by Tracy Lane
Chapter 3
“What’s gotten into you?” Tank asked as they sat on the curb outside the Stop ‘N Go on the way home that same afternoon. “Usually you eat your pie in, like, three bites. You’ve barely touched it!”
Tank sounded mortally offended. (She took her food very, very seriously.) Jake also knew her comment was code for him to share. He smirked and said, “Just not into it today, I guess. You want the rest—”
Before he had finished his offer, Tank had snatched the cherry pie out of his hand and shoved it into her mouth.
“It’s more than that,” Tank observed, wiping icing from the left corner of her mouth. “You seem seriously freaked out about something.”
Jake’s stomach hurt just thinking about what was really making him upset. For so long, he’d thought his parents were crazed fanatics running around the entire country, chasing down ghosts: figments of their imagination or rustling white sheets.
But now he knew the truth: ghosts were real. They lived. Well, sort of. They breathed, in a way. They wore crazy suits, and spoke funny, and had the absolute worst timing.
“Let’s go,” Jake grunted, easing up off the sidewalk and helping Tank to her feet.
Tank stood, straightening out her t-shirt before stumbling along at his side. The town of Dusk was small but could hold its own. It was clean, mostly, with lots of little side streets filled antique stores. There were ice cream churns, and a mall, and a movie theater out on the highway that could entertain whoever didn’t quite appreciate the town’s humbler charms.
Tank and Jake’s street, like most streets in Dusk, was lined with trees and white picket fences, bright red mailboxes and shiny cars.
Well, all except for the Hampton Arms, that is, the small apartment complex where Jake and his parents lived, which had none of those things. Actually, the Hampton (nobody in town called it the Hampton Arms) was set on the intersection of Reese Road and Mulligan Lane, but it made Jake feel good to know his best friend also lived on the same street.
Jake saw the Paranormal Properties van from a block away and groaned. He’d been hoping for a little peace and quiet after walking Tank home, not another endless discussion of camera lenses and boom mics with his folks. Tank heard him and smiled.
“You could always come home with me and help me whittle down my to-do list.”
Tank’s Dad was a true nut about chores. Even if he was never around when Tank really needed him, Mr. Barton made sure to drill into his daughter’s brain that chores led to discipline, and discipline to the good life. Every day, when Tank got home, he had a huge list waiting for her.
“No thanks,” Jake said. “Been there, hated that!”
Tank snorted and kept walking.
Moments later, Jake stood on the Hampton’s steps and watched her go; she and her favorite yellow backpack sulking down Mulligan Lane.
He sighed and walked into the lobby, using the smallest key on his Paranormal Properties keychain (it was shaped just like his Dad’s video camera) to check the mail. As usual, there was none. Either that or his parents had beaten him to it.
There was no elevator in the building, and only three stories anyway, so he took the main stairs, dawdling until he got to their door. It stood solid and black with three brass numbers at the top: 317.
He found his biggest key and opened the door, only to find his Dad strangling his Mom, and on camera, no less!
“Dad!” Jake shouted, to which his mother only waved him away.
“Not now, Jakey,” she gargled, clearing her throat. “We’re framing the shot for this week’s reenactment!”
“This one’s a doozy,” said his Dad, as if describing the morning paper’s funnies, “Bertram Pendergrast choked his wife to death in 1876, and she haunts the family mansion to this day. Mom and I thought you could head out there with us tonight, maybe check it out.”
“What, and watch you strangle each other some more?” Jake joked. “I mean, I knew you guys bickered a lot, but…”
His parents laughed, forcing his father to take his hands away from his mother’s throat and check his trusty video camera balanced on a tripod in the middle of the living room.
Technically, it was a living room; that’s what it was designed for, but mostly, it was a miniature TV studio. Where other kids had a couch and maybe a coffee table in their living rooms, Jake had a black picnic table topped with humming laptops and a wooden floor snaking with cables and wires.
