A Girl Who Sang the Blues

Blueish smoke hung low over the circular tables before the stage. Dim light glittered in every eye as they watched the singer finish her song. It was haunting, beautiful, and it captured the heart of everyone who heard it. Every eye and every heart but one.

He sat alone at a table near the back, head bowed over an untouched glass, waiting.

The smoke billowing in her wake, a server passed by his table, breaking her professionalism for the briefest moment to glance with pity at the man. He had been more once, but that was true for all of the old. Long decades took certain things from everyone, there was no escaping it. But he had fallen further and faster than most.

She turned away, his empty face and staring eyes too much for her. Remembering better times, she continued her rounds of the tables, slowly and quietly gathering drink orders, and tried not to think about him.

She failed.

On stage, the woman in the long red dress swayed in time with the gentle music from the band, looking out at the shrouded crowd. She knew where the old man was, the table was all but reserved for him. Had been for a long time. Would be for a long time yet. He would ask her the same question, the same old question that she could never answer and the same question that never lost its edge. Even after all this time, it still cut deep. A fresh scar whenever he asked it.

He was not at fault, of course. She knew that he was cut even more deeply by the remembrance, but he could not move on. That question still haunted him after all this time and there was nothing she could do to take that pain away.

Taking the mic off its stand, she paced the stage. Not quite launching into her next number, it was not a song that could be launched into; instead, she had to ease into its cadence and its lyrics, slowly and gently as one would with cold water or bad news.

Around the bar, through the haze, she saw faces fall and heads lean closer together. The song was an important one, the kind of song that broke hearts and conjured tears. At the back, visible through the smoke only because she was specifically looking for it, she saw the old man’s white head shift. He was looking at her now, listening just the same as everyone else.

Maybe this time he would cry. She didn’t think so but it was worth a shot.

With tears in her own eyes, she all but whispered the last verse and hung up the mic. Descending the stairs, she watched more than one of the band members wipe their eyes. Stuttering breaths and shaking gasps followed her as she strode through the hanging smoke towards the back table with its lonely occupant.

She sat across from him, the server bringing her a gin and tonic, courtesy of an admirer, and waited. The old man would do things in his own time, there was no point in rushing him. She could wait.

“You got any happy news for me?”

She just smiled at that, a slow, small smile that did not reach her eyes. Smiled and looked away. The same question, every time for almost two years. The same hopeful hopelessness in eyes that did not sparkle anymore.

“Didn’t think so,” his voice was soft and rough, like a gentle touch from a calloused hand. “It’s been a long time since… I thought maybe you would have something for me but… I wanted to introduce you to someone.”

A shadow detached itself from the foggy darkness beside the table and slid onto a chair. The shadow was tall, broad, and placed a fine hat on the polished wood before it. She looked into the shadow’s face and saw something she did not have a word for, but nonetheless had seen in countless faces since the war. A sense of buried pain and loss far behind the intense brown eyes in all the men who never truly returned.

“Good evening,” said the shadow, nodding to her in something like a seated bow.

“Amelia,” said the old man, resting one wrinkled hand on her arm. “This is Archie Fanon. He’s… well…”

“A detective,” Amelia supplied.

“Yes. Yes that is what he does.”

“Richard, you didn’t have to-”

“Yes I did,” Richard’s voice was so low as to be almost inaudible. “Trust me, Amy… I did.”

Amelia looked at Mr. Fanon with naked distrust that even the least observant could not fail to notice. Since he claimed to be a detective, she assumed that such intense and automatic dislike would register far higher for him. He took it in stride, detectives were rarely the most liked person in a room.

“I asked Mr. Fanon to look for him, to try and find… to try and get us answers.”

There was so much pain in Richard’s eyes, so much loss and fear that Amelia felt all of her anger fade away. Fanon was there, doing his job, and Richard was who he was. She nodded, leaned back, and tasted her drink. The barman was a master, utterly wasted in a dive like that, each drink was made with a care and passion that even broke through senses long dulled after a night on the town. She savoured the drink in the moment before another word was spoken.

Fanon lit a cigarette and blew a lungful of smoke out over the table, clearly taking time to assemble his thoughts. The woman was pretty and sang about as well as any he had ever heard. The old man looked desperate and gullible enough to have given the job to just about anyone. He guessed why Richard had insisted on meeting in that bar. Or at least he understood to whom they were in that place to speak.

He had not ordered a drink any of the times a server had asked. Despite the occasional envious glance at Amelia’s, glances that could be mistaken for admiring of the woman behind the glass, he needed to keep his wits for now. And this bar was a little pricy for him anyway.

Besides, it would have been wrong to take anything more from the old man.

“Mr. Beauchamp asked me to find Frederick Beauchamp,” he started, explaining things from the beginning despite the full knowledge that why he was there would be no mystery. “Find him or at least evidence of him.

