Sunny Dreams Read Online Free Page B

eat it after what we saw.”
    Again, that guilty look. It was unheard of for a thinking being to throw away any morsel of food in those hard years. And again, Fraser said, “That’s okay.”
    “What did you see, Johnny?” My voice came out barely above a whisper.
    “At first I thought it was just a pile of thistles by the tracks. But Artie thought it looked weird with all those flies. I did too. There were so many flies.”
    It was hot in the dining room. We had finished the water. When Johnny paused again Fraser picked up the pitcher and went to the kitchen to fill it from the tap.
    Johnny looked at the tabletop and waited for Fraser to return. What he told us next hadn’t been in the newspaper. We knew about it by now, but not from the paper, which hadn’t told us much at all.
    “There was no head,” he said, his eyes on mine now, his lips trembling slightly.
    “Most of the flies were at the head end.”
    Head end. It was an odd phrase, unlike any that we were used to hearing.
    “The end where the head had been,” said Johnny.
    “Yes,” Fraser and I said together.
    “His head had been on the rail when a train went by. That’s what the firemen said.” Johnny’s tears started up again.
    “It was flattened to nothing. We knew it had been there because of the flies. They made a great buzzing pile by the neck hole.”
    Neck hole.
    “The hole where…”
    “Yes.”
    “Other insects too, ants, and ones I didn’t even know what they were — new ones.”
    Fraser handed Johnny his damp handkerchief.
    The trains that we heard from across the river in Norwood were the ones that travelled those rails where the boys played. They headed to and from the CNR Station on Main Street. They were in the background of our lives most days and nights, and usually I didn’t notice them. But sometimes if I lay awake in the dark hours I imagined that I was a woman on a train, travelling alone with an expensive leather bag and a modern hairdo. I saw myself in fashionable trousers, tossing out witticisms to anyone who spoke to me, mostly porters and conductors, but sometimes a rich businessman who wanted me for his mistress. They all admired me no end.
    I allowed myself now to picture a well-loved head being crushed to nothing.
    Death by passing trains certainly wasn’t unheard of in those days, but mostly it was accidental — too much hooch — or in some cases a messy suicide.
    But not this time. This was murder. His naked body had been covered with tar and then plastered with Russian thistles: tarred and thistled. That part had been printed in the paper.

Chapter 2
     
Three Months Earlier
     
    In the spring of 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whether rightly or wrongly, was cooked in an electric chair for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Although it happened a long way away in another country, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. and the trial of his abductor was an event that resonated endlessly within the walls of our well-kept home. We had followed the news with heavy hearts.
    Aunt Helen was still with us after all these years. Mostly she looked after us, but occasionally she took a private nursing job if someone asked for her in particular.
    “Thank goodness that’s over,” she had said when we heard about Hauptmann on the radio news.
    I wasn’t so sure. Now whose job was it to kill the executioner? What about the ten commandments? What about, Thou shalt not kill? I was very back and forth about religion in those days, but certain parts of the bible were pretty hard to argue with.
    My dad said nothing.
    Our Sunny had never come home and, unlike the Lindberghs, we never received a ransom note or any communication at all from her kidnappers.
    Over the years I came to believe that criminals were raising her, that her underwear was filthy and her hair full of knots all through her childhood. Her teeth would be rotting and crumbling in her mouth. I pictured her in New York City, a place so big that she would go