by E M Kaplan
“Just till the end of the week.” The conference ran four days, Monday through Thursday. They were staying until Sunday morning, so they’d have a couple of days to relax and hit a few local sites together. Maybe they’d stroll down to the Congress Avenue Bridge if the weather was nice.
“Cool, cool. What have you seen so far?”
“Ruby’s. The Mineral Lick. I’m headed up to Smiley’s tomorrow.”
“That’s…a lot of meat. Welcome to Texas, I guess.” He sounded a little judgey. Maybe he was one of those militant vegans the Internet was always talking about but she’d had yet to meet. Based on the tooled leather bracelet around his wrist, probably not anti-animal-consumption.
“Do you know anything about that restaurant?” Yeah, she was totally fishing for gossip as she had been all day, but she never knew when she would land something juicy, so it was worth it to keep casting her line. Plus, as far as she could tell, everyone in this town knew a little bit about everything. It wasn’t too different from Tucson, the biggest small town she’d ever encountered in her life.
In fact, earlier in the day, she’d stacked the deck in her favor. Her breakfast waitress had mentioned the night bartender had once worked at Smiley’s. Josie was fishing for gossip, but she knew where the fish might be biting, so to speak.
He wiped the bar down. She counted three strokes before he answered. “I started out there bussing tables and washing dishes when I was in high school. My mom lives about a mile from Smiley’s, so I could ride my bike or skateboard there after school. Was really convenient for a first job.”
Josie took a sip of her tea. She could sense an addendum coming—a but—and the best thing for her to do was to keep quiet and wait for it. She watched him, trying to tease out more of his story. He kept busy, though, and avoided eye contact. Then his attention was diverted elsewhere. A couple slid into seats at the end of the bar and he left to wait on them. After that, he brought Josie her dishes, tapped the counter once, and excused himself to fill some orders.
She was rarely wrong about sensing more to a story. But if that was the case, she wasn’t going to hear it tonight. His tale needed a little more finessing.
Chapter 7
The prickly pear iced tea, as light as it sounded, packed a major caffeine punch. Maybe she should have gone with the mojito after all. She stayed up late seriously wired, working on notes for her blog post about Austin’s barbecue scene and surfing the Internet. Then she looked for articles about Billy Blake and his wife Mary Clare.
While Drew mumbled about bone density and beta blockers in his sleep, Josie found some articles in the online archives of the local paper, The Legislator, dated almost five years after Mary Clare’s disappearance.
MISSING PERSON REPORT FILED YEARS LATER
Mary Clare Blake (née Rogers), formerly of the Westview suburb of Dallas, hasn’t been heard from since the morning of Sept. 28, 1995, when she spoke to her mother on the phone, according to police.
Her husband and owner of the popular restaurant Smiley’s Smokehouse, Billy Blake, declined to report her disappearance. Family members have now reported her missing nearly three years later despite the fact that Blake insists she left the area of her own volition. Items found inside her home since her disappearance include her car keys and other personal items. Her 1994 Acura Integra still sits in the Blakes’ five-car garage.
Multiple agencies have helped in the search for her, aided by volunteers, ATV’s, horses, helicopters, and search dogs. No sign of the missing woman has been found.
Josie opened another tab on her browser and searched the Internet for Westview. She confirmed that Mary Clare’s family lived in a ritzy suburb of Dallas—and still resided there, according to a more recent charity feature story. Her mother and three siblings still routinely made the society headlines. What a quaint and Southern tradition—publicizing the do-good intentions of the wealthy as they dressed up in their finery. Or maybe it wasn’t relegated to the South. Though Josie had grown up in Arizona and Massachusetts, she hardly knew anything about the upper-crust of society.
But she knew someone who just might.
Maybe Josie’s benefactor, Greta Williams, might know the Rogers family, though it was a serious long-shot. Greta traveled more in the New England blue blood circuit than anywhere else, but the woman seemed to have a finger in every pie. Greta’s reach extended as far as San Francisco, so maybe she had some connections in Texas as well.
