The Tower

by J L Bryan

  “That's a pretty twisted thing to do to somebody,” Stacey said. “Way worse than keying their car, even. Which is still pretty bad. One time this girl keyed my car in high school just because I talked to her boyfriend. He wasn't even that hot. Well, maybe a little.”

  “If that's the case,” I said, referring to the ghosts, and ignoring her tales of teenage jealousy and vandalism, “then maybe those two ghosts are chasing and fighting each other at night, and they just happen to be passing through our clients' apartment because it's right below here. The ghosts could be enemies. I mean, Elton did kill her father with that bomb. He came here to punish the family for supporting that segregationist politician guy, and I guess for being 'capitalist swine' in general, or whatever. Maybe he wants to finish the job by killing Millie, too, but he's just not quite strong enough to make it happen.”

  “Or it could be just the opposite,” Stacey said. She tore open one of those compressed-fruit bars. “You know, they were best buds in life. Millie wanted Elton to bomb the tower, that's what Duperre said. They were in cahoots. So maybe they like running around the tower together, even as ghosts.”

  “And so they were attacking me together?” I asked.

  “Maybe you just got in the middle of playtime.”

  “I'm not getting a playful feeling from these ghosts. Why did she grab my hand and ask for help?”

  “Yeah, that...probably has to do with the dead doorman in the basement, right? Old Concrete-Face?”

  “We really need a name for that guy. Maybe we should check all the file cabinets on the twelfth floor. They might have old employment records.”

  “And you'll get another chance to chat with that dead reporter, so that'll be fun.”

  “I guess I'll wait until daytime,” I said. “I've seen enough ghosts for one night.”

  So that was pretty much what we did. Amazingly, Stacey dozed off about an hour before sunrise. I kept my eyes open, watching for any return of Millie's ghost, or Elton's ghost in pursuit of her.

  I probably could have napped myself if not for that image of the skeleton in the basement, blobs of concrete bulging from its cracked eyeholes and broken teeth. I wondered whether they'd killed him first and then dumped the body in the wet cement...or whether he'd still been alive, and drowned in it. A slow, painful death like that could leave a tormented ghost behind. Tormented, angry, and seeking revenge. If Elton or Siobhan had been involved in the doorman's murder, that certainly provided a motive for him to haunt them and their descendants.

  Just before daybreak, I left Stacey snoozing on the couch and took the service elevator down to the twelfth floor again and confronted the heap of disorganized boxes, loose folders, and filing cabinets. Only one overhead light responded when I threw the switch, and it flickered badly, so I used my flashlight to help me dig through the yellowed old paperwork. The older it got, the more it tended to be yellowed, faded, and handwritten, and I was looking for the employment record of a man who'd been there a hundred years earlier, whose name I did not even know.

  I didn't even know why he'd been killed. Maybe he'd witnessed something, some terrible and horrific business practices of the Penneforts, maybe antecedents to the kinds of intimidation and terror they'd employed against poor homeowners in the 1960's. The kind of thing Gary Brekowski had been investigating for The Great Horned Owl.

  “Hey, Gary,” I said, clicking off my flashlight as I called the name of the dead reporter ghost. “Want to give me a hand? Maybe send some floaty paperwork over to the dead doorman's file?” When nothing happened, I opened a random file full of crumbling paper and held it up. “Here, I'll give you a hand. Just...nudge the paper again. Feel free to use the A/C if you have to.”

  I tossed the papers in the air.

  One by one, they drifted down around me, like yellow leaves in the fall.

  One by one, they settled on the ground and lay still, signifying nothing.

  “Thanks a pantload, Gary,” I said, then dug back into the files.

  I stocked up on some things from the right time era, then headed back upstairs. Stacey was snoring despite the daylight pouring in on her.

  I worked, looking through files, trying to find any clue to the dead doorman's identity. My eyelids grew heavy, but each time I started to nod off, some memory would pop into my mind to jar me awake—a skull full of concrete, invisible cold fingers on my hands, or Vance's description of his father's ghost: “His face was burned, and I could see teeth on one side. His suit was burned. His eyelids were missing, and he stared at me. I could smell burned hair and cloth in the room, even after he disappeared.”

