Ghostly Hitchhiker Box Set

by Rodney Strong

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Beth said in a challenging tone.

  ‘I’m trying, but I’ve come to realise that your sister is less than forthcoming with important information.’

  (What does forthcoming mean? You know using lots of big words doesn’t make you smart.)

  Beth’s mouth twitched. ‘Yes, she was like that when she was alive as well.’ She walked over to the concrete steps that led up to the back door, and sat on the middle step. Monty wagged his tail one more time at Oliver, then went and lay down at her feet. ‘She always threatened to run away, and I know a couple of times she packed a bag and left the house, vowing she was going forever. Mum used to wait for about thirty seconds, then follow her. Debbie was so determined, and stubborn, she never thought to look behind her. Apparently both times she ran away, it was to Brigid’s house, so Mum would come back home, knowing that Brigid’s mother was looking after her.’

  (That’s…that’s…)

  ‘Sneaky,’ Oliver finished.

  (So that’s why Mum never seemed worried when I came home. Huh.)

  ‘But she was never gone for more than an hour. Once I had to pretend,’ Beth waggled her fingers in the air to emphasis the word, ‘to go around to Brigid’s house by coincidence, so I could bring her home.’

  (She was in on it too!)

  ‘When she went missing did you think she had just gone to Brigid’s house again?’ Oliver asked.

  Beth nodded. ‘That was the first place we looked, but Brigid was there and she claimed she didn’t know where Debbie was. That’s when Mum started to get worried.’

  Oliver felt a twinge of sympathy at the frantic feeling that must have enveloped Debbie’s parents. He knew if something happened to Rose he would be out of his mind with worry.

  ‘Was anything missing from her room the day she disappeared?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Mum checked and her bag was there. That’s when everyone really started to panic.’

  (Ha, shows what they know.)

  Does that mean you had a bag?

  (Yeah, you don’t run away without stuff.)

  But if it wasn’t your bag…. Oliver stopped mid-thought and realised two things. One, that Beth was staring at him with a curious expression, and two, so was the dog.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to Beth. ‘Sometimes I get into conversations with my hitchhikers and forget about actual people.’

  ‘I still can’t work out whether you’re gifted or crazy,’ Beth replied.

  (Crazy.)

  He ignored the sound of laughter that itched at the back of his eyes. ‘Some days neither can I,’ he confessed. ‘Did anyone ask if Brigid’s bag was missing?’

  Beth blinked twice, then grimaced like she was stifling a swear word. ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Something your sister said, or didn’t say. I think she was going to meet someone. I think she and Brigid planned it together, and if they didn’t use Debbie’s bag, then it stands to reason they’d use Brigid’s.’

  ‘I don’t believe anyone thought to ask Brigid about a bag,’ she said slowly. ‘But surely if Brigid knew that Debbie was going to meet someone she would have said, especially after she went missing.’

  (We swore a pinkie swear.)

  Oliver sighed. ‘Not if they swore an unbreakable childhood promise.’ He waved the smallest finger on his left hand. ‘Besides, what if the whole point was to run away. If Debbie disappeared then Brigid would just think her friend had succeeded in her plan.’

  ‘Who? Who was she meeting?’ Beth’s voice had an edge to it that Monty didn’t like. He whined and looked around for the invisible threat upsetting his owner.

  ‘Debbie?’

  There was an uncomfortable silence while Beth stared at Oliver who didn’t know where to look.

  ‘You might as well tell us, Debbie,’ Oliver pressed.

  (Fine. But he didn’t kill me.)

  ‘I’m not saying he did.’

  (It was Nick.)

  ‘Rawlings.’

  Beth’s head jerked back at hearing the name.

  (Yes, Nick Rawlings. How many Nick’s do you think I know?)

  ‘Nick Rawlings,’ Beth said.

  ‘Yes, but she’s adamant that he wasn’t the one that…’

  ‘You can say murdered or killed. I’ve had forty years to become accustomed to that reality.’

  ‘I’ve only had a few days,’ Oliver replied.

  Beth got slowly to her feet, immediately followed by Monty. He looked expectantly at the corner of the house, then up at his owner. ‘In a minute, Montster,’ she told him with a pat on the head. ‘They questioned Nick Rawlings at the time and he denied all knowledge. If I find out that he knew something all this time and didn’t say anything….’

  Monty barked, then yawned, showing off a nice set of sharp white teeth.

  ‘Exactly, boy,’ Beth finished. ‘Do you know where he is now?’ she asked Oliver.

  He shook his head. ‘No, but I’m working on it.’

  (I told you, he didn’t have anything to do with this.)

  ‘Would you like me to make some calls?’ Beth asked, already reaching into her handbag.

  ‘I have my people making calls as we speak,’ Oliver said, immediately regretting it.

