Expiration Date (11 page)

Coming from 2-C.

Then there was a sickening thud as something hit the wall right next to the door, so hard I felt the entire hall shake around me. There was another cry followed by something sharp—a slap. Another thud against the wall, then a
please please please Mom no.

Goddammit I told you to be a quiet!

This was none of my business. I knew that. What happened behind closed doors should stay behind—

Oh screw that.

I raced to the door and tried the handle. Locked. I guess if you’re going to beat your son you’re going to want to bolt your front door for privacy.

So I made a fist and pounded it into the door five times quickly, hard as I could. The crying choked off into a startled gasp. I heard a
shhhhh.
Footsteps approached the door. There was a hushed
Shut up! Now! I mean it!
Then a snuffle and a cough. The lock tumbled, the door creaked open. Erna, the woman from DeMeo’s office upstairs, peered out into the hallway. Mascara was running down the sides of her cheeks. Her skin was flush, hair askew. She couldn’t see me of course.

“Is someone there?”

“Yeah, Erna. It’s me. How about you stop smacking your kid.”

“Hello?”

I doubt if I would have been so bold in real life. But here, my
other self
was invisible. Nobody could hear my words—except maybe the kid. And that’s what I was counting on. To make sure he knew someone was listening. That his abuse was not going unnoticed.

Erna looked around the hallway again, then took a step back and started to close the door. But before it shut completely, she looked directly into my eyes. It wasn’t a momentary gaze—our eyes meeting by accident. I swear, for a second there,
she saw me.

Then she slammed the door shut.

I stayed outside the door for a while, listening for the slaps or the crying to resume. If it did, I would pound on the door again. I could do this all night, or until the pills ran out, whichever came first. But 2-C remained silent. Soon I felt awkward, standing in a dark hallway in 1972. So I put my ear to the door one last time, heard nothing but silence, and continued down the stairs to Frankford Avenue.

It was bitter cold outside. Traffic crawled down the avenue. The El rumbled overhead, bringing home workers from downtown. The frigid air felt good in my other lungs.

I wasn’t quite ready to go to Darrah Street yet, so I wandered across the street to the newsstand. A headline on the cover of the
Evening Bulletin
caught my eye:

4 Y.O. GIRL MISSING

Standing belly-to-counter at the newsstand—hoping nobody would bump into me and/or
through
me—I skimmed the story. The words were tough to read in the near-dark, and there were just a few inches of copy before the jump, but it was enough to get the idea. A four-year-old girl named Patty Glenhart had gone missing from Kresge’s, just a few blocks from where I stood.

At first I was filled with that sick feeling you get when you read about something tragic like this. You wish this didn’t have to happen. Then my self-defense system kicked in. Push it away, because there was nothing I could do about it except send thoughts and prayers to the little girl’s fam—

And then I remember where I was,
when
I was.

I
could
do something.

VII

The Pit

I needed a copy of the paper. I needed details. Names, addresses. Reporter stuff. Another fumbling routine later—this one lasting a full half-minute—I had a copy of the
Evening Bulletin
tucked under my arm.

Back upstairs in the office I opened the paper and memorized as much as I could. The Glenhart family lived on Allengrove Street in Northwood, about six blocks away. Patty had two older brothers, both in school. The girl, even though she was barely out of toddlerhood, was incredibly precocious. According to her mother, she had the habit of marching up to the Kresge’s luncheonette counter and ordering something to eat before her mother could say otherwise. The waitress and cook thought it was cute, and usually gave her a free snack.

But the same waitress and cook were quoted as noticing some “creepy” guy with long sideburns and a yellow jacket lurking near the lunch counter around the same time the mother started screaming for help, where’s my baby, oh God, where’s my baby. Police are seeking all leads, please call MU6-8989…

I read as much I could, committing as many details as possible to memory, then laid down on the floor and waited until I felt the familiar dizzy feeling again. I had taken four pills. I thought I would need the time, stalking my own father. I hadn’t counted on this.

After a while I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew I was back in the apartment.

After pulling myself up off the floor I checked the time on my laptop—3:17 a.m. Only a few hours until sunrise. Not much time at all left.

I hit Google and typed in “Glenhart” and “Allengrove” and “missing” and I got a hit immediately.

Like every old city, Philadelphia has a long history of atrocities. Some made national headlines, like Gary Heidnick and his infamous West Philly basement of sex slaves. Or the shooting of a police officer by a radio journalist who would later receive the death penalty and become a cause célèbre. Or the 1985 bombing of an entire city block to combat a bunch of radicals who called themselves Move. Only, that last one was the fault of the mayor.

But even here in Northeast Philadelphia—for which Frankford served as an unofficial border between it and the rest of the city—there were plenty of atrocities, too.

Take the “Boy in the Box”—the name given to a kid, no more than six years old, who was found beaten to death and dumped in an old J.C. Penney bassinet box along the side of a quiet street back in 1957. Despite intense publicity, and a photo of the boy included in every city gas bill, his identity remains unknown to this day.

