Expiration Date

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.”

From behind a small forearm covered with light, downy hair, a tiny eye forced itself open. A beautiful green eye.

And then she screamed.

I tried shushing her, reassuring her, but it was too late. Her piercing cry traveled up the pipes, through the floorboards, through everything, and convinced Dennis Michael Vincent—who was probably already awake, sitting in his parents’ old king-sized bed on the second floor—that something was wrong. I heard his heavy footsteps clomping down a wooden staircase. He was coming down to check on his captive.

“Patty! Listen to me! You need to be quiet!”

Then he was right above us, almost tripping over the open trapdoor.

“The hell!?”

Years from now, the neighbors would come forward with all kinds of details. Like how they remembered Vincent putting out ten paper bags of dirt for each weekly garbage collection. Didn’t even dump the dirt in the backyard; he put it out for the trash guys to pick up. Neighbors would also remember hearing sawing and hammering—and, once in a while, screaming. But they just thought it was a cowboy or science fiction show on TV. Maybe a war picture. Nothing to worry about.

Couldn’t they hear Patty’s screams now? Why didn’t they pick up the telephone and call the police—if nothing else but to put their minds at ease?

There was a harsh, bright light from above as Vincent turned on a light in the laundry room. Instantly I felt like I was going to throw up. The light again. Light did not like me. I inched backwards, trying to tuck myself back into the shadows. Of all of the Achilles’ heels in the world to have, why did mine have to be the thing the planet is bathed in half the time? And could be summoned with the flick of a switch?

Two brown work boots landed on the dirt, along with two legs clad in muddy denim. Then his whole form crouched down. Dennis Michael Vincent was a tall man. Ruddy-cheeked, big-boned with sideburns gone wild. His eyes were too close together, like he’d grown up while the upper half of his face stayed frozen.

“Shhhh now little girl,” he said. “We talked about this now. You don’t want to get the belt again do you? You want me to bring the belt into the pit?”

I lunged at him.

It hurt like hell—my other bones colliding with his real ones. But I think it hurt Vincent, too. And confused him. He grunted and spun around, squinting into the near darkness. I hissed at him, trying to sound as monstrous as possible.

“Get out of here now.”

Let him worry. Let him freak. Let him run screaming from his own house. Maybe then the neighbors would do something.

“Who is that? What the—”

I didn’t know if he could hear me. I didn’t care. It made me feel good.

“I’m the Devil. I’m here for my daughter.”

I charged him again.

This time, though, Vincent managed to grab me for a few seconds—how, I have no idea. But the light from above burned my back. I felt like I was going to throw up and fry to death at the same time. I twisted and rolled across the dirt, hearing Patty’s screams and Vincent’s fevered grunts as he searched for whatever was attacking him.

The opposite corner of the pit was pitch dark. I crouched there for a moment, trying to catch my breath and fight the dizziness I was feeling. Not yet. I couldn’t wake up just yet. Just a little while longer. Just until she’s free.

“You’re doing that, aren’t you? You’re doing that, aren’t you, you little whore?”

Patty screamed, but the cry was broken in half, like she’d been throttled halfway through.

“You’re doing that because you’re the daughter of the Devil! You stop it! You stop it or I’ll use the belt on you until your bottom bleeds!”

There was a slap. I charged him again. I didn’t care if I burned alive down there. I needed this man to stop hurting this child.

Vincent’s head struck pipe. There was a dull bonging sound and a second later he cried out in agony. Then he went scrambling up out of the pit. I grabbed a sheet from the kiddie mattress, draped it over my head and then climbed up into the laundry room, not stopping until I was safe in the darkness of the living room. He was in there, too. I could make out his dim form among the shadows, mouth agape, eyes bulging, trying to figure out what the hell was chasing him.

“I’m still here.”

I snarled, then smacked a lamp off a table.

Vincent screamed, stepped backwards.

I moved in closer, looking at his body, wondering where I could strike that would do the most damage.

“Go outside. Call to your neighbors for help. Tell them to send the police. Tell them the Devil has come for you.”

Vincent stumbled backwards until he bumped into his living room wall. He was panting. Shaking his head.

And then he reached over and flicked on the living room lights.

I threw my right arm up in the air. For a moment I must have looked like one of the scenes from 1950s movies about people caught in the flash of an H-bomb explosion. As if a forearm and bicep can hold back sheer atomic hell? I didn’t black out, but I think I stopped recording conscious memories, because the next thing I knew I was huddled beneath a coffee table. Vincent was taunting me:

“Devil don’t like the light, does he?”

