by Tracy Lane
“I didn’t do anything,” Jake hissed back. “The dog has a mind of its own!”
“You hurt that dog, and Frank won’t be the only ghost around here, Jake!”
The twine was growing hot and scratchy in Jake’s hands. He was getting blisters from the old rope and Marley was still two floors away. “Can’t you just whisk him up here?” he asked when he managed to tug the barking pup up another floor.
Frank laughed quietly. “I’m a ghost, Jake, not a genie.”
Jake snorted and tugged and whimpered as his muscles ached and the pup squirmed. Finally, the bucket clanged against the windowsill and, as if a ghost himself, Marley leapt over the sill and down onto the carpet, circling Frank’s legs like a miniature furry cyclone.
“Down, boy,” Frank soothed.
Jake sagged against the sill and waved down to Tank. “All clear!” he said.
Tank smiled begrudgingly and said, “You’re lucky!” Then, “What now?”
He leaned out of the window, looking down onto the very modern, very deserted street. “I guess I’ll hang out here during the day and come home at night?”
Tank nodded and gestured at the afternoon sun. “You be careful, Jake,” she said. “I’d be in there with you if I could be.”
“I know,” he said. She gave him a playful salute before turning and shuffling off down the street.
He left the twine knotted around the bucket handle and slid it behind the curtain, just in case they needed to hustle Marley out the window again in an emergency, and then he sank onto the desk chair, sweaty and winded.
Marley played with Frank’s pant legs, the cuffs of his pleated slacks drifting in and out of mist as Marley’s too-big-for-his-body paws swatted at them. And then, suddenly, he stopped, big ears perking up as he hunched down low. A soft, protective whine slipped from his throat.
Frank and Jake shared a look, and Frank said, “Trouble. Hide him.”
Jake nodded and looked around frantically as a fist hammered on the door to their room.
“Mr. Barrone,” called the slimy voice of Atticus Granger. “Are you in there?”
Marley yipped as Jake grabbed him and slid him under the nearest bed, begging him to be quiet. “Please, Marley,” he whimpered, “please, just stay quiet for five minutes, and I’ll give you all the dog treats you can eat!”
The pup looked back, brown eyes dark and endless, licking his lips. “Please,” Jake repeated, before standing just as Frank opened the door.
“Can I help you?” Frank asked, his wide shoulders barring the doorway.
As always, Atticus fairly quivered in Frank’s presence. “Yes, sir, actually,” he said. His beady eyes roamed the room and narrowed when they saw Jake standing by the open window. “Several guests have reported hearing barking in your room.”
“Nonsense!” Frank interrupted. “It’s just my nephew and I. We were about to go out for an afternoon walk.”
With that, Frank waved Jake forward, and Jake followed him past the clerk and out into the hall. Atticus peered into the room for a moment before Frank unceremoniously slammed the door shut. In the real world, dust shook from the rafters and swirled around their feet, but in the ghost world, Frank and Atticus seemed not to notice the rot and decay all around them.
“Very well, sir,” Atticus said with a little iron to his voice. “But be warned, if I find evidence you’re hiding an animal in there, I’ll have to evict you both, no refunds.”
“If you can find evidence of an animal in there,” Frank countered, hanging a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of their room, “you should take your act on the road, pal, because you’d make one heck of a magician.”
He snorted at his own joke and dragged Jake down the decrepit hallway, leaving the ghost of Atticus Granger standing there, shoulders hunched, tiny fists clenched at his sides.
“What if he uses his passkey to let himself in our room?” Jake whispered as they took the stairs down to the main lobby.
“He won’t,” Frank assured. “He’s scared of me. For now, fear will keep him from acting.”
Jake followed him into the silent lobby and out the door of the hotel; the gray October day wrapped tight around him the moment he stepped outside, chilled and blustery. He admired Frank’s confidence, and sure, the guy was a gangster through and through, but Jake wasn’t so sure that Atticus Granger was going to stay out of their way so easily.
