“This strange guest to the ball moved with grace as he flowed across the floor when he danced with any young woman who had sought him out for a dance,” my dad went on, seemingly still enchanted with this mysterious man he witnessed so many years ago.
“The stranger had his eyes on the new bride. Soon it seemed her eyes were fixed on him, and she was becoming intoxicated by his very visage. Newly married, she felt a shame in her heart, but it was becoming harder to deny the warmth rising up inside her as the stranger’s eyes fixated on her. She immediately excused herself from her wedding party’s table and slipped off to the ladies’ powder room.”
My father then said that he and his friends who had never taken their eyes off the stranger no longer caught sight of him among the crowd. They had started to focus on the dessert table, salivating over the cakes and other goodies, when they noticed the stranger was now gone from view.
“Where did he go?” they asked one another.
A few minutes passed, then all hell broke loose. The groom was missing his new bride, and he also became aware of the fact that the stranger was nowhere to be found. The groom called his male friends together, asking each of them if they had seen the new bride. No one had. It wasn’t long before the only activity at the celebration was to find the new bride. My father said he heard the tone of reason soon turned to a sound of anguish and deadly concern.
All the rooms had been searched with no success, and then the group moved outside where they found a young group of urchins lurking in the bushes. They questioned the young boys out of sheer desperation as if maybe they had seen something. My dad said that if there had been any dogs around, they would have questioned them too. That was how intense the evening had become. Sheer panic was starting to rule the night.
At that moment, a young lady ran out to where the men were congregating. She was holding a bracelet corsage that belonged to the young bride. The group ran back in, following the young lady who would lead them to where the corsage was found. My father and his friends now felt that they had license to be a part of the group, so in they went. In all the confusion, the kids went unnoticed, and since they had been questioned, they felt it was okay.
Helping themselves to the hors d’oeuvres as they ran through the dance hall, they really felt special in having a sense of purpose for the greater good.
It turned out that the room where the last clue was found was the ladies’ powder room. The corsage was dropped right outside the open window. That had to be the way out for any getaway. The stranger was nowhere to be found, and it soon become apparent that he was the bride’s abductor. Or maybe the rogue lover.
The newly wedded groom was inconsolable as he yelled for his beloved Elena.
So long he had waited for the virginal prize, one that he had ached for all those previous years, now to have it ripped away when it was finally his for the taking. Talk about having the blues in more ways than one.
As my father recanted this tale, he ended with a notion that would haunt me in the years to come. He told me, “Son, that person that I saw leap over the side of the bridge resembled the same person I had seen forty years earlier.”
Now I was really feeling a fear I couldn’t explain. How can that be possible? I thought to myself.
On that night of my father’s experience on the bridge, a young girl was abducted from a party at another dance hall across town. She was there with her parents and had gone to the ladies’ room. The night was described in the morning paper with a chilling detail that hit my father cold. One attendee at the dance was interviewed by the police; he stated that a man who was no longer in the crowd remained unaccounted for. The descriptions from some of the partygoers all agreed that he was a very handsome, mustached man dressed all in black. He wore a beautiful black fedora made of silk.
I was now relaying all the new information to my friends as we made our way to the river and up the bank to the dance hall. They were all spellbound by now and hanging on my every word. My friend Tommy asked if the dance hall before us was the site of the event my father had spoken about. I said no to the expressions of disappointment they communicated between them. With all the building materials laid out on the ground, we commenced on constructing the ladder.
Chapter 7
The Grand Ballroom
I was straw-bossing everyone as to the design of the ladder and hurrying them along so we could explore this mystery structure that was so much a part of our lives.
We leaned the ladder against the building beneath the window we decided was the best one through which to gain entrance. Well, mainly because that was the one with a broken window, not broken by any of us I’ll have you know. We had Rene do a test run on the ladder since he was the heaviest of the group. His parents owned a Mexican restaurant, and he never lacked food. He was perfect for testing the weight tolerances. Rene took a couple of steps up, and all was well. He made it to the top and reached in and unlatched the window fixture. One by one, we all made it up the ladder and into the building. This place was way beyond our expectations, grandiose in the splendor of a bygone era long ago gone. The six of us ran around in different directions, exploring all the nooks and crannies. There was a stage where one could envision a big band like Glenn Miller’s pounding out “Tuxedo Junction” to a multitude of dancing couples there on Saturday-night dates. I could imagine many things just standing around, thinking about a past I’d only heard my elders talk about. I guess maybe I was a hopeless romantic beneath all my mischievous ways.
Some of my friends were back behind the stage, exploring the dressing rooms, while some of the others were up in the loge/balcony section, which encircled the floor below. I could envision tables with couples enjoying the festivities as they watched the couples dancing below. Such a grand place with a layer of dust on everything and some old flyers strewn about the whole place.
I made my way to the front of the place where the main entrance was. There was a ticket sales window, an office with its storage area, and what I determined was a coat check stand. Across the way was a larger room that housed an area that I took to be a special dressing room or maybe a small apartment. Everything I explored was totally empty, with the exception of papers littering the floor. I left no stone unturned, no door unopened, or no cash drawer untried. Making my way back toward the other end of the ballroom, my friends were cutting up and carrying on, having a good time. I joined in on the nonsense. The fellas asked me what I saw up front as they slowly headed to where I had just been. I told them nothing but old papers and dust. They needed to have a look-see for themselves, while I went to go explore the back of the stage and dressing rooms. My survey of the entire building was almost complete, and I could feel that all the work was done.
Then the guys had come back to the area where we came in and chatted briefly about the day’s adventure. We all had something to propose about the night that something terrible went down with the young girl’s disappearance. The girl’s body we had found in the river was another set of circumstances that in no way could’ve taken place at this long-ago shuttered-up dance hall. We wanted to know more about the girl who disappeared from this dance hall.
The sun was starting the downward descent in the west, and soon it became clear to us that we should think about getting out of the joint before it became dark and creepy. The windows being whitewashed over allowed less light in than what was available on the outside.
Going out of the building was easier than coming in because the windows were only four feet above the dance floor. We never thought it strange that there was a two-foot difference in the dance floor and outside ground levels. Tommy and Nicky had made it out of the building as I was pushing fat Rene up to the ledge. He couldn’t seem to jump up enough to get his elbow over the sill and hoist his fat ass over the window ledge.
Blackie, Bobby, and I were in the process of deciding who would go next when all of sudden, a very loud slam of something I imagined to be a door made the loudest noise from the front area where the ticket booth was.
“Holy shit! What