Every Now and Then Page 22

  “They’re all fine,” the sheriff said. “The new nurse—her name is Dinah Harold, by the way—told us that she and Eddie were too scared to stay at the hospital and took off shortly after Doc and I did that night. Eddie couldn’t remember if he called Mitch Washington to come watch the third-floor patients, but when I spoke to Mitch, he told me he hadn’t.

  Frankie asked, “Did you catch Cruikshank and Nurse Holloway? Are they in jail?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “The surgeries Cruikshank was performing weren’t against the law, but kidnapping and transporting people across state lines is a federal crime, so the FBI was called in. Agents found them at O’Hare Airport, about to board a plan to Mexico, with suitcases that contained nearly a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “What about the patients?” I asked. “What’s gonna happen to them?”

  “The hospital has been closed down, and they’ve been relocated to other facilities,” he said. “Not sure what the future will hold.”

  Considering how he felt about Broadhurst, I thought he’d be pleased, but he didn’t seem so. When I pictured my favorite patient, Florence, and how she predicted that our lives were in danger, and how much Frankie would miss playing chess with Teddy Ellison, and I thought about poor Karen and her invisible baby and gentle gardener Roger Osgood, I wondered if our uncle had learned more about them during his investigation and was as touched by their plight as the girls and I had always been.

  As you can imagine, what had happened at Broadhurst was big news. Reporters from all the major newspapers in the country descended on Summit, eager for scoops about the three eleven-year-old girls who had inadvertently ended up exposing what Dr. Arthur Cruikshank had done. At first, Aunt Jane May allowed the reporters to ask us questions and take our pictures to their hearts’ content, but when they started showing up all hours of the day and night, she decided that enough was enough.

  I couldn’t blame the reporters for being persistent, really, because they had to compete against the stirring firsthand accounts of a reporter from the Chicago Tribune by the name of Leo Cavanaugh. Frankie, Viv, and I begged to read his articles, but Aunt Jane May rather we didn’t.

  “That man is too good a writer,” she told us as she fluffed Frankie’s pillows. “I could barely breathe when I read about the atrocities goin’ on beneath our noses, and it about broke my heart when I did. I’ve clipped Mister Cavanaugh’s articles from the paper and put them aside with the others. You can look them over after you come home.”

  But she did allow Leo to interview us on the telephone, and after one of our conversations, he promised that he and his brother, Harry, who wasn’t mentally ill, and his mother, Audrey, who had engineered her sons’ escape from the hospital, would come visit us when we were up and running again. The girls and I looked forward to seeing Harry and meeting Leo face-to-face, and their mother. We decided to stop calling her the Summit Witch because, well, she wasn’t. But Frankie told Viv that when she moaned in the woods on the day Audrey Cavanaugh saved us from Elvin Merchant that counted as fulfilling the witch dare she’d thrown at her during our first overnight, so all was copacetic in that department. I’d say that Viv was still not enamored with the idea of sitting around our pine kitchen table with Leo’s and Harry’s mom, but she was anxious to learn what fate had befallen winking, dog-loving knitter Ernie Fontaine, who Leo told us would also be coming along for the ride.

  While much of what happened was kept from us in those early days, the girls and I did manage to get our hands on a Milwaukee Journal someone had left in the hospital cafeteria. Our pictures were on the front page, and I was hailed as a hometown hero. “If Elizabeth Buchanan hadn’t been brave enough to elude Hopper and pull the alarm that alerted the Grand County deputies, three more lives would have ended that night,” the reporter wrote, but I didn’t feel brave. The girls and I wouldn’t have been anywhere near Broadhurst the night we almost lost our lives if I hadn’t convinced them to visit with the patients in the first place, and I thought it might take a good long time to forgive myself, if ever.

  In my book, the real hero was Mayor Bud Kibler. Sad to say, the man the girls and I had been so very fond of—the one who’d called us “small fries” and dressed up as a vampire and handed out all-day suckers on Halloween—died that night from the knife wound Hopper had inflicted on him. Frankie, Viv, and I weren’t in any shape to attend his viewing at the Cleary Funeral Home, but when Viv’s parents came to visit, her ma told us, “I fixed Bud’s hair just so and dressed him in a new blue suit. He looked as distinguished as Ike Eisenhower.” And Mr. Cleary said, “Bud’s visitation was the largest we’ve ever had. Wished you could’ve seen it, girls. The line went out the door.”