  Yeah, those things kept me awake at night. Or during the morning, in this case.

  I did catch some sleep in the afternoon. Then we heard from Isaiah Halberson, aka A. Truthteller. He called Stacey back. Stacey had left him a message in keeping with the cover story we'd given Jackie Duperre, claiming she was a graduate student researching the history of Atlanta in the 1960's. We were afraid to tell him the truth—that we were private investigators hired by the Pennefort family—because he'd been a known associate of Elton Roberts and Millie Pennefort during the time of the bombing, and we didn't want him to think we were trying to find more people for the family to blame. He might have clammed up at the prospect of being even remotely implicated in the bombing, even decades after the fact. It was the same reason we'd lied to Jackie Duperre when visiting him in prison.

  “Okey-dokes,” Stacey said after finishing her call with Halberson. “He said we can look through his collection of Great Horned Owl issues all we want, if we're careful, but we can't take anything with us.”

  “Good work,” I said. “Let's approach the subject of Millie, Elton, and the bombing slowly and delicately.”

  “Got it. So our first question shouldn't be, 'Hey, what do you know about that bomb? Anything that wasn't reported in the press? Were you involved in making it?'”

  “Right. We'll need to be a little more subtle than that.”

  It was about five in the afternoon by the time we parked on the tree-shaded street in front of Isaiah Halberson's house. It was painted a warm yellow, with window boxes and a wide front porch with a swing and a rocking chair. The neighborhood was a couple miles south of the Pennefort Building, and while it looked cheery enough, there were signs of economic depression. More than one house had plywood windows and overgrown yards. An old brick commercial building on the next street was empty, with fading signs advertising a shuttered neighborhood grocery store. A collapsing chainlink fence overlooked railroad tracks across the street from his house.

  Stacey and I walked up the concrete stairs from the sidewalk to the tiny putting green of the front yard, then up a few more steps to the front porch. Stacey rang the bell and put on her best smile.

  Halberson didn't take long to answer the door. He was a gray-haired man with a serious look, just like in his faculty picture. He was dressed in a stiff brown suit with a dark tie; something about the suit really screamed “history teacher” to me.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, opening the door to us. “I'm guessing one of you is Stacey?”

  “That's me!” she piped up, while reaching her hand out to shake his. “Thanks so much for taking time to meet with us, Mr. Halberson. This is my friend Ellie, she's helping me out.”

  He shook my hand and seemed to take the measure of each of us through his thick glasses. Not a hint of a smile touched his somber expression; it was easy to imagine being his student and forever failing to please him.

  “Come on inside. Coffee? Tea? Water?” he offered, his tone as solemn as the expression on his face.

  “We're fine!” Stacey said. I actually wouldn't have minded some water, but I didn't want to put him to any trouble.

  The interior of the house was tight but cozy, full of family pictures on the wall, comfortable-looking armchairs, and flowered curtains that dampened the harsh orange afternoon sunlight.

  “Have a seat if you like,” Halberson said.
“Though if you're wanting to look at the Owl, you may as well follow me down to the basement.”

  “That would be great!” Stacey said.

  He nodded and led us to a very short hallway, where he opened a door onto narrow wooden steps and flicked on the bare bulb above them. “What's your thesis about, again?” he asked, as he led us down into a dim cinderblock space below.

  “Eh, well, I'm still putting that together,” Stacey said. “But I'm looking into the whole counterculture thing in the 60's in Atlanta, you know, and how it...” Stacey looked back at me with wide, panicked eyes, and I shrugged. She jabbed her whole face at me, as if to jab me with those bulging eyes.

  “I liked how you put it earlier, in the car,” I said, buying a little time while I struggled to cook up some words to put in her mouth. “About the effect of underground newspapers on youth culture of the time.”

  “It's hard to say what effect the Owl had, if any,” Halberson said. “You're welcome to look, but be careful. Those pages will turn to crumbs in your hands.”

