by Tony Abbott
“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?”
She smiled that same half smile as the first time, tinged now with something like a blush. “Sorry, no. But I do remember a few months ago. You were running like you needed to catch a train. Only there wasn’t any train. It was at Mirror Lake. You were jumping down the library steps, holding a stack of paper like a serving tray.”
I laughed. “Deadline. I’m a writer.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Falcon,” I said. “Nick Falcon. Yours?”
“Marnie Blaine.
“Blaine?” It came to me. “The fat man —”
“My father, Quentin Blaine,” she said. “He owns that hotel, I suppose. And the Gulf Railroad.”
“But only about half of Florida,” I said.
She kept smiling. “Some greyhounds, a hideous new autogyro, and a racehorse or twenty. But really. No more than that.”
Behind her, a man was doing a pretty poor job of pretending to be invisible. He was so much taller than the palmetto he was standing behind that the upper branches might have tickled his chin. The guy was as tall as a house and as lanky as a stovepipe. If he was Mutt, Jeff stood next to him: a little round barrel with a red beard. Too bad there was no fireplug for him to hide behind; he might have had a chance. I’d seen them both before at the hotel when I was nine, only they’d grown. One up, the other sideways.
The giant’s face showed no anger or menace. In fact, there didn’t seem much life in it at all. I thought again of what my father had told me about faces like that. Was he someone else without a soul?
“Maybe this is too risky,” I said, looking at the goons. “Maybe I should send you a postcard.”
I nearly choked. A . . . postcard?!
She laughed. “A postcard. That’s slightly nuts. What for?”
“With a clue to show you where we can meet. A clue delivered all safe and sound by the U.S. Post Office. I write mysteries, remember?”
She smiled. “I’ll have to read one someday.”
“You’ll be in one,” I said. “I’ll write a story just for you, Marnie Blaine.”
The tall man drifted back into the shadows, satisfied to have seen whatever he was looking for. Redbeard rolled quietly after him. I didn’t like the look of that. Two ghoulish guys making snap judgments, then running off to tell their boss. It was the scenario for a cheap story, and I knew it; I’d written a few of them myself.
“Never mind the postcard,” I said. “The Pier.”
“Daddy keeps his autogyro at the Pier. But you don’t want a ride in it. He’s just learning to drive it.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I leave flying for the birds. And for angels. Like you.” I imagined her at that moment with a pair of bright wings, rose and white and shimmering blue. I liked what I imagined, and it must have shown on my face, because her eyes twinkled.
“I really should be going,” she said. Only she didn’t move.
“The Pier. For lunch,” I said. “And try to ditch the undead.”
“They’re always around. My father likes to know who I talk to.”
“Funny,” I said. “I don’t care who he talks to. Meet me?”
“Maybe I won’t be able to,” she said.
I smiled at her. “Yeah, you will.”
That put a smile on her lips. She walked away then. I followed at a distance and saw her get into a car. It was a cream yellow Phaeton and beautiful. It didn’t have any dents. Its windscreen was the opposite of a cracked one. The thing gleamed like a Roman chariot on race day.
I must have stood there frozen like a garden ornament with a dopey grin, because the driver, a wobbly pole of a guy with a skull for a face, saw me, came over, grasped my arm with fingers of bone, and asked me if I wasn’t forgetting my appointment. When I said I didn’t have an appointment, he offered to make me one with a doctor. I took the hint a
nd hit the bricks.
My stomach told me I needed some eggs.
My heart told me I needed to see her again. I can’t explain it. How could I not want to see Marnie again?
So there I was, dashing down the alley to the sidewalk, and there were the bullets again, going chink-chink-chink at my heels, and all I was thinking about was her.
I nearly made it to the far corner when a shot grazed my calf, and I went down like an arcade target at a state fair. The sedan screeched to a stop a full half inch from my head.
I tried to squirm away into a flower shop, but Redbeard and Mr. Tall weren’t having any. They burst from the car and tackled me before I got to the door.
“Just — a — carnation —” I winced.
