The Postcard (12 page)
Why I just followed her, I couldn’t tell you, but after three blocks we were at the Mirror Lake Public Library.
“Marnie saw Nick here, in the first chapter,” I said. “It’s cool that it’s still here.”
“We go to the best spots,” said Dia.
The library was a funky old building on one edge of a park with a lake in the middle. It looked like a Spanish mission and was cool inside, and quiet. A couple of old men were reading newspapers in big chairs, while some were just sitting and staring. A white-haired lady in a sweater the color of pistachio ice cream was unshelving books, peering at their covers over her glasses, and reshelving them.
Dia marched to the reference desk, where a young woman looked up from her computer screen. “Can I help you?” she said.
“We’re wondering if this old house is still around,” said Dia. She read out the address.
The woman hummed to herself as if she had heard the address before, got up, tugged a box off a nearby shelf, and emptied a stack of brochures on the desk. Her frown evaporated when she found what she was looking for. “I thought so. It’s called the Monroe-Davis House. Sometimes known as the Awnings. It’s from the early 1900s. It’s owned now by the St. Petersburg Historical Society.”
“Can people get in to see it?” I asked.
“Wednesday to Saturday, noon to three,” she read.
“Noon?” I said. “But, I’ve got to —”
“That’s fine,” Dia said to the librarian as she pulled me outside to the steps.
“But it’s only ten-thirty,” I said. “I can’t waste that much time —”
“You won’t. I’ll show you the Pier. Where Nick wanted to meet Grandma? You gotta see it.”
I couldn’t believe it, but she started walking, and I followed her. We walked toward the water, went all the way across the blazing hot white bridge to the Pier, limped back, walked along the bay, then turned north into narrow streets paved with dark bricks. It was a real hike, especially in the heat, and we had to stop for water bottles twice, but Dia convinced me it made more sense than finding a bus stop and waiting to make connections. A little over an hour after we’d left the library we were standing under big trees shaggy with Spanish moss at the corner of Beach Drive and 17th Street.
Number 1630 was a big square white house with a red tile roof under the shade of tall, mossy oak trees. A low iron fence circled the yard. Like most houses I’d seen, the yard was fairly small, and the house was close to the street, but it was big. Nearly every window — and there were dozens of them — was shaded by a large white awning trimmed in red. The water breezes kept the awnings inflating with air as if they were breathing.
“The Historical Society,” Dia said, reading a sign on the front lawn. “We’re visiting Fang’s house, T-Bone. We totally lucked out.”
T-Bone?
We unlatched the iron gate, paid the student prices with Dia’s babysitting money, and joined the first tour of the day.
The guide took us through large over-decorated rooms, saying that much of the furniture and fixtures had been brought in from the hotels that Fang — “Mr. Monroe” — had owned. Along the way, she told us how Patterson Monroe created a railroad empire stretching the whole length of the Gulf coast, that he built this house in 1906, and it was remodeled in the 1920s when his son Quincy inherited the business. The fact that Grandma used to live in the house, actually
lived
there, shocked me when I thought of the tiny box she had died in.
My heart skipped when the guide mentioned my grandmother as we headed into the vast dining room. “Quincy’s daughter, Agnes, was ill for many years and lived with a nurse in the bungalow,” she said. “It was a place she loved and called her own. Her mother, Ada, died when she was young, and so her father doted on her. Living with her in the bungalow was her favorite tiger-striped kitten, Malkin, whose photo you’ll see later on the tour.”
Dia grabbed my arm. Again. “Did you hear that, Sandy?”
“Grandma had a kitten named Malkin?” I said.
“No, the bungalow,” Dia whispered.
Hearing the word, the guide looked over and said, “That building is not on the tour yet. We’re currently renovating it and hope to open it this fall. Right now, the bungalow houses Mr. Monroe’s extensive personal library, which is slowly being brought to the big house. To your left is the study used by architect Benjamin Clinton Davis, who bought the house in 1954 after Quincy Monroe and his daughter moved to Europe —”
“Europe? Dad never told me about that —” I whispered to Dia, when she tugged me hard behind one of the columns. “Hey!”
“Shhh!” she said, a glint in her eye. “First of all, are you, like . . . awesomely rich?”
“Me? No way. Did you hear what the lady said —”
“Are you the ‘Railroad Prince’ or something?”