  ‘You have people?’ Beth said.

  ‘I have someone who would melt my skin off with a look if she ever heard me call her my “people”.’

  Beth nodded approvingly. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

  I’m surprised you didn’t in your professional life.

  ‘I better get going,’ he said out loud.

  ‘We’ll walk you out.’ She got slowly to her feet and shuffled for the first two steps, then seemed to regain her strength. Oliver resisted the urge to offer a hand in case it was bitten off, by either Beth or her dog.

  Oliver waited until they were back on the motorway before bringing up Nick again.

  ‘Tell me about the meeting you’d planned with Nick.’

  (It wasn’t a meeting. That’s what my Dad used to have at work all the time. We were running away together.)

  ‘Just the two of you? What about Brigid?’

  (She understood.)

  ‘Where were you going?’

  (I don’t know. We were going to decide that after we left.)

  ‘Okay, where were you meeting him?’

  (There was a spot where Brigid and I used to go swimming at the beach. He had seen us there a few times and so he wrote to meet him there.)

  Oliver seized on the word. ‘Wrote? You mean he didn’t ask you face to face?’

  (Of course not. We needed to be careful. It was so romantic. He left a note for me in our secret hiding spot.)

  ‘You and Nick had a secret hiding spot?’

  (Duh, not me and Nick. Me and Brigid’s spot.)

  A cold wave spread through Oliver, and his fingertips tingled. ‘You found a note buried in the tin in your back garden?’

  (Yes! Isn’t that amazing? I dug it up thinking there was something from Brigid there but it was a note from Nick.)

  ‘How do you know it was from him?’

  (Because it said Love Nick. And it had one of his poems in it.)

  ‘What exactly did it say?’

  (I can’t remember all the words, but it said that he loved me and wanted us to run away together and to meet him at the spot.)

  Oliver gripped the steering wheel tighter, blood leeching from his knuckles as he considered the possibilities.

  (What?)

  He shook himself out of the tumble of thoughts, and chose his next thought carefully, knowing Debbie could understand everything he was thinking.

  ‘Did it occur to you that the note might not have been from Nick? Or worse, that it was from Nick but the whole purpose was to lure you to a secluded area so he could kill you?’

  (I told you, Nick didn’t do it.)

  He sighed at the stubborn tone he recognised from Rose. Nothing was going to change her mind that Nick, the love of her young life, h
ad nothing to do with her death. But there were still unanswered questions.

  ‘Who knew that you and Brigid had a secret hiding spot?’

  (No one. That’s why it’s called a secret spot.)

  ‘Someone must have known or else they couldn’t have put the note there,’ he said.

  (Oh. Yeah. I guess you’re right.)

  ‘So who might have known?’

  The silence that followed lasted a song and a half and Oliver was too afraid to ask if she was sulking or thinking.

  (No one was supposed to know except us.)

  ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘But maybe someone found out by accident. Or maybe someone was spying on you one day when you or Brigid were burying a treasure.’

  (Bloody Beth. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have sworn.)

  ‘It’s fine,’ Oliver replied. Bloody was on the mild side of the swearing scale, in fact it barely made the list at all.

  (It must have been her. She was always spying on me so she could go running to Mum and tell on me. I bet she left the note as well, so she could have a laugh when Nick didn’t show up. I hate her.)

  ‘Don’t use words until you understand what they mean.’ It was something he always said to Reed and Rose and had been easier when they were younger and didn’t understand a lot of words. Now if he said that they wanted to know the meaning of the word so they could decide whether they wanted to use it, and some of them were becoming increasingly difficult to explain.

  (I know what hate is. And I do hate her. She must have tattled. She did it all the time.)

  ‘I’ll ask her if it was her. In the meantime is there anyone else you can think of? Anyone who might have been around at your house before you got the note?’

  (No. Just my stupid sister.)

  ‘Stupid is a mean word.’

  (Stop saying the same thing over and over. Anyway Jennifer said stupid before and you didn’t tell her off.)

  He opened his mouth to reply, then realised she was right, and closed it again.

  There was a growl and he looked down at the slight bulge of his stomach and thought of the healthy spinach leaves and lean chicken waiting for him in the fridge at home. Unfortunately his resolve lasted until he looked back up again. The first thing he saw was a giant golden M beckoning him from the side of the road.

  ‘I’ve been pretty good this week,’ he muttered.

  (What about that chocolate bar you had yesterday?)

  ‘Doesn’t count, it was dark chocolate.’

  (What does that mean?)

  ‘Dark chocolate barely counts as a treat. It’s full of…’ he struggled to remember what it was full of, ‘…natural stuff.’

  (If I asked Rose is that what she’d say?)

  ‘No need to bring my daughter into this,’ Oliver said as he indicated, then pulled into the drive through.