  Thankfully, Hopper’s attack on Bigger Dolores in the Broadhurst kitchen looked much worse than it was. The stitches over her right eye and her concussion didn’t keep her and many other Mud Towners from attending Bud Kibler’s funeral mass at St. Thomas’s.

  “After Doc got up and spoke about what a good and fair man the mayor was, and how he stuck my knife into Hopper’s leg and that gave you a chance to escape, Bizzy, I’ll tell ya, there wasn’t a dry eye left in them pews,” Bigger said during the first of her many visits. “And when your father told them that a statue of the mayor would be erected in front of City Hall, the whole church rose to their feet. Even that Mulrooney gal got off her rear end and was bawlin’ into her hankie.”

  If Viv could’ve hawked a loogie on the hospital floor she would have, because she didn’t believe Evelyn Mulrooney was mourning Bud at his funeral. “Those were probably tears of joy and that so-and-so was usin’ that hankie to cover her gloating mug,” she said, because his death meant that after the September election, we’d probably all be calling her mayor.

  Of course, we tried to pry more information about what’d happened at Broadhurst out of Bigger during her visits, but she said, “Jane May made me swear to keep my mouth shut, and if you think I wouldn’t mind gettin’ on her bad side, you’d be wronger than a chicken with teeth.” But she kept our spirits us in other way during her visits. She brought us good things to eat from her brother Earl’s place, told us how much in love she and Jimbo were, and reminded us that the Grand County Fair was right around the corner. I couldn’t remember anymore why she was the one who always took the girls and me to the fairgrounds every summer, but that’s the way it’d always been.

  “I heard from a friend of mine that the traveling carnival has a new tent show with oddities of all kinds,” she told us as she slid chiffon pie onto plates, “so I’m gonna need ya to get better real quick.”

  Of course, with all the attention the girls and I were getting, I figured it was just a matter of time before we would be separated for good. I worried that when the Maniachis were interviewed by the ace reporters from the fancy newspapers, one of them would question the lie that Sally, Sophia, and all of us who loved Frankie had been telling everyone since she and Dell moved in next door to me nine years ago. I thought if the truth came out, that would change everything, and how right I was.

  * * *

  A few nights before Frankie was to be released, she was reading Black Beauty, and Viv and I were curled up at the foot of her bed playing cat’s cradle under the watchful eye of Aunt Jane May. She was sitting in a chair near the window knitting, what I assumed to be a baby blanket for the Ellsworth baby she’d delivered, when Sophia, Dell, Uncle Sally, and Jimbo unexpectedly showed up.

  Frankie’s family had been by many times, bringing Sophia’s pizza pie and flowers from Sally’s garden and a Whitman’s Sampler box, but they’d never come together or that late.

  Aunt Jane May always said, “Bad news travels in the dark,” and I feared it’d arrived in our hospital room that night. I thought they’d come to tell us that one of the reporters had dug too deeply into Frankie’s roots, and as soon as she was released from the hospital, she and Dell would be moving to Jimbo’s house in Mud Town or, even worse, all the way back to Milwaukee.


  Wanting to be as far away as possible from that bad news, I collapsed the cat cradle string and told Sophia Maniachi, “Viv and I will get out of your hair.”

  When I started to get off the bed, Sophia wheeled her chair closer and said, “No. You must stay, cara. What we have come to say concerns you and Vivian, too.” She gave me one of her Holy Mother smiles. “Tutti per uno, uno per tutti.”

  After Dell greeted her best friend, Aunt Jane May, over in the corner, she said something complimentary about the baby blanket she was working on, then came to sit next to her daughter on the bed.

  Dell had charcoal circles under her eyes, faded lipstick on her lower lip, and a sleeveless white dress that didn’t fit her quite right—too tight. She usually took great pride in her appearance, so that put me even more on edge.

