Carlin Romano: Philadelphia Noir

Vaughan says, “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Things have moved rather fast. And just now, I’m sorry to say…” His voice trails off.

“What happened?” Frances asks. She pulls her hand out of his grasp. “Where’s Mother?”

He looks at her with an expression of great gravity. After a pause, he speaks softly and urgently about her mother, saying she felt ill, then began clutching at her heart, then collapsed. “She seemed to recover a little, and staggered. She got as far as the Young Master, and then she, well, died. She’s dead.”

Terror ripples along Frances’s spine. She tries to scream, but only a sigh comes out. Vaughan pulls her to him and settles onto the slipper chair with Frances on his lap. He says, “A young woman and her mother travel north. The mother is to marry a scientist. On the eve of her wedding, she suddenly dies. The man marries the lovely, innocent daughter instead. It was just as well, since he’d begun to find the mother tiresome, with a ghoulish streak.”

“She was angry with me,” Frances murmurs, stunned. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her mad.”

“You wanted to do the decent thing,” he says. “Bury those bodies. A man wants a woman who’ll make him do the proper thing.”

“Is this a horrible joke?” Frances asks.

“This house knows no jokes,” says Vaughan.

She leaps from his lap and runs for the door. He says, “Think it over, Frances.”

She hurtles down the stairs, into the basement, and spies the still form of her mother.

“Mother,” she cries, and touches her mother’s cheek, which is already cool. She pulls at her shoulders, but the body sags in her arms.

She takes the steps again, two at a time. If she can reach the door, she can get outside, to some safe place. She can almost feel the dew on the grass, the distance she’ll have to cover.

“So that concludes the Ghost Walk,” Annie says, as her tour group applauds. “The Beverly mansion used to be right here. It was torn down a long time ago, but that’s a true story.” She adds the capper: “And Frances was my great-great-grandmother.”

The group gasps, and Annie savors the effect of her tale. Where the Beverly mansion used to stand, there’s only a depression in the ground. Across the street, there’s a massive Victorian-style apartment house, where Annie herself lives, with towering sycamores out front. Annie has heard the tree frogs, just like she said. Besides, this is the perfect place to wind up the Ghost Walk, because the Irish-themed bar where Annie works is a five-minute walk away. She went on too long about Frances and Vaughan, though. She doesn’t have time to return her oil lantern to the Chestnut Hill Welcome Center.

“I think he murdered Frances’s mother. He was a serial killer,” a woman in a trench coat says. “Is that what we’re supposed to believe?”

Annie’s legs hurt. It was a mistake to wear platform sandals to traipse around these sidewalks in the dark. She says, “Frances died before I was born, but the story was handed down. She did escape, and she married somebody else.”

“Did she tell the police?” asks the trench-coated woman. “If she didn’t, then she let him get away with killing her own mother.”

Annie feels her authority fading. It would be so much better if the house were still here. “I don’t know all the details. The Beverly mansion stood empty for years, and people claimed to hear screams coming from the basement.”

“It’s a legend,” a bearded man tells the woman. “Ghost stories are supposed to leave you hanging. They’re not about closure.”

“Well, I’m disappointed,” the trench coat says flatly. “If it’s true, she ought to know the rest of it.”

Annie is chilled to hear herself spoken of in third person. And she wants to say, It’snot just a legend.

A child pipes up: “I saw leeches at the other place.”

The child’s mother, a young woman in a pink tracksuit, says, “We went to the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion. He’s talked about leeches all day.”

“Have you ever eaten eyeballs?” the child asks Annie.

“No,” Annie says. “How do they taste?”

The mother says hastily, “They were gumdrops, with M &Ms stuck in.”

“And there was brains!” the child gloats. “All red and squishy.”

“Cold spaghetti,” the mother explains. “They turned off the lights and let the kids stick their hands in it.”

“Well, I want a latte,” the woman in the trench coat says. “Join me, anyone?” and she looks pointedly at the bearded man, who edges away.

Annie says, “You can get apple cider and cookies at the Welcome Center. It’s free.”

She feels a tug of regret as her little group disperses, heading for cars or hiking north to Germantown Avenue. She forgot to ask their names. What’s the matter with her? She was with them for an hour, ever since they gathered at the side entrance of the Chestnut Hill Library and paid five dollars each to benefit a youth group. She volunteers because she loves to tell the stories of these old streets, the old churches, and especially the tale of Frances and Vaughan. She grew up with it; her mother remembered seeing the Beverly mansion as a child. The story makes Annie proud. It’s her heritage.

It’s practically all she has, she admits to herself. She grew up in the neighborhood, on Highland Avenue, went to college in Altoona for two years, came back, and allowed the job at the bar to become her career.

For one spooky, lively evening every October, she’s a star.

She hurries toward Germantown Avenue, wondering if anyone ever guesses that pieces of her own life, not only her great-great-grandmother’s, are embedded in the story. An old boyfriend had seen a soap woman at a museum. Captivated, Annie worked her into the spiel. She has no idea what Vaughan Beverly looked like, so she made up a description. Her own widowed mother can be maddening and oblivious, like Frances’s mother. Yet Annie feels she has not found the right ending. It’s not enough, somehow, that Frances gets away.

Annie and her mother used to entertain each other by embellishing the few known facts. Then her mother left Chestnut Hill for a retirement home in Jenkintown. The last time Annie brought up the Frances story, her mother gave a sheepish smile and said, “It’s bunk, for all I know. I’ve forgotten what’s true and what isn’t.” Annie went cold, for if the story is bunk, then her whole life feels like a lie.

When Annie reaches the corner, one platform sandal twists loose. She trips, falls, and skins her knee. The lantern flies out of her grip and smashes on the sidewalk. Its light sputters out, and she smells the spilled kerosene.

“Are you all right?” someone asks.

She looks up. A streetlight illuminates the bearded man from her tour.

“Here,” he says, taking her hand and helping her to her feet.

“Thanks,” she says, feeling shaky. “These stupid shoes.”

How quickly he vanishes. Her knee stings, and there was that brief panic of losing her balance. She gathers the shards of the lantern and tosses them in a trash can. Another Ghost Walk group passes by. Annie doesn’t recognize the guide, a woman with a booming voice and silver eye shadow. This group looks jollier than Annie’s was.

The bearded man is gone, but Annie’s hand still tingles from his touch.

She has given the Ghost Walk for ten years, and she suddenly feels too old, at thirty-nine, to speak in the exaggerated cadences she uses for drama, and to wear navy-blue nail polish and a tight black dress: her witch outfit. Did the man even recognize her? She hurries along, her ankle aching. Trees and restaurants along the avenue twinkle with strands of tiny white lights. Every store, every bank, has a glowing jack-o’-lantern out front, or cornstalks and baskets of gourds. She smells the raw squash of pumpkins and the potpourri of candles. Fake cobwebs drape the doorway of the Irish bar. She lifts them up and ducks inside.