“Look, I don’t have a choice. I need to figure out the connection between Billy Derace and my father. Maybe I can push it and go to the late 1970s, or even 1980. I can snoop around and see what I can piece together.”
“You told me you tried and you couldn’t go any further than 1975.”
Meghan blinked, caught herself, turned to the side.
“Okay, for the record, I can’t believe I made a statement like that…”
“Look, maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe it’s not just supposed to come to you.”
“Hmmm.”
From there we ate our slices in silence. It was ghetto pizza. Very thin on the sauce, with bad, greasy cheese. Frankford didn’t have much going for it in the 1970s, but it once had the be-all, end-all of Philadelphia foods: slices of Leandro’s Pizza. The tiny shop used to be on the ground floor of the stairwell leading up to the El stop. Step off the El, you couldn’t help but follow that intoxicating scent all the way down the concrete staircases, and the next thing you knew your hand was stuffed in your pants pocket, fingertips searching for the two quarters, one dime and one nickel it would cost to procure a slice. During my jaunts to the past I’d purposefully avoided Leandro’s. It would be like a eunuch visiting the Playboy Mansion.
By midnight we’d turned up very little that made any sense—so many of the notes and clips were about Philadelphians who were living in the 1920s and 1930s, none of them Deraces or Wadchecks.
So I finally convinced Meghan that the white pills were the way to go. Wearily, she agreed.
And then I remembered that I’d locked them in the medicine cabinet.
“Let me guess. You have no idea where the key is.”
“Nope.”
“Do you have a hammer?”
“I don’t know. You snooped around here all night. Did you see a hammer?”
“What’s in the silverware drawer?”
“I have silverware?”
Meghan checked the wooden slide-out drawer that contained a number of puzzling kitchen tools—none of them a hammer. Corkscrews. Many rusted beer bottle openers, some of them emblazoned with the logos of long- dead Philly brews like Schmidt’s and Ortlieb’s. There was a large, plastic-handled steak knife, but it didn’t look like the type that could saw through a tin can, let alone a padlock.
“I think I saw a dustpan and whisk broom in the closet. Would you mind double-checking that?”
“What, are you going to sweep the lock away?”
“No. I’m going to use something big and heavy—your head comes to mind—and shatter your medicine cabinet. Again, for the record, I can’t believe I’m saying these particular words out loud.”
“Why don’t you let me smash it?”
“You’ve got three good fingers. Do you really want to lose another one or two?”
She wrapped her right hand in a dirty gray oven mitt that looked like it had been used to hand-stomp out a grease fire, then picked up a heavy glass ashtray. She walked into the bathroom and a second later, I heard a loud pop and shatter. Then nothing.
“Are you okay?”
“Well, it’s open.”
I looked inside. The door was obliterated, glimmering fragments of mirror were all over the sink, floor, toilet seat and tub.
“I thought you were going to, like, do it on the count of three or something.”
“Would that have made you feel better?”
We cleaned up the glass and I plopped myself down on the couch. Meghan sat on the floor next to me, on her knees.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought maybe I could still talk to you when you were…you know, back in the past. I heard you mumbling in your sleep. Maybe you’re still connected with this time when you go on your little trips.”
“Am I supposed to be able to hear you?”
“I’ll shout. Come on, this is your idea. I’m just trying to help.”
I took two pills, looking into Meghan’s pretty eyes. She reached out to hold my hand. My eyelids grew heavy, slammed shut. When I woke up on February 28, 1972, I was looking at Erna Derace.
She was holding a gun.
X
Slasher’s Revenge
Erna Derace was sitting on the backs of her heels, the polka-dot dress fanned around her. The gun was a small, pearl-handled .38 revolver. I was fairly confident it was the same gun Dr. DeMeo held in his meaty paw and waved around my ghostly face a few days ago. Apparently, she’d taken it from his desk drawer. I could tell because the drawer was still open. And inside were papers and files, stuffed in horizontally.
She held the .38 casually, like it was a TV remote, and she’d become so absorbed in a show that she’d forgotten it was in her hand.
“Dammit…not again.”
She spoke softly, staring at the floor.
Was she about to kill herself? Or DeMeo? I tried to calm her down, even though I was invisible.
“I know you can’t hear or see me. But if there’s any way my words can find their way into your brain, please hear me now—I really think it would be a good idea to put down that gun.”
“I can hear you.”
I froze in place.
“What?”
She turned and locked eyes with me.
“I can see you, too. I can see
