Author: Jeff (Page 1 of 11)

The heavy front door of the VFW groaned shut, sealing out the amber light of the late afternoon. Peggy sat in the passenger seat of Eleanor’s battered Chevy. Her mind spinning faster than the gravel under the tires. Clutched in her arms, the “For Ethan’s Eyes Only” envelope felt heavy, a physical weight of secrets and skipped heartbeats.

“You’re awfully quiet, sugar,” Eleanor said, her eyes fixed on the winding blacktop. “Those old warhorses in there can talk your ear off, but they don’t mean much harm. Mostly just bored.”

Peggy looked at Eleanor’s profile. The woman’s hands were steady on the wheel, her face a map of small-town resilience. “Harold mentioned a woman named Grace. He said she stayed in Royal after everyone else left. After the power was cut.”

Eleanor’s foot hesitated on the gas for a fraction of a second. The engine hummed a lower note. “Harold always did have a soft spot for a ghost story. But Grace… she wasn’t a story. She was real enough.”

“Did you know her?”

Eleanor sighed, a sound like dry leaves skittering across pavement. “Everyone knew the girl who waited. She lived in that little Victorian house near Royal Park. The park with the gazebo. The house was a beautiful place before the quarantine. After? It was like the world just forgot to keep turning for her.”

Peggy’s breath hitched. The gazebo. The image from the puzzle, the image on the sheet music. It wasn’t just a romantic illustration; it was a landmark of a tragedy.

“She had a child, didn’t she?” Peggy pressed.

“A boy,” Eleanor said. “Born a few years before the ’59 outbreak. Grace was… different after that. Fiercely private. When the sheriff put up the roadblocks for the measles quarantine, she didn’t complain. Some say she liked the silence. But then the quarantine lasted too long. The measles story started to smell funny to folks in Oakhaven. People stopped getting sick, but the guards stayed. And when they finally left? Royal was just a shell.”

“Why didn’t she leave with the others?” Peggy asked.

“She told my mom once that she’d promised someone she’d be there when the music started again. Can you imagine? Waiting in a town with no lights, no mail, just the wind whistling through the abandoned town.” Eleanor shook her head. “She stayed until 1964. By then, the boy was school-age. The county finally sent a social worker in to force them out. They moved her to a state facility over in Chippewa Falls. The boy… well, he went into the system.”

Peggy gripped the envelope. “What was the boy’s name?”

Eleanor turned the blinker on, the rhythmic click-clack filling the tense silence of the car. “I really don’t remember. Maybe after his father. But Grace never would say who the father was. Just that he was a traveling man. Or something like that. Some said the father was a musician. He might have played in the Tommy Melk band”

The realization hit Peggy like a physical blow. Tommy Melk and the Melk Duds? Ethan’s grandfather? The family friend she told the old men about wasn’t just a friend. Could it be…?

As they pulled into the driveway of a small, neat house in Black River Falls, Eleanor turned off the ignition. The silence was absolute.

“Peggy,” Eleanor said softly, “that puzzle those old men were working on? It’s been in that VFW hall for years. No one ever finishes it because one piece is missing. Just like the truth about Royal. Some things are better left lost in the woods.”

Peggy looked at the dark silhouette of the trees against the twilight sky. Somewhere out there, past the highway and the history books, the ghost town of Royal was waiting. And she knew, with a terrifying certainty, that she held the missing piece in her hand.

The needle of Ethan’s life had finally found a groove. After several weeks in Royal, the initial static of terror had smoothed into a steady, mid-century hum. He had a routine now, one that felt more like a ceremony than a schedule.

Each morning, the sun would spill across his floorboards, beckoning him down to a kitchen that would eventually smell of percolating coffee and bacon and eggs. He’d step onto the porch to retrieve the morning paper, often lingering to trade pleasantries with a neighbor. These were simple exchanges—talk of the weather or local gossip—but they anchored him. By the time he sat down with his coffee and breakfast, Ethan’s true reality felt like a half-remembered dream.