My right arm was paralyzed by agony. Physical pain is one thing. As bad as it gets—like, say, torture room bad—you can always go into shock and retreat inside yourself. For whatever reason, this felt like soul pain…pain you couldn’t hide from, ever. So long as your soul exists.

I couldn’t take it anymore so I darted for the only available darkness—the kitchen. Then under the table. Sliding across the linoleum. Shaking badly. Ready to throw up and pass out.

“I’ll give you light, Devil!”

Another click. More light, all around me. Where the hell was I? Right. Kitchen. There was cool linoleum beneath my fingers—the remaining fingers of my left hand, that is. I didn’t know where my right hand was.

Two brown work boots appeared in front of me. The table above me began sliding to the left. Then two table legs lifted up from the floor. The shadow line raced toward me. And with it, a wave of murderous light. It was endgame time.

So I charged at the son of a bitch with all of my remaining strength.

Momentum propelled me forward, forward, forward. There was a crashing sound and I felt like I’d tumbled into a Black & Decker food processor. Skin, shredded; bones, ground to dust. Nerves, sliced open and prodded with hot needles.

But somehow I was still alive.

And in the cool, soothing darkness of night once again.

Dennis Michael Vincent lay next to me, gurgling, on the concrete path on the side of his house. We had gone through the kitchen window, and now pieces of glass were sticking out of his neck and forearms. Blood squirted from the right side of his throat in small, urgent beats. He moaned. Cursed the devil with the little bit of voice he had left.

There was a burst of yellow light to my right. The sound of a wooden door creaking open. A neighbor.

I crawled backwards until I felt a metal chain-link fence behind me. I tried to use it to stand up, but something weird was happening. I couldn’t seem to grab hold of anything. I heard a noise, then looked back at the house.

Patty Glenhart was standing on the back porch. She saw me. I guess only kids and psychos could see ghosts.

She screamed and turned and ran back into the house.

I glanced down at my right shoulder. My arm was completely gone.

The neighbors next door were calling out. Is everybody okay? Does anyone need help?

Meanwhile, Dennis Michael Vincent choked on his own blood.

I tried to forget my missing arm and used the three fingers on my left hand to pull myself up the fence until I was standing. Then I staggered along the side of the house, completely thrown off-balance. I turned right and walked a block, trying to make it to Frankford Avenue before I passed out.

When I woke up Meghan was staring at me. She had a cell phone in her hand and a panicked expression on her face. I was on the floor, wrapped in Grandpop’s overcoat, his fedora still on my head.

“Christ, Mickey—are you awake?”

“Oh God.”

I groaned, then rolled over on my side, wondering what Meghan was doing here. Wondering how I was going to explain why I was dressed in a coat, hat and gloves on the floor on a sweltering June morning.

“Mickey! Come on, stop screwing around!”

My right arm was still attached to my body, but like the fingers on my left hand, it was completely numb. A useless slab of dead meat hanging from my shoulder. Fingers were one thing. A whole arm was something else.

The pain coursing through my body was unreal. It was like the flu on anabolic steroids.

“I’m one button away from 911 unless you tell me what’s going on. And this time, I’m going to make sure they pump your stomach.”

I looked at her. Swallowed.

“I’m not…I’m not on drugs. I swear. Just help me up and bring over my laptop.”

“What? Your laptop? Why?”

“It’s important. Please.”

Against her better judgment, Meghan put the phone down and helped me to the houndstooth couch, then grabbed my laptop from the cherrywood desk and put it on my lap. I used my three good fingers to pull it into a useful typing position.

“Hey—what’s wrong with your arm?”

“It’s numb. Hang on a minute.”

It was difficult to type with three fingers. I knew plenty of people got by with two, but you have to understand—I was hardwired to type with at least eight. (The pinky fingers usually sit out my work sessions, like foremen on a construction crew.) Using three was unnatural. Using three was like trying to put in a contact lens using my elbows.

“Want me to do that for you?”

“I got it.”

I hunt-and-pecked “Patty Glenhart” and looked for the entry I’d found earlier.

It was gone.

I tried searching for it a different way, going to the main page of the true-crime website (SinnersAndSadists.com, it was called—charming, huh?) and search by “W” and “P,” but there was no entry about a girl named Patty Glenhart.

Meghan touched my shoulder.

“What are you looking for?”

“Hopefully, something that isn’t there.”

It sounded absurd, but maybe I’d actually gone back and changed things. Maybe there was a little girl who was alive right now because I traveled back to the year 1972 and pushed a pedophile out of his kitchen window. I’d lost the use of my arm in the process, but that didn’t matter, because maybe, just maybe Patty Glenhart was alive and the bad dreams were behind her.

Meghan looked at me.

“You know, for someone who’s trying to convince me that they’re not on drugs, you’re doing a really awful job.”

