Greetings, bold reader. I have accelerated the pace of this ultimate vanity press release. You get extra points if you noticed I published not two, but three chapters of this thing last week. Here are three more. Still with me? Good for you. Here:
17—a little crime
Will pulled off his worn Frye boots
and spent a minute rubbing his tired feet. Boomer paw-pawed over and looked up
at him with the quizzical expression he often assumed. What’s up, Dad, his eyes
asked.
Cats do not like the world to be
askew. Oh, they will adapt quicker than humans to turns about in the game plan,
or even to sudden rule changes in the game itself; but in their furry little heart of hearts, they would just as soon see their favorite napping
pillow stay just where it always has been, their food dished up and served just when and where
it has always been dished up and served, and their master or mistress
maintaining the same moods as always.
New moods especially disturb them.
When Will’s marriage had abruptly nosedived into marital oblivion, he had been
the master (if one can be the master of a cat) of a four-year-old tomcat named
Dangerfield. The first day Will had walked away from the tiny white frame
Knoxville cottage, in order to “think things over,” he had not really known—or
admitted to himself—that he would ever return.
But Danger had. That night Danger had
run away, simply packed his little kitty knapsack and split.
Will pulled himself out of his
memories, changed into some sweat socks, and pulled his elastic knee brace up
over his ankle. He peeled off his jeans and slipped into his cotton briefs and
over these pulled his dark brown terry drawstring pants. He added a dark tee
shirt and a navy-blue sweatshirt.
Into his old waist pack, which was
just a zippered bag on a webbed belt, he tossed a pencil, his apartment key,
his key to the library, a penlight flashlight, and his little blue spiral notebook.
He slipped into his running shoes,
hiked up his left pants, and pulled the brace into position. It had not yet
dried completely from his morning run, and it encased his knee in elastic
coolness.
He stretched for two minutes.
He put out the bewildered cat.
He locked the sliding glass door. He
ran. He ran the even mile to the library in 7:32:`06, his fastest mile ever. Inside
of twelve minutes he found himself once again leaning into the old microfilm
viewer.
He was looking for any reference to
cemeteries.
Cemeteries.
Cemeteries.
The reels creaked, splitting the dark
silence of the empty library. He wound the metal crank slowly, avoiding the distraction
of advertisements. He would stop to scan the obituaries, and total quiet would
consume the building until his breathing sounded too loud to him. Above the
glowing screen of the reader and past it, the darkened windows of the typing
room.
At last he found what he didn’t know
he had been looking for. Its discovery took him so thoroughly by surprise that
for a long while he stared blankly at the advertisement in front of him.
As his eyes went in and out of focus
on the block letter ad fitting snuggly upon the page, it fell just as snugly
into place within the jigsaw of the broad mystery he had been living. His mind
raced over possibilities while his body settled into a sort of suspended
animation. All notion of time left him. He sat still as the night, as quiet as quiet
as can be, until a glowing shape which gradually appeared outside the typing
room window moved.
That movement at the periphery of
Will’s vision caused him to turn his head a little to the left. As he did so he
experienced the odd sensation that, although he was undoubtedly turning to look
left, he had somehow left his head behind.
Sort of a gentle tug.
The luminescent shape outside the
dark window moved again, extended something like an arm from something like its
chest and pointed something like a finger straight at Will. That should have
frightened him, but he felt nothing. As if he were asleep, and this was not
happening. He felt not cold, but frozen.
But if he were asleep, how was he
standing up without a sound? How was he passing through the glass windowed door
and following the shimmering, phosphorescent presence through the library
stacks to their south wall? He risked a look behind him without turning his
head. He saw his body, his own body, sitting there, leaning into the old film viewer,
just where he left it. That felt perfectly natural.
He followed the glowing thing,
knowing that was what was expected of him, and found himself (himself?)
standing before a smaller wall of photographs he had not yet explored. The
Essence, or the Presence, or the Whatever, which seemed to possess no
identifiable features now, once again raised what should have been its arm to
point directly at a picture near the center of the photos.
He couldn’t be asleep then. He must
be awake. He must be standing unfeeling before a display of framed pictures,
calmly experiencing what he could only call a ghost point at a picture.
He must be…
On the verge of tears. His heart must
be thundering in the cage of his chest. HE must want to scream, “GO AWAY!” and
so with all the urgent necessity that his mind could muster, with all his force
of will, with all his courage, he summed up the energy and shouted, “GO AWAY!,”
and although the shout came out as a hoarse whisper, the apparition lowered its
“hand” and, holding out both arms toward Will as if to embrace him, it
shimmered once, twice, and disappeared.
He came to his senses all at once. He
was there, occupying his own body, and the effect was staggering.
