young matron, hippy, with a rather coarse face and a dab of chocolate on her chin. “I’ve been right here my whole life long, so if you lived here I guess maybe I ought to know you.” She laughed in a rather disturbingly coy way.
    “I used to work in this store,” he said.
    The other woman peered at him intently. “You wouldn’t … you couldn’t possibly be Alex Doyle? You must be!” She was a sallow blonde with a long upper lip.
    “You’re right.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t guess you’d know me because I was just a little bit of a thing, but I sure remember you coming over to the house to see Jody. Jody Burch. I’m one of Jody’s kid sisters. I’m Junie. Now I’m Junie Hillyard. I don’t know if you remember Billy Hillyard. And this here is my best girl friend, Kathy Hubbard, who used to be Kathy King.”
    “I … I don’t remember Billy Hillyard, except as a name. But I certainly remember Jody. Does he live here?”
    “Jody’s dead,” she said. “He liked the navy so good he stayed in, and it was just three years ago and he was on a supply ship and they were loading something and something broke and they dropped it on him. It was a terrible thing. He had thirteen years in and he was only going