Day of Wrath Read Online Free PDF Page A

said with false confidence.
"Wouldn't want to be putting the wrong ideas in anyone's head."
    "Of course not," the woman said.
    "I mean, this is a serious business, isn't it? This is
a bad thing."
    " A bad thing," Madge repeated.
    "I blame it on the school system," Fred said. "Now they
want another mil of tax money, and they don't even look after our children
properly. Our whole society is screwed up, if you ask me. When I was a
boy, no one ran away from home. No one wanted to. Home was . . ."
    "Everything," the wife said. "Exactly. Home was everything.
You lived there and you died there. And the generations passed through
your house. And you got to see people growing old, and they got to see
you growing up and another generation coming. Nobody stuck anyone else
in nursing homes, to
wither and rot. Nobody ever ran away."
    " It was all natural," Madge said.
    "That's what it was. You learned to accept things—to
tolerate things. Differences. To accommodate them for the sake of the family.
You had to accept them, because you saw yourself everywhere you looked.
Like your whole life was happening at once. Bits and pieces of it. Different
stages. From birth to death. So how could you not show . .."
    "Charity," Madge Rostow said.
    I was moved in spite of the sentimentality of the words
and the sing-song way they'd been delivered. And in spite of the fact that
things had never really been that way. The Rostows were only voicing their
own hopes and the hopes of their beleaguered class. For them, it had all
come down to pictures in a photo album—those bits and pieces of a continuous
time.
    "Well, here she is," Fred said with alarming gaiety.
    " How you doing, princess?"
    Sylvia Rostow ambled into the room, plopped down on a
baize chair, and stared at us with undisguised boredom. She was a plump,
freckle-faced teenager, with her mother's dirty blonde hair and her father's
knife-blade nose and a little, bruised O of a mouth that made her look—and
would probably always make her look—as if she'd been sucking on a stick
of cinnamon candy. She had on a tartan skirt, knee socks, sneakers, and
a school-girl's white blouse. And she was chewing a wad of gum so large
that it made her pale, white cheek look swollen.
    "Get rid of that gum," her mother commanded.
    Sylvia pulled a long string of it out of her mouth, then
sucked it back in like a strand of spaghetti.
    " Young lady," her mother warned her.
    Sylvia gave her a look, then reached inside her mouth,
pulled out the wad of gum, and plunked it down in a glass ashtray sitting
on a table beside her chair.
    " Satisfied?" she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.
    "You mind your manners," the mother said.
    Sylvia made a face, then stared at me. "So you're the
detective, huh?"
    "I'm the detective," I said.
    " You don't look like a detective," she said. "You're too
old."
    I laughed and Sylvia's mom threw her hands to her head
as if she thought she might lose her mind. Fred squirmed on the arm of
the sofa.
    " Princess," he said.
    "Well, geez, Dad," Sylvia said. "I mean, how do you know
he's a real detective? He could be just anybody."
    Fred looked at his wife—as if to say "she's got a point."
    Sylvia plainly had him wrapped around her pudgy finger.
But the mother wasn't taken in for a second. "Stop being such a smart-aleck,
Miss," she said. "Or there's going to be trouble."
    " Geez," Sylvia groaned. "O.K. What do you want to ask
me?"
    I said, "Do you know where your friend Robbie Segal's
gone?"
    "She's not my friend," she said disdainfully. "Not my
real friend."
    "That's not what I've been told."
    "Well, you've been talking to that batty Mildred."
    "That's it!" Madge Rostow said. "You're grounded for the
night."
    "Oh, Mom," Sylvia said.
    "And if you don't start behaving, it'll be for the week.
Your friend Robbie could be in a lot of trouble, whether you know it or
not. I want you to tell this man everything he wants to know or there's
going to be hell to pay later."
    "Robbie can take care