The man’s eyes swiveled back around to Jesse, and Jesse knew he was the kind of guy who might punch a man in the face. His eyes looked stormy and unforgiving.
Jesse chose his next words carefully.
“My dad was a private eye. He’s dead and gone now, but I caught the same bug, so to speak. It’s not my occupation. No, I’m a car man, but when I hear about certain cases, the need to look deeper starts gnawing away at me.”
Jesse’s dad was not a private detective, but his dad’s best friend had been. The man used to regale Jesse and his dad with stories of spying on men’s wives or tracking drug dealers around town. And once, just once, the man helped solve a murder case. An old woman had been robbed and beaten in a Detroit alley. The woman’s son hired the private investigator when the police couldn’t turn up a suspect. The P.I. had spent a month getting close to the street kids, until one day they finally blurted out that one of the kid’s fathers had done the deed.
The man at the table scowled at Jesse, holding his glass of beer in both hands. His jaw was set, and Jesse could see the throb of a vein pulsing in the man’s forehead.
“Veronica’s been gone twenty years. You think you’re gonna blow into town, an outsider, and know somethin’ we don’t? See somethin’ we can’t? What are you after, chump? Money? Piss off.”
The man turned back to the game.
Jesse was not afraid of taking a pounding. His dad died when Jesse was twelve. He’d learned to be scrappy in the orphanages, and later on the street. He could hold his own. Not that he wanted to fight the man. He didn’t, but he wasn’t afraid to. Sometimes a knock to the head was the only way a man heard sense.
Jesse drained his glass and slammed it on the table. He laughed and shook his head.
“Typical small-town bullshit,” he chided. “If you’d rather go to your grave not knowing, that’s your choice.”
Jesse stood and walked from the bar. He felt the man’s eyes on him as he pushed through the swinging door into the cool September night.
He turned and started down the road, slowing when he heard the door to the bar shove open and the slap of footsteps on the concrete.
He braced to get hit from behind, but the man didn’t shove him.
“Wait a sec,” the man said. He put a hand on Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse didn’t flinch.
“Like I said before,” Jesse told him, extending a hand. “I’m Jesse Kaminski.”
The man nodded and took Jesse’s hand.
“Tony Medawar. I shouldn’t have cold-shouldered you. I had a long day at the diner, and…” He tensed and looked at the starry sky. “This time of year is fucked for me. Twenty years, and I’m still…” He didn’t finish, couldn’t finish, Jesse thought as he heard the thickness enter Tony’s voice.
“I get it, man,” Jesse told him. “It’s okay.”
“Can I make ya a burger?” Tony gestured to the Silver Spoon Diner a few blocks in the other direction.
“Yeah, sure.”
“So how do we do this?” Tony asked. “My parents talked to a private dick back in the ‘40s, but he never found a thing and they paid through the nose for him.”
“For starters, I’m not interested in money. Like I said, I’m a car man. This is something I’m interested in because… well, it’s the right thing, is all. Your sister’s picture has stuck with me. But I need to know the facts. Everything you can tell me about the night Veronica disappeared.”
Jesse took a bite of his burger as Tony sat on a barstool, squinting at the tiny red and gold flecks on the countertop.
“It was Halloween 1945. I graduated the year before, and I was working for my old man. He owned a shoe store. I didn’t buy this place until ’55. I was still living at home, saving for a place and what-not. I remember getting home from work that afternoon, and I could hear the record player on in Veronica’s room. My ma told me she’d been in there for an hour doing God knows what. She had ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ playing on the record player, and now and then you’d hear her stomping like she was up there dancing.” Tony laughed and slapped the counter. “Damn, she could dance. She really could. Swing, jive, jitterbug, you name it and Veronica could do it.”
Tony took a sip of the root beer float he’d made. “These take me back,” he said. “Root beer floats after high school dances. But Veronica is frozen there, you know? She’s trapped in 1945. She never got married, had kids. My Katie looks a lot like her.” Tony inclined his head toward the missing poster pinned to the corkboard.
Jesse looked at the girl’s dark curls and thought again of the spirals of hair in the trunk.
“I didn’t see her leave,” Tony admitted. “She was actin’ sneaky that night. Usually, she came down and pranced around, showed off her outfit, had my ma fussing with her hair and makeup. My dad spotted her as she went down the walk. She was wearing a big purple dress. The formal kind. Not a Halloween costume, but he thought maybe the theme was princesses or some such thing.”
“And no one knew where she was going? Not your parents?”
“Not a soul,” Tony answered. “No one in our family and none of her friends, and that was the really strange thing. She told her friends everything. She had a tight little group of girls. Typical teen girls - bossy and gossipy, but Veronica was a good girl. She was real pretty and popular. She was the girl everyone wanted to be. But she didn’t use a bathroom without her girlfriends. When we started calling the next day, none of them knew where Veronica went on Halloween. It was a big secret. She told them they’d know soon enough. Her girlfriends all went to a costume party at this kid Brandon Maloney’s house. Half the senior class was there, but not Veronica. She had told them the day before Halloween that she had other plans, but she couldn’t tell them about it until after.”
Jesse frowned, listening closely and thinking about the spell. Had something gone wrong that night? Had Stephen Kaiser and Liv lured Veronica to the house to curse her and somehow, she ended up dead?
“Tony, was Veronica friends with a boy named Stephen Kaiser?”
Tony scrunched his brow, and then shook his head.
“Nah. I remember him vaguely. The rich kid whose father hung himself. His mom was a real Betty, but I only saw her around town a few times. He went to boarding school, so he didn’t exactly chum around with the local kids.”
“Except I heard he was friends with a girl named Liv.”
Tony scratched his chin.
“Yeah, Liv Hart. I might have seen them around town a time or two. She was a ragamuffin, that one. I think Veronica and her friends gave her a hard time, but it was just kids' stuff.”
“Gave her a hard time?”
Tony shrugged.
“Oh, you know, teased her because she was poor, probably said stuff about never brushing her hair. I mean, come on, you should have seen the girl. She looked like wolves had raised her. Her sister lives in town, though, and she’s as sweet as ice cream. Arlene Hester. But I’m not sure what this has to do with Veronica?”
Jesse shook his head.
“It probably doesn’t, but someone mentioned Stephen Kaiser left town around the same time, so I wanted to ask.”
“You think they ran off together?” Tony asked, a hopeful tinge in his voice. “I’d have a half a mind to slap her upside the head if that were true, but man, I wish it were. We had a funeral for her in 1955, on the ten-year anniversary. My parents have burial plots at Pine Grove Cemetery, and they wanted their daughter beside them when the time came. We buried a casket with her favorite dress and a stuffed bear she’d had since she was a baby. One of the worst days of my life,” he muttered, and the bit of hope in his voice had soured.