“I don’t mind telling you two that it wasn’t easy. Just as Mr. Beauchamp said when he hired me, it was as though the young man simply vanished. I checked the usual places, the whore houses and the opium dens from here to Toronto – not because I genuinely thought he would be there, miss…?”

“Call me Amelia.”

“Alright. Not because I genuinely thought he would be found in any of them, Amelia, but because that is the first place I always check. Young men from good families with, if I may say, some means, can be found in places like that more often than most people want to admit. Or at least that’s where one can usually find their trail. Put enough silver in the right pockets and people suddenly remember just about anything, especially when those places are generally paid to forget.

“I asked around the police here, in Toronto and up in Montreal too. No records of a Mr. Beauchamp nor of anyone who matched the photograph I was able to provide. Naturally, they had some few matches, but I was able to tick them off the list fast enough. I have some contacts in the major unions, brother-bands, and urban Nations, too. But that was a nonstarter.

“I understand that the Beauchamp’s never kept a car, so the train was the only reasonable solution and I spent some time going through the passenger records leaving from Kingston north and south. No mention of him, and no one remembered his description. Sadly that evidence isn’t the most reliable, I started my search rather a long time after his… disappearance.”

Amelia released a shuddering breath she had not realized she had been holding. Fred hadn’t disappeared into Toronto or up to Montreal. A worry she never gave voice to but one that had cost her more than one night’s honest sleep. The risk of a person disappearing into those places, diving into the underground and never coming back out was always there.

She leaned forward and laid a slim hand on Richard’s thin, shaking one. He needed Archie to finish his story, stop going through every step of it like this and just come out and say that his son was dead. But he knew that was not how private dicks worked. Not the respectable ones, at least.

No, he needed to explain the process. Explain what exactly he had done and why in case the family and friends noticed something he missed. Richard listened carefully to every word the detective said, desperate to notice something. Desperate for there to be a piece of the puzzle that only someone who knew Fred well would pick out.

“Looking closer to home, I approached some people I know here in Kingston. We got to talking, and it was hard going. Every day it felt like I was being sent from one group to the other and back again, asking the same questions on repeat.

“The lack of answers were their own answers though. I don’t mind telling you that it’s damn hard to get anything out of these people in the best of times, but through my discussions with them I managed to understand that none of the ones I talked to know anything substantial about Frederick.”

Amelia placed her glass on the polished table with the determined click that silenced the rambling detective. He looked over at her, scanning from head to where her torso vanished beneath the table and back to her eyes. She bristled, ready to be furious at his ogling, but paused. That look. She had seen it before but rarely direct at her self.

Richard watched Fanon eye the woman, assessing her as a threat. He wanted to quail, to move away from the bigger man in case he got violent. Everyone had served in the war it seemed, Richard did not know a single boy from his son’s class who hadn’t at least tried to enlist and only three of them had been refused. But even then, there was something in Archie’s face as he looked at Amelia. Something almost unnatural.

There was nothing in the detective’s eyes except evaluation. He was not amused, not aroused, not even politely interested in what she had to say. In that moment, as his gazed flicked across her, she was suddenly and painfully aware of how a child must feel when cruel older boys noticed him. Vulnerable. Small.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, controlling a voice that wanted to quaver with all the skill of one whose voice was her business. “But I don’t very much care how you went about it, to whom you spoke or how many people you needed to intimidate. All I want to know is: did you find him?”

Fanon looked away, eyes flicking down and to the left as he blew out another puff of blueish smoke. He considered the question, tried to assemble his thoughts in neat sentences. Despite what people tended to think about him and his trade, he did not enjoy this part, the final moments of a case.

Explaining that a beloved son, or treasured lover was gone without a trace was never easy. It did nothing more than cause pain. What he wouldn’t give for a simple lost dog case on nights like that.

Of course, Archie Fanon knew that the young man was dead. In all of his searching, he had turned up exactly one piece of evidence about him, one person who might have known something. Donning a mask and entering the influenza ward had been more daunting than facing a hail of German bullets but he’d done it. Each step down the long, long room of the sick and dying echoing off the vaulted ceiling of the converted drill hall rang anew in his ears at he looked from one to the other of his clients.

They were both his clients, though only the old man was paying him. Amelia the lover, and Richard the father, if any two people in the whole world had the right to know what had happened to Frederick, it was them.

If only he could give them a proper answer.

-0-

Lying in the bed, under clean white sheets and surrounded by people destined to share the same fate, a familiar face had looked out at him. On his walk from the door to the bed, Archie had flirted with the idea of this being Frederick, had allowed himself a brief daydream of the man recovering and the whole sorry affair having a happy ending. Popped corks and sparkling wine all around.

