The Postcard (6 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Dumpster delivery truck came early Saturday and woke me up with its incredible thudding and banging and clunking. My dad had to run out in his pajamas and repark the Subaru Termite so the guy could leave the Dumpster in the driveway.

There was so much junk! The garage was filled with boxes and bags of I don’t even know what and millions of papers and magazines like a library.
Life
magazines and
Time
magazines. When I saw the towering stacks of twined-up newspapers from the last fifteen years, I wondered how many of them Grandma had gotten for free. Dad arranged for a church to pick up some of the big pieces of furniture for a shelter they sponsored, then dragged her old clothes from the closet, searched the pockets, sorted them in piles by type, then folded them (at first, then later just stuffed them) into garbage bags.

Mrs. Keach told him where the Goodwill truck was. He made three trips in the car while I started tossing stuff in the Dumpster that I knew wasn’t good enough to sell or donate.

It was afternoon, and Dad was on his last trip when I slumped, exhausted, onto a chair in the living room. The white carton Mrs. K had taken from Grandma’s closet sat next to me on the floor. Taped on it was her note in black marker:
Very Important Papers!!!
I wondered what she — or Grandma — would consider very important, so I opened the carton flaps and lifted out a stack of yellow folders filled with old papers. My dad had already gotten the will and the deed to the house from a safe deposit box at the bank, but this was other stuff. Old tax records, home insurance policies, store credits, bills, receipts, manuals for appliances, bank statements, all kinds of records you probably didn’t need but couldn’t just throw out.

Grandma had signed some of them. On the old ones from the 1960s and ’70s, her signature was thin and neat. Later ones were signed more raggedly. On the very recent ones her writing was no more than a scribble. On one, from fewer than ten years ago, there was a scrawl followed by initials ending in K. Mrs. Keesh, maybe? I couldn’t tell.

I was just about to leave the carton for Dad to go through when I found something that didn’t belong. In a folder marked
EB
was a copy of an old magazine. But it wasn’t like
Time
or
Life
or
National Geographic.

The magazine was called
Bizarre Mysteries
and was dated October 1944. On the cover under the big yellow title was a dark, crazy picture. A man in a suit and tie was crouching, holding a machine gun and firing it. His eyes were staring in terror at something outside the frame of the picture. His jaw was set hard. His suit was ripped, and there was a streak of bright red blood on his arm. It matched the color of his tie. A beautiful woman in a red dress (the same color as the blood and the tie) seemed to be leaping down next to him from a height. Her eyes were filled with fear like his, but a pistol in her hand was blazing with orange flame as she fired at someone or something in the same direction as he was.

But that wasn’t the most amazing thing. Behind them a giant alligator lay on its back, its massive jaws hanging open loosely.

Even that wasn’t the most startling thing. Behind the alligator were three ghoulish-looking creatures, hardly human, holding long, curved daggers. They wore billowy black capes that shimmered in wild colors like an oily rainbow. They looked like demented clowns, their skull-like heads silhouetted against the dull glow of the background. They were ready to pounce on the man and the woman, who obviously didn’t know they were there. To make matters worse, the couple seemed to be in a dismal swamp somewhere, with thick vines and wispy moss hanging down from above. And they were up to their ankles in bubbling black water.

But the most astonishing detail was one I hadn’t even caught right away. It was only when I looked and looked did I see that on the woman’s back, arching up from her red dress, were what looked like wings — feathery wings of very deep blue, almost invisible against the darkness of the swamp. Wings! A flying lady!

“What the —!” I swore to myself.

Running along the bottom of the cover were the titles of some of the stories inside the magazine: “Dying the Hard Way,” by a guy named Chester H. Dobbs; “Who Killed Owen Taylor?” by Chandler Hawks; “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Gun” by Gerald McHiggins; and “Twin Palms: A Novel of Thrilling Terror,” by someone named Emerson Beale.

“Emerson Beale,” I said, glancing at the thin letters penned on the folder tab. “EB.”

When I heard my father pull up in the driveway next to the Dumpster, I jumped to the door. “Dad, you have got to see this!”

He came into the living room with a bag of groceries and a wad of folded cartons under his arm. “Hmm?”

“Look at this thing,” I said.

He dropped the boxes on the couch and set the bag on the kitchen counter. He put a half gallon of milk, more eggs, a six-pack of beer, a loaf of bread, and a bag of sliced cheese in the fridge. Then he pulled out one of the beers and came in and took the magazine. “So what’s this? What did you find?”

“Is it weird or what? Grandma kept this in a secret folder in the closet along with regular important papers. Take a look. Skeletons with daggers. Machine guns. Alligators!”

