by E M Kaplan
She backed out of the pantry and edged farther down the hallway in the semi-dark with Lizzie close behind her. The next door led to the garage, the first two bays of which were empty, other than a puddle of oil stains in the one closest to the door. The third bay, however, was occupied by what Josie realized was a car.
A dark green older model Acura—Mary Clare’s car.
Chapter 24
Yes, they were in a hurry. They didn’t have all night to jump on the beds and try out every bowl of porridge. True, she didn’t know who had broken the glass—or if there was a homicidal maniac roaming the house with them—but here was Mary Clare’s car. Right in front of her.
The car was a sporty, two-door 1994 Acura Integra in that dark metallic green that had been so popular, with a spoiler—the same vehicle that Josie remembered reading about in the article online.
She peeked in the driver’s side window, shining her creepy red light inside. She listed off the features she could see—automatic transmission, leather seats. In the nineties, this would have been a nice, classy car to drive, and 1994 had been a major redesign in terms of looks. Very trendy and sleek. Other than a thin layer of dust, it looked to be in like-new condition.
She checked each of the windows and none were broken, so this wasn’t the source of the shattering glass sound. And otherwise, the garage was empty. No person-sized shadows lurking in the corners. She swept her flashlight around just to make sure.
And holy crap, what is that?
When she shined the flashlight on the wall ahead of the car, the beam of bloody red light caught a massive portrait of the dead woman and what looked to be a homemade memorial. Pink and white silk flowers tied together with broad, silk white ribbon, arranged in a large heart shape surrounded the painting, framing Mary Clare’s face and frozen Mona Lisa half-smile. Super creepy.
Lizzie also issued a sharp intake of air as she caught sight of the display. “What the—?”
“It’s just the funeral flowers,” Josie said, trying to reassure herself as well. “It’s the portrait and stand from the ceremony. Someone hung it on the wall. Nothing to worry about. No big deal.”
Yeah, like it was totally normal to display that stuff on the wall in your garage. The silk flowers had kept well, though. Not a surprise—it was cold and quiet as a tomb in here.
Lizzie rubbed her arms, clearly wigged out by it. Josie was, too, but she kept it to herself.
On one hand, the wall memorial was unnerving as heck. On the other, mourning his wife was bittersweet and natural. This memorial brought to Josie’s mind the patient and loving Billy she had heard on the cassette tape. Making this wall hanging might have been his personal way of facing her death. Maybe he wasn’t a natural-born artist, but his crafting ability was beyond reproach.
She moved in for a closer look and peered at the flowers, noting each bunch had been attached into the drywall with what looked to be staples from a high-powered staple gun.
The sound that would have made…that decisive and final chunk chunk chunk of the staples sinking into the wall, pinning the silk there permanently. Okay, that gave her the chills.
“Did you know the heart shape is really not representative of the two sides of a human heart like a lot of people think?” Lizzie said. “It’s actually from ancient times and was drawn to imitate the leaf of the silphium plant, which was also used for brothel signs.”
“What?…How do you know all this stuff?” And yet, still not know who Errol Flynn was.
“I like to read,” she said.
But what in the world was she reading?
“Fair enough,” Josie said. She made up her mind not to mock Lizzie again about the Flynn thing. At least, not out loud. The kid was a reader, and that made her a rare breed these days, although she was kind of stubborn.
Turning back to the car, Josie lifted up the driver’s side door handle using the hem of her t-shirt. She’d been hoping for an easy way in, but it was locked.
“What are you doing? Don’t touch that. What if it has an alarm?”
If the car had truly been sitting here in this garage since Mary Clare vanished all those years ago, even if it did have an alarm system, chances were good that the battery was long dead. In any case, she took the risk of yanking on the handle and was lucky that no alarm went off. Not lucky enough to have found the car unlocked, though. She edged around the hood of the car and tried the passenger side, which was also locked, unfortunately. She would’ve liked to check out the glove box.