His hands trembled, his ears rang,
his eyes throbbed as if with the afterimage of the brightest light, he smelled
Sulphur, and he tasted fear.
Legs shaking as if they would buckle
out from under him, he approached the photograph which had been singled out
from all the rest. He unzipped his fanny pack and without looking at it fumbled
within and brought out his penlight. He clicked it on. He focused its beam upon
the photograph.
Two men lounged stiffly on wicker
chairs. Four more stood formally on the wooden slat porch of the shop building.
The carved wooden sign over the two painted shop signs read “G.D. WILLEY BL.”
One long sign horizontal sign, its black block letters stark against its white
background, proclaimed “CENTRAL DRUG STORE.” The other one was straight out of
Will’s recurring dream, and it bore the same information as did the ad in which
Will had only moments before lost his senses. It was the sign for the Place
& Fretwell furniture store, the store where the fire had ignited on July
26, 1891, the scene of his dreams, and it read, in addition to the names of the
proprietors,
“FURNITURE
& UNDERTAKING”
At once every farmed photograph on
that long wall dropped to the floor and the sound of glass shattering was the
only sound in the world.
Will was halfway home, flying like
the December wind itself, when he began to feel he was being followed. He could
discern no one behind him, and yet the feeling persisted until he had locked
his door behind him.
That night, alone in his basement
apartment, he sat up in the living room. Every light in the room shone
brightly. A paperback novel sat open and unread in his lap. He slept not at
all.
18—miss
riley’s suspicions
Miss Riley sat back at her desk in
the library’s office. It was Wednesday morning, and she was alone in the
library. She had come into work early to clear up some paperwork left undone
the previous day. So unlike her.
She spoke into the telephone.
Frequently, as she talked, she scratched abstract little lines into a scrap of
paper on her desk. Her pencil moved slowly and deliberately. At intervals, she would
tap her pencil on her desk until her grip on its skinny orange length was as
far down as it could arrive, at which point she would simply turn it about and
tap the eraser end on her desk. It was a never-ending game she played, tapping
and twirling, tapping and twirling, then pausing to sketch her little lines.
“I am absolutely, beyond any
shade of any doubt, certain, completely certain that that
microfilm viewer was not left on when I quit this floor to leave last night.
Why, not a single person even used the thing yesterday evening, and the
very last thing I did was to exit through the typing room from the staff lounge
after making sure the lounge was clean and those lights were out, and it
was dark as dark can be, I remember plainly, so I called you, Robert. Yes. I
know it’s your day off but…”
Silence.
“My point, sir, is that someone has been lurking about in our…”
Silence. Longer this time.
“No, Robert, and that is precisely
why I am so concerned, Robert, I think it must have been an employee.”
Pause.
“Well, I think that is pretty
obvious. Nothing was broken—so a key was used. Nothing was vandalized—those
young high school students we call “students” would have at least knocked some
books about a bit.”
A very long silence. The quiet of a
sleeping building. Miss Riley, with a great deal of concentration, added heavy straight-line
perpendiculars to her parallel squiggles.
She tapped her pencil to its end,
twirled it about.
“That is why I called you. I need
your authorization to call them. We have little complaint, you know. All we
really have is a microfilm viewer left turned on overnight. I was a little
concerned that you might laugh at…”
“All right, I will. But can we do
that? I mean, isn’t it a violation of civil rights or something? Not to mention
the morale prob…”
“All right. I will. Yes. Goodbye.”
The rattle and click of a receiver
being placed in its cradle was followed by the briefer clicking as the receiver
was once again taken up. Seven muffled clitters as seven numbered buttons ere
depressed in rapid succession.
“Hello. This if Miss Riley at the Los
Gatos Memorial Library. I have a question about lie detector testing. Perhaps
you can help me. Polygraph? Oh, yes, polygraph. Well. Same thing, isn’t it?”
19—40
years ago today
Saturday dawned blue sky crystal
clear and Will, too tired from another restless night to motivate himself onto
the road for his morning run, satisfied himself with running the mile to work.
He toiled the morning in the
Children’s Library, repeatedly shaking off a groggy feeling and forcing himself
to direct his wandering attention to work at hand. More than once in the course
of the morning he screwed up some simple clerical task and chided himself for
his lack of concentration.
Not that he was actually counting,
but it had been two weeks since he had slept more than an hour or two without
awakening in a cold sweat to the sound of three beats of a kind. Knock. Knock.
Knock. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
Sarah had not been around for several
days now, and Will could not really blame her. He could think nor talk of
nothing else but his dreams or his speculation about their source. And as for
sleeping together, well. Will wasn’t doing much sleeping lately. And neither
was anyone else trying to sleep in the same bed. Even Boomer had given up his preference
for the foot of the bed and was curling up each night on the kitchen table.