The tall man clamped his hammy hand on my mouth. Together, he and the barrel pulled me to my feet, dusted me off, and tried to interest me in a quaint little alley they had in mind.
“You’re real estate agents?” I grunted. “And I could have sworn you were punks.”
That didn’t crack half a smile between them.
“Alley,” the tall one breathed. “Now.”
I said, “I would, but I’m late for my shuffleboard date —” I tried to hobble away, but they were persistent and dragged me into that alley, anyway.
“You’re a credit to your boss,” I said. “By the way, just to be clear, is your boss a fat guy the color of cooked lobster —”
I doubled over when the giant punched me in the gut. His fist was only as big as a battering ram.
To make a long story short, I never did meet Marnie at the Pier, but I did get a chance to ride in that dented blue sedan. It wasn’t the kind of ride they advertise on the radio, all picnic baskets and yodeling kids. The car backed into the alley with us. Skullface swung out of the driver’s seat and sauntered to the back of the car. His oily suit swished in the shadows.
“I tell simple words for you, boy,” he said, as if he had learned how to speak from a book, or a robot, or maybe a book written by a robot. “She there, you not there. She here, you not here. She everywhere, you nowhere. Good. Now I think you understand it, eh?”
“I think I got it,” I said. “Can I go see her now?”
I fell to my knees when he kicked my wounded leg. He kicked me so many times, I couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing yellow socks with little blue anchors all over them. Stylish. I was about to ask him where he shopped when the bearded German grunted, “Enuf. Not here!”
“We’re gonna take you to da post office,” said the giant.
Post Office? Had they read my stories?
“Ya!” chuckled Redbeard. “Vee goink to post you!”
“To where,” I managed to say.
“Everywhere!” said the giant with a laugh.
“You guys been reading Spinoza?” I asked.
I got a final glimpse of yellow sock near my nose before Mr. Skull straightened his suit — all that kicking had rumpled it. He drew a set of car keys out of his pocket, unlocked the trunk, and held it open while the other two goons scooped me up off the ground and poured me inside.
There was something rotten in there that had attracted a few million flies. They were soon done with it, though. I was fresh meat to them.
Just before they slammed down the trunk lid, I heard one of the thugs say, “Gandy.”
Turns out the real estate men knew something about architecture, too. We were going to Gandy Bridge. I guessed their “post office” was an underwater branch, and the posts they were talking about were the concrete ones that supported the bridge. They were going to tie me to one and hope that the fish and maybe an alligator or three would eliminate the evidence.
We drove off at high speed. In the dark of the trunk, I imagined the turns between downtown and the bridge. I remembered that feeling of sand under the tires just before you hit the bridge. The sedan would have to slow a bit or shimmy on the highway. It would be my last chance to escape before they pulled off the road and carried me down beyond the scrubby palms and sand to where the posts were. There wasn’t much time.
My legs were like stalks of pain. My eyes burned. My lungs felt like lead. My nose was filled with the stink of something dead, and I wondered if I was smelling my own future. I decided not to dwell on it. I slipped off my belt and started working on the lock with the prong of the buckle. The sedan tore through the streets, fast, fast. After a while, we jerked right; then I felt the tires tearing over sand. They slowed. Then —click — the lock opened.
“Timing!” I whispered. Edging the trunk up, I jumped out, hit the ground, and rolled clear just as the car picked up speed again and bounced off into the shadowy undergrowth.
I looped my belt back on and took off as fast as my sore legs could carry me. With my wounded calf, it wasn’t all that fast, but for the moment I was alive and free. How long I would be either was anyone’s guess.
End of Chapter I
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I was quaking all over, barely able to breathe. Grandma’s boyfriend had written this story. A guy named Nick Falcon met a girl named Marnie in my great-grandfather’s hotel. The funeral guy had called Grandma “Marnie.” I saw the posts under the Gandy Bridge. I saw the tall man and the short German. Was this a story based on things that really happened? Would Dad know?
Would he tell me?