I had never thought of it that way. But of course I wasn’t, since Dad was never acknowledged as part of the Monroe family. “No. No,” I whispered. “Besides, Monroe lost everything soon after my dad was born. He lost his fortune a long time ago. That’s why Grandma was in a dumpy little house —”
Dia suddenly grew cold. “A dumpy little house? Like mine, you mean.”
“Come on, no. I didn’t mean that —”
Her hand slapped over my mouth. “Shhh!”
Just before the guide moved to the next room, she looked around as if checking to see that everyone was with her. Dia and I made ourselves thin behind the column. The tour left the room. We were alone.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean —”
“Just never mind,” she snapped.
“Will you stop that?” I said. “You never let me fin-ish a —”
“So you’re
not
thinking what I’m thinking?” she said, interrupting me again.
I looked at her. “You want to sneak into the bungalow.”
“Where Grandma lived?” she said. “Uh, yeah.”
As if Grandma were her grandma.
Again, I just followed her, darting out of the house and across the back lawn.
Darting across the back lawn! Like a criminal!
The little house was separated from the main one by a sidewalk and a hedge. It was a low, stucco building, small and partially hidden by a high bank of wild bushes that fell over it from the edge of the property. It was white like the main house, tile-roofed, and almost perfectly square, with a porch running along the front. We stepped up to it. Wicker furniture stood here and there on the awninged porch as if someone lived there.
It struck me more than once — more than a hundred times! — that I should be at the hospital because in, like, a minute, we would be caught and get arrested and the police would search my backpack and find the postcard and know that it was us snooping at the hotel and my mom would rush down here and take me back and Dad would drink again and fall a second time but Mrs. Keese wouldn’t see him and just go on hanging her laundry until it was too late and I’d see his face popping up out of a coffin, but —
Sometimes you just go with it, and I was going with it now.
Sidling up between the bushes on the back side of the bungalow, we cupped our hands and peeked in a window. The inside was scattered with short ladders and buckets and tools and coils of electrical wire. There were also cartons of books and papers just like at Grandma’s house, and old furniture under sheets.
“I could totally live here,” said Dia.
After first checking to see if any security wires were visible, she began to fiddle with a windowsill, got nowhere, then went around the corner. I peeked toward the house and saw a new tour assembling on the street and heading up the sidewalk. “We have to hurry. Dia —” I didn’t see her anywhere.
The back door swung out a pinch, and her face appeared, smiling.
“You coming in?”
It was hot and dark inside the bungalow. Cobwebs hung across the main room. Something alive moved between the walls, which gave me the creeps until I thought of Nick’s terrier-sized rat, and I almost didn’t mind. Dia went right for the boxes and began to sift through them for signs of anything that looked like a magazine, a manuscript, or a postcard.
I knew it was close to impossible that anything might still be there. But when I saw my great-grandfather’s library in dozens of boxes and filling the shelves, it reminded me of Grandma’s messy house and all the boxes there and that the whole mystery had started in a place like this.
I set to work right away, too. Or tried to. Among the ghostly furniture I saw what looked like a wheel peeking out from under a dusty sheet. Dust bloomed in the air when I lifted the sheet. It was an ancient wheelchair. The seat and back were made of darkened brown wicker, splitting now, worn in several places, and fraying apart.
“Dia,” I said.
She turned from her carton and went quiet. “Wow.”
It wasn’t the one from Dad’s photograph, but maybe an earlier one. It saddened me to think of Grandma going through wheelchairs one after another for so many years. All Dad’s stories about doctors and hospitals and Grandma’s mysterious accident suddenly became real, and it hurt. It was almost as if she were there in the room with us, sitting in that chair, young again.
What would she say to me?
My throat tightened.
For a while we didn’t say much, just emptied boxes quietly, found nothing, and repacked them. I kept thinking how I should be at the hospital and how time was passing, but I kept looking, anyway. Maybe I thought that the better the story I came up with, the less Dad would be mad that it took me so long to visit him. Then Dia went quiet over a carton she had been digging in. When I looked up, her hand flicked out of the box, holding a postcard.
“My God, Corey,” she said.
The card was dated 1949 and was from a place called Al Lang Field, which Dia said was a baseball diamond near the Pier. It was addressed to Beach Drive, but bore no message or inscribed chapter number. When we held it up to the light, we saw no pinhole anywhere.
“Keep digging,” she said. “I
will
score on this, Fergus. You better believe I will.”
We found two more postcards over the next half hour. One from 1948 featured a guy named Webb and his huge drug store called Webb City. The third was of a place called The Fountain of Youth and was dated 1950. Again, none of them had a message or a pinhole.