Most people who spent any amount of time in their cars treated them like a home away from home—receipts, fast food wrappers, coins, lost business cards. Anything under the seats or on the floors could hold a clue to where the woman had vanished. A long, unexpected colored hair, even. Animal fur. Seed pods of a faraway plant. Something that investigators before her might have missed.
Peering into the small, triangular backseat window, she tried to remember if the glass on this model rolled down or if it was just cosmetic. From what she could see, the backseat looked empty, though there could have been something on the floor, which was hidden in shadow. She attempted to angle her light downward, but it didn’t reach the darkest recesses. She’d have to go back to the other side to shine it across, but that still would give her only a partial view of the interior.
If she hurried, maybe she could unlock a door. Sweeping her light around, she spied a workbench and toolbox along the far side of the garage. All she needed was a screwdriver and she could get in that car. She’d be in like—she side-eyed Lizzie—Flynn.
“Stop that. What are you doing? You’re going to bring the cops here.”
Josie rummaged around in the toolbox and found just what she needed: a nice Craftsman flathead screwdriver. No, she wasn’t going to hot-wire Mary Clare’s car. Not that she remembered how. She merely wanted to search the inside of it. Thanks to her Uncle Jack, she knew how. All she had to do was pry back the rubber strip around one of the windows and create a gap for her hand, slip her arm inside, and pop the lock. Luckily, the Acura’s door locks were up near the top of the door because her arms were short—proportionally short, not extra short. She was only five-two and three quarters.
And sensitive about it, thank you very much.
“Just give me five minutes.” Fingertips just inches from the car, she paused. “Hey, do you happen to have gloves in your kit?”
#
“Holy smokes, you got inside that car in under four minutes. My God, I’m glad you use your powers for good and not evil.” Lizzie had timed her using her phone’s stopwatch, which up-lit her face with a ghostly pallor. She’d tossed one of her gadgets back into her bag in favor of her smartphone so she could use the clock app. “How’d you learn how to do that?”
“My uncle works with cars,” Josie said, handing her the screwdriver and snapping the too-big latex gloves from Lizzie tighter while she slid into the passenger seat. When Lizzie slid her a suspicious look, she added, “He has a legitimate garage, not a chop shop.”
Okay, so it was a slight exaggeration.
After retiring from McDonnell Douglas, the airplane manufacturer, her Uncle Jack had begun collecting antique cars on his property in Tucson. He loved autos from all historical eras, but only worked on modern cars when he owed people favors—which wasn’t often, but important when it happened. He had on occasion helped a friend out who had locked keys in a car in the middle of the night in South Tucson. Or had Josie open a locked car that had been towed to his lot for repayment of one debt or another. Off the books. Not a lot of questions asked, only the necessary ones, like how fast do you need this back?
Maybe that was where Josie had acquired her slippery, relativistic view of the law.
She checked the glove box first, but found only the car manual and Mary Clare’s printed proof of insurance that expired at the end of 1995. No DNA-filled gum wrappers, no used pregnancy tests, no scary heroin needles. No candlestick, rope, or knife. Yeah, maybe it was a bit too much
to hope for a smoking gun after all these years.
A sweep of her flashlight between the seats yielded nothing, so she slid out beside the car and crouched down to look under the seats. Again, nothing. She leaned across the driver’s seat to open the hatchback, almost popping the hood with the button on the dash before she remembered the trunk release was down on the floor with the gas cap lever. She’d detailed her uncle’s loaner Acura of a similar make many times, so she was intimately and depressingly familiar with the layout. Getting Arizona dust out of A/C ducts was no joke. And if she’d been particularly mouthy with her aunt or uncle that week, he’d hand her a bag of Q-Tips and cotton balls and tell her to get the job done using them.
Totally deserved it, every time.
As she worked her way around to the back of the car, she noted that Lizzie had gotten her ghost detection equipment working and was walking around the garage now, waving the gadget with the lights and buttons in front of her as she walked, reminding Josie of a red-shirted Star Trek extra. Hopefully not one of the disposable ones.
“Any signs of life?” Josie asked and shook her head at her choice of words. Signs of afterlife would have been more fitting.
