by Tracy Lane
A code sounded from one of the machines he was hooked up to, a beeping that sounded weak, like it had batteries that needed to be recharged. Weak or not, in seconds the room was filled with doctors and nurses trying to save Mr. Barton.
“Miss,” they said to Tank, “you have to leave the room. We’ll do our best.”
Tank looked at her father one last time. Jake led her out of the room by dragging on the sleeve of her favorite yellow raincoat. There was a waiting room at the end of the hall. He took her there, sat her on a couch, and then sat on a chair across from her. Frank sank down next to him.
“You okay?” Jake asked, handing her a tissue from the green box on the coffee table in front of him.
She waved it away. “Yeah, I’m…I’m fine. I don’t know what just happened. I guess I should thank you.”
Jake turned to the chair next to him. “Thank Frank.”
Tank started to roll her eyes, and then stopped. “What, he’s…he’s sitting there?”
“Frank?” Jake asked.
Frank sighed. “I’m getting tired of these cheap parlor tricks, Jake.”
Even so, he grabbed the tissue box and waved it through the air three or four times before slamming it back down.
Tank’s eyes grew wide as she slumped back into the couch. “Thank you, Frank,” she whispered, eyes closing as a single tear fell across her plump, red cheek.
A nurse came into the room, followed by a woman in a suit. The woman in the suit had a clipboard and a pen ready. “Clarice Suzanne Barton?” she asked, and Tank blushed.
Jake felt the hint of a smile despite the grim circumstances. He’d never heard Tank’s full name before.
“Yes,” she said, avoiding Jake’s eyes.
“I’m Mrs. Collins, the social worker assigned to your case. If you’ll come with me, I’d like to ask you a few questions about where you’ll be living, now that your father’s…deceased.”
Tank just sat there, slouched on the middle couch cushion. Jake saw the vulnerability in her eyes.
“Now?” he asked Mrs. Collins. “I mean, can’t it wait until—”
“I’m afraid it can’t, young man.”
By the time Jake looked back at Tank, she was standing. “It’s okay, Jake. Can you wait for me?”
“This may take some time, dear,” Mrs. Collins snapped.
Still looking at Jake, Tank said a tad more forcefully, “Wait for me?”
Jake nodded.
When the room was empty, he asked Frank, “Is that what you want?”
“What? A social worker with a clipboard? She’s a little young for my taste.”
Jake nudged Frank’s shoulder, glad to be able to reach out and touch him. In some ways, Frank felt less like a ghost than most living people Jake knew. In his own way, Frank was so much more alive.
“I meant…what Mr. Barton had? At the end there, when he spoke to his daughter. That sense of peace? That…closure?”
Frank nodded solemnly. “I think it’s too late for me to get that kind of peace,” he said. “But, yes, Jake, when I find out who killed me and why, perhaps I too can leave this world behind.”
Jake glanced sideways at Frank. The ghost’s face said he was confident, ready to move on, but Jake wasn’t sure if he would be ready to let him go.
Chapter 10
“It’s Betty Cooper!” said the woman at the Dusk Home for Seniors, Shut-ins and Recluses. She clung to a faded teddy bear. Her eyes were sunken and she wore too much lipstick, but her voice was clear.
Frank leaned in the corner of the stuffy room, checking his fingernails. Jake sat in a chair across from the old woman at a table filled with dusty teacups and stale cookies.
“Are you sure?” Jake asked as she handed back his copy of the photo from the Lido Lounge.
The elderly lady, Mabel Gable, frowned. “Of course I am, sonny boy. That’s her standing right next to me!”
Jake smiled despite the old woman’s mocking tone; Frank called him “sonny boy” sometimes.
“In fact,” she said, standing with the aid of a metal cane with four legs popping out at the bottom. Each one had a tennis ball stuck to it to cushion her steps. “I have a better picture of her over here.”
Jake stood up to follow and immediately felt Frank’s presence beside him. “Look at all these old photos, Jake,” he said as the woman hobbled to a nearby table covered with black and white pictures in dime store frames. “I can’t tell who’s living in the past more: me or Mabel.”