The clock on her computer screen said 12:36 a.m. While it wasn’t too late to send Greta in Boston a text message—the older woman was either an insomniac or a vampire, Josie had yet to decide which—she didn’t want to give Greta the impression that she was available at all hours of the night. The woman had boundary issues as it was, sending Josie across the country to do her legwork, getting her into sticky situations…Okay, to be fair, most of those tight spots were of Josie’s own making. But she never would have had the funds or the initial kick in the seat of the pants to burrow in like a tick, seeking the truth.
She clicked on another article dated a few months later by an Austin investigative reporter named Skip Richmond.
WHERE IS MARY CLARE?
Speculation still swirls around the disappearance of Mary Clare Blake, wife of Smiley’s owner, Billy Blake, and much of the suspicion falls on her husband. The taciturn yet well-respected restaurant owner has declined frequent requests for interviews.
According to sources within the Austin Police Department, multiple searches of the Blake mansion in the hills west of Austin did not turn up any signs of struggle or foul play. The only additional evidence of Mary Clare’s absence is her missing purse.
A spokesperson from the APD has stated, “Mr. Blake has been questioned, and he will not face charges at this time.”
Billy Blake maintains his statement that Mary Clare departed of her own free will. However, he has also stated his wife has not contacted him from her new location or advised him or anyone else of her well-being.
The news stories died down for a few years. No more public speculation surfaced after that, at least none that Josie could find in the online newspaper archives. Years later, a now-defunct Texas Hill Country magazine published a restaurant review of Smiley’s. She did some hasty subtraction based on the dates. Was seven years the standard amount of time to let bygones be bygones?
Probably not, if she were to ask Mary Clare’s loved ones. Josie had lost her own father to an unexpected heart attack decades ago and the pain of loss still stung. Not as bad as an open wound, but what she imagined the pain would feel like from a missing arm.
Did they miss Mary Clare like a phantom limb?
#
“Hey,” Drew’s voice filtered into her subconscious. A large hand rubbed her back and swept her hair off her face. “Did you sleep the whole night on your laptop?”
Josie awoke to find herself slumped on the hotel room desk where countless other people had probably laid their city maps and rental car keys, half-full beverages cups and take-out containers, dirty feet and worse…and now, a small puddle of her drool made its home there as well.
Classy.
She wiped her chin and blinked sightlessly. “What time is it?” she croaked. Her voice sounded like she’d picked up a pack-a-day habit overnight.
“Ten after six.”
“Why?”
Fortunately, Drew was fluent in early morning Josie-speak. Why meant, what was he doing up so early, and why was he waking her up to suffer with him?
“Coffee,” he said.
She answered him by heaving herself off the desk and crawling into the bed he’d recently vacated. That part of the bed, deep under the blankets, was still warm. She nestled into the depression left by his body, breathing in his warm Drew scent.
When she woke up several hours later, she was alone, but a blanket was tucked around her chin. Awwww.
Her stomach was making some crazy lonely wolf noises, the ooo-woohs reverberating through her intestin
es, but the breakfast hour had long passed. She checked the clock again. If she got up and showered, she could waste just enough time until lunch. Smiley’s was located about 45 minutes north of Austin in a small town called Leandro. So for now, a cup of room-brewed tea would do while she made use of the rainfall shower in the trendy black-slate tiled bathroom.
She’d slept soundly during the few last hours she’d been stretched out and horizontal in the plush bed, but she’d been visited by strange dreams. She’d been driving her Uncle Jack’s 1957 T-bird down a desert road and had seen a hitchhiker. A ghostly woman in a white flowing gown with over-sprayed Kelly LeBrock hair circa Weird Science stood by the side of the road, trying to flag her down. Josie hadn’t stopped the car—because who picked up hitchhikers these days?—but somehow, the woman appeared in the passenger seat next to her.
That was it, the full extent of the dream.
