New Historical Fiction - The Gift
A Shot of Jack #60
Hello and welcome to the bi-weekly edition of A Shot of Jack. I’m Jack Cameron. This is my newsletter where you’ll find new fiction, links worth clicking, and whatever else I feel like adding to the mix.
The last two short stories had earlier lives in previous publications. This next short story, The Gift, is something else entirely. It’s brand new. Exactly one other person has read it besides me (a good writer friend who isn’t afraid to tell me when I suck).
The Gift is loosely based on a true story. Enjoy.
New Short Historical Fiction
The Gift - A Grit City Story
by Jack Cameron
Friday, January 14, 1949
He shouldn’t have taken it home. It belonged in a brown paper bag on a shelf in the basement of the Tacoma Police Department’s headquarters with the rest of the evidence.
Detective Tom Pope had stared at that dress a hundred times in the last seventy-two days in a black and white photo where the red was a darker gray, like that of a storm cloud. He held up the dress. Dry now. The red of an autumn leaf.
A sixty-seven year old garbage man had found it walking his dog a few days ago near Wapato Lake. The morning dew had soaked it as if it had been there all night. The thing of it was, the man, Carl, took that trail through the woods every morning and the red dress hanging off of the branch was not there the day before.
So where had that dress been since November 5, 1948? And where was little Noreen Cooper, the 18-year-old beauty school student that dress belonged to?
Noreen Cooper had a cute, chubby baby face that made you want to pinch her cheeks. The sort of face you might see on an advertisement for sweets. He’d never seen her in person, but the photo her mother had given him showed a happy girl with an honest face.
The morning of November 5th, Noreen had forgotten to pack her lunch the night before though her father swore he reminded her. She missed her bus, so she told her mom she’d catch a ride with Ellen, a classmate who lived just a few blocks away, but she never made it. No one had seen her since.
Pope put the dress on his kitchen table and spread it out. Tell me where you’ve been.
Why leave the dress hanging there? Taunting the police? Does the person want to get caught? Are they feeling guilty? These were his thoughts as he looked for something he and everyone else missed.
It was such a small piece of fabric. The right shoulder is ripped. When did that happen? The moment a man grabbed her? Or maybe it ripped being taken off the tree branch.
“This was hers?”
Pope jumped at the voice.
“Jesus, Gen. How’d you?”
“Mom told me you were stumped. I came over to help.”
“You can’t help.”
His sister gave him the look she seemed to give him every time he saw her. It seemed to say ‘Do you have to be such an absolute drip?”
“You never believed,” she said, almost accusingly.
“And you never doubted, but you’re here and I’ve got nothing else to go on.”
She gave him another look.
“What?”
“Say it then.”
“Say what?”
“Say it.”
“I’ll let you do your thing.”
“Say. It.”
“Fine. I need your help.”
“There,” she said, as if Tom’s admitting he needed her help had solved the whole case.
“What?”
“It helps if we have a unity of purpose here if not a unity of belief.”
“Heard you’ve been running around with Leon Slidel.”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“Guy’s slime.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Tom sighed and looked at his sister. Genevieve Pope, seer. She had the Gift. Or so Aunt Agnes said. A mark on her ear, like someone had failed to pierce it. Gen didn’t look like a kid no more. She’d lost that somewhere in her early 20s. Now as she neared thirty (which would somehow make Tom nearly thirty-five), she looked like the young woman she’d probably be for the next twenty years.
Both siblings were tall, though Tom was a head taller than her. His hair was darker, but had the same curls. His cigarette habit had put lines on his face early, but he didn’t mind so much. He still had trouble seeing Gen as a woman and not just his kid sister.
His sister believed in everything you couldn’t prove. Spirits, astrology, telepathy, and any other thing that made Tom feel like his sister had escaped an asylum. And at the same time, she’d be oblivious to the most obvious things things in the world like Leon Slidel being a shady punk of a man unworthy of Genevieve Pope.
“Because where you get images and impressions, I have his criminal record. Slidel’s no good.”
“Leon treats me nice.”
“And treats the waiter like a chump. Am I right?”
“Say it again,” Gen said. “Say it again or I split.”
Tom thought to tell her Slidel was no good again, but he stopped himself. He exhaled, looked at his sister, and said, “Help me. If you can.”
Gen waited a moment, finally saying, “Good enough.”
Gen pulled out a small black ribbon and tied her auburn hair into a ponytail. Her bluegreen eyes had these flecks of brown in them that you could only see if you stared very closely. Right now she smiled at her brother because he’d asked for her help. And if he solved this case because of what she told him, he’d have to admit her expertise.
But she wouldn’t. That kind of thing was hokum. Tom Pope watched his sister close her eyes and touch the red cotton. Her eyes fluttered. Was that involuntary or for his benefit?
“If you truly can’t believe, just pretend that you do, Tom. I can feel you like static on a radio.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Gen looked up at her brother, genuinely annoyed.