Mabel’s hands shook as she reached for a frame in the middle of a field of pictures. It was blackened and dusty, but Betty Cooper’s face smiled through the faded glass. It was if she was looking right at Jake.
She was beautiful, with wavy blond hair, flawless skin and high cheekbones. Her smile seemed to take up half of her face. She wore a little black hat and, in the picture, a much younger Mabel Gable held her hand.
They were on a boardwalk somewhere, standing at the end of a pier and clutching each other nervously. Even in black and white, the sky above them looked blue, the day windy and warm.
Mabel had been pretty, too, once upon a time. She was wearing a dark dress and a bigger hat than Betty, which she held onto her head with her other hand for fear it might blow off.
“We were at Seaside Shores that day, down in South Carolina,” Mabel recalled as Jake helped her back to the table. She had put out cookies for him; stale cookies, which, like the photo, may also have been from 1951. “We both played hooky from work and took the bus. It cost seventy-nine cents both ways; can you believe that, sonny?”
Frank chuckled. Jake couldn’t risk looking at him. “Ask her, kid,” Frank egged him on. “You ask Mabel who took that picture.”
“Who took the picture, Mabel?” Jake asked, feeling like one of those wooden ventriloquist mannequins in a bad Talent Night contest.
Mabel’s eyes lit up. “Betty’s fella, that’s who, a man by the name of Frank Barrone. He was playing a gig down there, at the pier. Nothing would do but for Betty to drag me there and see him with her.”
Frank didn’t need to tell Jake what to ask next. “You said this Frank was Betty’s fella. Was Betty seeing anyone else at the time?”
Mabel made a funny little face and did something with her left eye that might have been a wink – or the beginning of a mild cardiac event. Jake wasn’t sure which.
“We both had fellas on the side back then, see?” she explained, putting the picture down on the table. “And the fellas we had on the side had girls on the side, and so on and so forth. It’s how we were.”
She paused, taking a sip of the tea she’d made when Jake had arrived ten minutes earlier. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said, chuckling pleasantly. “I was a real looker back in the day.”
She took one of the cookies on the plate between them and Jake winced as she bit into it, sure it would crack her dentures in half. While she chewed noisily, Jake saw Frank standing behind her.
“Ask her if she knows the names of any of Betty’s other fellas,” he said.
Jake asked like the mannequin he was.
“Kiddo,” Mabel said, “that’s like asking me what my locker combination from junior high was. I do know that she always had to slip away to see Frank because one of her boyfriends was jealous of him. I just…don’t remember which one.”
With a pang of disappointment, Jake thanked her and stood. Mabel started to rise, but Jake said, “It’s okay, Ms. Gable. I’ll show myself out.”
“What a polite young man,” she murmured to herself as he walked the few paces across her room.
Jake stopped at the door, paused, and turned around. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
Mabel smiled. “You’re from the high school, right? Lots of times, they send nice boys like you in to talk to old gals like me and cheer us up. You really did the trick, sonny.”
Jake returned Mabel’s smile and left the room, stepping out into the hall. The hallways of the Dusk Home for Seniors, Shut-ins and Rec
luses smelled like butterscotch pudding and brown rice. The halls were wide, and every few rooms, Jake would see a wheelchair sitting in the hallway. Sometimes there were people in them. Sometimes the people would say things, random things, like:
“Look out for my ginger snaps.”
Or, “You took my shoelaces.”
Or one time, “Tell me a story.”
Jake stood outside the door, watching Frank pace up and down the plaid hallway carpet. He had never seen the ghost so troubled.
“This is getting us nowhere,” said Frank, turning again down the hall.
Jake had written a room number down on his palm – room 344 – and he looked at it now. It was the room Tank was currently investigating, a place where they would hopefully find more answers than they had here. Looking back up at Frank, Jake said, “It’ll be just a bit longer.”
Frank wrinkled his nose at the assurance. “There are too many souls here, Jake. It’s like being on a crowded bus. This…this was a mistake.”