I wondered, of course, whether Emerson Beale could be Dad’s father. He was Grandma’s boyfriend, after all. But Dad said Beale went away long before he was born. I wanted to read the story again — every word — but before I could turn back to the beginning, I saw a small box outlined in black at the bottom of the last page.
A Note from the Editors
Chapter II of “Twin Palms” would have appeared in the next issue of Bizarre Mysteries. It is our sad duty to report that Emerson Beale was killed in action on the island of Saipan in June of this year. His passing will be mourned. It is to his memory that we dedicate his unfinished story.
I stared at the black box. My heart thudded, then skipped. My throat was thick. I couldn’t swallow.
He died? Emerson Beale died? His passing will be mourned?
I felt as if I had been kicked in the chest. Whatever thoughts I had about who Dad’s father might have been couldn’t include Emerson Beale anymore. He died in the war almost twenty years before Dad was born.
But even more amazing was what I found written in the margin of the last page. In thin blue ink, in neater penmanship than I have ever seen, were words in what I knew was my grandmother’s handwriting:
your Marnie forever
So that pretty much confirmed it. Grandma was Marnie. If Emerson Beale was Nick Falcon, he had been good to his word. He had written a story for her. Only it was a story with no ending.
I took up the postcard again and began to study it. Could there have been a clue on it, as Nick said in the story? Was that what the caller wanted me to find? I turned the card over and stopped short. I read the postmark again.
1947.
Emerson Beale died in 1944.
I stood up and paced the room. “The card couldn’t have been from him,” I said to myself. “He had been dead for three years before it was sent. So who sent it? And why was it hidden that way in the desk —”
I heard the sharp sound of scraping metal outside the back door and then a yell.
“No —!” my father cried. “Oh, Gawww —”
I jumped into the kitchen in time to see the ladder slide down across the back of the house followed by a deep thump.
“Dad!” I cried, rushing out the back door.
The ladder was lying across the bushes. My father had fallen off the house and hit his head on the concrete patio.
“Dad!” I said. “Dad!” He was doubled in half and not moving. “Dad!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For what seemed like hours, he didn’t move. Then he blinked his eyes and swore. “Holy —!” I was never so happy to hear him curse. “Dad, are you okay?”
He
swore again. “No . . . oh, man . . . Jason . . .” He let his head settle back onto the patio, moaning and clutching the side of his face. One of his ears was bleeding from the inside.
“It’s okay. Don’t move so much.”
Mrs. K’s door opened, and she came out, her arms full of wet laundry. She was humming. When she saw us on the ground, she screamed.
“Call 9-1-1!” I said. She turned this way and that, then finally dropped the wet clothes on her stoop and scurried inside.
Dad rolled over the corner of the patio onto the grass, clutching his head until he went still, blinking his eyes at the weird angle of his left leg. It was bent in a way that looked like a cartoon character might be able to snap it back into place, but not a person. He looked for a while at his leg, groaned weirdly, then sank bank.
“Oh, gawww . . . oh, jeez . . . Jason . . .”
“Don’t try to talk,” I said. “An ambulance is coming.”
“I called them!” said Mrs. K, stepping through the side yard. “A few minutes is all —”
She was right. It wasn’t long before I heard the siren and again not long before the ambulance screeched into the driveway. Two women rushed around to the back with a couple of packs. They twisted Dad carefully into a more or less normal shape, him yelling with each small movement, then lifted him onto a collapsible gurney a man brought around. They strapped Dad’s head tightly with braces and Velcro straps. Mrs. K was clutching my arm the whole way around the side yard to the van.
“St. Pete General,” said a medic, and one of the women hopped behind the wheel. A police car drove up now. An officer jumped out and helped the others slide the gurney into the van.
“You’re going, too?” the policeman asked me. Before I could answer, he asked, “Where’s your mother? Is she here?”
“In Boston,” I said.
“What? Boston?” he said, slipping the radio from his belt.
“Get in!” said the man in the back of the van.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital,” said Mrs. K.
My legs took over, and I headed for the van. Before I got in, I glanced back at the front door of the house.