If Josie were a dream analysis kind of person, she might think the specter of Mary Clare Blake had attached itself to her and planned to ride shotgun during her stay in Austin. In light of the myriad bad decisions Josie had made throughout her life, maybe having another soul on board wasn’t such a bad thing.
Depending on if Mary Clare were the vengeful spirit type or not.
Chapter 8
Smiley’s didn’t have a greeter at the front door of their low-ceilinged wood paneled dining room, no cheerful high-schooler hostess with flawless skin and dress-up yoga pants that failed to mask a perky backside and a raring metabolism. No laminated menus. No Hank Williams, Sr. or Willie Nelson as an audio backdrop to the clang of metal pans and the gruff curses emanating from the open fire pit in the kitchen.
Like Ruby’s, Smiley’s had a pickup counter along the back of the restaurant, but that was where the similarities ended. Where Ruby’s could have been the flagship location of a budding franchise with its down-home kitsch and hand-painted signs, metal tables, and benches, Smiley’s could have been Josie’s uncle’s garage back home in Arizona. It had a lived-in feel, if that made any sense for a restaurant. And she felt more at home here than in any other place in Austin.
Two of the walls had dark wood paneling. A third was covered with yellowed, peeling wallpaper that may have been bright and somewhat feminine when it was new. The fussy floral pattern reminded Josie of a Victorian house, from a time in which a family room might have been referred to as a “parlor,” a place in which people sat upon a “Davenport.” A cork bulletin board covered with hundreds of thumb-tacked business cards for locals hung from the wall—real estate agents, general contractors, plumbers, landscapers, and house sitters. The cards were in varying shades, from crisp white to downright sepia, thanks to the smoke that had probably filtered through Smiley’s over the years, even since it had been rebuilt.
Josie wondered what the carcinogen intake level was here just breathing the air. She suspected it was akin to sucking on the exhaust pipe of an eighteen-wheeler.
“I thought this place burned down.” She leaned her denim-clad elbow on the grimy counter and looked the guy behind it up and down. Her standard MO when she was sticking her nose where it didn’t belong was to make nicey-nice with the natives until they accepted her as one of their own enough to blab all their secrets. Did her method work? Not very often. But she was thick-skulled enough to keep trying. Or was that the definition of insanity? She was lucky though. Most of the people she’d talked to so far were in the service industry—they were pretty much required to talk to her, so she didn’t need to work her ethnically ambiguous, girl-next-door mojo on anyone yet.
“Yeah, that was a long time ago. ‘Bout a decade, more or less. It got rebuilt. But now it’s old again.”
She guessed he was in his late forties, not taking into consideration any premature-by-smoke-inhalation aging. His flannel plaid outer shirt, Round Rock Fire Department t-shirt—what was it about firefighters and barbecue? They seemed to go hand in hand. Were they all pyros?—and stained John Deere cap would have made him right at home on the back of a tractor or a 125cc four-wheeler like they used to race up and down the dry wash beds in Arizona.
“The place was a total loss?”
He lifted his cap and re-fitted it over too-long hair curling over the tops of his ears. His disheveled locks weren’t graying at all. She adjusted her age estimate downward a few years. He didn’t look like the Just For Men type. Maybe it was soot. Dirty fingernails tipped the ends of his surprisingly nice-looking hands. If he’d had some busted knuckles and darker grease stains, he would have fit in better at a body shop.
“Pretty much.” He sighed, his Texan drawl stretching out to full syrup mode as he realized she wasn’t going to give him her order anytime soon. He adjusted from business to Southern chit-chat mode with the ease of a sleek nutria, an aquatic rodent sliding into lukewarm lake water. He eased his considerable bulk onto an elbow on the scarred countertop. “All the structure—wood frame—burned down, so that was a total re-do, but the original fire pit survived, even though they gutted it and scrubbed it out. I guess you can’t burn down a stone fire pit, just in case you were planning on it.”
“Nah,” she said. “Not today.”
She got a smile for that. The man had good teeth. No, she wasn’t attracted to him, she had a boyfriend. This guy was just…magnetic, if she looked at him in an objective way.
