Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  “I’ll have a pub house burger with home fries. No cheese, but add an order of fresh fruit on the side.” She was feeling wholesome and small-townish, and a burger was the only thing that would fit the bill. Having gotten this far on the path to virtuousness, she passed on the hot chocolate, which might have hurt her dairy-sensitive stomach, and ordered a cup of tea, which would fortify her before the walk home.

  The waitress keyed Josie’s order into a handheld device that she said sent the ticket automatically to the kitchen via WiFi. “Love this little thing,” the girl said. “At my last job, we used to wear iPads strapped across our bodies like shoulder bags. I don’t carry a purse normally, so that felt awkward.”

  Josie wasn’t into handbags either, but she was less into technology. She’d had to learn a lot of computer-y tricks to keep her blog up-to-date and fresh, but her web guy, Clark, handled all of the complicated stuff. Plus, if Josie had late-night questions, her friend Susan knew a thing or two and could always talk her down if she was teetering on a technological ledge.

  After a startlingly short amount of time, the waitress brought Josie a plate that contained less a burger than a work of art. A hand-pressed beef patty, not too thick and not too thin, hovered between two egg-glazed, golden-brown halves of a brioche bun, resting on a bed of pleasantly green lettuce and a deep red slice of tomato, with a snowy white circle of sweet onion. The lovely hamburger dome sat off-center on an oversized, heavy white bistro plate with a mountain of thin, crispy fries and a cup of fruit that included bright red berries.

  “Wow,” Josie said, and before she could ask, the waitress also set down some mini ramekins of ketchup, mustard, and mayo on a wooden flight board.

  “We make our own condiments here,” the girl said with a proud smile, obviously amused by Josie’s shock. “We also do a green tomato ketchup later in spring when the menu changes. That would probably be better for St. Patrick’s Day, but we’re more focused on fish for Lent around then.”

  “This is amazing.” Josie had already dunked a piping hot fry into the deep ruby red tomato sauce and was nibbling the end of it. She could clearly taste the different elements: sweet sugar, the tang of vinegar, onion, garlic, celery, at least two kinds of peppers—and was that cloves?

  She sampled the other sauces carefully before biting into her burger, wanting to make sure her taste buds were free and clear of meat juices so she could get the full effect of each flavor. She barely even registered that the waitress had left her to enjoy her meal in silence, which she did, other than the man in the corner table speaking on his phone as he drank coffee and looked through his papers. Josie was too enamored with her meal to mind his chaotic presence.

  “Did we file the papers for that grant on time?” he said into his phone. After a pause, he responded with, “Good. I think we have a decent shot at that one. We could fund another fair or maybe even a food truck festival. Harveysville did one of those last year and their downtown was packed. The cheese curd truck ran out of food.” He listened for a bit, and then added, “Well, of course we’re going to do it better.”

  When the waitress came back to check on Josie, she’d made it through only half her meal, but she was done in. She’d have to throw in the towel and take home a box for Bert.

  “Looks like you didn’t leave any room for dessert,” the waitress said, and Josie almost took it for a dare. “We have a Dutch apple pie cheesecake that’s amazing. You know, there’s a theory that you have a separate stomach just for desserts. That’s why you can still find room for them even after a big meal.”

  “I might be back tomorrow.” Josie was only half-kidding. Cheesecake would kill her stomach, and she didn’t want to end up praying to the porcelain gods on this trip. Not when she needed all her wits about her.

  “How long are you in town?”

  “Just a couple weeks, and actually, maybe you can help me out. I’m doing a little research. Do you know where I can find out more about some of the local history, like the Wells School for Boys or William Falls Wells?”

  “That guy would be your best bet,” she said, pointing to the man at the corner table with the coffee and papers.

  “Who is he, some kind of local historian?”

  “Yes, and he also happens to be the mayor.”

  Chapter 16

  Dan Beardsley seemed more than happy to abandon his work for a chat with Josie.

  “I guess I’m the local expert on…well, just about everything around Lake Park Villa. Come here,” he said, gesturing with an impatient, spastic flap of his hand as he left his table and went to the front window of the restaurant.

  She followed and stood next to him, coming up to his shoulder as they peered out into the fading light at the town square.

  “Take a look out there,” he said. “Our town currently has about twenty-thousand people. We have a bookshop, three cafés, a bakery, a raw foods bistro, two handmade soap shops, a drug store, three salons, six bars, and three meeting halls—along with a bunch of other specialty shops. We’re at the end of the Metra train line, which makes us a destination stop when the weather is good. In the early 1900s, the entire town burned down and they rebuilt it, added the cobblestones and street lamps. That store over there used to have a speakeasy in the basement.” He pointed to a storefront for a lawyer’s office. “We give walking tours during the summer. You should come back after we thaw out. Don’t let this week’s weather paint the whole picture for you.”

  “It doesn’t seem that bad,” she protested.

  His gray-blond eyebrow shot up as he assessed her. “Maybe so. Depends on what you’re used to.”

  “Finally. Someone believes me when I say that.”

  “Then again,” he added, “just wait until tomorrow.”

  And she had to roll her eyes again.

