The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen Page B

fishin’ and all.”
    His wife started to cry. “I cain’t believe it either,” she said. “I’ll never believe it.” She composed herself and dialed Missing Persons to pass along the news about the letter. After she had read it into the phone, the voice on the other end told her, “Well, if you’ve heard from him, he isn’t missing anymore. We’ll have to take him off our list.”
    That same morning, Gerald and Eunice Oncale read a similar letter. Eunice mislaid it later, but she could recite it from memory:” ‘Mom, I’m sorry I left like I did, but I got a better job working on a truck loading and unloading from Houston to Washington. We should be back within three or four weeks. I’ll either call you or see you then. Love, Johnny.’”
    Gerald noted that the letter was in Johnny’s handwriting, but Eunice saw something peculiar. “Gerald,” she said, “Johnny can’t write this good. Why, there’s not a misspelt word anywhere!” She told her husband she had a mother’s feeling that she might never see her son again.
    Oncale flatly refused to believe that the boy was in trouble. “Just like all the rest of ’em nowadays,” he said. “He’s run away for awhile. Can’t nobody keep track of ’em. He’ll be back when he gets an appetite.”
    Summer passed, and Houston’s clammy winter began, and there was no word from either boy. One night Eunice’s sister picked up her ringing telephone and was told to stand by for a person-to-person call from Frankfurt, Germany. A voice came on the line and began talking like a phonograph record played at high speed, and the operator cut in and said she would try for a better connection. The sister waited, but there was no call-back. Later she told Gerald and Eunice, and they decided that Johnny must be in the Army in Germany. “That call couldn’t have come from anybody else,” Gerald insisted. “He’s alive, he’s okay, that’s the main thing!”
    The Baulches took turns dialing anyone who might have a clue or a suggestion about Little Bill’s disappearance. Like Dorothy and Fred Hilligiest, undergoing their own quiet ordeal twelve blocks north, they examined their son’s background for clues, and like the Hilligiests they found nothing to suggest that he might have run away. “Little Bill was a steady boy,” Billy Gene said. “He wasn’t mixed up in the thangs that alius get boys in trouble. Why, he wouldn’t even touch a drank! When we’d be fishin’ out in the middle of the lake, I’d alius take along a few beers, which I have myself drank a little all my life, and I’ve offered it to him, and he’d say no thanks. Out there dyin’ of thirst! That’s how I know my son wouldn’t touch no alkeehol. I’d say, ‘Son, it’s wet, jes’ put a little in your mouth,’ and he’d say, ‘No, I don’t wont that stuff in my mouth.’ Wouldn’t take a swaller even.”
    “He was the same about dope,” Janey Baulch said. “One time when he was fifteen, two years before he went away, a blond-headed boy named David Brooks give him a capsule, and Billy brought it on home to me. Said, ‘Hey, lookee here what David give me!’ His dad wasn’t in from work, and I just took that pill andI said, ‘We’ll dispose of this rat cheer!’ And I flushed it down the commode. Then I called the police, and they sent a man from narcotics. He wrote everythin’ down, and he tole Little Bill and I, he said, ‘We have David Brooks on our list now, but we can’t pick him up unless we catch him sellin’ or passin’ it to somebody.’ The next time Brooks tried to give Little Bill some dope, we called headquarters and asked for the same detective, but they never could locate him. Efficiency! Little Bill tole me Brooks kept givin’ those things out like candy, and the police never did nothin’.”
    The Baulches also had reason to remember David Brooks’s close companion, Dean Corll, who once had been the subject of mild suspicion in the Baulch