He spent his midday hours in a state of quiet productivity. He mowed the lawn, tended to his vegetable garden, and performed his ritual check on the windmill. He found solace in his backyard shed, tinkering with tools and reading articles from a stack of Popular Science magazines.

Most surprisingly, he had returned to his violin. At first, the music was a struggle. His fingers were stiff, and the bow felt like a lead weight in his hand. The notes he produced were rusty, screeching protests that sounded out of tune with the world around him. But as the days passed, the stiffness in his arm melted away, and the melodies began to flow, smoothing out until they matched the rhythm of the town itself.

By afternoon, Ethan was the charming voice of WRYL. Ethan would walk to the radio studio and back with the easy gait of a man who belonged. He ate at the Lunch Box Cafe, engaged in philosophical bouts with Pastor Dzef, and attended services at Saint Helga’s. He was happy or so he told himself. He felt a sense of control that had eluded him in his “real” life.

But Royal had a way of reminding him he was a guest, not a native.

Every evening, the silence of the house brought the “other” reality back into focus. He would look into the corner of the dining room and see them –  the backpack, the cooler, and the suitcase. They sat there like artifacts from a shipwreck. In their presence, Ethan would snap back to his true timeline, and the anxiety would bloom in his chest like a dark flower.

On his hardest days -the days when Ethan was not working, he would walk to the edge of town. He’d stare at the horizon, wondering if he could simply outrun the 1950s. But Royal was a jealous guardian. Every time he strayed too far, a neighbor or a passerby would magically appear, striking up a conversation that gently but firmly steered him back home. He was trapped in a tug-of-war between his memory of Peggy and his family, and the magnetic pull of this perfect, impossible place. At night, he felt a presence watching over him, a phantom guardian that vanished the moment he woke.

One afternoon, the Town of Royal decided it was time for Ethan to move beyond his routine.

As he walked toward the radio studio, he spotted a woman outside the Greyhound bus station, right next to the Lunch Box Cafe. She stood by a lone suitcase, her long brown hair catching the light. She looked familiar – hauntingly so. But the connection slipped through Ethan’s mind. Her face had a radiant, almost angelic glow. When she looked at Ethan and smiled, he felt mesmerized, his feet momentarily rooted to the sidewalk.

A bus pulled up, venting a cloud of diesel smoke. Passengers spilled out, and Ethan quickened his pace, desperate to reach her. But by the time the door hissed shut and the bus pulled away, the sidewalk was empty. She wasn’t on the bus, and she wasn’t on the street. She had simply vanished.

“People stay and people leave. It is all in what you believe,” a voice stated.

Ethan turned to find Pastor Dzef standing there, holding out a chocolate malt. The Pastor’s gaze was heavy with meaning as they both watched the bus disappear down the road. “What do you believe in, Ethan?”

Ethan didn’t have an answer. He offered a small smile, thanked the Pastor for the malt, and continued toward work.

As he passed Royal Park, something new caught his eye on the community bulletin board. A vibrant poster announced that Tommy Melk and the Melk Duds would be performing at the gazebo during the upcoming Royal Festival Days.

Pinned right next to it was a small, hand-written scrap of paper that seemed to vibrate with possibility. Tommy Melk was looking for a violin player.

Ethan felt the weight of the chocolate malt in one hand and the calluses on the fingers of the other. The tug of realities had just entered a new phase.

Peggy pulled open the service door and stepped into a dimly lit hallway. The air was thick and heavy with the scent of aged beer, Pine-Sol cleaner, and the sharp, nicotine tang of old tobacco smoke. It was quite warm inside. A stark contrast to the fresh gentle breeze outside.

The hallway led her around a corner and into the main hall – a large, cavernous room where sunlight struggled to penetrate the high, dusty windows. A few folding tables were set up near a makeshift counter, and seated around one table were three elderly men, wearing jackets, baseball caps and the casual, comfortable clothes of retirement. They were arguing good-naturedly over a half-completed jigsaw puzzle, their voices rumbling like distant thunder.

“Look, Fred, that piece is clearly part of the river! You can see the shading!”

“Nonsense, Harold! That’s part of the sky!”

