Sugarland finished performing their final song a few minutes before eleven o’clock, signaling the end of formal festivities for the evening—the key word being formal. If things went like the previous two years, there would be a small group that would hang until midnight to see what surprises—if any—Mika Flagler had in store. And she did not disappoint.
At half-past midnight the twenty or so people who’d stayed behind found themselves sitting beneath the stars in a circle around the fire pit on the Mulvaney mansion’s large back deck, sipping an exquisite Trisaetum pinot noir from Willamette Valley in Oregon.
“This is marvelous,” someone said.
“It’s drinkable and also quite affordable,” Mika said.
“That’s one thing I’ll say for Mika,” Bruce added after taking a second sip of the pinot. “She never judges a wine by its price tag or its release date. What elevation was this grown at?”
“Three-hundred and fifty feet,” Mika said with a smile. “Bruce is convinced he can grow an Oregon pinot at lower elevations. I think he’s right.”
“In fact, I’ve had my sights set on a sixty-acre parcel on the Oregon coast,” Bruce said. “It’s a place called Crimson Cove. Been trying to get my hands on it for years, but the old woman who lives in the lighthouse there refuses to sell. But I haven’t given up, and besides, she’s bound to kick the bucket eventually, and when she does, I’ll be waiting.”
“Well, as much as I enjoy the wine, I’ve been craving a good cigar. But I can’t imagine anything more extravagant than those Black Dragon’s you conjured up in Savannah,” one of the gathered said.
“Never underestimate Mika Flagler,” Bruce said. “She never ceases to amaze me.”
Koda suddenly got it.
While Koda had been away—traveling with Dane for the past two years—Mika had continued her pursuit of marriage by forging a connection with his father through his two greatest weaknesses—expensive cigars and pinot noir.
Mika stood and clinked her knife against her wine glass to get everyone’s attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, the smokes have arrived.”
Moments later, a lanky man dressed in a white suit walked out onto the deck carrying a box of cigars in his gloved hands, as if he were holding the Holy Grail. Koda recognized the man—a dead ringer for Colonel Sanders—as the Master of Ceremonies at the Restoring Savannah Foundation banquet, better known as the Southern Gentleman.
“Please, feel free to join in,” the Southern Gentleman said, before he began to sing...
Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away!
Dixie Land.
I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray!
In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand
To live and die in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie.
The Southern Gentleman started with the party’s host, Bruce Mulvaney—having him take a cigar, clipping it with a Philippe Stark cigar cutter, and lighting it—then continuing around the circle.
“The last time I saw you, young Mr. Mulvaney,” he said when he got around to Koda, “I quipped at how it appeared that you’d just seen a ghost. I had no idea, of course, just how accurate my words truly were.”
As inappropriate as it was, a number of people in the circle found it impossible to suppress their chuckles.
Koda sat in the darkness beneath a perfectly clear sky dotted with millions of stars and surrounded by the circle of cigars glowing red around him. He hated cigars almost as much as he hated the Southern Gentleman, though he had a hard time putting his finger on the reason. It was simply a feeling.
That’s when he remembered one of his recent dreams, one he’d had about a month earlier.
In the dream, Koda heard the sounds of a woman screaming—a woman he believed to be his mother.
Then the dream shifted to Christmas morning, with Koda in his pajamas at the base of a fully decorated tree, opening a gift.
A telescope.
The dream shifted again, as dreams often do, and Koda found himself outside with the telescope when a flicker of light off in the distance caught his eye. He points the telescope and looks through to see a man standing in a window of a house, smoking a cigarette, looking back at him through a pair of binoculars.
Koda now knew who the man was—it was the man who lived in the house across the way in the old slave quarters that his grandfather failed to buy thirty years earlier—the one his father had been trying to get his hands on for so many years.
Koda turned to his father. “Did you and mom ever buy me a telescope?”
“A telescope?”
“Yes, a telescope.”
“Hell, Koda, we bought you tons of things,” Bruce said, annoyance clearly detectable in his voice.
Koda stood up and walked into the house.
If he’d been given a telescope as a kid—a telescope he’d somehow forgotten about—there were only two places it could be. The first was his bedroom, and to the best of his knowledge it wasn’t there.
The other place was the basement storage area in the old part of the house, the part that was the original Stone Plantation before the family added on additional sections.
Koda found the stairway and opened the door, the musty smell of two-hundred-year-old maple and hickory filling his nostrils as he turned on the light.
The room was jammed, filled with thirty years of clutter.
But it didn’t take long to find it.
There—leaning against the wall on the far side of the room—was a Meade telescope.
And now he knew.
The dream of looking through the telescope, and seeing the man with the dull, dark eyes across the way wasn’t a dream.
It was a memory.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chicago, Illinois
September 14, 1938
The plan to take the school bus fell apart thirty seconds after leaving the theater, when Declan and Tommy discovered their bus had been blocked in by other buses. The only other option was to take off on foot, which they did. After getting the address from a phone book, the boys made their way to the Greyhound bus terminal six blocks to the south and eight blocks west of the theater.