There were monitors everywhere; on metal bookshelves, empty video equipment carts, even on the milk crates that doubled as their dinner table most nights. And since the Weirs never stayed anywhere very long, they never bothered to decorate the walls.
Once upon a time, Jake could remember pictures of flowers or city skylines on the walls. Somewhere along the way, in one move or another, his parents just stopped dragging them along. They were probably still hanging in a rundown apartment or rental house someplace in the nation.
“I’ll, uh, I’ll think about it,” Jake added as he started to leave.
“Sure thing, sweetie,” his mother replied as she straightened out the collar of her shirt and turned back to her notes.
In every available space, his mother’s research littered the living room. She took her ghost hunting seriously; both of his parents both did, no matter how much it might have seemed like a joke to his makeshift friends, or their neighbors. They were convinced that their time on tacky public access channels was only temporary and that, one day, their obsession with all things un-living would pay off.
Exiting the living room, Jake skipped the tiny fridge in the even tinier kitchen. He was never starving for food. It was a benefit of home schooling: eating whenever.
As his parents fiddled with blocking out their “reenactment” for this week, Jake slipped slowly into his room. On a two-by-four resting across some cinder blocks (don’t ask) sat a beat-up laptop that could perhaps have been the first one ever built.
It was thick and dented, and the dents were covered over with, of course, Paranormal Properties stickers. It was slow, but if you never shut it off – and Jake never did – it ran all right.
Most of the time.
He sat down on a busted desk chair and booted up the ancient laptop, giving him plenty of time to spin around and stare out the third story window to the street below.
It was late afternoon now, the second week in October, and the grass between the apartment building and the sidewalk was yellow and brittle. Fall leaves dotted the trees in the park across the street as a mother swung her daughter up and down, down and up, the girl’s little red pigtails flying in the breeze.
The window was open just a smidge, and between the sounds of traffic passing in the street below, Jake could hear the little girl’s laughter dancing on the wind.
A long, slow swivel in his chair brought him back to the laptop, where he selected a search engine and typed in all of the information he had: “Frank Barrone.”
He clicked Enter and groaned when all of his hits were phone books and Facebook pages and those annoying, “we can find anybody,” links. He scooted his chair up closer and added a few more parameters to his search: “Frank Barrone + dead + funeral + 1950.”
The laptop clacked, whirred, and gurgled frighteningly until it finally spit out an old newspaper story. It was dated September 17, 1951. Jake clicked on the link, stomach turning, until a black and white picture that ran with the story filled up half of his screen; it was Frank, all right, in the same suit he’d worn that day.
In fact, he was clothed in the exact same outfit, fedora and all.
The headline said, “Local Musician Gunned Down in Popular Nightclub.”
A smaller picture below the first showed a small nightclub with a giant, blinking martini glass on top and a parking lot full of giant 1950s cars; the very kind of car Jake could picture Frank Barrone driving up in, one arm lounging out the window.
He read the first paragraph of the article:
“Po
pular Dusk, North Carolina lounge singer, Frank Barrone, was reportedly gunned down today while singing his signature tune, “Barroom Eyes,” in front of a packed house at the Lido Lounge. Police are still looking for Barrone’s killers, a trio of masked gunman who burst into the club, called out the singer’s name and, when he turned around, filled him full of lead…”
Jake pulled a face. “Filled him full of lead?” he murmured to himself, spinning around in his chair as he printed the story on his equally outdated printer. It sounded like a line from an old gangster movie.
The printer shoved out the first page and, as it printed the second, he read it more carefully, circling names that might be useful, starting with this “Lido Lounge” place. It sounded like as good a place as any to start with.
As he read the printout – four pages in all – the breeze that blew in through his open window grew cooler. He looked up to find that the sun had set. Jake watched the streetlight directly outside his window flicker to life, filling his dark room with a ghastly orange glow.
