The Darkest Night

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Late afternoon sunlight fell across the table; it felt pleasantly warm on Tom’s hands and face. He studied the pattern on the table top, the sunlight cut by words stuck on the windows that announced to the public that Pauly’s had the best pie in the world, and invited them to try a slice. On the table top the words were just formless shadows that marred what might otherwise have been a perfect fall of light.

  Tom looked over at Patricia’s plate; she was half finished with her turkey sandwich, though she had barely taken a sip of her coffee. Tom hadn’t ordered anything. Frankie had ordered too much, three scrambled eggs, two pieces of toast, hash browns, sausage links, and three silver dollar hotcakes, which he had smothered in butter and syrup. Most of the hash browns and one of the hotcakes was still on the plate, and Frankie was sitting back in his seat, holding his stomach and looking at the plate of leftover food like it was his mortal enemy. Tom had to smile.

  Carol the waitress, who had waited on Tom and Patricia before, came over and asked if any of them wanted anything else. Tom shook his head.

  “No; I’m good,” Patricia said.

  “I’m stuffed,” Frankie grunted.

  The waitress looked at the empty space on the table in front of Tom, looked him in the eye briefly and turned away.

  “You should really order something,” Patricia said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Tom said.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  He was surprised to find that he actually meant it. He felt fine. The night before he had actually managed to get a few hours of sleep, and that was a welcome development. Soon he might even be able to sleep normally. He wondered how much sleep Patricia and Frankie were getting lately, but he didn’t want to ask. They both looked a bit tired, but he thought they would be all right. It had been two weeks since the night at the Home, and things were slowly sliding back to something close to normal, even if it would never quite get there.

  Frankie burped quietly into his hand.

  “Excuse me,” he apologized.

  “What have you been up to lately, Frankie?” Tom asked.

  “I’ve been hanging out with some of my friends from school,” Frankie replied.

  “That’s good,” Tom said. “You should be around people your own age, and not just us old farts.”

  “Did you just call me an old fart?” Patricia said.

  Frankie chuckled. The laugh die quickly though, and his faced took on a more serious cast.

  “Everyone is still talking about Buddy and his friends. They were never found. Some kids are saying that they ran away together, and that they were the ones who called the tip in to the cops to confuse everybody.”

  After their escape from the Home, Tom had taken both Patricia and Frankie back to his house, and had used an assortment of tools to pry the metal cuff off of Frankie’s wrist. They had then driven Frankie home, and he snuck back into his room, his parents never having realized that he was gone. Tom and Patricia had gone back to Tom’s house. As the sun rose that morning Patricia made an anonymous call to the Cedar Falls Police Department from a payphone. Without using any names she had told the 911 operator that some people had been hurt, and that the police should check the old orphanage. The police hadn’t found Buddy and his friends, nor had they found Harry, Jack or Kate. The only proof that any of them had ever been there was the abandoned equipment in the lobby.

  Both Tom and Patricia had worried about that equipment, as they had both touched things. If the police dusted for fingerprints, some of those prints would be theirs. Neither of them had ever been arrested, however, and so the police would have nothing to compare the prints to. Patricia had also been worried that her car may have left tire tracks, but neither of them wanted to go back to the Home to try and erase any clues connecting them to the place. They would just have to hope for the best.

  Another concern had been whether anyone would come looking for Harry and his assistants. Patricia had gotten in touch with Harry’s friend Brian (or rather, he had gotten in touch with her through an e-mail), and she had told him everything, holding nothing back. She had known that there was no point in lying, as Harry had kept Brian filled in on his dealings with her. She had thought that the man would think she was crazy, but he had believed her. He also eased her mind somewhat when he told her that he didn’t think it was likely that anyone would come looking for Harry in Cedar Falls, as the man didn’t have any family, and he usually kept anything he was working on close to the vest, and he expected any assistants who worked with him to do the same. It was more than likely that (other than Brian) no one knew where harry and his two assistants had been headed off to.