Chapter 14
“This is it?” Jake asked, standing in front of the crooked grave marker.
Tank knelt next to it and tugged on the dried weeds that seemed to thrive only around the lonely headstone. Next to her, Marley snuffled and sneezed at the mound of dead undergrowth that grew by his side; the little pup had been strangely subdued ever since walking into the graveyard.
Elsewhere in the Memorial Gardens Cemetery that lay just south of the city, the headstones were all well-tended and freshly manicured. Of course, it would be this one particular marker that looked as though it had been neglected for decades.
“You can see the name for yourself,” Tank said, a little huffy as Marley let out another big sneeze.
“I see it, I see it,” Jake grumbled. Even so, he peered closer and swiped off years of dust and debris with his sleeve until he could more clearly read the inscription: “Atticus Granger III,” it read in all capital letters, and beneath the name read two simple dates, separated by a dash: “1901-1932.”
That was that. No “Loving father, devoted family man.” No “He will be missed.” Not even a “Rest in Peace.”
“He looks a lot older than that,” Jake announced, sinking back onto the moldy stone bench that faced Atticus’ grave. Marley watched him carefully; he seemed disappointed that his new pal Frank wasn’t around.
Tank nodded without looking up from her weeding duties. “I think the guys just looked older back then, because of how they dressed, slicked their hair back, that kind of thing.”
Jake shrugged in agreement, though she couldn’t see it, and continued watching her work. He knew he should help her, but he just couldn’t muster up the sympathy required to pick weeds off of Atticus Granger’s grave. He was surprised that Tank could.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked, sharper than he had intended, so sharp that Tank looked up, surprised.
“What?” She held a fistful of dried yellow weeds in each hand. “This?”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” Jake said, looking away. He was thinking of Clara, of her sweet, innocent face. Then there were all of the other guests, all of them gone now; parents, children, friends. All of them dead, all because of Atticus Granger, and Tank saw fit to tend a mass murderer’s grave?
Eventually, she stood and swiped her hands together to get rid of the dirt. Behind her, in a small pile, lay the bounty of her work, which was ruined the minute Marley saw her stand and decided to start bouncing around on her scattered pile of weeds.
From inside the giant pocket of her raincoat – which she wore even though the San Francisco sky was a cloudless blue – she drew out plastic flowers. They were purple, orange, and her favorite color, yellow.
She laid them down on the place she’d just weeded, which was now as spotless and green as the rest of the gravesites in the Memorial Gardens Cemetery. Marley sniffed them curiously, and quickly grew bored when he realized they weren’t the real deal.
“Everyone deserves it, Jake,” she said. Her voice sounded far away. “No one’s perfect.”
“Perfect?” he snapped. “I’d say murdering all those people makes him pretty far from perfect!”
Tank stood next to the grave marker defiantly. “I’m not saying he was an angel, Jake—”
“I should hope not,” Jake flared.
“But,” she went on anyway, “I mean, you never know the full story until you know the full story, you know?”
Jake’s anger stopped in its tracks; he saw the quiver in her chin and the way she was biting her lower lip.
“She’s not tal
king about Atticus Granger,” Frank said, materializing at Jake’s side.
Jake hardly flinched anymore at the ghost’s random appearances, but he did turn then, Frank’s words surprising him.
Then he remembered Tank’s father – he remembered the frustration and the misunderstandings and the hospital visits. He remembered Tank before the Weirs had adopted her, alone and suddenly having lost so much, and he understood.
Jake’s shoulders sagged and the fight left him, just like that. He sighed and said, “So why don’t you tell me the whole story, Tank?”
She didn’t quite smile, but she didn’t haul off and slug him either (which was always a good sign). Instead, she said, “Not now. For now, I just wanted to see his grave with my own eyes.”