He stood to close his window and peered down into the street. Frank Barrone stood under the streetlight, looking up. When he spotted Jake, he took the brim of his fedora between his fingers and tipped it forward. He stayed leaning on the lamppost as if this were a scene from that same old gangster movie. His whistle filled the air and reached the open window. That is, until Jake slammed it shut.
He turned, tugging his window shade down until it banged against the dusty sill. His Dad poked his head in, ball cap backward over his short, blond hair, camera over his shoulder and his car keys in hand.
“You okay in here, bud?” he asked. When Jake didn’t answer, Dennis Weir said a tad more quietly, “Mom and I thought you could head out to scout locations with us tonight, maybe—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Jake had grabbed his jacket and squeezed past his Dad in the bedroom doorway.
“I’ll go,” he said, opening the apartment door for his Mom, who was standing there, purse in hand and a confused expression on her face. “I’d love to help you guys scout out a house.”
Chapter 4
The Lido Lounge was an old, rundown building in an old, rundown part of town. Yet, as Jake pulled up to it on his bike, he could picture it being as bustling and attractive as it had appeared in the newspaper article.
He took it out of his pocket, carefully unfolding the computer printout and comparing the black and white photo of the club to the dilapidated building that stood in front of him.
The martini-shaped neon emblem was still on top, but it looked like it hadn’t been lit in centuries. Rust and water stains dotted the round, curved edge of the “glass” and ran down the “stem.”
A faded sign just over the heavy wooden door that had once read LIDO LOUNGE in all capital letters now had a few letters missing. It now read, “LI_O L_UNGE.”
“Lio Lunge,” grunted a voice beside him, startling Jake. He jumped, still getting used to the whole idea of ghosts. “That would have made a great name too, huh, kid?”
Jake turned to see Frank Barrone standing there in his same fancy suit.
He waited until he could speak to croak, “Could you give a guy a little warning when you do stuff like that?”
They were standing on an abandoned street corner with not a car in sight, but Jake knew that if anyone were to drive by, they’d see some random kid on a Mongoose bike talking to himself.
“Sorry,” said Frank as he stepped into the street, the soles of his shoes scraping in the pitted concrete of the road. “I’m not much used to company, or how to act around it.”
Jake followed cautiously, walking his red bike across the road. “What, you mean you don’t go around haunting all the other kids in Dusk?”
Frank paused right there in the middle of the empty street. He turned and looked down at Jake, who stopped under his gaze.
“Don’t you get it, kid?” Frank asked, wagging a finger. His voice was low and serious, borderline desperate. “Why I’m bothering you all of a sudden? Why I’m showing up night and day? You’re the only one who can see me, Jake Weir. You’re the only one who can hear me. At least, the only person I’ve met since I passed on.”
“So that’s why you’re stalking me?” Jake asked, grabbing Frank’s suit and nudging him forward. Frank got the hint, considering Jake couldn’t materialize into a puff of mist at the drop of a fedora should a car come flying down the street.
“I don’t know about stalking,” Frank sighed, leaning against a lamppost outside of the Lido Lounge once he reached the other side of the road. “I’m sorry to put all this on you, Jake, but…I can’t hang around here for another fifty or sixty years waiting for the next kid who can see me to show up. You know what I mean?”
Jake rested his bike against the lamppost, not bothering to lock it. “But, why me?” he asked, lifting his ball cap and scratching his cowlick underneath.
Frank shrugged his broad shoulders. “‘Beats me, kid. Maybe those ghost-busting parents of yours passed on a gene that lets you see ghosts for real. Or maybe you’ve just been around so many haunted houses in your lifetime, you’ve evolved into someone who can see actual spirits. Maybe you were just born with it, what do I know? All I know is if no one else but you can see me, then I can’t very well go to the places and ask the questions you can, Jakey.”
Jake nodded, chewing his lower lip, nervously. He thought of Frank wandering around tiny Dusk, North Carolina for eternity, whistling his tune, snapping his fingers. What did he do all day? All month? All year?
Forever?
