The Postcard by Tony Abbott Read Free Book Online Page B

this? What did you find?”
    “Is it weird or what? Grandma kept this in a secret folder in the closet along with regular important papers. Take a look. Skeletons with daggers. Machine guns. Alligators!”
    He snorted a laugh. “
Bizarre Mysteries.
Yeah, I guess so.”
    “But look at the wings! Dad, the wings! Like what Mom said Grandma said. About flying!”
    He shook his head quickly. “Yeah, well . . . try to forget all that —” He stopped in the middle of a sip.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    He held the magazine out and frowned at its cover, lost in thought. “I remember this,” he said finally.
    “You do?”
    “I think so. The colors. And the machine gun detective. And . . . this guy . . .” He tapped his finger at the bottom of the cover. “Emerson Beale. I think she knew him. Your grandma knew him. Yeah, Emerson Beale. She must have said his name when I was growing up. Holy cow, I haven’t thought of him in forever. In fact, I think he was her boyfriend.” He almost smiled.
    “Are you kidding? Grandma had a boyfriend?” Then imagining her old face in the coffin, I began to feel icky, like Mom must have felt when thinking about a flying old lady. An old lady with a boyfriend? And no husband?
    “Wait . . . really? A boyfriend? When? Dad, could he have been, you know . . . your . . .”
    “Father? No, no, this was when she was young. In high school, I mean. When she was young. He was gone long before I came along. Something happened and . . . did you look through this?”
    “I just found it.”
    We sat in the Florida room and flipped through the magazine together. The pages were old, brown, and brittle. The corners chipped off in our laps as we turned the pages. At the beginning were ads for things like body building (“In just 15 minutes a day, I can make you A NEW MAN!”), jewelry (“GENUINE INDIA-MADE SILVER RINGS”), false teeth for as low as $7.95, how to write and weld and paint and play trumpet and become an accountant and a fingerprint expert and how to cure indigestion and asthma at home.
    But the stories were the main thing. Some had monsters or ghosts or mummies or doubles or ancient curses, but leafing through them, we could see that they were all dark and dangerous and weird. They were about kidnapping and murder, robbery and murder, robbery and kidnapping and murder, murder and murder, and just plain murder. And they were all written in rugged, tough-guy language.
    “Bizarre mysteries is right,” I said. “I mean, come on. Alligators and flying women and machine guns?”
    He got up and went to the refrigerator. He twisted open a second bottle of beer, moved the important papers carton to the desk, and began looking through the other folders.
    “So . . . Dad . . . ,” I started.
    “Hmm?”
    “What’s all this about Grandma’s father? The railroad thing?”
    He shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s dumb. He was someone, I guess, but that was so long ago. There hasn’t been any fortune forever. He went bust, I think. Broke.” Maybe Dad didn’t really want to talk about it, but I was just being casual and eventually got him to say a few things, even though he said that nothing meant anything because it was so long ago. Listening to him, I became astonished at the history of my family.
    Grandma’s grandfather — and my great-great-grand-father — was a guy named Patterson Monroe. Dad said that he was one of the men who brought the railroad to the west coast of Florida in the early 1900s. At that time the state was undeveloped and wild, more like what the Everglades is still — swampy, green, jungly. His son, Quincy Monroe, was Grandma’s father. He inherited the big railroad empire from his father and ran it up until the 1960s.
    Patterson. Quincy. What names!
    “And this guy? Emerson Beale? You really think he was her boyfriend? When she was young?” I said.
    “I don’t know much,” he said. “All I’m remembering is that he wrote cheesy detective mysteries for