Free The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen Page A

They could have dropped her off in downtown
Chicago and she would have felt the same way. After being in that man’s
presence, anything afterward was emptiness.
    IV.

     

    I t was dark when the Firefly Brothers
crept through their mother’s backyard again.
They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing
an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust
for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s
boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would
one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked,
scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help
Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of
sight.
They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough,
and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a
white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a
five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.
No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so
they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.
It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival,
though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded
telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be
sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:
PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER
THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.
Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only
when they were alone.
The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace,
or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were
police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the
girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be
easier to procure funds on their own.
It felt so strange to be wearing Pop’s old clothes. Whit had gone so far
as to name his son after Pop, but to Jason the subject of their father was one
best left unmentioned. Yet here were these borrowed clothes, practically
screaming at him.
Pop hadn’t been a screamer, but he’d certainly been a preacher. All
those endless sayings about the benefits of hard work, early birds getting
worms, stitches in time saving nine, so hokey Jason winced to remember them.
Patrick Fireson had read countless Horatio Alger novels as a young man and
continued to reread them as an adult. They were stories of poor boys who worked
through poverty and whose good deeds and work ethic attracted the favor of
kindly rich men, who helped them up the ladder. Pop had given copies of the
books to his sons, but Jason had found them deathly boring and corny;
he’d been more a Huck Finn kind of boy.
But those books had rung true for Pop, who liked to joke that he himself was a
character from an Alger novel brought to life. His parents had died in a fire
when he was five, and his distant relatives weren’t in a position to
help. Pop was sent to a Catholic orphanage, and at the age of twelve he started
as a clerk in a small grocery. He toiled there for many years, gradually gaining
the good graces of the owner, a thrifty German named Schmidt. Pictures of the
young, hardworking Patrick Fireson show a thin lad who always seems to have
stopped in the middle of some activity—his hair mussed, his collar loose,
his eyes impatient for the camera’s shutter. Pop served in the Great War,
returning to the store after nine months with some shrapnel in his right knee
but his can-do attitude undiminished. Schmidt’s adult son died of
pneumonia in the winter of ’24, and two years later Pop received an
unexpected inheritance from an armybuddy. By then
Schmidt was tired of the store and the memories they held of his doomed