Jake shook his head in resolution. “All right, then,” he said, feeling kind of special despite himself that he alone could see Frank.
“What about your bike?” Frank asked as Jake started walking over broken glass and weeds in the sidewalk cracks to the back of the Lido Lounge. “Aren’t you afraid someone might steal it?”
“They’d be doing me a favor,” Jake cracked, stepping high over the grass as he crept close to the building’s stained side.
Frank walked beside him, technically; he was floating a few inches off the ground.
“I don’t want to mess up my shoes in this mess you’re taking us through,” Frank insisted with a smile as he hovered nearby.
“How do you do that?” Jake asked.
“Do what?” Frank replied as they neared the back of the building.
“Hover, disappear, reappear. And that mist you leave behind. What’s that?”
At the back of the lounge, Frank lowered himself to the earth. Jake watched carefully as his spotless black and white shoes made an impression on the brown, broken grass beneath; just like a real person.
“I’m a ghost, remember? I don’t really have a physical body, not the way you mortals think about it, but I have my mind, my soul and with it I can do things; wondrous things. It’s all about control.”
Jake was a little confused. “Controlling what, though?”
Frank explained. “It wasn’t always like this. The first few decades, I floated around and acted like your general Casper the Friendly Ghost. I’d go here, I’d go there, but wouldn’t interact. I couldn’t really touch things, pick them up, move them; nothing. Then, twenty or thirty years ago, I started working really hard on taking a physical form. I thought, maybe if I could actually open a door or grab a book off a shelf, I could get to a point where I could solve my own murder and be rid of this place…”
Frank stood rigid, uncomfortable as his voice trailed off. “But even though I grew stronger, learned how to control my physical body and make it more…real, it didn’t solve my problem. There are still places I can’t go, still things I can’t do, like talk to people or ask them what I need to know. But with you, I can be real. I can touch you,” —Frank reached out and playfully poked Jake in the stomach. The touch was cold, but firm— “or I can vanish, just like this…”
Frank disappeared; handkerchief and all. That fine, white mist appeared in the October morning air, hov
ering vaguely in a Frank-shaped cloud until the first stiff breeze scattered it.
Jake waited a moment, then two more. Suddenly, the familiar tune Frank was always humming sounded, and Jake turned around to discover its source.
There he stood, leaning on a rusty tin shed and smiling. “Sorry,” he said. “Just wanted to answer your question about the mist. For some reason, whenever I go in and out of physical space, the form I have – this body – just kind of evaporates. It’s like I expend all this energy focusing on whatever I’m doing in real life, that when I revert to my spirit self, something just…pops. The mist is the result. I’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe you can ask your parents for me?”
Jake smirked. “They’d love that. Me, the ultimate skeptic, asking them a ghost question!”
Frank chuckled. It was an easy laugh, a breezy laugh. Jake tried to picture him standing here, outside the club on a busy Saturday night, sneaking a quick smoke between sets and laughing with the rest of the band some sixty years ago.
He turned, careful to avoid a cluster of broken glass at his feet, and regarded the back door. It was metal, and bolted shut in about fifteen different ways. He looked around for a tool, but spotted only castoff barstools with rusty legs and rat-gnarled cushions with moldy, white stuffing flowing out of them.
He heard a whistle, and then felt a gust of cold air. He looked back, face bathed in a crackly mist, only to find Frank gone and that shimmery “Frank” shape where he’d just been standing. Then, the shape moved.
There were clanking sounds, crunching, the spray of rust coating the floor, the creak of a door opening, and suddenly Frank was smiling even broader as he stood on the other side of the open door.
“Remember,” Frank said, “you help me and I help you.”
Frank swept his arm wide and Jake stepped into a small, ramshackle kitchen. Stainless steel countertops were, in fact, stained a deep and rusty red, and cobwebs filled every conceivable corner. Pots hung from a giant metal rack screwed to the ceiling and threatened to spill to the countertop below at any minute.
