Haunted Market
Chapter two
By the time Charlie reached the Machine Shop, the sun was
beginning to come up over Evanston. The
first sounds of the day were already coming from inside.
Metal striking metal. The hiss of steam. The clatter of
tools being moved across concrete.
Charlie knew those sounds as well as he knew the sound of
his own front door. He had worked at the Machine Shop for years, and over that
time he had earned a reputation.
Charlie knew metal.
He was a welder, and not just the kind of welder who could
make two pieces of steel stick together. Charlie understood what happened to
metal when it was heated, where a crack was likely to spread, and when a repair
needed to be done again instead of being passed off as good enough.
He didn't take shortcuts. If Charlie put his name behind a
repair, the other men trusted it. That was worth something at the Machine Shop.
He wasn't a foreman. He wasn't management. He wasn't the
highest-paid man in the building.
He was simply Charlie Miller. A man who showed up every
morning, did his job, and usually knew how to fix whatever had gone wrong.
The younger workers sometimes came to him with questions. Charlie
never made them feel foolish for asking. He'd show them what to look for,
explain what he was doing, and then let them try it themselves.
That's how he'd met Gary.
Gary had only been at the Machine Shop a short time when
Charlie noticed him struggling with a large metal box filled with scrap iron. The
box should have rolled easily enough. It
didn't.
Gary pushed harder. The
box barely moved.
Charlie watched for a moment before walking over.
"That wheel's not turning."
Gary looked down.
Charlie was right.
One of the wheels had a broken weld and was dragging instead
of rolling. Charlie helped Gary empty the box, then repaired the wheel. When
they finished, Gary pushed the box toward the junk pile as if nothing had ever
been wrong with it.
It was a small thing.
Charlie probably didn't think much about it afterward.
Gary did. From then on, Gary paid attention when Charlie
spoke. Over the years, the two men became friends in the way men at the Machine
Shop often did. They worked. They joked. They occasionally complained about the
job.
And once in a while, after a particularly hard week, they
would sit down with the rest of the crew at a local tavern and share a couple
of beers.
Charlie didn't talk much about himself. But the men knew
enough. They knew he lived alone across the tracks. They knew he walked to
work. They knew he went to church every Sunday.
And they knew that if a difficult piece of work came through
the doors of the Machine Shop, somebody would eventually say:
"Get Charlie."
Charlie Miller was the kind of man you could count on.
And on Halloween morning, 1957, Charlie walked into the
Machine Shop just like he had hundreds of mornings before.
He had no reason to believe this morning would be any
different.