He laughed. “‘Pretty old’ isn’t old enough for me, Gram. Thanks, but I’ll take a rain check,” he said, going down the hall to his room.
She smiled to herself as she lined the dishes in the rack to drain. Her thoughts turned inward to her husband, Granville, gone ten years ago, just like that, of a stroke, just about the time of his retirement from the railroad…and just when they could have really enjoyed life! And eight years before that, their son, John, killed in a car accident with Debbie, his wife, leaving Gary a six-year old orphan. At first it was hard, not being a spring chicken anymore when they took him in. Now he was the sole joy of her life and her sole reason for living. So much like her husband, Gary almost made her feel that her Granville had never left her, that Gary was there to take his place.
She rinsed the rest of the dishes and dried them with slow, circular motions and stacked them in the cupboard. Arthritis stabbed her shoulder with every stretch, the way it hurt her knees all the time. She was getting older fast, and privately she worried. How much longer would Gary be with her? He was already twenty-three, or was it twenty-four? …no, not for another few months… and apparently quite serious with Shelley. Being engaged, it was only a matter of time before they-- The sudden thought of being left alone or, worse, shipped off to a nursing home so terrified her that she almost dropped the bowl in her hand… to be put in with all those old people!
With the door closed behind him, Gary opened his computer to check his e-mail. “Nobody loves me,” he said, shutting it down and making a quick dive onto his bed. His eyes burned from all the reading of record labels, advertisements and magazines earlier in the attic, and his full belly made him sleepy. Turning on his side to get more comfortable, he spotted the old newspaper atop his dresser. Briefly, he fought the impulse to get up, but memory of the haunting face of the little girl on the front page got the best of him and he gave into it. Sitting on the edge of his bed he smoothed the paper on his lap and began to read.
What Gary didn’t realize at the moment was that the newspaper he’d found buried that afternoon would open the door to the past, to a world of danger, mystery and romance.
Chapter 3
The little girl smiled out at him again, seemed to be smiling with bright eyes, despite the shadowy quality of the picture. The story, continued on an inside page, was so disturbing he could hardly bring himself to read it, but after doing the calendar math he comforted himself with the knowledge that the pain and the agony of the murder no longer had meaning to anyone. Sixty years or so was a long time ago. Still, he read through the account quickly:
Early this morning two boys discovered the partially decomposed body of nine year old Dolores ‘Dolly’ Czarnowski under debris behind a building next to the old First Ward playground, two blocks from where she lived. The girl had been missing since April 21st when she failed to return home from a trip to the grocery store. Sources close to the investigation say that she had apparently been sexually assaulted, bound and gagged and her throat slashed. They speculate that the murder took place inside the building, an abandoned two-story house which, in recent months, angry neighbors have been petitioning the city to demolish. Investigators are asking anyone with information regarding this crime and, in particular, a stranger seen lurking in the vicinity several days earlier to….
It made him sick thinking of the terror the little girl must have gone through before she died. If I could only go back, he thought, looking at the picture again. Back just long enough to save this one beautiful child. And to perform one definitive act in my life, just one! Wondering if his grandma possibly knew the girl, he tore the article out to show her and shoved it in his pocket.
He was about to set the newspaper aside when an ad for a Hohner harmonica jumped out at him. Only a dollar. That was a good make harmonica, and still around today, if he wasn’t mistaken. Wouldn’t it be something if… he mused… if…no, it was a crazy thought… but just maybe…. He checked the name and address. Yes, right here in town, Morgan Fisher Enterprises, not far away on the south side, North Division Street.
He chided himself. Maybe he was beginning to lose it, like Grandpa did, near the end. Grandma had good reason to worry that he was becoming too much like him. He cast the paper aside, about to lay back… still…Oh, what the hell! What did he have to lose except for a postage stamp. It was possible the company was still in business here in town and they just might find his order amusing enough to play along:
“Hey, Clarence, look here. Some joker wants to order a base model from a pre-World War II price list.
“You’re kidding.”
“Naw. Lookee here.”
“What a screwball. Throw it--no, wait a minute. Did he send the buck?”
“Yeah, here, see?”
“Fill the order.”
“You mean it?”
“Sure, why not? Make the sap happy, and charge it up to good will.”
Tearing the ad out of the paper, Gary scribbled a quick note placing the order, pulled a dollar from his wallet and put it all together in an envelope, ready for mailing. He set it on his dresser, then dropped back to relax. He was comforted by the warm smell of popcorn seeping into the room.
Arms akimbo behind his head, he gazed across to the wall he helped his grandfather paint a long time ago: You hold the brush like this, see, Gary? Then you dip it just so far, like this, see? Run one side flat against the lip of the can so it don’t drip all….
More than anything, he loved the old man, gaunt, forever running an agitated hand through wispy gray hair, moody, sometimes explosive, his hard jaw set in anger against the world and his place in it. But the old man was always good to him, taking him along on his trips to the library and book stores, teaching him to tie knots-- the square and the bowline and the sheepshank, regaling him with stories of his long ago youth and his navy experiences in the war.
He brought it all to life the year before he died, when the three of them took a trip to Hawaii and visited Pearl Harbor. He remembered vividly the pictures his Grandpa painted of the attack as they took the launch out to the Memorial, just off Ford Island, more vivid even than the movie they showed in the visitors’ center before they boarded. He could still visualize names of the dead sailors engraved in marble inside the Memorial, and tried to imagine the thousand trapped sailors suffocating to death at the bottom of the harbor. Most horrifying of all was the image of them still there, entombed in the hull, directly below where he was standing.
And Grandma, patient despite her exasperation with Gramps, her pale blue eyes expressing an understanding beyond words, serving him dinner as if he were a king, massaging his aching back with a liniment so strong it burned your eyes if you stood too close, tolerating his tantrums that erupted like boiling geysers, and faded away as quickly, like a harmless mist.
For a long time he had been thinking of getting his grandma out of the old house she had lived in for fifty years or more. As a whole the neighborhood still had some vitality to it, but it had been decaying for at least a decade, and here and there boarded up houses festooned