He snorted a laugh. “
Bizarre Mysteries.
Yeah, I guess so.”

“But look at the wings! Dad, the wings! Like what Mom said Grandma said. About flying!”

He shook his head quickly. “Yeah, well . . . try to forget all that —” He stopped in the middle of a sip.

“What is it?” I asked.

He held the magazine out and frowned at its cover, lost in thought. “I remember this,” he said finally.

“You do?”

“I think so. The colors. And the machine gun detective. And . . . this guy . . .” He tapped his finger at the bottom of the cover. “Emerson Beale. I think she knew him. Your grandma knew him. Yeah, Emerson Beale. She must have said his name when I was growing up. Holy cow, I haven’t thought of him in forever. In fact, I think he was her boyfriend.” He almost smiled.

“Are you kidding? Grandma had a boyfriend?” Then imagining her old face in the coffin, I began to feel icky, like Mom must have felt when thinking about a flying old lady. An old lady with a boyfriend? And no husband?

“Wait . . . really? A boyfriend? When? Dad, could he have been, you know . . . your . . .”

“Father? No, no, this was when she was young. In high school, I mean. When she was young. He was gone long before I came along. Something happened and . . . did you look through this?”

“I just found it.”

We sat in the Florida room and flipped through the magazine together. The pages were old, brown, and brittle. The corners chipped off in our laps as we turned the pages. At the beginning were ads for things like body building (“In just 15 minutes a day, I can make you A NEW MAN!”), jewelry (“GENUINE INDIA-MADE SILVER RINGS”), false teeth for as low as $7.95, how to write and weld and paint and play trumpet and become an accountant and a fingerprint expert and how to cure indigestion and asthma at home.

But the stories were the main thing. Some had monsters or ghosts or mummies or doubles or ancient curses, but leafing through them, we could see that they were all dark and dangerous and weird. They were about kidnapping and murder, robbery and murder, robbery and kidnapping and murder, murder and murder, and just plain murder. And they were all written in rugged, tough-guy language.

“Bizarre mysteries is right,” I said. “I mean, come on. Alligators and flying women and machine guns?”

He got up and went to the refrigerator. He twisted open a second bottle of beer, moved the important papers carton to the desk, and began looking through the other folders.

“So . . . Dad . . . ,” I started.

“Hmm?”

“What’s all this about Grandma’s father? The railroad thing?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s dumb. He was someone, I guess, but that was so long ago. There hasn’t been any fortune forever. He went bust, I think. Broke.” Maybe Dad didn’t really want to talk about it, but I was just being casual and eventually got him to say a few things, even though he said that nothing meant anything because it was so long ago. Listening to him, I became astonished at the history of my family.

Grandma’s grandfather — and my great-great-grand-father — was a guy named Patterson Monroe. Dad said that he was one of the men who brought the railroad to the west coast of Florida in the early 1900s. At that time the state was undeveloped and wild, more like what the Everglades is still — swampy, green, jungly. His son, Quincy Monroe, was Grandma’s father. He inherited the big railroad empire from his father and ran it up until the 1960s.

Patterson. Quincy. What names!

“And this guy? Emerson Beale? You really think he was her boyfriend? When she was young?” I said.

“I don’t know much,” he said. “All I’m remembering is that he wrote cheesy detective mysteries for magazines like this one. But it was when they were really young. Eighteen or twenty or something. He was only around for a little while, then he was gone. Vanished. That was, I don’t know, fifteen years before I was born. Longer.”

Gone? Vanished? Maybe there actually
was
a mystery.

“Her father didn’t like him for some reason. But then, the old man didn’t like anyone.” He paused to shake his head. “She talked about him a little, Beale, I remember that. But he went away and who knows?”

I wanted to call Hector right away. Grandma with a boyfriend! From a picture we found earlier in the buffet, I could tell that she was pretty as a teenager. But not long after that she had some kind of accident and didn’t get better. She was in a wheelchair most of her life. Dad always said he didn’t know what actually had happened to her, only that she nearly drowned. It got very hazy when he talked about it, so I didn’t understand much. Maybe Mom was right. It was all pretty strange. But at least he was talking about it.

The Florida room was warming up as the afternoon went on.

Dad finished his second beer and gazed at the floor, not sorting papers, only shaking his head slowly. “It was okay for a while when I was young,” he said. “I mean, almost normal. I liked that. I loved growing up here. Who wouldn’t? But she was never well, always sick. Hospitals, clinics. I saw her less and less and nurses more. Nannies took care of me for a while. There was money. Then, I don’t know, things changed. She was really sick then, and I barely saw her after that. I wanted to stay, but she was vehement that I should go away.”