Jake nodded. “Well, listen, why don’t you wait here and I’ll see if Tank found out anything with Mr. Appleton, okay?”
By the time Jake blinked, Frank was already gone, disappearing into a fine mist. Taking that as his cue to leave, Jake headed off, turned a corner, passed a water fountain, and found the room he was looking for.
As he started to reach for the door, Tank stumbled out, white as a ghost.
“Tank, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “That dude’s crazy!”
“Who, Mr. Appleton?”
She nodded frantically, toying with the strings that poked out of her yellow hoodie.
“Well, did he say anything?” Jake pressed as they stood outside room 344.
“No,” Tank snapped. “Apparently your ghost here doesn’t have the highest IQ, because when I handed the old guy the Boston crème donuts Frank told us to buy, he freaked out.”
Jake did notice a smear of chocolate icing on her face.
He thought of Frank vaporizing himself in the hallway out of fear and pain and frustration. “I have to try anyway, Tank,” he said, putting a hand on the door. It felt sticky and wet: more chocolate! “For Frank.”
“I better stay out here,” Tank reasoned, scooting away. “I don’t want to set him off again.”
Jake agreed and turned the knob.
“What do you want?” asked Robert Appleton, the man in Room 344, upon Jake’s entry. His mouth was covered in chocolate, an open pastry box in his lap.
Jake smirked to himself. He guessed the donuts Tank brought him weren’t so bad after all. “Hi, Mr. Appleton.”
Mr. Appleton waved his chocolate-covered hand in a “get on with it” motion.
“Well, my friend outside says she had a hard time—”
“Hold up, kid. That there was a girl?”
Jake nodded slowly. “Yes, and…she was just trying to ask what you know about a man named Frank Barrone.”
Mr. Appleton was thin and pale beneath his powder blue robe. His room was laid out exactly like Mabel Gable’s, with a single bed in the corner, a table with two chairs against the wall, a small love seat, coffee table and its chair, and a small kitchenette next to the bathroom.
But whereas Mabel’s room was covered with framed photos and knickknacks from her life before the nursing home, Mr. Appleton’s room looked downright barren. The walls held generic clown pictures like those you’d see in a doctor’s office. They were likely put up by the staff just so it would look like someone was living in here.
Mr. Appleton straightened up in bed, chocolate all over the stiff white sheets. Jake lingered by the door, afraid to take a chocolate-frosted donut in the face at any minute.
“I might have heard of him,” said Mr. Appleton, motioning toward the kitchenette with Boston crème on the tip of his finger. “If you’d be so kind as to pour me a glass of milk from over there.”
Jake opened the fridge and found a row of tiny milk cartons lined on top, the kind they served in school cafeterias. He grabbed two and brought them over to Mr. Appleton.
“Would you mind?” the old man said, wriggling his dirty fingers. Jake opened the cartons for him only moments before he snatched them away.
“That’s better,” Mr. Appleton said between slurps. He had stubbly white hair to match his stubbly white beard, and no matter how much he moved, the thick black glasses on the tip of his nose never moved up or down. The lapels of his robe were dotted with stains, none of them fresh.
The room smelled like a lack of disinfectant and too much spoiled milk. Jake couldn’t wait to leave.
“Frank Barrone was a man’s man, you understand kid?” said the old man as he smacked his milky lips. “Tough to the core, but tender when he needed to be.”
Jake was too busy trying to ignore the smell. “So, you knew him, then?” he asked.
“Everybody knew Frank Barrone back in the day. He was Dusk’s Sinatra. It wasn’t a Saturday night if you hadn’t stopped by the Lido Lounge to hear him sing. Trust me.”
“So he must have been pretty popular with the ladies then, huh?” Jake asked.
“You betcha!” Mr. Appleton smiled for the first time, seeming to recall happier days. “And I was, too, once I bought a snazzy new suit and fedora just like Frank’s. Only trouble was, as many women threw themselves at him, old Frank only had eyes for Betty Cooper.”
“Was he the only one?”
Mr. Appleton stopped smiling and narrowed his eyes. “You mean did Betty have eyes for another man?”