“Smart move. Because I gotta tell ya, you can burn this place down, but it’ll keep on going. It’s a force of nature.”
“I’m more of a food aficionado than a firebug. The only time I’m interested in smoke is if it’s making the perfect pink smoke ring on my brisket.”
He blinked. “You a chef?”
“I’m a fan of eating.” She decided not to be coy since he seemed so down-home. “I’m a food critic and blogger.”
“Huh.”
She waited to see what that meant, since the conversation could go any number of directions from here. They were close enough to a technologically robust metropolis that a person like her making a living in the virtual blogosphere might be accepted instead of shunned, but she wasn’t certain of her welcome, especially with old fashioned wallpaper like this.
“DJ,” he said by way of introduction, sticking his big hand out. When he caught sight of how dirty it was, he quickly withdrew it and chuckled. “Whoa. I was restocking the wood. Mesquite. Hickory. Hardwood. Gotta keep the fires burning. Sorry about that.”
“No problem. I’m Josie,” she said, jabbing a thumb toward her sternum. She was straightforward with him, but to a point. If there had been any justice in the world, the paper P.I. license in her wallet would have spontaneously combusted at that moment. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Yes, she was a food blogger, but she was also a card-carrying P.I. with a big penchant for being nosy. Also, she hadn’t exactly earned her P.I. license, and when she probably should have legitimately used it to identify herself—like right now—she purposefully chose to ignore it.
“I wasn’t GM of this place back when the fire happened. Billy was doing it all by himself. I think the man just about lived here. I’m not kidding—he had a cot and a sleeping bag in the back office. Still does, actually. Truth is, I don’t think he wanted to go home to that big ol’ empty house by himself every night—you know that story, right?”
GM meant general manager, which was interesting. Essentially, this guy was Billy’s right-hand man.
Josie wasn’t sure which story about Smiley’s, or Billy, he meant with such a stacked deck of cards to choose from. Mary Clare’s disappearance and alleged murder. Her possible ghost sighting. Angry spirits at the Blake mansion. Josie went with a slight frown and tilted her head to encourage him to elaborate.
“His wife up and left him. Broke him up but good.” He looked like he wanted to say more, and Josie had no idea which direction he would’ve headed conversation-wise. An anti-woman diatribe? The loss of a good woman leaving a man nothing but an empty shell?
“That must have been rough.”
“They were
college sweethearts, so yeah, about as rough as it could be. Guess that’s why I’ll be a bachelor until the day I die. If I need someone to cut my chest wide open and rip my heart out, all I need to do is keep rooting for the Cowboys. Hell, that happens on a yearly basis.”
Loud guffaws filtered out from the back of the open kitchen. Josie enjoyed the trash talk as it flew fast and furiously for a few minutes—stuff about quarterbacks and Jimmy Someone that flew over her head for a while. She chocked it up to a native dialogue she didn’t need to understand. Sadly, she was the same way about the Red Sox, and she lived within a stone’s throw of Fenway Park.
“All right then, missy, what’ll it be? We have—”
He was interrupted by a string of curse words the likes of which Josie hadn’t heard since she’d taken her uncle’s vintage Indian motorcycle for a midnight joyride.
#
A metal pan—a big rectangular one commercial kitchens use—skated across the kitchen’s stone floor like a skateboard slipping out from under a kid’s feet. It clattered to a noisy halt next to the fire pit. The swearing escalated in ferocity and volume from the back of the kitchen. Josie glanced around the restaurant, probably looking like a rabbit about to make a mad dash for the nearest exit. The other patrons had frozen, giving each other similar side-eye looks. One guy in a shirt and tie had a forkful of brisket lifted halfway to his mouth.
She was alarmed yet relieved to find the ruckus was an abnormal occurrence for Smiley’s. Another muted clatter came from the back, this one accompanied by the distinct whack of a long mop or broom handle hitting the floor—someone had kicked the bucket at Smiley’s. Literally.