“Swear to God, I’m not on drugs.”

“You’re talking gibberish. I found you on the floor, wrapped in an overcoat and wearing a hat. Your right arm is numb. Tell me which of these things does not say, I’m having a lost weekend in the middle of the week. What’s going on?”

There were a million reasons not to tell Meghan what was going on. The spiral of insanity I mentioned.

But I told her anyway.

After I’d finished laying it out for her—and I must have done a fairly good job, because she didn’t interrupt once—Meghan asked me if I wanted some Vitamin Water. I told her sure. She removed a plastic bottle from a paper bag she’d placed on the cherrywood desk, unscrewed it, then handed it to me. I was clever enough not to reach for it with my right hand. But not clever enough to realize that my three-finger grip on the bottle wouldn’t be enough. It slipped straight down, bouncing slightly on a couch cushion, and gushing pale purple liquid all over my lap.

“Gah!”

I lifted the laptop out of the way. It was a Mac relic, but it was also my only link to the outside world. That is to say, anyplace that wasn’t Frankford.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Meghan said, picking up the bottle and then darting across the room in search of a clean towel. Which she wouldn’t find, since I hadn’t done laundry since I’d moved in. There were two paper towels left on a roll that my grandpop must have purchased. She brought them over, started patting my lap.

“Dear Penthouse Letters. I swear this never happened to me before, but one night…”

Meghan shot me a sardonic grin. It was the first joke we’d shared in days, and it felt nice. She finished soaking up what she could, then balled up the paper towels and executed a perfect hook into the sink. Then she grabbed my knees and looked me dead in the eye.

“Here’s how this is going to work.”

“How what is going to—”

“Don’t interrupt me. I’m going to try to shoot holes in everything you’ve just told me. If it all holds up when we’re finished, then I’ll stay and we can talk through this. But if I get the slightest hint you’re messing with my head, or inventing some bullshit story because you’re out of your mind on drugs, then I’m gone.”

“Okay.”

“Last chance. You swear that everything you’ve told me is true?”

“Yes. To the best of my knowledge. Want me to put my numb right hand on a Bible?”

Meghan was her father’s daughter. She wasn’t a lawyer. In fact, I had no idea what she did for a living—if she made a living for herself at all. Our friendship had revolved around life in the Spruce Street apartment building, as well as its nearby bars and restaurants. But some of her father’s prosecutorial skills must have rubbed off on her, because she grilled me like a pro.

First, she demanded to see these “pills.” I told her to check the Tylenol bottle in the medicine cabinet. She found them, tapped one out into her hand. Examined it. Looked for a brand name, but couldn’t find one. They were smooth white capsules with only the dosage (250 mg) carved along one side.

She placed the pill in a small Ziploc baggie like she was preserving the chain of evidence.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Next Meghan took me through my alleged physical interactions in the past. So I could open doors and walk downstairs, but I had trouble picking up newspapers and comic books? Why? Light hurt my body, but only direct light—is that correct? What about ambient light? When your fingers fell off, did they disappear right away, or after a few seconds?

“Okay, and you say no one can see you?”

“Almost nobody. That kid I mentioned.”

“Whose name you don’t know.”

“Right. He can see me. And the little girl, Patty. I think she could see me.”

“Hmmmm.”

We went around and around this for a good half-hour until she finally circled back to Patty Glenhart. Meghan wouldn’t let go of it.

“Your only proof was this profile on a blog.”

“A true-crime website.”

“Whatever. And when you searched for the profile, just now, it was gone, right?”

“Right.”

“What if the site administrator just took it down?”

“You mean coincidentally, just a few hours after I first read it?”

“It’s a possibility. Or, you could have hallucinated the entry.”

I thought about this.

“Wait. There was that piece in the Bulletin, with the ‘Girl Missing’ headline.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“No. I can’t bring anything back, remember?”

“But this newspaper has to exist.”

She turned away from me, as if making a mental note to herself.

“You say you went back and got her out of that basement, but you didn’t prevent her abduction.”

“Right!”

“I’ll check the Bulletin morgue tomorrow. If you saw the headline, then it’ll be there.”

“You know about the Bulletin morgue?”

The morgue was part of Temple University’s Urban Archives center, and was basically the clips files of the long-defunct newspaper. Before the Internet, if you wanted to look up a piece of Philadelphia history, you had to go to the morgue and look through dozens of tiny manila envelopes, each stuffed with little yellowed clippings, which had been cut by hand and dated by some long-forgotten staffer. It was basically a steampunk version of Google, and it had been my secret reporting weapon for years.

But it was old news to Meghan.