  “Honey,” Dell said to Frankie, “we’ve come to tell you …” is all she managed to get out before she broke into tears.

  Uncle Sally’s blue shirt was open at the neck and the bedside lamp caught his gold crucifix when he put his arm around his housekeeper’s heaving shoulders and picked up where she’d left off.

  “Frankie, dear,” he said, “your mother and I need to tell you something that we’ve put off for—”

  “Save your breath,” the brains of our operation told him very matter-of-factly from her propped up pillows. “I already know you’re my father.”

  Viv popped up at her feet and squealed, “He’s what?”

  Dell gasped at what Frankie had said and asked her, “How did you find out?”

  “I thought you mighta fallen in love ’cause I’ve seen you holding hands when you thought I wasn’t around. And the way he looks at you sometimes … it’s like watching one of those dumb romance movies Viv drags us to,” Frankie told her mom. “But it wasn’t until right before the Fourth that I found out he was my father. When you asked me to get you your red belt, I couldn’t find it where it usually was, so I reached to the top shelf in your closet and started feeling around. I knocked down a shoe box and the letters ya wrote to each another spilled out.” Because Frankie looked like she might throw up, I thought the letters must’ve been sealed with kisses.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Sophia asked.

  “And how come you didn’t tell Biz and me?” Viv said, outraged.

  Frankie said, “I was waitin’ for the right time. ”

  “But you’re supposed to tell us everything right away and—ouch! What was that for?” Viv said when I pinched her leg to shut her up.

  Sophia reached for Frankie’s hand and said, “Now that you know why Sally and I have always loved you as our own, it’s important that you understand why we’ve kept it a secret all these years.”

  That was Sally’s cue. “When your mother and I fell in love, my father refused to bless our union. He’s a very powerful man, and our family has certain business interests that must be kept private. I was expected to marry an Italian girl.”

  “Mister Maniachi threatened to disown Sally and, right or wrong, family is important,” Dell explained to Frankie. “I couldn’t bear to cause him that kind of pain, so I broke off our engagement and didn’t tell him when I found out a few months later that I was having you.”

  “I tried many, many times to contact her,” Sally said, “but she refused to take my calls and wouldn’t answer the door when I came to visit. I eventually gave up after Jimbo made it abundantly clear that I better not come again.”

  Jimbo, who was hovering near Aunt Jane May, said sheepishly, “I roughed him up some and threatened worse if he kept bothering Dell.”

  Barely able to contain herself, Viv asked, “Then what happened? I mean, how did you all end up in Summit?”

  “Sophia and I had visited when we were children and had fond memories,” Sally answered. “After she told me that moving out of Milwaukee and putting some distance between our family and Dell might help heal my broken heart, this is the first place we thought of.”

  “But out of sight, out of mind doesn’t always work out the way you think it will,” Dell told Frankie. “I never stopped loving him, and when he started writing to me and we began talkin’ again, one thing led to another. When I got up the nerve to tell him about you”—she looked up at Sally with such tenderness—“he drove down in the middle of the night, and we were married at the courthouse soon after.”

  Sally dug into his brown pants pocket, brought Dell’s hand up to his lips, slipped the prettiest gold band onto the fourth finger of her left hand, and said, “’Til death do us part.”

  I figured that keeping their marriage a secret is what Dell must’ve meant that night the girls and I overheard her and her best friend talking during one of their late-night back-porch meetings. “If the truth ever comes out … God help us, Jane May.” It also crossed my mind that when our aunt told her about how the gossips in town had been saying that Sally and Sophia had moved to Summit because they were part of a crime family, they might’ve been right. Of course, Sophia hadn’t been shot and crippled during a bank robbery, but gossip can be like that. A seed of truth can grow into a noxious weed if you throw enough fertilizer on it.

  When Dell leaned over and placed her newly ringed hand on Frankie’s cheek, she looked like she was on the brink of tears again. “I’m sorry for keeping this from you as long as I have,” she said. “Sophia and Sally wanted me to tell you sooner, but I was frightened about the trouble that’d cause on both sides of the tracks. No one likes to see a colored girl and a white man fall in love. I thought when the gossip started that we’d have to move and … I couldn’t stand the thought of leavin’ Jimbo and Jane May behind and breakin’ you girls up.” The tears she’d been trying to hold back spilled onto her cheeks. “Do you think you can forgive me, baby?”