  They returned to his table, and she sat opposite him.

  “My dad was a photographer and I inherited his collection when he passed away. That makes it sound like a couple of albums and a scrapbook, but actually, he built a warehouse for it on the family property. People keep telling me to open a museum—I have enough to fill five museums—but then they elected me mayor, and now I don’t have any free time. I mean, come on, mixed messages, people. Do they like me or hate me? Lake Park Villa doesn’t have any term limits for the mayor, so I may be stuck here for life…until I pass off the oar to the next poor soul who comes along. I’m like Charon on the River Styx.” He hunched his shoulders and pretended to row a boat alongside the table. Josie chuckled.

  If she had to guess his age, she’d say he was in his late sixties. His thinning hair was still blond but on the wispy side of needing a haircut, and his rumpled white button-down could have used a good laundering and a bit of starch, or at least a vigorous shaking out. His face was kind but a bit jowly and unshaven. Kind of like a small town Jeff Daniels, if he’d chosen middle America over Hollywood. She glanced at the amber liquid in his lowball glass and realized how he’d arrived at his cheerful, albeit slightly rumpled state this evening.

  “Anyway, enough about me,” he said. “I overheard you asking about the Wells School and Billy Falls Wells. What do you want to know?”

  Josie couldn’t very well say she was looking for people who might have a motive to poison Lynetta Downes—namely any distant relatives hiding in the family tree who might be tired of waiting for nature to take its course so they could inherit their millions.

  “I’m curious how the school came about. We’re pretty far out from the city.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Even more so back then—not that physical distance has changed obviously, but most of the suburbs out here didn’t exist. All you saw were cornfields and pony carts. There weren’t any tollways and ninety-mile-an-hour soccer moms gunning down the road kissing your back bumper.” He ran a hand over his overly long hair sweeping it back from his shiny forehead. “Coming out to Lake Park Villa would have been like going on a serious adventure out to the country.”

  “I t
hought the school was a prestigious prep school for boys. Wasn’t the Wells boy some kind of genius? It sounds like it was more of a social reform facility than an Exeter. I take it that was the reason for building the school way out here.”

  “Now you’re on the right track,” he said, pushing away his papers and his dinner plate, which had the remains of a sandwich—a Reuben if Josie wasn’t mistaken. “Around the turn of the century—and I mean the previous century, not the 2000s—Chicago was a pretty vicious place. Crime, pollution, and poverty. It was rough on adults, but even worse for parentless kids. The disparity between the filthy stinkin’ rich people and the street-level poor was just starting to become significant. Personally, I think that’s where we can find the foundations of the one-percenters, but I’m no expert. I mean, I’m an amateur historian, but I’m sure there are people out there who know way more than I do about this kind of thing.”

  Josie knew a thing or two about juvenile delinquents, having been one of them herself in high school out in Arizona. At one point in time, Tucson had had a program called Soul Quest where highly at-risk kids had been rounded up and, oddly enough, sent out into the desert under the guise of learning survival skills…although for some kids, doing smack, turning tricks, and other underage horrors were also survival skills, albeit horrifically desperate ones.

  “Was the Wells School successful?”

  “In rehabbing street thugs? Not so much. Rumor has it that a few boys disappeared while under the school’s care. Inadequate lists were kept—you should see the state of the enrollment records. Handwritten and incomplete. Some boys were just referred to by their first names. ‘Johnny. Walter. Howie. Smitty.’ And since many of them were orphans and picked up from inner city homes, they didn’t even have family who would have missed them if they suddenly disappeared.”

  Josie felt a pang in her gut at that. Her dad had died when she was a teenager about the same time her mom had started exhibiting signs of mental deficiency and later went into a care home. If it hadn’t been for her Aunt Ruth in Arizona, Josie might have been one of those lost kids that no one was looking out for.

  How close was I to disappearing into the foster system?

  “Was there ever an investigation?”

  Her face must have relayed her moment of personal horror at his words, because he was quick to brush the whole thing off as speculation. But now the idea was planted in her brain. Her mind was full of images of little Oliver Twists with turn-of-the-century Chicago accents in their short pants and driver’s caps being carted out to the cornfields of Lake Park Villa. Their wind-chafed hands holding out bowls with them asking, “More porridge, sir?” and getting no gruel, no deep-dish pizza, no Chicago style hot dog. She shook her head to clear it, especially when food and humor were doing their unbidden best to relieve her of the sad thoughts, however inappropriately.

  He shrugged, and she realized he was wearing a green woolen Christmas sweater…in February. “It was all just rumor. Local lore, if you will. I don’t think any of it could ever be proven, and most of the people directly involved with the school have long since passed away.”

  Josie didn’t believe in ghosts despite the bumpy scar on her wrist that she’d picked up during her recent visit to Texas—which may or may not have been placed there by a spirit…or an exposed electrical wire—but that wouldn’t stop her from scanning the hallways for the specters of lost boys the next time she visited Pleasant Valley. Or she could ask the grouchy woman at the front desk. Josie almost laughed out loud thinking how well that would go over.

  “Well, this has been educational,” she said.