“We went there freshman year. Our English professor took us on a field trip. Doesn’t every college send their freshmen down there?”

Finally, Meghan turned her attention back to my numb arm and fingers, asking if I could wiggle them, or feel anything when she poked my forearm with a fork. Which she did. Repeatedly. Up and down my skin. But nothing.

“Okay, this is kind of scary. Let me take you to the hospital.”

“No. I hate those places. Plus, I’m pretty sure I don’t have health insurance.”

“Even if I do believe your crazy ass story about the pills—and the jury’s still out, by the way—why wouldn’t you want to have your arm checked? You could have pinched a nerve. You could lose feeling in it forever.”

“I just need to sleep. And what do you mean the jury’s still out? Have you found a single hole in my story?”

“Not yet. But I haven’t found any proof either.”

I thought about it for a moment. Then it hit me.

“Okay then. I’ll give you proof.”

Meghan held the steak knife with both hands, fingers on the handle and the dull edge of the blade. She looked up at me, pointed down at the pill. “Good enough?”

“No. Cut it again. I don’t want to be out long.”

“So an eighth, then? And let me repeat that this is a stupendously bad idea.”

“Just cut the pill.”

“For all we know, these pills are causing the numbness. And the hallucinations.”

“They’re not hallucinations.”

Meghan handed me the tiny sliver of the pill anyway.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Right up there.”

I pointed to the chipped wooden molding around the bathroom door. The molding was the same in 1972 as it was today. It hadn’t even been painted, as far as I could tell.

“I’m going to go back and carve your initials into that molding.”

“You’re such a romantic.”

Her initials were MC. Not long after I’d met Meghan and learned her last name was “Charles”—names didn’t get more Main Line than that—I started calling her MC Meghan, which not only failed to make literal sense, but also annoyed her to no end.

Meghan eyed the molding skeptically, even reaching up to brush it with her fingertips, as if I’d already carved her initials there, then covered it up with a generous helping of dust.

“Again for the record…”

“This is stupid, I know.”

I popped the pill in my mouth then laid down on the couch.

“See you in a little while. Watch that doorway.”

Dizziness. Head throbs. Weak limbs. Then my eyelids felt like they were a thousand pounds each.

I woke up in the office back in 1972. And yes, my right arm was gone, all the way up to the shoulder. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but I was. And more than a little horrified. The missing limb really threw my balance off. I swear to God, I felt myself tilting to one side.

Plus, I’d have to do my initial-carving one-handed.

There was nothing sharper than a butter knife in the kitchenette drawer. Not the most ideal cutting tool. Carving those two letters might take me the entire trip back to the past, but so be it. I would love to be there, in the present, to watch Meghan’s face when her initials start to carve themselves into the paint-chipped wood. Would they slowly appear, one stroke at a time? Or would she blink and then see all at once, the new reality conforming around her?

I wondered if Grandpop Henry, sometime down the road, would notice the initials and take a moment to ponder them.

The idea that I was about to change reality hit me hard. I’d read enough sci-fi novels growing up to know about the so-called butterfly effect—change one thing in the past, and the ripple effects could be potentially disastrous. Would something as simple as initials on a door frame make a difference? Sure, maybe if I carved a message like STAY OUT OF NYC ON 9-11-01 or BUY MICROSOFT. Initials were innocuous, though…right?

Then again, I had prevented a little girl’s death a few hours ago. And now there was one more person in the world who previously hadn’t been with us. Had someone died in her place? Had she grown up to do something awful? What havoc had I already wreaked?

I’d just pressed the tip of the knife to the molding when there was a loud scream outside my door.

The cry of a boy.

I knew I shouldn’t go to the door. I should just proceed with my original plan and start carving Meghan Charles’s initials into the wooden molding around my grandpop’s bathroom door.

But you’re only blessed with this kind of insight after the fact. After everything’s been taken away from you, and it’s too late to change a thing.

Instead, I walked across the room and pressed my ear to the pebbled glass.

I heard heavy footsteps.

There was the sound of slapping, and then another cry, and footsteps running down the hall. And then the gunshot slam of the door down on the ground floor. After a few minutes I managed to open the front door.

Bright sunshine. It was morning. The intensity of the light made me blink. My vision turned white. I dropped the butter knife. I slammed the door shut and crouched down and turned my back to the door and leaned against it and concentrated on breathing slowly.

I heard Erna’s shrill voice filling the hallway:

“Listen to me! You have to be quiet! Do you want us to get kicked out of here? Thrown out on the street to live like animals?”

And then:

“Shut up shut up SHUT UP. Not another sound!”

And then finally:

“BILLY ALLEN DERACE YOU STOP CRYING OR I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT.”