He went quiet and seemed to fall into himself like at home. I totally knew what Mom meant. It was hard to know what to do. Was he going to start crying again?

“Maybe because she was too busy?” I said.

“What?”

“With doctors and all? Maybe that’s why she wanted you to go to Boston? After high school. Because her whole time was spent with being sick and stuff. Maybe?”

He snorted. “Who knows? I hated it. I didn’t want to go. I was mad. I wanted to stay in St. Petersburg. I loved it here.” He paused. “But after school everyone split up, anyway. My friends went different places. I went to Boston, worked for a while, then went to school. I met your mother there.” He paused again. “That was good. Your sister and brother came along, then she got sick. Mom got sick. I mean, my mother, not Mommy, got sick in her mind and nothing was the same. It all . . . it all . . . jeez, Jason, whatever!” He stood up. “Can’t you see I don’t want to talk about it? Her adventurous spirit has flown —
pfff.
” He made a little sound. “She’s dead now, and buried. For Pete’s sake. It’s over.”

He got up and stomped into the kitchen. He grabbed the refrigerator door, yanked it open, and pulled out another beer.

“Just get to work, huh? Leave that box alone; I’ll do it. Trash the junk from the buffet, then empty the kitchen cabinets into the boxes I bought. Let’s get this moving!”

“Sure, Dad. I’ll do it.”

I went back to the buffet while he slumped off to the bedroom. I heard drawers slam and clothes hangers jangle, cursing, then it went quiet. A few minutes later, I heard snoring. Well, good. He had, what, three beers in the middle of the day? The sun was pouring into the backyard now; it was deep afternoon. I dragged an empty carton over. I tried for a few minutes to calm down, not sure what to do, until I found myself back at the desk and that magazine in my hands again. It smelled of closets and dust and old things, but also strangely sweet, like chocolate. I sat down and went through it page by page until I found Emerson Beale’s story. The story by Grandma’s old boyfriend. Taking a long breath to calm myself, I began to read.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TWIN PALMS

A NOVEL OF THRILLING TERROR

By Emerson Beale

—I—

THE BLUE SEDAN

There are a hundred Different ways to start a story.

For instance, I might begin by telling you about Marnie. Marnie Blaine. Gosh, Marnie!

That stopped me dead. Marnie?
Marnie?
I read the words again and again. Are you kidding? The funeral guy called Grandma that! I’d thought it was just a mistake. Wasn’t it? This couldn’t just be a coincidence?

“Dad —”

I froze. Dad was still snoring in his bedroom. I couldn’t ask him, anyway. He might get angry and have another beer. My heart was pounding. I started to read again.

My heart thumps like a bebop drummer just saying her name. I could begin the story with her. I could end the story with her. Marnie’s everything to me.

Maybe I should start with the big old hotel. That’s a piece of the story, too, weaving in and out of it all the way to the end. I could tell you about that.

My father? Sure. He may even have started the whole thing, with his simple, “Hey, Nick —”

Or Florida. Crazy old Florida. The way it turns your mind around and makes you see things and feel things and think things that might or might not be there. Florida is as much a part of the story as the hotel is or I am or Marnie is.

I could even start by saying something smart. Like how everything that happens to me, to you, to everyone, is really part of the same long mystery.

But never mind all that. I’ll start with something dumb. I’ll start with the blue sedan.

The blue sedan. It’s funny how dumb things stick in your head, isn’t it? Dumb things and silly things and huge things. They all bobble around inside your brain and get mixed up until you can’t tell what’s important and what’s not.

Like the flash of bullets and a plate of fried eggs.

The glint of a dagger and the color of a guy’s socks.

Finally, just when you think your head will explode with everything knocking around inside it, your heart taps you on the shoulder and tells you what’s what.

That’s how it was the day I finally met Marnie Blaine.

It happened like this.

I was strolling out of a breakfast joint on Third North. It was wartime. I was nearly twenty. But the Army would have to pull up its bootstraps and march along without me. A bum left eye had kept me out of the service and idling on the home front, but I was doing my part with the Florida War Bonds effort.

I was heading for my office, humming a catchy little Cuban dance tune I had heard on the diner’s radio, the taste of home fries and eggs still in my mouth, when I heard a funny sound like chink. Chink.

I just had time to think, Funny sound, when the squeal of tires and the pop-pop of a rough engine filled the air. A blue sedan tore around the corner, a series of bright flashes bursting from its side window. Every flash was followed by one of those chinking sounds and a spray of brick dust off the wall next to my face.