It was kind of spooky, seeing the grave marker there, moldy and tilted slightly in the ground, after he had seen the grave’s occupant face to face multiple times. He couldn’t remember, in all his years of chasing haunted houses with his parents, them ever dragging him to the cemetery where one of their “ghosts” was buried.
Jake stood and approached the marker with Frank at his side. Marley edged close to them cautiously, sniffing around at Frank’s heels before squeaking contentedly and following him, as usual.
When he was close enough to touch the marker, Jake’s eyes wandered beyond it and looked over the rows and rows of headstones that sat crooked and stained in the cold, hard ground, just like Granger’s.
“Are they all here?” he asked. “The victims, I mean?”
His eyes met Tank’s, and she shook her head regretfully. “None of them are buried here. This is what’s known as a pauper’s cemetery,” she explained, drifting back to the bench where Jake had been sitting. He knew she didn’t like to stand up for too long. She let out a long breath and spent a minute wiping the dirt off her sneakers and then straightening her raincoat.
“What’s that mean?” Jake asked.
“Folks who had no families, or couldn’t afford a proper grave, got buried here for free by the city,” she replied. “The rest of the victims were either from out of town or were buried properly in one of the other cemeteries.
“There was one guy, a busboy, whose family didn’t have the money for a proper burial,” she said. “He was supposed to be buried here, but when folks found out, they raised the money and had him buried somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t think it was right the poor guy should be buried in the same cemetery as his murderer.”
Jake had never heard of something like that happening before, but he kept that to himself. His gaze strayed to Granger’s grave marker once more.
He decided to take a seat next to Tank. “Atticus had no family?” he asked, settling down next to her while Frank drifted quietly among the tombstones.
Tank shook her head again. “He had family, but none of them would claim him.”
“So they hated him too, huh?”
She frowned at him again. “We don’t know that,” she said. “But…no one claimed him and none of them came to the funeral; that much we do know…”
She paused and slid her backpack off her shoulders, tugging her tablet out from inside. Her fingers flew across the screen, and it was a moment before she showed him a newspaper clipping marked December 27, 1921. The black and white photo showed two men, hats off, standing beside the grave.
“Who are they?” Jake asked.
“Oh.” Tank swiped her finger to make the photo’s caption bigger.
She handed it back and he read, “‘Gravediggers offer a solemn prayer at the side of mass murderer Atticus Granger’s burial site.’”
Jake handed the tablet back, less surprised than he thought he’d be that the only people to attend Granger’s funeral were the ones paid to dig his hole in the ground.
He pondered the date next to the caption. “What took them so long?” he asked.
“What, to bury him?” Tank asked. When he nodded, she said, “They kept waiting for someone to claim him. Nobody did, and at some point, they finally got the okay to put him in the ground…”
Tank looked at the time in the corner of the tablet and sucked in air through her teeth. “Come on,” she said, snatching up her backpack. “We need to hustle or we’ll be late for the bus.”
Jake got to his feet and turned to tell Frank, but the ghost was nowhere to be seen. Marley stood solemn and still at his feet, as he always did when Frank vanished.
On the bus back home, Tank continued to flick through the bookmarks on her tablet. “I’ve found a bit more about Atticus from old newspaper reports at the library,” she explained as Jake sat wedged against the bus window with Marley sleeping peacefully between his feet.
“Here’s where Atticus lived,” she said, and showed him a picture of a basement room with the windows broken out.
“What happened to it?” He took the tablet and scrolled through pictures of the inside. It was dingy and cramped; it housed a bed, a chair, a lamp, a washboard and basin, not much else. The furniture was trashed. “Killer” was spray-painted on the walls.
“When folks found out who lived there,” Tank said, “they tore the place apart in protest.”
“I doubt it looked much better before they tore it up,” Jake grumbled.
“No,” she agreed. “By all accounts, he lived a pretty pathetic life before dying a miserable death.”
Jake harrumphed, casting his gaze out the window as the city finally came back into view. “He could have died miserable and alone,” he said. “Instead he chose to kill over seventy innocent people.”