“Nothing yet, but I’m patient. The key to being a good ghost hunter is to be good at waiting for something to happen, some spirit to decide to expose itself.”
You’ll be waitin’ a long time, Josie thought as she bent forward into the open hatchback, trying to hurry, yet be thorough. This was probably her last chance to find something in the car. She ran her gloved fingers under the edge of the trunk board and lifted it up. The spare tire in the trunk well looked clean and intact. No dust on it, even. In fact, it looked as if the car had been detailed.
But being anal retentive about the state of a car wasn’t a proof of guilt, she reminded herself, though she wanted to declare otherwise. Taking care of her car could have been a way of honoring his wife’s memory. Just because it was squeaky, show-room clean didn’t mean it had been covered with incriminating DNA evidence. It didn’t mean that Billy Blake had murdered his wife and transported her body out to the Texas wilderness using her own car. Though, now Josie was picturing that very thing in her mind and shivered as she let the board back down and closed the trunk with a thunk. “Well, that was a bust.”
Dang it. She’d really hoped to find something incriminating. Or just find anything at all. Instead, she’d come up with a big, fat zero.
“Let’s go back in the house. There’s nothing here. And it’s creepy,” Lizzie said.
“Truth.”
They’d wasted precious minutes in her fruitless search of the car when they still hadn’t found the cause of the broken glass. The house was big enough that the intruder—or spirit, Josie was willing to allow, just this once and only because she felt bad for breaking into the car—might have left already without revealing itself.
One could only hope.
Josie didn’t particularly want to encounter anything vengeful, mercenary, or violent, whether corporeal or otherworldly. She preferred not to get injured. She was willing to admit that maybe she’d been unconsciously traveling in the opposite direction of the shattering glass in self-preservation.
However, as they rounded the corner into the kitchen, they came face to face with a breathtakingly horrible, bikini-clad apparition.
Chapter 25
Four-inch cork wedge high heels. Heroin-chic legs, minus the chic part. Denim cut-off short-shorts that failed to hide a distinctly male crotch. Abs of an anorexic teenage girl. Hot pink string bikini top. Turkey-waddle neck. Stained, wispy gray beard. All topped by a sunken, toothless face.
The three of them shrieked, and Josie’s hearing was blocked out for a few seconds until she swallowed hard to open her ears back up. When the screaming stopped, the bikini man—whom she now recognized from her near collision with him earlier downtown—bent over with a hand to his heaving chest, and Josie hoped to God she wouldn’t have to perform CPR on that mouth.
“What are you ladies doing here?” he demanded.
Okay, not a ghost. And hello, did you just assume my gender?
“No, you first. What are you doing here?” Lizzie asked, clearly territorial on behalf of her realtor cousin.
“Don’t make me pull one of those antique guns off the wall, because I’m a pacifist. I don’t like to hurt people, but if you corner me, I’ll go honey badger on your butts. And I’ll have you know, I’m a legal renter. I have a month-to-month lease in writing.”
Though he lisped horribly because of his lack of teeth, Josie realized he was lucid and not too badly spoken. He didn’t have any fresh track marks on his arms, so if he was using, it was in some other way. At this very moment, he was as sane as either one of them.
“Seriously? You’re paying to live here?” Josie asked. What kind of income did he have to afford it and how could she get in on a gig like this?
“No. I’m being paid to live here. This is my humble abode.”
“That’s impossible. Who would pay you to do that?” Lizzie asked, her shock and awe clear as the starkly drawn eyebrows on her face.
“Look, I’ll show you my rental contract. It’s in my suitcase. I just need to clean this up first.” He gestured to the double sink where he’d been rinsing a blood-covered towel. “Don’t get too close,” he said, and visions of hepatitis tests flooded through Josie’s mind. Hep C was no laughing matter. But then he added, “Red wine stains horribly. I lost a chiffon prom dress to merlot just last week. Just about broke my heart. I cried for days. Love your bracelet, by the way. Kind of weird with the gloves, though. It’s so you. Kind of dark and broody, but classy, in a way.”