“Then leave. Or tell me to leave. But this won’t work while you keep doubting.”
“This isn’t going to work at all.”
“By the light, what did I just say?”
“There’s a reason detectives aren’t issued a deck of Tarot cards.”
“Because your department’s run by closed minded guys like you?”
“This is going worse than if you hadn't showed up at all.”
“Go! Get yourself an ice cream or something.”
Tom stormed out of the room and out the front door where he pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one up and looked back at his house. Taking a drag he imagined his sister saying nonsense words, but then wondered if she only did that when there was an audience.
Tom’s mother had encouraged Genevieve every chance she got. She’d take her to state fairs and the like and let her use her ‘gift of psychometry’. Tom had the skepticism of his father, who’d shot himself five years after his return from the Great War. Tom had been nine.
Genevieve didn’t remember her father at all. She didn’t remember her father’s tortured screaming as nightmares plagued him. He’d been exposed to some sort of gas over there and he’d seen things. He never gave details. His father clearly didn’t think nature would pass on his skepticism. That theory might explain that last night.
Tom couldn’t be sure what had awakened him. And thinking of it now as he smoked the cigarette, he became aware that he couldn’t have been much older than little Noreen Cooper when it happened.
He woke up to find his father kneeling at his bed. His eyes wide and bloodshot. And what appeared to be the largest and sharpest knife in the world all too close to Tom’s small face.
“It’s just meat. That’s all we are, Tommy. I could carve you into a thousand pieces and never find your soul because it’s just not there. We’re just badly behaving meat. Never forget that.”
His father groaned a little as he got up from the floor.
He shot himself the next day shortly after Tom and Genevieve had left with their mother for school.
At the funeral and long after, people said that his father was in ‘a better place’.
“We’re just badly behaving meat.”
But do we have to be? Tom wondered. It had taken Tom years to see that his father, even if he was right, had been unnecessarily cruel. And now he felt that perhaps skepticism wasn’t all he’d inherited from their dad.
Tom Pope walked in to find his sister sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. He saw the tears in her eyes.
“Gen, it’s okay if you didn’t get anything off the damn dress.”
Gen wiped her face with her sleeve then said, “Your killer lives somewhere on the East Side, drives a 1939 Ford, and has the first name of Dale.”
“Baloney.”
Gen flashed a smile. “Yeah.”
“I’ll tell Mom you tried and you’ll tell Mom I was open to it.”
Gen nodded.
“She was cold,” Gen said.
“What?”
“She was really cold. Like ice.”
“You don’t have to come up with something. It’s fine.”
“I didn’t. It’s all she could tell me.”
“Who? Noreen?”
Gen laughed. “No, silly. The dress. Cold as ice she said.”
Maybe the dress had been in an ice box all this time. Was that the real cause of the dampness? If so, how long would it stay that way? It’s a fairly rural area. How many ice boxes within a mile of that trail?
“I hope you find her safe.”
“That’s not how these things usually go.”
“I know. The dress thinks she’s dead too.”
It took conscious effort not to roll his eyes. His sister was having conversations with articles of clothing and stranger still, he had facilitated the conversation. From that perspective, it seemed equal parts natural and ridiculous to follow it up. And didn’t that just sum up his relationship with his eccentric family perfectly? Natural and ridiculous.
“I don’t suppose the dress caught the name of the guy who hung her in a tree?”
“It doesn’t work like that, but I’ll make you a deal.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll stop seeing Leon Slidel if you’ll look into the ice box thing.”
“I’ll look into it,” Tom said, surprising himself.
“Really?”
“If it helps me find Noreen, I’ll try anything. But if it gets you away from Slidel, consider it a top priority.”
“You dislike him that much?”
“No. I like you that much. You’re my sister. You deserve a decent guy. Not a pinball mogul.”
“He’s a really nice guy.”
“Nah. He’s a creep you think you can turn into a nice guy,” Tom said. “You know, sis you may have a Gift, but you ain’t magic.”
“I know. See you around.”
Genevieve left. She’d been gone ten minutes before he thought to ask her to stay for dinner. He picked up the dress. It felt stiff in his hands. Was she right? Had it been frozen? Was Noreen’s body somewhere out there frozen? He put the dress back in the evidence bag and went into the kitchen to figure out dinner. He did his best to mentally pack up the case. He could follow the hunches of his crackpot sister tomorrow.
END
One Last Thing
As mentioned above, The Gift is based on a true story and is part of my research into Tacoma in the mid-20th century. Researching the past reveals thousands of potential stories to be told, but I think the best way to tell them is with fictional characters I can develop rather than trying to evoke the ghosts of the past with what fragments of their lives remain.
I feel it’s better to breathe life into the stories with characters I can bring to life. I hope you agree.
Let me know what you think.
- Jack Cameron