“Where are we going to go?” Tommy asked.
“It depends on how much money we have,” Declan said, opening the coin purse Sister Kay Kay had given them.
The purse itself was interesting. Made of soft, brown leather with a metal crisscross clasp at the top, the purse was small—like something a child would use.
The front of the purse had a picture of a large building. Stamped beneath it in gold were the words:
Louisiana Purchase Exposition,
St. Louis, U.S.A., 1904.
The Exposition—or World’s Fair as it was often referred to—took place in St. Louis eighteen years before Declan was born and twenty-one years before Tommy. Declan had seen pictures of the World’s Fair in some of the magazines he’d taken from Father Fanning’s office over the years. The pictures featured many of the buildings and exhibits sponsored by other states and even other countries.
The magazines always included the fair’s main attraction—the Ferris wheel.
Father Fanning claimed to have attended the fair when he was younger, often pointing to a framed photo on the wall behind his desk and boasting how he had taken the picture himself.
Declan knew this was a lie.
One of the magazines he’d taken from the priest’s office had a page missing—a page from a feature article on the history of Dr. Ferris and his amazing wheel.
Declan knew then that Father Fanning was a liar. It would take a few more years to know the full extent of the Catholic priest’s sins.
But it was the backside of the purse that interested Declan most. Scratched into the brown leather was a single word—Onyx—with a small spider carved into the le
ather at the bottom of the letter y.
Declan assumed Onyx was the name of the child who’d once owned the purse. If so, where did Sister Kay Kay get it? Onyx was a unique name, and Declan could not remember any girl at Open Arms with that name. The only Onyx he’d ever met was the sick woman that Sister Kay Kay had nursed back to health a few years earlier. If the purse had been hers, how did Kay Kay get it? There was only one logical answer:
She’d stolen it from the sick woman.
Declan felt a wave of sadness sweep over him. He knew Sister Katherine was a murderer—having drowned Sister Mary Margaret in the bathtub—but the older nun had it coming. But he’d never thought of Sister Kay Kay as a common thief, which seemed so much worse somehow.
In any case, he was glad to have the money, stolen or not.
Declan dumped the contents of the purse into his lap. Combined with the money from Father Fanning’s wallet, the total came to $18.45.
“You got any money on you?” Declan asked.
Tommy reached into his pocket and pulled out two nickels, his eyes cast down at the floor in shame. “I never made it to the—”
“Tom, it’s okay” Declan said. “It’s over.”
Tommy nodded. “What about you? You got some money, right?”
Declan shook his head. “Everything I saved is back at the orphanage.” It was almost ten dollars earned a few pennies at a time doing odd jobs for people in and around DeSoto—and there was nothing Declan could do about it. Going back to get it was out of the question.
In any case, Declan knew they would need to go to a large city, somewhere they wouldn’t be noticed. Small towns were out. He walked to the ticket window and asked, “How much does it cost to get to Chicago?”
Twelve hours after killing Father Fanning, the two boys were on the streets of one of the biggest cities in the world, all alone, and with nowhere to go.
Going to one of the local orphanages was out of the question, and they soon discovered that people who ran the few homeless shelters that existed asked too many questions anyway. Declan and Tommy had no idea if the police were pursuing them, so they had to operate with caution and avoid drawing any attention to themselves.
The first two nights Declan and Tommy sought refuge in an abandoned warehouse on Division Street, sleeping on the concrete floor, amused at missing the comfort of the beds at the orphanage.
On the third morning, Declan walked to the library to see if they had a copy of that day’s St. Louis Post Dispatch. They did. There, right on the front page, the headline read:
“Catholic Priest, Two Young Boys Go Missing at Boys Town Movie Premiere.”
The police were investigating, and foul play was suspected.
Not good.
The article included a number of comments and quotes from the police and members of the Open Arms staff, including a quote from Sister Katherine Keane, stating that Father Fanning had abducted the boys and run off.
“I see no reason to look for the boys,” Sister Katherine was quoted saying. “If you ask me, I’d say the boys are probably dead and buried by now, never to be found.”
It was a great attempt at trying to cover for them, and Declan truly appreciated it.
But, as the article pointed out, there were many unanswered questions, including why the bus Father Fanning had driven to the movie premiere was still in the theater parking lot. Why hadn’t the priest used it to take the boys?
The article finished by mentioning that when St. Louis detectives returned to the Open Arms Orphanage to continue their investigation the following day, they discovered that one of the nuns—Sister Katherine Keane—had cleared out her things and left without a word to anyone.
Billed as “The World’s Largest Amusement Park,” Chicago’s Riverview was seventy-four acres of amusement park rides and carnival games, worked and managed by tattooed felons and homeless runaways willing to accept cash under the table. That—combined with the fact that the employers looked the other way when it came to providing documents like birth certificates and such—made Riverview the perfect place for Declan Mulvaney and Tommy Bilazzo to blend in and hide.
