Beware the Young Stranger Read Free Page A

miles to converge on coastal resort towns. A sleepless weekend on a main diet of hamburgers follows.
    â€œIndividually, they’re everyday, normal kids. They go, some of them, because it’s the thing to do. Parents permit it because they’re too busy to think it through, because everybody’s doing it, and because such jaunts by the youngsters have taken on the earmarks of status symbols. The results are not always pretty.”
    Vallancourt waited patiently for Dorcas to go on.
    â€œThis past spring, a lovely girl from Keith’s home town—Cheryl Pemberton was her name—talked her parents into letting her go with a group of girls to Port Palmetto, Florida. She put up the usual arguments. The girls had reserved a cottage, quite apart from the boys, she assured them; girls from the best families in town were going; she simply had to fit in with the crowd; she could take care of herself; and, finally, didn’t they trust her?”
    Vallancourt watched her shiver.
    â€œCheryl Pemberton’s parents never saw her alive again.”
    â€œDorcas …”
    She looked resolutely away from him, spine stiff, hands locked in her lap.
    â€œDon’t, John. Please. I have to get this out quickly.
    â€œWhen darkness came to the beaches at Port Palmetto that Saturday night, the ferment began to work. No one knows just why or how these things get started, but before midnight, in the light of bonfires dotting the beaches, hundreds of young people were snake-dancing and chanting a pagan praise to beer, sand, and sex.
    â€œThe local police came out in force. Their appearance on the beach touched off a riot. Several officers were hurt. Squad cars were overturned. The jail was literally packed with youngsters.
    â€œEarly the next morning, a city sanitation crew was put on emergency duty to clean the beaches of débris.
    â€œThe nude and battered body of Cheryl Pemberton was found under an old wooden fishing pier. Indications were that some boy, inflamed by liquor and mob pyschosis, had lost control of himself and momentarily become a fiend.
    â€œKeith … it was Keith whom the police suspected. He and Cheryl were classmates, completing their senior year. There’d been a tacit agreement that they would be dating each other in Port Palmetto. Keith was the last boy to have been seen with her. He was picked up as he was leaving town.”
    Vallancourt mercifully looked out the window.
    â€œKeith withstood nearly sixty continuous hours of interrogation, John. He was able to do this because he was telling the truth. I know he was telling the truth!
    â€œThe truth was that he had got separated from Cheryl Pemberton, knew nothing of her death until the police took him in custody. The scenes on the beach had sickened him, and he had decided to leave.
    â€œHe was released because there wasn’t a shred of evidence against him, just suspicion. John, that suspicion mustn’t destroy the only living soul close to me I care anything about!”

3.
    Vallancourt turned back to Dorcas with sympathy. But he lacked her subjective entanglement. He had already sensed the tension and hostility in Keith Rollins. He reserved judgment. But then, he could afford to. Dorcas must be prey to her uncertainties and their clash with her loyalty and attachment to the boy.
    Vallancourt caught a swift mental glimpse of the girl’s beginning to struggle as panic overcame her, and of a drink-crazed boy losing control. It was conceivable that Keith had acted during a black-out, without later recollection of the event. He would then feel only revulsion and a desire to get away.
    â€œI think,” Dorcas was saying slowly, “I’ve been working all these years for Keith’s sake. They haven’t been altogether pleasant years, John. When my parents died and left three young daughters in a world of bankruptcy and creditors, the responsibility fell on my shoulders. Poor Maggie would have