  His basement was full of fascinating odds and ends. He had a collection of arrowheads on one table, laid out in rows and carefully labeled as to when and where they'd been found. Another section had Civil War artifacts, including musket balls and framed sepia photographs of battlefields and burned houses. A third included old-timey pictures of churches, homes, and a barbershop, as well as people marching during the Civil Rights era.

  “It's like a museum down here!” Stacey gasped.

  “My mother started it,” Halberson said. “This was her house before she passed. I inherited the history bug from her. Now, I just moved the Owl to a plastic bin...well, ten or twelve years ago...it's all under there if you want to look. I'd kneel down and drag it out for you, but my back is not so reliable these days.”

  “That's okay!” Stacey dropped to the floor and slid out a clear plastic storage bin from beneath the table he'd indicated. It looked like a twenty-gallon box, filled with massive binders. Dust swirled from the top of it, which just underscored how dust-free the rest of the place was. Halberson kept his arrowheads and pottery shards polished. Even the concrete floor was spotless and recently mopped, unlike basically any other basement I'd ever seen. And I've seen kind of a ridiculous number of them in my line of work. Ghosts love their dark, hidden domains, where they can obsess over themselves and their memories, and occasionally jump out to feed on the living who are foolish enough to stray too close.

  I knelt by Stacey—that floor really was as impossibly dust-free as it looked—and we pried off the lid. There was a little gasp as the long-sealed air inside touched the air outside, and the smell of old newsprint filled my nostrils, conjuring countless memories of digging through library archives in search of long-forgotten news from the past. The obituary pages, usually.

  We lifted out one of the giant binders inside, marked 1968, and opened it gently.

  The first copy of The Great Horned Owl had a yellow, crumbling cover with a cartoony, amateurish ink drawing of soldiers kneeling in the mud while an army of trees fired machine guns at them. Tet Offensive! the headline read. The Hopelessness and Exploitation of War.

  “So the Vietnamese guys are the Ents?” Stacey asked, pointing at the heavily armed tree-people.

  “I suppose it kinda made sense at the time,” Halberson said. “Captain Transience was really into Tolkien, Lewis, Jensen, people like that.”

  “Who is Captain Transience?” I asked.

  “That was Brad White's name. One of our cartoonists. I tried my hand at a few, too.”

  “You did Nixon on the nuke,” I said, remembering the cracked, flaking copy of the underground paper I'd seen in Millie Pennefort's room.

  “Yeah.” His brow furrowed. “You've seen that somewhere?”

  “Millie still has it.” I turned the pages gently, past cartoons, ads for head shops and bars, music reviews and political rants. Another issue commemorated both the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Another depicted a cartoon of black men in track clothes holding up Olympic medals in one hand and black-power fists in the other.

  “Nobody talks about Tommie Smith and John Carlos anymore,” Halberson said. “But they ripple. All of it ripples. This may look like ancient history to you two, but history's a river, and every tributary matters.”

  I nodded. “What can you tell us about Elton Roberts and Millie Pennefort?” I asked.

  “Those two?” He shook his head. “Girl was crazy, boy was crazier. They fit right together. Falcon was a sweet enough girl before he got into her head. She had lots of trouble with her family. She was a high school kid when she started coming around, about sixteen. Sometimes her family would send men to find her and bring her home, when she'd been down on the Strip for a few days. Watching her, I came to know that rich folks are just as miserable as the rest of us.

  “Falcon started out with poems, mostly, for the Owl. Then articles. Of course, after the bomb at the Pennefort Building, we never saw her again. I heard they sent her off to some asylum for crazy rich kids. Better than prison, I guess.”

  “Was she part of the plot to bomb her family's building?” I guessed.

  “Oh, she was part of whatever Elton did.”

  “Do you think she intended to kill her own father?”

  “To be honest...I really couldn't say. Elton and those New Front people, they did put bombs where they could, government offices, defense contractor offices a couple times. Usually they went off at night, not hurting anybody, just making a big destructive splash. I never really liked that kind of action. Violence just feeds the beast.” He smiled a little, the skin crinkled around his eyes, which had a faraway look for a moment. “I haven't said that out loud in a few years.”