“Holy smoke!” I shouted to whomever would listen. “I’m being shot at! Hey! Anybody! Help —”

Chink! Chink!

I ducked for safety behind a big green Pontiac just as its driver pulled away from his parking spot.

“It’s all yours!” he said brightly, and gave me a wave.

“Thanks a lot, pal!” I yelled, trying to hide behind the thin stalk of a parking meter. I failed.

Chink! Chink! The gunmen were testing their bullets against the sidewalk now. Even as the blue sedan careened toward me, I saw two deep dents on its left fender and a Y-shaped crack on its windscreen.

I remember the dents — dumb things that they were — because even as I scrambled for cover, even in that half second, my mind flashed back to another dented blue car.

The one that had roared past me eleven years earlier.

I was nine.

My father and I were crossing Central Avenue. He was angry, fuming, and panicked about I didn’t know what. A car that same color blue had nearly knocked us down in the street. Without thinking twice, we jumped onto the sidewalk, my father sputtering under his breath as the car wheeled by.

“Hey, Nick,” he said, “run in there and get us a newspaper. Run into that hotel and pick up a paper.”

I looked up at the big place next to us. He said he needed to know about the fight, the big battle in Tallahassee.

“Dad?” I grew scared, because I didn’t know about any battle so near us and if people got hurt or how many had died.

“They’ll have a paper, Nicky,” he told me again, his eyes searching the storefronts from one side of the street to the other. “I’ll go to that stand on the corner. But get a copy from the lobby if they have one, will you?”

He gave me a nickel and hurried away along the street, his head stretching every which way, his hands shaking like palm leaves in a storm.

“Okay, Dad, okay.” I ran up the steps and stumbled into the lobby. It was the famous Hotel DeSoto. It was vast and rich and fancy. . . .

Whoa, whoa, whoa,
what
? The hotel on the postcard? The hotel my great-grandfather owned? The place being bulldozed next week? No way!

I was sucked in again.

Before I saw anything, before I saw the rack of papers or the neat-haired boy selling them or the long mahogany counter or the silver bell gleaming on top of it or the postcard rack or the gilded columns or the tufted cushions, I saw her.

I saw her. A single willow, all in white except for the pastel green ribbons on each shoulder of her dress and the one in her hair. She was standing in the middle of the carpet, standing like something made of white stone (like a gravestone angel, I thought), except that she was turning to see me, to see what the noise was, startled by my rush into the lobby, and watching me trip past the doorman, nearly landing on my face, her light brown hair waving in the breeze of the doors.

Her green eyes, her hazel-green eyes, were looking at me now and frowning. Those eyes, that white, bright forehead with the hair pulled back from it and tied in that ribbon, were frowning at me, but half smiling, too.

My mouth must have been hanging open, and I froze where I lay, and everything froze.

Who are you? I wondered.

Soon enough a beefy hand broke out of nowhere and snatched hers, shaking loose the scene and starting everything moving again. When my eyes flicked up, I saw a man in a pink suit not quite as big as a circus tent. His fat face was lobster-red; his eyeteeth glistened in his mouth and were longer than any man’s I’d ever seen. His dark eyes flashed like pistol shots at midnight. He pulled the girl to him.

Just then my father came into the lobby and right up to me, a paper folded under his arm. He knelt and helped me up from the floor and dusted me off. I remember his hat fell on the floor when he did that.

She spoke then, and I turned away from my father.

“Daddy, is he —,” she said.

“Never mind him, Marnie. Let’s go,” the fat man said.

Marnie!

But he didn’t go, not right away. Eyeing my father and me, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a silver cigarette case. It had a blue stone in the center of it. He clicked it open, pulled out a cigarette, closed the case, and returned it to his pocket in a flash of silver.

Then he tugged the girl across the lobby to where a group of impossibly thin men in oily black suits held open the door of an elevator. A young man with legs like stilts was loping down the stairs into view. He was far over seven feet, close to eight, a giant-in-training with shoes the size of ash cans. Next to him was a squat balloon, also young, also in oily blacks. A flash of curved silver came from his ample waist, but I turned away. The girl was looking over her shoulder at me, and my mind was filled with her, her hazel eyes, that face, that bouncing waterfall of hair, the shattering of the lobby into pieces like a cracked mirror, the sudden earthquake of her her her.

With that half smile, she drew my nine-year-old heart right out of me. She took it into herself and never gave it back. She has it still. She’ll always have it.

