LITMIR.BIZ

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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 with graffiti bloomed like festering lesions. She had no real reason for wanting to stay put, not any that he could see, anyway. Most of her friends had either moved away or passed on. The businesses and shops she had spoken of so often, and one or two that he himself still remembered-- Franz’s bakery, Jack’s grocery store, the tailor shop run by a little hump-backed man they called Hammy, the drug store with the sweet smell of vanilla ice cream sodas-- all were gone except the grocery store, which had been replaced by one of the big chain markets, and the closest drug store was now half a mile away. The dark shell of the old Bijou Theater was still standing, and the Kit Kat Klub, his grandpa’s old hangout, had long since faded into oblivion.

      Over the years everything had changed. No wonder Grandpa yearned for the ‘good old days.’ They were simpler, happier days. Ironically, in her own way and for her own stubborn reasons, Grandma couldn’t give up the past any more than could Grandpa.

      In another month he would be graduating from the university and finally be able to give all his time to work. He had several interviews set up with various public schools and had no doubt he’d get hired. His grades were about as high as they could go, and he had nothing in his background that could hurt him. With a full-time teaching job he would easily make enough to buy something nice just outside the city. She was a stubborn lady, his grandma. The times in the past few years when he had broached the subject of moving, she had refused to even discuss it. His uncles Jerry and Wilbur and Aunt Shirley had no more luck talking to her than he did. But eventually she would have to accept the inevitable. Sometimes it was really hard to figure out old people.

      Then, of course, there was Shelley. They’d been engaged six months and had pretty much agreed to wait awhile after their graduation to get married. They hadn’t really discussed where they would like to live, although it was assumed, at least by her, that they would rent something cheap until they could save enough for a down payment on a house of their own. He had his own ideas, though he wasn’t about to air them yet. Shelley apparently assumed his grandmother would live on her own or move in with one of her children, most likely Aunt Shirley, but that wasn’t something he wanted to happen. He wanted to take her in himself, to do for her what she had done for him when he had no one, when he was essentially an orphan. He didn’t know how he would work it all out, but he would. Somehow. Growing drowsy, he sank back to his pillow and fell into a light sleep. He dreamed:

      

       …a burning ship, his grandpa shouting something from the rail and holding a child in his arms, a little girl whose shadowy face he couldn’t quite make out…..

      

       Chapter 4

      

      At three in the afternoon, a few days later, Gary bounded up the steps to the university library. Once inside, his eyes swept the cavernous room filled with book smells, where neither the librarian nor the handful of people browsing among the shelves seemed to notice him. His eyes lit up when he spotted her at a long table near the ‘mystery’ section, hunched over her texts.

      “Hi, Shell,” he whispered, sliding up a chair across from her.

      From between a curtain of blond hair that parted when she lifted her head, her face appeared smiling, coyly. Pleasure or displeasure, he couldn’t tell. Her pale eyebrow cocked, she glanced at the clock on the far wall. “Is this two o’clock?”

      Displeasure,

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