In a way? Come on. What wasn’t classy about her? She quickly snapped off her gloves and smoothed back her messy hair.
He finished wringing out the towel and led them outside through the patio doors. His Daisy Dukes were giving him a serious wedgie, and Josie averted her eyes too late to avoid seeing his emaciated cheeks. Under the covered pergola on the patio, he’d set up a lounge chair with a sleeping bag next to a suitcase on rollers. A large splash of red wine marred the cream-colored cement decking next to the chair.
“Watch out. I’m going to need to get the garden hose before that stains. I think I got all the glass, but you never know. Little slivers can get right into your skin and next thing you know, you got sepsis. I had that once. And hypothermia. Lost two toes—makes my platforms fit better, so there’s a flip side to everything. But that was before I came to Austin. I was living in Oklahoma, but it’s just too damn cold up there.”
And definitely more conservative than Austin, Josie speculated. Especially for a cross-dresser. Or trans-person, not that she wanted to assume anything.
“My name’s Marion,” he said, not pausing in his mopping up of the spilled wine. “Like John Wayne, you know? His real name before Hollywood got ahold of him was Marion. But not John Wayne Gacy. What a way to ruin a name. That guy was a creep. I hate clowns.”
Clowns? What about serial murderers?
“What are y’all doing here anyway?” He straightened up and jutted out a hip bone, propping a hand on it. Pink nail polish, Josie noted. A more subtle shade than her friend, Barbecue Barbie, had been wearing. A shade Josie herself wouldn’t have minded wearing if she ever were to paint her nails.
“We’re looking for ghosts. Seen any around?” she asked.
Might as well be honest with him. When she’d asked Lizzie to come out to Billy’s house, she had no idea she’d find an actual living resident. She was caught off guard by the whole situation and with her emotional drawbridge down, she’d been accidentally forthright.
He didn’t seem the least bit phased by their nighttime adventuring in the house, like there was some underground cultural with which he was familiar that didn’t adhere to strict daylight hours or boundaries like locked doors. Nocturnal trespassers. Denizens of the night, like street kids or vampires.
“Ghosts. Spirits. Specters. Phantoms. You
should hear all the noises in the house at night,” he said, making her more aware of words with the letter S than she’d ever been before.
He reached across the lounger for his suitcase and set aside a vintage rhinestone tiara and a pair of acrylic platform stripper heels before pulling out a packet of dog-eared papers.
“They don’t bother me much. I only use the washroom and the fridge, so I’m not inside much. I sleep out here on the chair. Mostly because I can’t stand to be in closed spaces. That’s what you get when your mother locks you in a closet at night so she can go out hooking. Oops—was that too much sharing? I was in group therapy once in a place I stayed at. I got used to telling everyone what I was feeling, and now I just can’t stop. Anyway, all the details are right there in the agreement.” He pointed to the line with his cotton candy colored nail as Josie skimmed through the contract.
Lizzie, reading over Josie’s shoulder, shrieked in her ear, making her head ring and her ear close up. Again. She swallowed hard as if she were on an airplane and managed to get a little hearing back.
“Good God, girl, you got a set of pipes on you. If there are any ghosts around tonight, you certainly woke them up now.” Marion’s mouth hung open, giving Josie a good view of the pits in the front of it where his teeth used to be. His gums weren’t all that healthy looking either. That explained all the soft foods in the fridge. Hummus was probably his friend.
“Jessica Rubiak!” Lizzie said, pointing to the top of the contract, disgust and outrage turbo-charging the volume of her voice up to level eleven. “The number one real estate agent in the city. And my cousin’s rival. She’s letting him squat here so she can sabotage the sale.” She shot Marion the evil eye.
“I resent that, missy,” he said, his voice even raspier with protest. “I’m no squatter.” He pronounced it th’kwatter. “I’m a paid renter. It’s a job. Not only is this is my place of employ, it just so happened to be also where I hang my tiara at night.”
