Freak City

  Chapter Eleven

  Organized, methodical, determined, and totally freaked out, Jolene tracked her boyfriend down at what he liked to call "building number two" in the Martinsgate section of town. There, Seth was engaged in customer relations with Mister Havenaard, a retired sailor who enjoyed telling tall tales. Seth was leaning against a lamp post on the sidewalk nodding as "The Captain" related a genuine marvel that occurred way back when at a time when the teller was probably not even born yet. Nevertheless, he claimed, it was true. He had seen things. He could tell you. A man who had died a few days before walked right up the street where the young Havenaard was playing.

  "I must have been four or maybe five at the time,” the sailor said. "That man was looking around as if he was lost. I watched him as he stopped in front of each house and stood there and stared. When he came up to my family's house, I asked him if he was looking for something."

  "He didn't even see me,” Havenaard went on. "Just kept going right on. I told him where he lived. I said 'hey Mister your house's right there' and I pointed, but he didn't hear. He walked just in that way, stopped each time, right up the block, and then he reached the corner, and then he was gone."

  "He turned?" Seth wanted to know.

  "Turn? Nothing. No turning. Just gone. Poof. Just like that."

  "Wow,” Seth said, "that's pretty wild."

  "It's a crazy place,” the sailor replied. "I seen more than that around there."

  "Where?"

  "Here,” the man said, "Spring Hill Lake. There's parts of it I wouldn't even go nowadays."

  "Yeah,” Seth agreed, "some pretty bad neighborhoods. Every city's got 'em"

  "Not like this,” Havenaard told him. "I know what I've seen."

  Jolene came honking up and screeched to a halt beside Seth. She called out,

  "Come on, get in, it's important,” and shifted impatiently while Seth made his typical drawn-out goodbyes to the Captain. When he finally piled into the passenger seat, Jolene screamed off down the street, talking a mile a minute. She told him all about the old men in the park and to Seth it sounded familiar, like a story his sailor friend would tell. He let her vent until done. She drive right back there to show him, but of course when they arrived, there were no old men, or anyone at all in the area.

  "I’ve got pictures,” she told him and he said,

  "Wow, that's cool."

  "Cool?" Jolene asked. "Is that all you got?"

  "Well, it is pretty cool,” he replied. "It must have seemed like the old photo came alive just like that."

  "I took pictures,” Jolene repeated.

  "Listen,” said Seth, when he finally got a chance to tell her. "I found something myself."

  He unfolded his own bus map and laid it out on the table and sat down right where Roy had been sitting.

  "I figured I might need it. Since you had the car, I had to take the 46 and the 63 but I guess I got turned around and went the wrong way. Anyway it's a good thing I did because I was just sitting there looking out the window when we went by that Spring River office building, the one in the photo from 2004. So I marked it down on the map. Look, it's up here."

  "What are those other black circles?,” she asked, checking over his map.

  "That one down there is your park,” he replied. "Then further up, the Spring River building. Then another couple blocks further and across the street, that's where the Fulsom Towers building fell down. You notice the pattern?"

  "There's two on Visitation Street,” Jolene said. "And the one at the end, that's the stadium, right? I remember that place. It's on a different street, though, and so's my park."

  "It's not the street,” Seth pointed out. "It's the map. All four of those places are on the same bus route, the 63 Venezia line. See? It goes here, and then here,” he followed its path with his finger.

  "Oh my God,” Jolene said, "Maybe we could find all the other places too!"

  "Just follow the bus,” Seth said with a grin.

  They did. Jolene drove the whole length of the line, and then they switched places and Seth drove it back, but they didn't find anything else. The 63 Venezia carved a diagonal path from the northeast to the southwest of the square-shaped city. Along the way it passed through city center, and on either side a variety of residential neighborhoods and local shopping districts. At the far northern end the line ended abruptly in front of a vast, rubble-filled vacant lot which was formerly the site of the Sea Dragons football stadium. At the other end it trickled to a halt in a series of twists and turns through the rundown harbor area known as Old Town.

  Jolene's park was on the edge of that neighborhood, where Visitation Boulevard turned into Settlement Drive. It was here that the city was founded, more than two hundred years earlier, along the banks of the Wetford River. The harbor was only used now by drifters who squatted in old houseboats, by weekend warriors who drove out there from shiny new condos to sail in their mini-yachts, and by locals who clung to the old ways. You could still find a bakery there, one that actually baked bread. ‘Maybe it was too much to expect,’ Seth reflected,’ and maybe my so-called discovery was only a fluke’. After all, it was hardly strange that the two tall office buildings would be located in the heart of downtown on one of the busiest streets. All of the tall buildings were in that vicinity. Jolene was still buzzing about her amazing find, and initially rejected Seth's notion that maybe the date on the photo was wrong, that maybe the photo was recent. In that case perhaps it wasn't so strange for a pair of old pals to be out playing cards in the park, but Jolene countered with 'why would anyone go to the trouble of putting the wrong date on a photo', to which Seth could only reply that 'why would anyone go to the trouble of putting that whole package together'. It seemed to him that the date merely fit the six hundred day sequence.

  "But in that case,” Jolene said, "why should we believe that any of the dates are correct?"

  "Maybe they're not,” he replied.

  After a long afternoon of tracing the route without further success, Seth and Jolene finally went home, where Maribel was waiting with news of a huge new catering order, thanks to Jolene's bright idea to hit up old clients. Exhausted but dutiful, Jolene threw herself into action, and was 'not to be disturbed' for the rest of the night.