  Frankie was a very tough nut to crack and not prone to waterworks, but when she nodded and told her mother, her father, and her Aunt Sophia, “Ti amo,” it came from the bottom of her heart.

  Viv started bawling, though, and said, “This is better than any damn romance movie I’ve ever seen!”

  “Language!” Aunt Jane May scolded from over in the corner, but I could tell she shared the sentiment. I’d always thought she was too long in the tooth to crave attention from a man, but something in her face that night made me wonder if she yearned to lie in bed at night with a man’s arms around her, too.

  “Now that you know that Dell and Sally have been living as husband and wife for many years, the temptation is for them to go on as they have been and not rock the boat,” Sophia told Frankie. “But the baby changes everything.”

  Viv’s head jerked up. “Who’s havin’ a baby?”

  Dell moved her hand down to the dress that fit too snugly across her tummy. “In five months.”

  “There will be no more hiding!” Sophia said with such fervor that for a minute I thought she’d get right up out of that wheelchair. “There will be another wedding. Jimbo will be the best man, Jane May the maid of honor. I will cook, and you, bambinas, will be flower girls, capiche?”

  “And anyone in this town who doesn’t like it can baciami il culo,” Sally said fiercely.

  Wished it did, but love didn’t conquer all. We all knew the difficulties they’d face, but the feeling in that hospital room that night? It was the same feeling I’d had on the Fourth of July when Aunt Jane May stood in front of the Emanuel Baptist choir and sang her heart out.

  Most everyone in town cheered them on that night, and while I wished they’d do the same for Dell and Sally, I knew many our neighbors would turn their backs on them. Singing together was one thing, but it would take time, I thought—years and years, maybe—before people on both sides of the tracks would learn to keep their big fat mouths shut about a white man and a black woman making a different kind of beautiful music together.

  But, you know, I recall feeling a little hopeful that day would come as Frankie, Viv, and I drifted off to sleep that night, entwined in one another’s arms. We had black and whit
e blood running in our veins, and if the three of us could get along, hell, anybody could.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After Frankie was released from the hospital, she had a cast on her leg, so we had to take it easy the first weeks of August. The heat had shown no interest in relinquishing its hold, so we mostly hung out at Whitcomb’s air-conditioned fountain counter, where, as you can imagine, we were the toast of the town.

  We also didn’t miss seeing the Saturday afternoon showings of 13 Ghosts and Battle in Outer Space at the Rivoli. After we paid our quarters at the box office and Mr. Willis told us, “Nice to see you up and about again, girls,” he handed each of us something called a “supernatural viewer” and told us to wear it during 13 Ghosts.

  Now, that sounded like a pretty cool idea that I was sure would take our minds off all the real-life horror we were trying to forget, until we discovered that the ghosts in the movie were haunting a mansion that bore an uncanny resemblance to Broadhurst. And, of course, the girls and I were reminded of the Mondurians during the second feature, but the real horrifying cherry on top? Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, portrayed a creepy housekeeper in Battle in Outer Space. I expected the worst the second she came on the screen and was so proud of Viv when she retained her composure. I didn’t realize she hadn’t recognized her until the man named Buck asked the housekeeper, “You really are a witch, aren’t you?” and she popped out of her seat and ran out of the theatre like she was getting chased by flying monkeys.

  * * *

  Aunt Jane May did not bury us beneath the willow out back, but to make amends for prevaricating to her and disobeying every rule she’d laid down for us that summer, the girls and I were doing all we could to lighten her load. We weeded her vegetable garden, dusted her knickknacks, and beat the rugs. We also washed the bowls and cleaned the kitchen after she baked pies and shortbread cookies. She’d waited until the last minute to take them out of the oven, so they’d be as fresh as they could be when she entered them in the yearly baking competition that’d be held the following day. That was an easy penance because we shared her excitement.