  “Can you point us to some of Millie or Elton's writing in these old papers?”

  “Elton, no. He wasn't a writer at all, more an angry young man with a loud voice who never got off his soapbox. A big talker, not a big typer. But little Falcon's stuff, I can help you with that. There's more in the '69 binder, too.” He shook his head. “That poor girl. Drifted around with a sad look in her eyes, except when she got real excited about something. Then her eyes got big and shiny. She might have been manic-depressive, looking back on it. But I'm no doctor.”

  We set the 1969 and 1970 binders on a table at the center of the room, next to a set of Jackie Robinson baseball cards sealed in glass. They were labeled by year, going back to 1948. I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about baseball cards, but those had to be worth a small fortune.

  Halberson opened the '68 binder and turned the pages carefully. He used long scraps of paper to mark the spots where Millie's poetry and articles had been published, so I could look through them.

  “She was prolific,” I said. There were seventeen bookmarks and counting in the '68 binder alone. “You said she was just sixteen?”

  “Sixteen, seventeen. She was a devout delinquent. She was enrolled in The Westminster Schools, you know, typical for the Penneforts. That's a private school meant to train the children of the elites to stay elite, to keep the power structure in place, you might say. But Falcon, she was never going to be a prim and proper debutante. She refused to let anyone call her Millie, you know. She'd burn you with a cigarette for that, if you kept it up. I've never seen anyone harbor such hate for her own family. She wrote a poem or two about it. Happy reading.” Halberson nodded at the '68 binder and stepped over to the 1969 one.

  “I'll wait for that one,” Stacey said, pointing to the much thinner 1970 binder.

  “Pink Falcon wasn't around in 1970,” Halberson said. “Her family reclaimed her fully after the bombing, sent her to pricey psychiatrists, kept her on doctor-approved brain dope. I hear they set a guard on her when she got back home. She was rarely seen outside the tower after that.”

  “Why is 1970 the smallest?” I asked. “Is that when the paper went out of print?”

  “Out of print is one way to say it. Another is to
say our offices got burned in the middle of the night by the goobers, after they tried harassing us and pressuring us.”

  “Goobers?” I asked.

  “For 'good ol boy,' network. GOB'ers, we started to call them. Goobers. Or hill-williams. Racist white trash with political connections and lots of money. But trash all the same. Money doesn't buy character, you know. It doesn't buy morals. In a lot of folks, it only serves to corrupt both. The Owl covered local and state politics, you see, not just national issues. Gary Brekowski was point man on that. He loved rooting out local corruption, doing the work he thought the real papers should have been doing. He was an earnest, idealistic young man, too much so for his own good. The Owl became a target for the local power structure. Police raided us, watched us, looked for any reason to arrest us. And you could spend a night or two in jail for just about anything in those days. Public obscenity, that was a favorite.

  “Others started showing up, too. Not cops, but more brutal types. They'd bust up everything we had in the office, typewriters, the mimeograph machine, beat up on us a little bit, and take whatever money we had. They were thugs for the Penneforts, the same ones they were using to bust blocks, to push out poor people in the way of new developments. Homeowners had two options: sell cheap, or get intimidated into selling cheap. Houses in the path of Albert Pennefort's future shopping centers and apartments had a funny way of burning to the ground if the owners didn't cooperate. That's how Gary came to cover the mayoral election of '69 and Albert's support of Palmer Madden. Albert Pennefort wanted to raze the black neighborhoods, places like Vine City and Mechanicsville, to make room for his new projects. Palmer Madden just wanted to raze them on principle. That made them natural political allies.”

  “Man, the Penneforts sure were a bag of meanie-weenies,” Stacey said. Halberson and I both looked at her, and she shrugged. “I mean, sorry for the language, but geesh. No wonder their skyscraper is full of ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” Halberson looked between us, his thin white eyebrows raising. “Is that part of your thesis?”