Free The Postcard by Tony Abbott

unlocked the trunk, and held it open while the other two goons scooped me up off the ground and poured me inside.
    There was something rotten in there that had attracted a few million flies. They were soon done with it, though. I was fresh meat to them.
    Just before they slammed down the trunk lid, I heard one of the thugs say, “Gandy.”
    Turns out the real estate men knew something about architecture, too. We were going to Gandy Bridge. I guessed their “post office” was an underwater branch, and the posts they were talking about were the concrete ones that supported the bridge. They were going to tie me to one and hope that the fish and maybe an alligator or three would eliminate the evidence.
    We drove off at high speed. In the dark of the trunk, I imagined the turns between downtown and the bridge. I remembered that feeling of sand under the tires just before you hit the bridge. The sedan would have to slow a bit or shimmy on the highway. It would be my last chance to escape before they pulled off the road and carried me down beyond the scrubby palms and sand to where the posts were. There wasn’t much time.
    My legs were like stalks of pain. My eyes burned. My lungs felt like lead. My nose was filled with the stink of something dead, and I wondered if I was smelling my own future. I decided not to dwell on it. I slipped off my belt and started working on the lock with the prong of the buckle. The sedan tore through the streets, fast, fast. After a while, we jerked right; then I felt the tires tearing over sand. They slowed. Then —click — the lock opened.
    “Timing!” I whispered. Edging the trunk up, I jumped out, hit the ground, and rolled clear just as the car picked up speed again and bounced off into the shadowy undergrowth.
    I looped my belt back on and took off as fast as my sore legs could carry me. With my wounded calf, it wasn’t all that fast, but for the moment I was alive and free. How long I would be either was anyone’s guess.
    End of Chapter I
    CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    I was quaking all over, barely able to breathe. Grandma’s boyfriend had written this story. A guy named Nick Falcon met a girl named Marnie in my great-grandfather’s hotel. The funeral guy had called Grandma “Marnie.” I saw the posts under the Gandy Bridge. I saw the tall man and the short German. Was this a story based on things that really happened? Would Dad know?
    Would he tell me?
    I wondered, of course, whether Emerson Beale could be Dad’s father. He was Grandma’s boyfriend, after all. But Dad said Beale went away long before he was born. I wanted to read the story again — every word — but before I could turn back to the beginning, I saw a small box outlined in black at the bottom of the last page.
    A Note from the Editors
    Chapter II of “Twin Palms” would have appeared in the next issue of Bizarre Mysteries . It is our sad duty to report that Emerson Beale was killed in action on the island of Saipan in June of this year. His passing will be mourned. It is to his memory that we dedicate his unfinished story.
    I stared at the black box. My heart thudded, then skipped. My throat was thick. I couldn’t swallow.
    He died? Emerson Beale died?
His passing will be mourned?
    I felt as if I had been kicked in the chest. Whatever thoughts I had about who Dad’s father might have been couldn’t include Emerson Beale anymore. He died in the war almost twenty years before Dad was born.
    But even more amazing was what I found written in the margin of the last page. In thin blue ink, in neater penmanship than I have ever seen, were words in what I knew was my grandmother’s handwriting:
    your Marnie forever
    So that pretty much confirmed it. Grandma was Marnie. If Emerson Beale was Nick Falcon, he had been good to his word. He had written a story for her. Only it was a story with no ending.
    I took up the postcard again and began to study it. Could there have been a clue on it, as Nick said in the story? Was that what