For a period during the 1920s, the park had garnered bad press due to a rivalry between the two organized crime gangs—the first headed by an Italian mobster named Al Capone; the other headed by Irish mobster Dion O’Banion. No one wanted to bring his or her family to a place where violence was likely to erupt, and Riverview’s business suffered as a result.
Once prohibition ended and the mob lost interest in the park, Riverview was deemed safe once again, even with the unsavory characters who worked the rides and lived in the shadows.
Like Declan and Tommy.
The carnies who worked on the front lines had no interest in helping anyone find work, especially since the person they helped today might become competition for their job tomorrow. The answer was to talk to the owners, which is how Declan and Tommy finally became employed.
Declan’s job was taking tickets at The Bobs—an enormous roller coaster that featured an eight-five-foot drop, making it the fastest and most-feared ride in the country. It was also by far the most popular ride at the park, allowing Declan to work as many hours as he wanted.
For Tommy, things weren’t as easy.
Tommy’s job was running rigged games of chance with virtually no chance of winning, unless, of course, you were privy to the tricks of the trade. One was the Milk Bottle Pyramid. The bottom pins were filled with lead, making them virtually impossible to knock over. Another was the Balloon Dart Throw, where underinflated balloons would often deflect even the most perfectly thrown darts—the tips of which Tommy had been instructed to make dull with a metal file.
Tommy hated cheating people out of their hard-earned money and would often discourage them from playing, which eventually got him fired. Fortunately, there was an opening working on a construction crew hired to rebuild several attractions that had burned down a year earlier, including one of Riverview’s most popular attractions, the House of Mirrors.
Three kids were killed in the fire.
Two girls and one boy.
Tommy was convinced the place was haunted. One day walking alone through the remnants of the attraction, he’d seen a ghost—the boy. He was reluctant to tell anyone what he’d seen for fear of sounding crazy and getting fired again.
With both boys bringing in a regular income, even if only a few dollars a week, they decided it was time to find a place to stay. Not only had sleeping on the cement floor become intolerable, but it was also starting to get cold, especially at night. If they were still living in the abandoned warehouse a month from now, they would freeze to death.
“We’re going to have to find a place to live, like a real place,” Tommy said, pulling his coat more tightly around him.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” Declan said.
“Any ideas?”
“Yeah, I saw a classified ad for a room for rent just off Irving, near Narragansett,” Declan said.
“Out of the city? How much we talking?”
“That’s the thing, it’s only six dollars a month,” Declan said. “I figure we could take the bus, and with the two of us working…”
Tommy nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Declan said.
“I was thinking about Sister Katherine,” Tommy said. “I wonder where she is, where she ran off to. I mean, this was all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Tom,” Declan said. “Father Fanning got what he had coming to him. And as far as the Sister is concerned, she knew what was happening. If we hadn’t killed him, she would have, and she’d be on the run anyway.”
Tommy nodded. “You ever wish we were back home at the orphanage?”
“No,” Declan said. “And don’t ever let me hear you call that place home again. The Open Arms was never home.”
Tommy went silent again, and Declan could tell there was something else on his friend’s mind.
“Come on, I know something else is eating you,” Declan said.
“I don’t want you to think I’m nuts, but—”
“Just spill it,” Declan said.
“I think I saw a ghost,” Tommy said.
“Where?” Declan asked.
“In the House of Mirrors,” Tommy said. “It was a young boy standing in front of one of the mirrors. I asked him what he was doing there, and he just disappeared.”
“You mean he just vanished?”
“Not exactly,” Tommy said. “He just turned away and…”
“And what?”
“…and he walked into the mirror, like he just disappeared into the mirror.”
“Wow,” Declan said.
Tommy was expecting Declan to laugh at him, but Declan didn’t. “There’s something else,” Tommy said.
“Yeah?”
“I walked over and looked in the mirror, and the kid was standing there—in the mirror—just looking at me.”
“That’s creepy,” Declan said.
“It gets worse. There was a man there, too. He was standing behind the kid, with his hands on the kid’s shoulders—looking at me. Someone we know.”
“Are you saying…?” Declan asked.
“Yeah, it was Father Fanning.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
San Francisco, California
June 23, 1936
Onyx and Ulrich sat in a private booth at Joe’s, arranged by the bellman at The Palace Hotel, listening to the piano and watching white-jacketed chefs laboring over orders of veal scaloppini and sautéed mushrooms in round shallow pans.
A tuxedoed waiter took their order and talked Ulrich into a pricey bottle of 1931 Clos St. Jerome Vin Blanc. The wine was delicious, and Onyx found herself mesmerized by the label depicting lush grapevines trailing down the sides with a quaint French village in the background.
Onyx Webb: Book Two Page 14