Peggy cleared her throat. The conversation stopped instantly. All three heads snapped towards Peggy – a young woman with a backpack, looking totally out of place.

“Well, hello there,” the man Peggy took to be Harold said, pushing his chair back. He had a friendly but suspicious look in his eye. “Can we help you, miss? The VFW isn’t officially open until five.”

Peggy forced a smile and walked toward them, placing the backpack on the table. She pulled out the folded copy of the 1957 road map and the blurry 1959 newspaper photo from the envelope.

“My name is Peggy. I know this is strange, but I’m looking for some information about an old dance band, Tommy Melk and the Melk Duds, and a town called Royal. I have an old poster for a dance held in this hall.”

The men exchanged glances. The one named Fred grunted, chewing on the end of a wooden toothpick. “Melk Duds? Sure, I remember Melk. They played a mean polka. But that was years ago, kid. Long before you were born.”

Harold picked up the map, his finger tracing the line from Highway 139 until the finger rested on the small dot labeled Royal.

“This here map is old,” he observed. “Royal. That town’s been long gone. What in the blazes do you want with Royal?”

Peggy chose her words carefully, deciding to focus on the people, not the quarantine. “I’m trying to trace the history of a family friend, a musician. His name was Paul, and he played the accordion for the Melk Duds.” Peggy then pointed to the newspaper photo of the roadblock. “Do any of you remember this? The quarantine in 1959?”

The third man, who had been silent, slowly pushed his glasses up his nose. “Quarantine? I remember that. April ’59. Measles outbreak was terrible. County sheriff locked that place down tighter than an oil drum. Never seen anything like it.” He looked at Peggy, his eyes suddenly sharp. “Why’s that important, girl?”

“I have reason to believe this family friend … Paul … lived in Royal. I’m trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together. I need to find out what happened to the town and people of Royal.”

Fred snorted. “What happened? They waited out the quarantine, same as everyone else. Once the all-clear came, people just started leaving. Royal was a small place anyway, mostly a tourist trap. By the mid-sixties, everyone was gone and the county just abandoned the town and roads.”

Harold, however, was still staring at the map. “Wait a minute, Fred. That ain’t exactly right. The quarantine was lifted, sure, but Royal didn’t just empty out. Some folks… they never left right away. And that one woman, Grace. She was….” Harold’s  voice trailed off. He stared down and went back to work on the puzzle.

Peggy’s heart hammered against her ribs. Grace. The love of Ethan’s grandfather’s life.

“What about Grace?” Peggy whispered, leaning in.

Harold looked uneasy, casting a glance down the hallway. “Years before the measles outbreak, Grace had a kid. Folks said the measles hit the town hard. I heard… just talk, mind you… that Grace and her child were the last ones in Royal to leave. They stayed there long after the power was cut. She was holding out for someone to come back.”

“Who was she holding out for?” Peggy pressed, her voice sounding urgent.

Before Harold could answer, the front door of the VFW hall swung open.

“Peggy!”

It was Eleanor, the taxi driver, standing framed in the doorway, her face etched with genuine alarm.

“Eleanor, what are you doing here?” Peggy asked, bewildered. The front doors were locked. How did she get in?

“I came back for you!” Eleanor strode into the hall, ignoring the men. “I got halfway back to Black River Falls and realized what I did. Dropping a pretty college girl off alone in Oakhaven with nothing but a backpack. I was worried sick. You get some real rough characters wandering these parts. You’re coming home with me.”

Peggy realized she had misjudged the woman completely; Eleanor wasn’t just a taxi driver, she was a motherly protector. She quickly gathered her materials. The men, their conversation thoroughly disrupted, offered no protest.

Peggy looked down at Harold. “I need to come back tomorrow,” Peggy told Harold firmly. “I need to know more about Grace and that child.”

Harold just nodded, looking resigned. “You ask Eleanor. She’s a local. She’ll know more than us old coots.”

As Peggy was putting the map and newspaper article back in the envelope, she glanced down at the puzzle the three old men were putting together. Peggy’s eyes widened at the almost completed puzzle. It was the gazebo from the cover page of the sheet music “In The Shadow Of Yesterday”.