The Curse of Damien Crain

Daniel J. Zahn

Description

When a nightclub singer hired private eye, Dan’l Coffey to find her son, he had no idea that his search would lead him to a double homicide that would send him after Damien Crain; a nineteen year old kid who believes he has been cursed. The clues Coffey finds lead him to a St. Louis “Hooverville” on the Mississippi, a hobo jungle in Illinois, and a fellow called “Banjer Jack”.
When he finds the kid in the company of a fortune teller, Coffey, a rationalist, learns that there are some things that just can’t be explained.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669851462
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CURSE OF DAMIEN CRAIN
 
 
 
 
DANIEL J. ZAHN
 
 
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel J. Zahn.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022919044
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5148-6

Softcover
978-1-6698-5147-9

eBook
978-1-6698-5146-2

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 10/14/2022
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
846036
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Faces in the Mirror
Chapter 2 The fortune teller
Chapter 3 The smoking gun
Chapter 4 The fly fisherman
Chapter 5 How do you do?
Chapter 6 Running from the bulls
Chapter 7 A thorn by any other name
Chapter 8 Original sin
Chapter 9 A ride to Chicago
Chapter 10 Down on big muddy
Chapter 11 Abigail, is that you?
Chapter 12 The crescent moon
Chapter 13 Vengeance is mine …
Chapter 14 Motherly instincts
Chapter 15 Lucky jack
Chapter 16 Logic and a little bit of luck
Chapter 17 The morning after black and blues
Chapter 18 The mother he wished he had
Chapter 19 St. Louis re-visited
Chapter 20 Urges
Chapter 21 Claire Baker
Chapter 22 Finding jack
Chapter 23 A well dressed hobo
Chapter 24 Magic in the moon room
Chapter 25 Mr. Blaine
Chapter 26 The smoking gun part two
Chapter 27 Something special about the kid
Chapter 28 Answers and questions
Chapter 29 Tap … tap
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
books by Daniel J. Zahn
 
THE BALLAD OF RANDALL REDD
MOON OVER SQUAW CREEK
THE CONSTANT FISHERMAN
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
THE CURSE OF DAMIEN CRAIN
1
FACES IN THE MIRROR
H e got the blame for everything his teenage sister, Evelyn, did. In this case, it was breaking mom’s fancy hand mirror, the one with the plastic pearl handle and the gold plated rim that was turning green in some places, and was completely worn off in others. He should have told her that he didn’t break the mirror, that he had only just entered the room. Instead, he remained quiet, standing there, taking the verbal beating that she was so good at dishing out.
It seemed like his mother had it in for him since the day he was born. She would often carry on about how she suffered to bring him into this world; fourteen hours of labor and nothing to ease the pain. Sometimes, when she was angry, she would curse the day of his birth and wouldn’t think twice about letting him know it. Evelyn’s birth, in contrast, had been an easy one and so, it seemed, was the rest of her existence, as long as Damien was around to shoulder the blame.
“Damn you, boy!” mother yelled at the quaking five-year-old. “That’s seven years bad luck you’ve brought upon us. How could you?” As if he did it on purpose.
When mom launched into one of her frequent, epic tirades, Damien would shut down. He had learned quickly that speaking out in his own defense just made things worse. Such was the case when he was found standing over the broken mirror in a room where neither of them belonged.
The room was Uncle Danny’s room. Uncle Danny, mom’s younger brother, was a drunken drug addict who had been kicked out of his own home, and was invited by Damien’s father to live in their spare room as long as he attempted to clean up his act. The day after the broken mirror incident, Uncle Danny was found in his room, face down in a pool of his own vomit, the victim of his own demons. According to mom, it was the beginning of what would become known as Damien’s Curse.
Three years later, at the age of sixteen, Evelyn and her date, an older boy of eighteen, were killed when he slid off the road in his wealthy father’s brand new 1925 Rolls-Royce Piccadilly Roadster. Broken bottles of Old Fitzgerald’s Kentucky Bourbon were found in the car. According to Mom, it was another tragedy brought on by the curse her son inflicted upon their family—even though Damien didn’t tell her about the nightmare he had the night before the accident, the one in which he was staring down at the broken hand mirror that lay at his feet reflecting the cracked image of his sister.