Except that the man lying in the bed in Montreal had not seen Frederick Beauchamp for a long time. In the city to help protect an Urban Nation’s assets near the docks he had been coughed on by the wrong person at the wrong time. Now condemned to die, alone, surrounded by nurses who were powerless to help him.

“Do you know this man,” Archie had said, showing the photo of Frederick in his new uniform before being shipped overseas.

“Water,” the dying man had croaked. Then, after Archie gave it to him, he said, “good kid. Got a scar in the war it seems but I know his face,” a coughing fit then, “why?”

“Family hired me to find him,” Archie saw no reason to protect client confidentiality with someone who was little more than a corpse. “You know anything?”

“Water ain’t wet. Only stuff with water on it is wet.”

“About him.”

“Yeah. He was helping us with a job, simple thing, barely even illegal. Stand still and watch the door is all we needed him to do. Send a signal, the normal things.” Another, longer bout of coughing. Archie edged away until the man in the bed was finished. “Then he… ah shit…”

When he was ready, he told Archie what had really happened.

-0-

He’s dead, then. Richard deflated, finally taking up his glass. He had known, really. Fred had been gone for nearly a year, just up and vanished one day. A hard war, that’s what he always said, it had been a hard war.

The poor boy had never found himself again, never quite come home. Isn’t that what people said about the boys who made it back from France? That some piece of them was left behind?

Hand shaking with more than age and hard work, Richard took out a small locket and opened it. A smiling boy looked up at him, from one side. The three of them, Richard, Fred, and his mother from the other. They had been happy, for a while; he would just have to hold onto that.

She did not believe him. Fanon had to be lying, all that work only for Fred to have died trying to earn a little money in the old city? It was absurd. It was… reasonable. Even though the Beauchamp family had never been poor, Frederick had struggled to adjust since the war. Paying work grew difficult to come by and he had never been one to sit on his hands even before he volunteered.

Amelia dabbed at a rebellious tear and avoided looking at Richard, who was staring blankly into his locket. She wanted to rage, wanted to hit Fanon, but could not do it. Archie hadn’t killed Fred, hadn’t spirited him away to the United or the Confederate States. Hadn’t helped him vanish without a trace.

Pale and shaking almost as hard as Richard’s hands, Amelia downed the rest of her drink in one go and raised the empty glass. Another swiftly appeared and again, she downed it in one. Deep down she had known that, alive or dead, Fred was never coming back. If he had wanted to, no, if he had been able to, he would have done. But something kept him away from her and now… he was gone.

-0-

Blueish smoke hung low over the circular tables before the stage. Dim light glittered in every eye as they watched the singer finish her song. It was haunting, beautiful, and it captured the heart of everyone who heard it. Every eye and every heart but one.

Archie Fanon stood in the shadows by the door and watched the people wipe or dab at their eyes as the woman sang. She was magnificent, a treasure of a voice and eyes that could wrench the heart from any but a cold dead chest. Frederick had told him about her, as he lay in what would be his deathbed. Told him about the wonderful woman he had left behind to go to war, then again when he’d come home.

She was better than Fred had deserved, that’s what the dying man had said. Looking at her, Archie could not help but agree with him. No one who would willingly walk away from her deserved her.

He tried not to think about the old man, glass now empty, who sat and watched a girl who sang the blues. Tried not to think about the empty, glassy eyes as Archie had lied to him – told him that the boy was dead and gone but that no one could tell him why. Tried not to think about the cost paid and the cost avoided by the living for the dead.

He failed.

“Don’t tell them about this,” Fred had begged. “I don’t want them to know. Say I died in that first job. Please.”

On stage, the woman in the long red dress swayed in time with the gentle music from the band, looking out at the shrouded crowd. She knew where the old man was, the table was all but reserved for him. Had been for a long time. Would be for a long time yet. He might never ask her that question again, might never speak to her again; she couldn’t bear the thought. Not after she had finally lost Fred for good. Even after all this time, it still cut deep. A fresh scar whenever she remembered it.

He was not at fault, of course. She knew that he was cut even more deeply by the remembrance, but he could not move on. Questions still haunted him after all this time and there was nothing she could do to take that pain away.

There, in the deeper shadows by the door, she saw the flash of a lighter and the tiny red glow of a cigarette. Archie was standing there, listening to the song that she had to sing when all she wanted to do was cry. He had been asked the same question, asked for some happy news. The tiny red light turned away. The door opened and shut. And the tall man in the dark suit was gone.

Pain would still haunt the old man, who was watching the woman he had wanted for a daughter-in-law. A different pain now, the pain of loss and the pain of remembering. Even if she did not quite understand it, though, one of his pains had been taken away. The pain of not knowing.

Certainty had replaced that pain. It hurt, but pain was the wrong word.

For the first time since Frederick had disappeared, he cried.