Jake nodded.
“There was talk around the club that Betty was spoken for by some local mobster.”
Jake was getting excited. “Really?”
“Why do you care so much, boy?”
“I’m…I’m…” he scrambled for words, “doing a school paper on how Frank Barrone might have died.”
“We all know how he died,” Mr. Appleton said.
“But not who killed him?”
Robert Appleton was eyeing the picture of the Lido Lounge that Jake had pulled out when he finally said, “Gino Vitelli—”
“That’s the mobster she was dating?”
He looked at Jake like he’d just stumbled off the back of a dump truck. “Hold your horses, kid. Gino Vitelli used to drive for all them mob guys back in the fifties. If anyone knew who Betty Cooper was dating in the underworld, it’d be Gino.”
Jake let the information sink in before he stifled a groan and turned to leave the room. This was turning out to be the worst mystery ever. There were no clues, the only witnesses weren’t clues themselves, and the only ones who knew anything only knew someone else who might know something.
Jake paused near the door and decided to ask, “Know where Gino might be living these days?” “Last I heard, the poor guy had a stroke and is in the ICU at Dusk Memorial.”
“Great,” Jake said, not even caring if Mr. Appleton heard him or not.
Once he and Tank were outside and sitting on a bench at the bus stop, she asked him, “How’d you get him to talk?”
“I guess your donuts loosened his tongue.”
“So, what? Now we’re going to have to go back to the hospital?”
Jake looked around for Frank, who hadn’t shown up yet. “I guess so.”
Tank craned her neck for the bus, even though Jake knew she wasn’t in any hurry to get back to the foster home where she’d been temporarily placed.
“Any word on my parent’s paperwork yet?” he asked while making sure he had enough bus fare in his pocket.
Tank nodded. “That social worker said it should be approved by next week.” She paused and looked at him closely. “Are you sure about this, Jake? I mean, it’s not that I’m not grateful, but…it’s a big step.”
Jake thought of his parents and how they were up early the morning after Tank’s Dad died, filling out paperwork at children’s welfare to make sure Tank could stay with them. Even he was surprised by how absolutely they’d thrown themselves i
nto the process of becoming Tank’s foster parents. He thought maybe, at best, they’d offer to let her stay over on the weekends every once in a while, but his mother had been insistent.
“Jake,” she had said, looking up from a mountain of paperwork from the Child Welfare Office. “Tank has lost the only parent she’s ever really known. We may not have much, we never have, but we’ve always been family. I think, we think…” she’d clutched Mr. Weir’s hand as he’d nodded energetically, “that what Tank needs the most right now is family. How can we deny her the one thing we can do for her?”
Now, he just smiled. “Hey, as long as you don’t mind chasing ghosts with us every weekend, we’re all gonna get along just fine.”
Tank nodded, blushing. A few moments later, the bus rolled up to their position. It ground its gears and hissed its brakes and clamored to a stop.
“Speaking of ghosts,” she said, paying both of their fares as they stepped onto the bus, “where did Frank go?”
It made Jake smile wider to see Frank, all alone in the back of the bus, whistling “Barroom Eyes” and winking at him.
“Don’t worry about him, Tank. He’s always just a little closer than you think…”
Chapter 11
Jake saw the social worker’s car from two blocks away. It was silver, and on the side there was one of those magnetic door signs that said, “Dusk Department of Child Welfare” in big, red letters.
“She’s here!” he bellowed, bounding out of his room and nearly knocking his mother over as she watered the house plants, something she always set about to when she was nervous.
“Oh, good,” his Dad said, turning down the heat on his spaghetti sauce and tossing the dish rag onto the kitchen counter.
They were just getting downstairs and opening up the lobby door when the car pulled up to the front stoop. Tank was in the backseat, in her beloved yellow pullover, her hair flat and wet as if she’d just gotten out of the shower.
She smiled nervously and gave a little wave. The car jerked to a stop, and an officious woman in a bright red suit and matching hair stepped outside from behind the wheel and strode around the vehicle toward Jake and his parents.