Just Kill Me
Page 23
So much at once. My brain is totally puddled.
But maybe I can make it all work.
Lately I feel like I can do anything.
Cyn gets off at the LaSalle Street exit, rolling right into Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast.
“This isn’t the way to Magwitch Park,” I say.
“I just have one thing to take care of first.”
The bare branches of the ancient trees that line the street reach for the sky like chimney smoke. They rattle like bones in the night as she steers us down Dearborn. We’ll be going right past Bughouse Square in a few blocks.
Some of the townhouses have gone all-out with their decorations. Orange lights and spider webs are everywhere. One house has a full-size mummy on the porch. Another has an old-fashioned coffin. It’s wonderful.
The jack-o’-lanterns are in bloom, laughing at death with their glowing smiles as we drive into the Halloween night.
A BRIEF NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Just to clear things up a bit:
Most of the historical stories in the book are real; the main exception is the stuff about Marjorie Kay Stone and Finders of Magwitch Park (Magwitch Park isn’t even a real town, and you can’t really make your own ghost by punching people in the brain, so don’t come running to me if you try it and get suspended or something). People and businesses mentioned in the book are a mixture of real people and fictional ones. Mysterious Chicago Tours wasn’t real when I started working on the book, though it is now!
Lillian Collier was a real person in Chicago—Megan found out what became of her after 1924 a lot faster than I did. She was a mystery to me for years until I started work on this book, decided to buckle down and clear it up, and found that Times Herald article that gave me her maiden name, which opened up the rest.
As to whether she and Virginia Harrison were a couple, I really don’t know. Lillian’s son, Frank, doesn’t know for sure, either, though he says they “might very well could have been.” “She was never very upset when I told her I was gay!” he says.
I asked Frank to write a brief note about his mother:
My mother, Nellise Child, (pronounced Nell . . . eese, as in peace, accent on the second syllable), was born in New York. Her parents, being Russian Jews, came to New York around the turn of the century. With only a high-school education she simply read everything she could get her hands on. She knew from an early age she wanted to be a writer. She was a member of the New Dramatist’s Committee, so between 1948 and 1962, we got to see nearly every play on Broadway. She published two novels, Wolf in the Fold in 1941 and If I Come Home in 1943, as well as two mystery novels in the early 1930s. Soon after that her play, Weep for the Virgins, was produced on Broadway, by the Group Theatre, in New York. She was a great cook and entertainer. My father and I were very lucky to have known her!
Several plays Lillian wrote are still on file at the Library of Congress, and her books can be tracked down without too much trouble. For a time she worked as a writer for the Herald-Examiner under the terribly patronizing byline of “Our Little Girl Reporter,” but I’ve only ever found one of her articles; she later recalled assignments such as fainting in the street to see what happened. Efforts are underway to make more of her work available online.
As a side note, I’ve never found any more information on Virginia Harrison. One paper said that her real name was Jean Lawrence, which is a good clue, but both names are common enough to make her hard to trace, and it’s possible that neither was her real name. As Ricardo said, “there are some mysteries you just never get to solve.”
Adam Selzer lived in Des Moines back before it was cool, then tried out a series of small Georgia towns that will probably never be cool before settling in Chicago. In addition to several books on Chicago history and ghostlore, he’s the author of several young adult and middle grade novels, including Play Me Backwards, How to Get Suspended and Influence People (which is part of the ALA’s Banned Books Week packet), I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It, and Stonewall Honor Book Sparks (under the name SJ Adams). He has seen Bob Dylan in concert more than forty times, holds a world record for “Most Richard Nixon Jokes in a Children’s Book,” and often performs music, both solo and with various bands, at science-fiction conventions. Visit him online at adamselzer.com.
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ALSO BY ADAM SELZER
Play Me Backwards
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Edition
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4814-3494-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4814-3496-6 (eBook)