The ogre living above Will’s
apartment was becoming increasingly active lately, adding to the sleep
disruptive environment. Will’s complaints to the manager had gone in one ear
and out the other, eliciting promises of action that were as empty of substance
as Will’s nights were of sleep. He was on the verge of direct action, of
confronting the villain (or villainess) directly, something he had avoided out
of suspicion it would only worsen matters. However, it was getting to the point
where matters could not, as far as Will could see, get much worse.
Something, or somebody, had to give.
Will spent his lunch out at the
microfilm viewer.
A reread of the Bruntz book had led
him to seek out the January 16, 1958 issue of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Times-Observer.
Its headline read, “Dulles wants summit meeting on ‘on condition,” and the Cold
War was in a cool rage.
On page three, Gene’s Country Liquors
(“Opposite Post Office”) ran an ad detailing the recipe for a “Happy Apple Knocker,”
two ounces of apple juice, and ounce of vodka, and the juice of ½ lime (or one
tablespoon lime juice) over crushed ice and shook it all together.
Will looked up. Miss Riley as staring
at him with an odd expression on her lined face, through the glass door. He
checked his watch, verified that he still had plenty of lunch time left, smiled
quickly and renewed his scrutiny of the microfilm. After a moment, she
disappeared. Will just looked back up and she was gone. His skin goosebumped
over, and he took a deep breath. That must have been a dream. It was all
running together in the cloudy reaches of his memory. The photographs still
hung where they had always hung.
He cranked the reel and searched on.
The First National Bank offered a
whopping 3% interest on savings and actually paid postage both ways for
save-by-mail customers. Frank Sinatra starred with Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak
in “Pal Joey” at the Los Gatos movie theatre. Second billing was James Cagney
in “Man of a Thousand Faces.”
And:
40 YEARS AGO
George Place recalls cannery workers sitting on head
stones at old cemetery
By Jim Sims
Motorists who speed through
the Intersection of Saratoga and Santa Cruz avenues, beware. The ghost of
“Little Willie” Turner may rise to haunt you.
No one knows for sure just
who “Little Willie” was, but George Place, proprietor of the Place Funeral
Home, knows that he was buried in the old Los Gatos cemetery near the present
intersection. When the cemetery was moved to its present Almaden Road location,
some of the graves were left sine no one would pay for their removal. “Little
Willie” was one of those who stayed in the old burial grounds.
A Lost Gatos family
originally gave the cemetery site to the Los Gatos school district on the
condition that it would revert back to the family when and if the land was no
longer used for burial purposes. Hunt Brothers, however, bought the property
and used the land for a cannery and its housing project. Most of the graves
were removed, but a few were left. The headstones on these were tipped over and
buried. Much of the area now occupied by Little Village was made into a living
area with cabins for the cannery workers. The Live Oak inn was part of the
original cannery Cafeteria. Place relates that cannery workers often sat on the
headstones and monument while eating their lunches before the removals were
completed.
Place’s father, E.E. Place,
founder of a furniture store and mortuary, began removing graves from the old
site in August, 1908. The last burial to take place in the old cemetery that
year was at midnight. The midnight burial came about after removal of graves
was started. The city did not want to remove a new interment and so obtained
injunctions preventing burials taking place in the old grounds. Place says that
an old man insisted that his wife be buried in the family plot and not in a new
cemetery. To prevent the city from serving him with an injunction he and his
friends made a midnight burial on Saturday. The city offices were closed and
the processes of law could not stop the man from burying his wife as he
promised.
Another man whose remains
are probably under Little Village or Santa Cruz avenue was George Teasdale. He
is best known for the unusual gift he left to Los Gatos children many years
ago. He bequeathed about two hundred dollars to the school district to be used
to buy candy for children at Christmas time. He had started the practice
himself some years before his death and wanted to see it continued.
The money was placed in a
bank and is still drawing interest. The sum presents a problem for the school
district today. No one knows what to do with the money. Teasdale died in 1873
and when the cemetery was sold 30 years later no one offered to pay to remove
his grave to the new site. His headstone was tipped over, buried and perhaps
lies beneath the passing cars or scurrying feet of busy people.
Place believes that when the streets are widened the construction crews may come across several such graves of forgotten people. Although Place has the only complete file of grave resignation and a map of the old cemetery, it is difficult to determine if the graves were removed. The remains of Teasdale and “Little Willie” may yet come to light. Until then it is hoped that Willie doesn’t mind too much the humming of automobile tires and the tramping of feet over his head.