Closer still was the Frankford Slasher, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in Frankford during the late 1980s. I hadn’t been kidding with Meghan about that; the Slasher was real. Police apprehended a man who was later convicted of one of the murders, but the real Slasher is believed to be dead or still at large.

This wasn’t the case with “The Girl in the Pit,” another Frankford atrocity. I was surprised that I’d never heard of it. I made it a point to seek out any crime stories that took place where I grew up.

But one amateur true-crime website had posted a quick case summary. The story was real. Patty Glenhart had gone missing, and stayed missing. They found her body years later.

I didn’t linger over gruesome details. I only cared about two things: the name of the bastard who had taken her.

And his address.

The house was a single on Harrison Street, just four blocks away from where I grew up. It dwarfed much of the other homes in the area, and had a wide skirting of lawn on both sides. A deep porch. Three floors, including an attic.

The top floors didn’t interest me—it was the pit. It was little more than a crawl space under the laundry room just behind the kitchen. But according to the website, the pit was where the remains of Patty Glenhart were discovered by a new owner doing renovations. There was a full, unfinished basement in this house, but the pit was something extra, hand-dug by the previous owner. The killer of Patty Glenhart.

His name was Dennis Michael Vincent. After his arrest in October 1983, Vincent admitted to police that he intended it as a bomb shelter in case the Russians had any H-bombs pointed at Frankford. He’d grabbed four-year-old Patty because he thought an attack was coming in March 1972 and he wanted to save her because she was so blond and young and beautiful and would be useful when it came time to repopulate the country. Forensic investigators would find twenty-seven of her bones broken, and her head fractured in six places.

Later, Vincent claimed he’d been mistaken. She wasn’t beautiful. She was evil. She was the daughter of the devil.

So now I stood in front of Vincent’s house, wondering how to break in. The front door was locked. So were the windows. I moved along the side of the house and climbed onto the wooden porch. There was still a summer weather screen on the back door. Vincent hadn’t bothered to change it out, even though it was February. I pressed the fingers of my right hand into the mesh screen and clawed down as hard as I could. The material slipped beneath my fingers. I clawed harder, hanging as much weight as I could on it.

The screen ripped a little. I put three fingers into the hole and tore it away from the frame.

There was an eye latch and hook. I worked it free, then tried the handle of the storm door.

It was locked.

But the door was wooden, with a single pane of built-in glass. I stepped back down to the yard, found a rock, then tapped it against the glass. It held. I couldn’t risk smashing it too hard—I had to be quiet here. Stealthy. I tapped the rock again. The glass splintered a little. A few taps later it finally broke, the shards clinking on the linoleum floor on the other side.

I waited.

No sound, no nothing. It was close to four in the morning.

I pushed away the rest of the glass then reached my arm in to flip the latch. This took me a long time, especially since I couldn’t see what the hell I was doing. Ghosts in movies have it easy. They can walk through walls, float up through a ceiling, sink down into the floor, whatever. Here I was, having trouble with the most rudimentary door lock ever created.

Finally the lock opened, but there was another one. A deadbolt. Hadn’t counted on that. I reached my arm in farther and wrapped my fingers around the nub and pulled hard. It moved a fraction of an inch. I pulled again. It opened with a loud clack.

I was in.

Now I needed to find that laundry room and the pit beneath. I prayed I wasn’t too late. Prayed that Vincent the monster hadn’t taken her and killed her in the same day.

The time was 11:00 p.m. according to a cuckoo clock in Vincent’s kitchen. The whole place was full of dusty antique furniture, which made me think Vincent’s parents had been well-to-do but died young, and left him a ton of things he didn’t know what to do with. Including adulthood.

Did he sleep upstairs? Or did he keep vigil by the trapdoor he’d jerry-rigged on the wooden floor of the laundry room?

I kept moving.

The laundry room wasn’t hard to find. It was right behind the kitchen, and I could see the hand-sawed square in the floor, with the rusty hinges on one side and a deadbolt handle on the other. Yes, more locks. It took me a full minute to work it free and jump down into the dark pit.

My mouth instantly tasted like dirt. I pressed my hands against the floor and pushed up, spitting and snuffing. It was freezing down here. There was about four feet of space below the boards, with a wildly uneven muddy brown floor carved out. The dirt was cold and clammy under my palms, and felt like greasy modeling clay.

There was almost no light down here, but I could make out a few things the more my eyes adjusted. On one side was a small kid-sized mattress. No bed frame, just a single sheet that half-covered a cheap mattress that looked shiny. In a cardboard box next to the mattress were a couple of toys—a worn fabric doll, a wooden duck with red wheels and a string attached to its beak. The kind of toys you expect to find in an orphanage. A badly run, broke-ass orphanage.

And curled up in a corner was Patty Glenhart.

She was sleeping on the dirt next to an exposed pipe. Condensation dripped from the rusted metal. She must have chosen that spot because it was slightly warm. I moved closer then whispered to her, not wanting to frighten her more than she already was.

“Patty.”

She groaned. Curled up tighter into herself.

“I’m going to get you out of here, Patty, I promise. You’ll be back with your mommy and daddy soon.”