The Case Against Owen Williams Read Online Free PDF

anything about her. I went to every name on the list except one that I couldn’t find, and I went to some other people that they said might know something about her. Nothing. I went to the railroad station and the bus stop. Nothing. Nobody had seen anyone like her.”
    â€œDo you think that she might have got on a train or a bus without them noticing?” Drost asked.
    â€œThat’s possible, I suppose,” Hooper said.
    â€œBut Matilda Coile said she didn’t take any of her clothes,” Drost said.
    â€œYou said she had a fight with her old man,” Hooper said. “Maybe it was bad enough that she didn’t dare go back for her clothes. Maybe he threw her out.”
    â€œMaybe,” Drost said. “It still seems odd though.”
    â€œMaybe she’s set up with some guy and doesn’t want to be found,” Carvell said.
    â€œI wondered about that too,” Drost said. “I wondered if maybe she’d been set up somewhere by Williams. But he’s not the type. He’s a child.”
    â€œHe’s the last person who saw her?” Carvell asked.
    â€œThe last person we know who saw her,” Drost said. “He said she told him that she wasn’t feeling well, and he walked her to the Hannigan Road and left her there.”
    â€œMaybe she did go home,” Hooper said.
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œShe had another fight with her father.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Hooper said. “I was just thinking.”
    â€œWhat do you know about Daniel Coile?” Drost asked Carvell.
    â€œNothing that’s new,” Carvell said. “That place he lives on is the family place. The old man died a long time ago. Dan had a lot of brothers and sisters. I don’t know where the brothers went. Some of the sisters are married and live around here. Dan’s wife came from out near the border, and the talk is that Dan married her because he had to. I guess they were a pretty rough crew out there for a while. They drank, and Dan used to knock his wife and the kids around. But he’s slowed down, and a few years ago, the wife got religion, and I haven’t heard much about either of them lately.”
    â€œWhat about the daughter?” Drost asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Carvell said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a little like the mother at that age.”
    â€œI wonder what I should do,” Drost said. “I don’t think I’d better put out an alert this soon, but it’s beginning to look funny. I wonder if I should go out to the dance hall and look around. Just so that everything’s done right before I start the rumours flying.”
    Carvell looked at his watch.
    â€œI’ll come along,” he said. “Nice day for a walk in the country.”

    The Silver Dollar was a long, wooden, one-storey building standing in a ragged clearing of dirt and weeds that had once been part of a farm, now failed, vanished, and mostly overgrown by bushes and small trees. From the front peak of the roof a round sign, painted silver, hung out over the front door with the name, The Silver Dollar, printed around the edge. The centre of the sign had been decorated with a couple of dozen bullet holes of assorted calibres and one charge of bird shot fired at close range. The door was closed, and there were shutters on the windows, not to keep out burglars, which they wouldn’t have done, but to dissuade the local bucks from shooting out the windows.
    Drost parked at the back out of sight of the road, and he and Carvell got out. There was no one around. Drost had been out to The Silver Dollar often enough at night but never during the day, and the quiet seemed unnatural. Instead of the usual uproar of music and rage, there was only the backdrop of bird calls and somewhere, everywhere and nowhere at once, the intermittent shrillness of a cicada.
    They walked from the dance hall