“Come on, Nicky,” my father murmured as he helped me to the street.

“Do you know that man, Dad?” I asked him. “The large man with the girl?”

He’d say nothing to me then nor for a long time after.

When I found out later that the battle in the state capital was about land and money, only land and money, I wondered why my father cared so much. When he died two years later, my mother discovered he had nothing. From then on, we were as poor as church mice. Poorer.

But I’ll never forget the fat man’s eyes. They were as black as swamp water on a moonless night. When my father did speak, he told me about those eyes. He said they were mine shafts of evil. That man, he said, was cold-blooded and a thief who had no soul. He was dead inside. A ghost crawling the earth.

I paused. So what the heck was all this? No soul? And a tall kid at the hotel like the tall man at the funeral? And all at the hotel my great-grandfather owned? I picked up the old postcard. I imagined the lobby inside the front doors. “Okay, this is nuts,” I said aloud. “Nutty-nutty-nuts!”

I forgot that Dad was sleeping. He woke up with a start.

“What? Huh?”

I said nothing.

“Jason? Jason!”

“Sorry, Dad,” I said, getting up. “It’s this story. It’s so weird —”

He stumbled noisily out of his bedroom, looked at his watch, and swore. “I’ve wasted the whole day!”

“Dad, it’s only been a half hour —”

“The guy’s coming! The real estate agent. You heard him. Why didn’t you wake me up?” He put his hands to his temples and clamped his eyes shut.

“Sorry, Dad,” I said, closing the magazine. “I’ll work.”

“I have to fix that gutter in the back. It looks stupid. It makes the whole house look like a dump.” He was storming around the kitchen now. “And where is that dumb girl who cuts the grass. Why is the lawn half done? Why would she leave it like that?”

I gulped. “Dad, sorry. That was me. I didn’t know. I told her not to —”

He turned to me. “You what? Who are you to tell her anything? What do you think we’re doing this for? Have you finished filling those boxes?”

“Dad, let’s eat some lunch or something —”

“You haven’t done anything! You wasted a whole hour! With that stupid magazine! Give it to me!”

“Dad —”

I wasn’t prepared for how quickly he would turn. He flew around and tore the magazine from my hands and threw it across the room. I heard the cover rip. His hand was still moving and knocked Grandma’s picture off the buffet. It crashed to the floor and shattered at my feet.

“Dad!” I said, kneeling to the picture.

“Never mind that, do what I told you!” he shouted.

Before I knew it, he was through the kitchen, tugging a hammer and a can of nails from the cabinet under the sink. He swore again and again and slammed out the back door.

Trembling, I watched him toss the hammer to the ground, go to the shed, drag out a ladder, bump it along the ground, and throw it against the corner of the house. He lifted himself up on the first step. Stopping, he turned his head down and looked at me through the screen door. I stepped away. He bent down, picked up the hammer and nails, and started up the ladder again.

I stumbled back to the boxes, shaking, shaking. He had had too much to drink. Mom was right. Never mind. His mother just died. He had no father. He was mad. I got it. Never mind.

When he started banging the hammer on the gutter, I swept up the broken glass and threw it away. Then I picked up the magazine. A three-inch rip across the cover tore one of the wings of the red-dress lady. It hurt to see that tear. I taped it up from behind and began to read again. The hell with him, too, hammering out there. I couldn’t help it. Holding the magazine in my hands again, I had to open it. I had to start reading where I’d left off.

All those thoughts flashed in and out of my mind in the time it takes for a bullet to go chink!

I slid around the corner and started running down the street. The blue sedan followed. Then I saw the hotel. The same hotel. My feet had taken over, and I was running toward the hotel, my thoughts racing as fast as I was.

Is this why I’m being shot at? Is this what it’s all about? The hotel? The girl? Is it about her, after all? Is it all about . . . Marnie?

I raced down a cut-through between two halves of a block while my mind, my silly mind, tried to put the pieces together and flew back again, this time to that very morning, exactly one hour before. . . .

It was only seven-thirty, but already the air was as heavy as wet wool. My shirt was clinging to me like a new bride. I was just imagining a plate of hot eggs in a cool diner and thinking I’d unstick myself from that street bench I seemed glued to, when there she was again.

Sure, it was eleven years later, but I had never forgotten the girl from the hotel. How could I? Now she wore a dress the color of pale butter. But when she looked over, I was the one who melted. She saw me, shimmered slowly up to the bench, and smiled.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said, light flickering in her eyes.

I stood up, remembering the lobby and her, and my tongue started moving. “You remember eleven years ago? In the big hotel on Central?”