On a cold November afternoon in 1927, Mr. Crain, a sergeant in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, took a bullet in the chest during a shootout with an armed bank robber. That night, nine-year-old Damien dreamed of the broken mirror again. This time the image in the mirror belonged to his father who was undergoing surgery at St. Theresa’s Hospital eight miles away. At three o’clock that morning, Officer Crain died.
It was the Roaring Twenties, a time of economic boom and Prohibition. If you wanted anything with a kick to it, you settled for bathtub gin, or you might get your doctor to give you one of those legal government prescriptions for another pint of Old Fitzgerald’s; for medicinal purposes, of course.
The Crain family doctor, John Q. McNulty, filled out many of those forms for his favorite patients. The good doctor and the friendly local pharmacist profited handsomely from the legal sale of Old Fitz and other liquors on the government’s list of medicines. Damien’s mother suffered from an acute case of chronic hypochondria. Her medicinal needs were prodigious.
After Sgt. Crain’s death, Dr. McNulty started to make frequent house calls. On these visits, the doctor and Widow Crain would spend the evening sharing mom’s medicine. These visits would last late into the night.
During one of these late night visits, a little past one a.m., Damien, on his way to the bathroom, saw his mother on her knees in front of the doctor, him seated in one of the living room chairs with his head back, moaning with pleasure—hands clutching at the arms of the chair. The next morning, mom aimed another of her epic rants at Damien, after which she begged forgiveness from the Lord Almighty.
This became a regular thing, happening a couple of times a week, usually with the doctor, sometimes the pharmacist from the corner drugstore, once with a Fuller Brush Man. Mom would sometimes be on the floor, sometimes she was in the chair, sometimes on the couch with her legs spread wide. It always took place out in the open, never behind a closed door, as if she wanted Damien to see. The next morning, he would catch hell for her behavior followed by another soul-cleansing conversation with the man above.

On October 29 th , 1929, Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began in the United States. Soon it spread to include all of the industrialized world.
Wealthy men who’d lost their fortunes in the crash threw themselves out the windows of tall buildings. For a very few, it was the beginning of windfall profits, but for most, it was the beginning of the hardest time of their lives.
On December 5 th , 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the ratification of the twenty-first amendment bringing prohibition to an end. The Widow Crain celebrated by drinking up her stash of medicine. Not having anyone to celebrate with that night, she attempted to seduce her sixteen-year-old son by kneeling at the sleeping teenager’s bedside and fondling him under his nightshirt. He woke up with a start and when he saw the source of his arousal, he jumped out of bed and ran out of the room.
He locked himself in the bathroom until the sun came up, at which time he dressed, threw a few things in a suitcase, grabbed his dad’s wide brimmed fedora and headed out the door. He could hear her cursing him as he walked away.

By the time he reached the age of nineteen Damien Crain had stood in breadlines and eaten in soup kitchens run by churches and various religious organizations. In Chicago, he stood in a breadline started by none other than Al Capone, created in an attempt to clean up his image.
He rode the rails from Chicago to New York state where he lived for a while in a Hooverville along the Hudson River. All this time he kept to himself. Like many young, itinerant men, he worked at whatever odd job he could find.
And every time he got tired enough to sleep, he would conjure up the image of his mother, hoping that while he slept he would see that face reflected in a cracked hand mirror. The nightmare seemed like it would never come until one night, while sleeping in a boxcar on the way back to Chicago, it happened—perhaps the most eidetic nightmare he’d ever experienced.
Several days later in a soup kitchen in Waukegan, he found a local newspaper. He read about the fire that burned the old house to the ground. One body was burned to a crisp. A lone survivor was in the burn ward at St. Theresa’s Hospital: one John Q. McNulty, M.D.
2
THE FORTUNE TELLER
F   elice Dumas was the result of a Mardi Gras encounter between Esmee Dumas, the daughter of a French plantation owner, and a handsome black union worker. It had be