The Colorado Kid Read Online Free PDF Page A

passed between them, and this time she couldn’t come even close to reading the thought that went with it. They were sitting in identical lawn chairs, Stephanie with her hands on the arms of hers. Now Dave reached over and patted one of them. “We don’t mind tellin you…do we, Vince?”
    “Nah, guess not,” Vince said, and once again all those wrinkles appeared as he smiled up into the sun.
    “But if you want to ride the ferry, you have to bring tea for the tillerman. Have you ever heard that one?”
    “Somewhere.” She thought on one of her mom’s old record albums, up in the attic.
    “Okay,” Dave said, “then answer the question. Hanratty didn’t want those stories because they’ve been written to rags. Why have they been?”
    She thought about it, and once again they let her. Once again took pleasure in watching her do it.
    “Well,” Stephanie said, at last, “I suppose people like stories that are good for a shiver or two on a winter night, especially if the lights are on and the fire’s nice and warm. Stories about, you know, the unknown.”
    “How many unknown things per story, dear?” Vince Teague asked. His voice was soft but his eyes were sharp.
    She opened her mouth to say As many as six, anyway, thinking about the Church Picnic Poisoner, then closed it again. Six people had died that day on the shores of Tashmore Lake, but one whopper dose of poison had killed them all and she guessed that just one hand had administered it. She didn’t know how many Coast Lights there had been, but had no doubt that folks thought of it as a single phenomenon. So—
    “One?” she said, feeling like a contestant in the Final Jeopardy round. “One unknown thing per story?”
    Vince pointed his finger at her, smiling more widely than ever, and Stephanie relaxed. This wasn’t real school, and these two men wouldn’t like her any less if she flubbed an answer, but she had come to want to please them in a way she had only wanted to please the very best of her high school and college teachers. The ones who were fierce in their commitments.
    “The other thing is that folks have to believe in their hearts that there’s a musta-been in there someplace, and they got a damn good idea what it is,” Dave said. “Here’s the Pretty Lisa , washed up on the rocks just south of Dingle Nook on Smack Island in 1926—”
    “’27,” Vince said.
    “All right, ’27, smarty-britches, and Teodore Riponeaux is still on board, but dead as a hake, and the other five are gone, and even though there’s no sign of blood or a struggle, folks say musta-been pirates, so now there’s stories about how they had a treasure map and found buried gold and the folks that were guarding it took the swag off them and who knows what-all else.”
    “Or they got fighting among themselves,” Vince said. “That’s always been a Pretty Lisa favorite. The point is, there are stories some folks tell and other folks like to hear, but Hanratty was wise enough to know his editor wouldn’t fall for such reheated hash.”
    “In another ten years, maybe,” Dave said.
    “Because sooner or later, everything old is new again. You might not believe that, Steffi, but it’s actually true.”
    “I do believe it,” she said, and thought: Tea for the Tillerman, was that Al Stewart or Cat Stevens?
    “Then there’s the Coast Lights,” Vince said, “and I can tell you exactly what’s always made that such a favorite. There’s a picture of them—probably nothing but reflected lights from Ellsworth on the low clouds that hung together just right to make circles that looked like saucers—and below them you can see the whole Hancock Lumber Little League team looking up, all in their uniforms.”
    “And one little boy pointin with his glove,” Dave said. “It’s the final touch. And people all look at it and say, ‘Why, that musta-been folks from outer space, droppin down for a little look-see at the Great American Pastime. But it’s still