  Though Harry had no family to speak of, he certainly had friends. Jack and Kate must have had families, and Buddy and his cohorts certainly did. Patricia felt awful that none of their families, or their friends, would ever know what had happened to them. She had considered sending anonymous letters, but apart from the problem of not knowing where to send the letters, she figured that the tall tale the letters would tell would just serve to confuse and hurt people more.

  “Look,” Tom said, pulling Patricia out of her thoughts.

  He nodded his head in the direction of the television that was bolted high up on the wall in a corner of the café. Both Patricia and Frankie followed Tom’s gaze and looked at the TV. He TV was muted. The chyron covering the bottom of the screen read:

  Authorities continue digging at the site of former orphanage.

  “How many have they found so far?” Patricia asked.

  “Nine, last time I heard,” Tom said. “There’ll be more.”

  When the police had searched the Home for the injured people the anonymous caller had tipped them off to, they had found nothing inside the Home. Outside, however, an inquisitive officer had checked out the fenced-in field into which Tom, Patricia and Frankie had fled on that terrible night. The cop had stumbled over something which turned out to be an exposed femur bone.

  The police dug up the rest of the skeleton, thinking that they might have found one of the “injured people” the 911 caller had mentioned, but when the county M.E. took a look at the bones he decided that they had been buried there for fifties years or more.

  A week later the city had started to dig, searching for more bones. It seemed that the old mystery of what had happened to the missing kids of the Cedar Falls Home for Orphaned Children was a mystery no more. They had been buried in a field behind the Home. There had even been a story about it in the Review, though Tom hadn’t been the one to write it.

  “Those poor children,” Patricia said as she turned away from the newscast.

  Frankie looked away from the TV as well. He looked at his plate, made a face and pushed it away. Tom looked out the window.

  “Those poor children,” Patricia repeated.

  Nobody spoke then for a long while. Patricia finished her breakfast. Frankie got up without a word to use the bathroom, and came back shortly after, taking his seat again. Patricia picked up the check, paying for herself and Frankie; she offered to get Tom something if he changed his mind, but he hadn’t. Carol the waitress told them to have a good day, and Tom told her to do the same.

  Outside the café Tom, Patricia and Frankie stood under the harsh blue sky, basking in the full warmth of the day.

  “Come on, Frankie,” Tom said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “No thanks. I feel like walking.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “All right, then,” Tom said.

  Frankie sauntered off toward the sidewalk. He stopped and turned back, looking at Patricia, then at Tom.

  “Is it really over?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Frankie; I think it is,” Tom answered.

  Frankie’s lips spread into a small smile. It was a weak smile, but a hopeful one as well, and in it Tom saw all the promise in the world.

  “I think I’m gonna walk
over to Graham Park,” Frankie said. “It was my sister’s favorite park. I like to talk to her there. Maybe today she’ll talk back.”

  “I hope she does,” Patricia said.

  Frankie waved once and was gone, rounding a corner and disappearing into his own life. Tom and Patricia stood there for a minute, looking for a way to say goodbye. Tom stepped over to his car, the four-door he had bought years earlier, when the possibility of having a family had seemed so real.

  “Stay in touch,” Tom said, and it sounded dumb to his own ears.

  “Sure,” Patricia said, standing near to her own car.

  Tom opened his car door and started to get inside.

  “Wait, Tom,” Patricia said.

  She walked over to him, stood in front of him and looked up into his eyes. She grasped both of his hands with hers, stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed him.

  “Were you really just going to drive off like that?” she asked.

  “Well…”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said and gave him another kiss.

  Tom laughed.

  “You know,” he said, “I remember having this thought once, that this wasn’t the type of story that ended with ‘they lived happily ever after’”.

  “Do you still believe that?”

  He thought about it for a second, and shook his head.

  “No. It can be what we want it to be. We can make it what we want to make it.”

  “Do you want to make it a ‘happily ever after’ story?”

  “I think I would like that. I would like it just fine.”

  They kissed a third time, and this time they held it. They held each other. Their darkest night was over, and it was a beautiful summer day.