“You’re right,” Tank said, and he turned to face her.
“So why are you trying to make me feel sorry for him?”
“I’m not. I’m just trying to find out why he decided to take so many people with him, that’s all.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he gave his friend a weak smile. “I know you are, Tank. And it’s great, all this stuff. And I know it’s necessary. Frank says that if we can free Atticus Granger’s spirit, the other ghosts can leave the hotel too. I just…”
“You just what?” She took the tablet from his hands and slipped it back into her backpack.
“I just don’t like thinking about him,” Jake said. “He gives me the creeps.”
The bus squealed to a stop at Mott Street, but only Jake stood up, Marley jerking awake from his brief nap to leap dutifully into his arms. In his bag were his old-fashioned clothes, which he would change into in the bathroom of the bodega on the street corner before heading to his room on the fourth floor of the hotel.
“Be careful,” Tank said as he squeezed past her and into the aisle.
“I will,” he promised.
“And don’t forget,” she piped up as he walked toward the open back door of the bus, “your dad comes home from rehab tomorrow.”
Chapter 15
Marley was sleeping in a corner of some upstairs hallway while Jake explored the burned-out hotel rooms, taking background shots with his handheld camera to fill in his mother’s narrations in the upcoming Halloween Special.
It was quiet. Soft midday light filtered through cracked windows as Frank wandered just behind him with Clara at his side. Jake made sure to wriggle the camera every now and again, to give the footage that “handheld” feel that made the scares all the more authentic. He walked slowly, picturing his mother as she narrated something that would probably sound a lot like this:
“The halls are empty now, barren; dust mites filter through the midday sunlight, charred windowsills cracked and moldy, wallpaper peeling. Once upon a time, this hallway bustled with San Francisco’s elite. That is, before they met their grisly end…”
He smirked at the thought and kept filming. Apparently, he had slowed his steps, and he was surprised to find ghostly Clara hovering right beside him.
“What is the boy holding?” she asked, curious, and Jake was glad he’d remembered to wear his old-fashioned duds.
Fr
ank was slick, no doubt. He answered quickly, “It’s a newfangled camera they just invented. Cost us a pretty penny back in New York City, I can tell you that much.”
Clara nodded, but her eyes suddenly, slowly wandered to peer sadly out a window. She did that often, Jake noticed. Frank must have too, for he sent Jake a worried look.
“What troubles you, Clara?” he asked. His voice was gentle and low in a way he almost never used with Jake.
She turned, distracted, and offered a quick smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Hm?” she asked in a faraway voice.
Frank chuckled and tucked her gently under the chin. “Penny for your thoughts,” he said, trying a different angle.
Clara smiled, more real this time, and Jake’s heart fluttered briefly. She sank down onto the window seat at the end of the hallway. “You don’t need to hear my burdens, Frank,” she said
“I wouldn’t ask,” he replied, crouching across from her so that their knees almost touched, “if I didn’t want to hear.”
She nodded, eyes downcast and hands perched gracefully on her frilly maid’s apron. “You know our front desk clerk, Atticus Granger?” she started.
Jake immediately grew tense, and he shared a look with Frank.
“The thin man behind the counter downstairs?” Frank asked, as if he didn’t know everything Jake knew about the vengeful spirit.
“That’s him,” she said, meeting Frank’s inquisitive eyes.
“What about him?” Frank pressed when she offered nothing further.
She sighed, bit her lower lip; then, “He troubles me, sometimes.”
“How so?” Frank asked, inching closer and taking her hand. It was a gentle move, and in it, Jake saw the affection of a friend, not a lover.
She must have too, for then the words came rushing out. “The looks he gives me,” she said with a voice tight and grim. “Sometimes I think he admires me. Other times…I feel like he hates me.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t,” Frank said. “How could anyone hate you?”
She shrugged, looking anywhere but at him. “You’ll think less of me if I say, Frank.”