“So why no clues on these?” Dia asked, slumping into the wheelchair with the postcards on her lap.
“I —”
“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Nick sent the cards to Marnie to show he was going to be there. He was still trying to see her.”
“Emerson,” I corrected. “Sent to my grandmother —”
“He was trying to see her,” she said, ignoring me, “but she never made it to any of these places.”
“Maybe. We don’t know.”
“I do. He was trying, but her father wouldn’t let her go. He’s Fang, remember? He had no soul. And as much as Marnie loved Nick, Fang hated him. I bet she never even saw these postcards. That’s why they’re sitting here with Fang’s stuff and not with hers at your house.”
I glanced up at her, sunlight in my face. “You have this all figured out, don’t you?”
Even in the dark, I saw her do a grinny thing with her eyebrows, then her expression changed. She went kind of, I don’t know,
soft.
“You . . . ,” she whispered, “. . . the sun . . . you’re . . .” Slowly, she leaned forward in the wheelchair, across the slanting light, and reached toward me as if she was going to touch my hair. For some reason, I just watched her face get closer to mine. I didn’t move.
“Move!” she said. She pushed me out of the way, the chair rolled back, and she grabbed something from the shelf behind me.
It flashed in the sunlight coming in the window.
“Holy crikey!” she gasped.
It was a silver cigarette case studded with a blue stone.
Dia’s fingers trembled in the streaked darkness of the bungalow as she turned the cigarette case over and over. “Nick sees Fang open this in the hotel. When he first sees Marnie.”
She opened it now, and the smell of stale tobacco blossomed from inside. Folded neatly behind a few ancient cigarettes was . . . a postcard.
“Oh, whoa and a half,” she said, her mouth hanging open. She handed the case to me. “You do it.”
My hands were like an old man’s again, shaking and cold. I slipped the postcard out from behind the cigarettes and unfolded it.
The front had a picture of a tall but obviously fake waterfall. The rocks that formed it were partly real and partly cement molded to look like rocks. Water splashed down from level to level and finally into a flowery pond at the bottom. The whole waterfall was surrounded by vines and dangling branches. Over the top of the picture it read, “Beautiful Sunken Gardens.”
I turned the card over. It was addressed to Beach Drive and postmarked from St. Petersburg on May 14, 1952.
“It was 1944 when they first met,” I said. “Eight years have passed. Eight years. I guess he still liked her.”
“Of course he still liked her,” said Dia. “Quit stalling.”
Moving my fingers over the card, I felt three lines stamped inklessly into the message area:
III
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Dia, “and is there a hole in it? My gosh, Willy, will you hold it up to the light?”
I don’t know why I was taking so long. Maybe I didn’t want to be disappointed. Maybe I just wanted it to last longer. When I finally moved the card up into the window, my heart nearly stopped. Near the top of the card, just under the top ledge of the waterfall, was a tiny twinkle of light. “Oh, whoa . . .”
Dia snatched the card away and looked at it. “Holy, Buster!” she cried. “She never saw this one. He was hiding it from her. We are
so
lucky. A lot of the old tourist places are long gone. Nothing but dust. My dad could list them for you. He’s always going on about old Florida junk vanishing and stuff. That’s why he always drives over the Gandy. He loves that bridge. Gandy-Gandy-Gandy —”
“Dia!” I said, putting the cigarette case back on the shelf. “The point?”
“The point is, not Sunken Gardens. It’s still around. In fact, it’s not even that far away. Johnny, this is it. Chapter III. We are so close I can almost smell the recycled water.” A smile lit up her whole bronze face. She looked so . . . so . . . jeez, never mind!
“Your grandma never saw this card, I know it,” she said, slipping out the door, and flipping the latch to lock behind us. “Fang hid it from her and kept it. He probably knew it meant something, but not what. And supposing he never figured it out, whatever is hidden in the waterfall might still be there. Chapter III? Oh, yeah. Buff up your reading glasses, Elmer —”
“Dia, wait. Fifty-plus years in a public place? With probably ten million people all over it. And storms and hurricanes . . .?”
There was something in the smile she was making now as we moved across the lawn to the gate that told me she had stopped listening to me and was already thinking about our route to Sunken Gardens.
I sighed. “So are we going there right now?”
“Tommy Boy, we are
so
going there! Only not right now. I gotta eat really bad. Plus you can meet my mom!”