  What she didn’t add was that it hadn’t helped her in finding any legitimate and rightful heirs who might want to aid Lynetta in her time of need. Or further her toward death and their inheritance either.

  She pushed back her chair, intending to leave the mayor to his papers and his coffee, which their waitress had just set on the table without him ordering it. He slid it in front of him and reached for the sweetener.

  Good God, four sugars. She’d be up all night staring at the ceiling if she were pounding half that amount of stimulants.

  “You don’t know the worst of it,” he said, stirring his cup. “The rumors of abuse persist at that place.”

  

  Josie’s heart gave an uncomfortable thump. Does he mean what I think he means?

  Dan Beardsley continued, “The Pleasant Valley nursing home, you know? It’s like a shadow still lies over that building and they can’t get out from under it. If I had a nickel for every time Marcy calls me with her hair on fire to tell me IDPH is breathing down their necks… well, let’s just say I could build an Egyptian pyramid in the middle of town square and still have some pocket change leftover.”

  Josie must have looked confused because he backtracked. “Marcy is the gal who works over at the front desk of Pleasant Valley. And IDPH is the Illinois Department of Public Health. They’re the ones who investigate all nursing home complaints in this state. They process something like thirteen hundred investigations every year in Illinois but get more than triple that in complaints. I cringe to think how many complaints they receive about Pleasant Valley.”

  Marcy? I thought her name would be Helga…or Bellatrix. Wait, Sandra mentioned someone named Marcy. They must know each other.

  “How is Pleasant Valley still open?” Josie was baffled.

  “They can never find anything to substantiate the claims. Complaint after complaint is piling up, but every time they are investigated, nothing comes up.”

  “Is it the same person filing the complaints?”

  “That I don’t know. But I suspect if that were the case, they’d just be brushed off or filed away in the drawer for crackpots and crazies. Someone with a personal vendetta to destroy the place.”

  Josie could buy that theory. Filing frivolous complaints was the next step after compulsive letter-writing. Her boss at the news magazine that hosted and sponsored her blog often bragged about the crazy letters to the editor they got in their email inbox.

  But what if the complaints against Pleasant Valley are legitimate? What if there is some other reason they were being ignored or dismissed? Like money or bribery?

  There was only one thing Josie had left to do, only one reasonable course of action: she would have to do the impossible, breach the unbreachable wall. She needed to best the dragon. She had to get on Marcy’s good side.

  Chapter 17

  The wind biting her skin, Josie shuffled home with her hood pulled tightly around not only her head but also most of her face, and her chin dipped down into her zipped up collar as far as it would retract.

  Sweet Christmas, it’s cold.

  The gusts of icy air swept through the legs of her jeans and chafed her thighs as if she were wearing delicate ballet tights instead of a thick layer of Levi Strauss’s finest. She navigated her way down the sidewalk through a one-inch opening in her fleece and wool wrappings, the short handful of city blocks stretching out much farther than they’d seemed on her way into the square. Somehow she managed to open the front door with her frozen fingers and she nearly collapsed in the entryway as she waited for feeling to return to her extremities.

  “How do people live like this?” she asked Bert, who had click-click-clicked with his nails on the hardwood floor into the foyer to greet her. “My nose froze inside. Literally froze. I swear there are icicles inside of it. I won’t be able to smell anything again until spring.”

  He snuffled the French fry salt off her pants as she slowly began to feel her face again and started to unwrap herself. The house felt warm and cozy to her, but she didn’t know if that was because outdoors was so much worse. The wind suddenly picked up and buffeted the walls on the northeast side. The whole house—which she was coming to think of as a little old lady—creaked and shifted. Josie shivered in empathy and anticipated a cold draft coming under the front door, but the little old lady stood firm and stalwart against the gust, which eve
ntually died down.

  “That’s it. Cup of Sleepytime tea, flannel pajamas, and we are hibernating for the rest of the week,” she told Bert. “Pleasant Valley can go stuff itself. Lynetta is a hypochondriac with chronic senior moments. We’re out of here in a day or two at the most.”

  She could swear the dog rolled his eyes at her.

  In the lull of the easing of the wind, a car engine gunned down the street. Harris Kane roared up and turned into the driveway opposite her in his gray Taurus. Josie flipped off the light inside the entryway so she could peer at the yellow house better—and without being seen herself.

  Voyeur tricks of the trade…

  The street lamps had all come on, so she could see her grumpy neighbor perfectly as he climbed out of his car, cursed the cold, slammed the sedan’s door, and cursed again as the end of his scarf was caught in the door, yanking him back a step. He opened the door to release his neckwear and repeated the shiver-and-curse routine as he re-closed his car, mounted the steps of the house, and slammed that door as well.

  The whole routine would have been humorous except for the black scowl on his face. Josie remained pressed against the glass of her front door wondering what his foul mood might mean for the woman who lived with him.

  

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  The shouting began almost immediately.

  “Yikes.”

  Josie watched for a few more minutes, but no one came out of the house. The arguing continued for a bit longer. She couldn’t make out any of their words, but the very fact that she could hear them yelling at each other through both their closed door and hers was impressive—and scary.