  (We went to a McDonald’s once. It opened in Porirua when I was six. Dad said it was the first one in New Zealand. They had yummy chips.)

  ‘They still do.’

  A few minutes later he was negotiating traffic while trying to avoid a big blob of sauce escaping from the side of his burger. As it slid closer towards a free fall he took a giant bite, instantly realised it was too big and, panicking, looked for somewhere to spit it whilst attempting to break it into smaller bits in his mouth. Eventually he swallowed the last of it, and felt a slight pain in his chest as the burger inched its way closer to his stomach.

  He took a drink which made him feel a little better, so he shoved a handful of fries into his mouth and chewed on those while he navigated the roundabout and accelerated onto the motorway.

  ‘I’ll go for a bike ride,’ he said, almost meaning it as he crumpled the empty bag into a ball.

  Exercise and Oliver had a complicated history. He would go through spurts of intense exercise, sometimes running, sometimes the gym, and would even eat healthily at the same time, well healthier. Then something would happen, like a knee injury, or a Friday, and his diet would be off, and the exercise usually followed suit. His latest attempt had been bike riding, which had the added attraction of being lower impact than running but the disadvantage that everywhere he biked had a hill on the way home. Unless he drove his car to somewhere flat and then biked, which seemed like a lot of hard work and a bit pointless.

  So far biking had been in favour for three weeks. The diet less so.

  Oliver made sure to put the empty bag in the outside rubbish bin, partly to keep the car tidy-ish, but mostly to hide the evidence.

  He glanced at the patchy front lawn, too long in parts and almost dead in others, and decided to run the lawnmower over it. That would almost count as exercise. Just as he opened the garage door his cell phone rang.

  ‘Lucky for us Detective Wilson likes his uncle, and had a quiet morning,’ Alice said.

  ‘He found Nick Rawlings.’

  ‘Isn’t that what I just said? It turns out that Nick is in the city. He runs the City Art Gallery in the square.’

  ‘But I checked the electoral roll?’ Oliver said.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, maybe he doesn’t vote. Who cares, he’s here.’

  ‘And let me guess, you’ve made an appointment for us to see him in twenty minutes,’ Oliver said, staring at the lawnmower hanging from a hook on the back wall.

  Alice laughed. ‘I tried. But he can’t meet us until four. Is that going to be a problem? With the kids?’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ he sighed. ‘I can put them into after school care. Or bring them with me.’

  ‘Rose and Reed in a gallery full of expensive art work? I’d like to see that.’

  ‘You haven’t even met my kids!’ he protested.

  ‘I’ve met kids before,’ Alice replied. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to see the bull in the china shop comparison, although your kids are a bit small to be bulls. More like goats.’

  ‘See you at four,’ Oliver said and hung up before his children could be compared to any more animals.

  EIGHTEEN

  (What’s after school care?)

  He placed the lawnmower down and went back into the garage and picked up the power cord. Plugging one end into the wall socket, he fought and muttered and somehow tied his hand up as he attempted to unroll the long cord.

  ‘The school has a service where you can leave your kids in the hall and someone will supervise them. You have to pay for it, but it really helps if both parents work fulltime.’

  (More school work!)

  ‘Not quite. They play games with their friends, and play computer games and Reed especially never wants to come home.’

  Further conversation was drowned out by the noise of the mower. He found the rhythmic movement of walking back and forth quite soothing, and satisfying as the long bits of grass came down to meet their shorter compatriots.

  A short while later he rubbed the sweat off his forehead and put everything back into the garage. Then he went and had a shower, with his eyes closed, and groped around to dry himself and pull some clothes on. Even in the short time that Debbie had been around, he had learned to put his clothes at the end of the bed before jumping in the shower. It was better than attempting to extract clothes from the drawers in the walk-in closet. The first time he’d done that, he found that he was wearing his underwear backwards and had accidentally put on one of Jennifer’s old T-shirts. A sight that was both embarrassing and a relief, as for a moment he’d thought his weight had rocketed up overnight and none of his T-shirts fit anymore.

  He pottered around the house for a little while, eyeing up the laptop, before resisting the idea of turning it on. Christmas wasn’t far away and after that was four weeks of school holidays, involving bored children demanding to be entertained. It was never a productive time for writing, but it did mean he had a holiday, of sorts.

  He had arranged to meet Reed and Rose at the main school gates after the bell, but when he arrived only Rose was there.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked as she clim
bed into the car.

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

  His first reaction was irritation, then an uneasy feeling came as he considered Debbie and what had happened to her.

  (I’m sure he’s okay. Maybe his class got held back. I remember this one time we were naughty, well it was only Christine but we all got punished and the teacher made us wait for ten minutes after the bell rang.)

  Oliver fought his way through painfully slow-moving parents and snagged a carpark around the corner. When he got up to Reed’s classroom it was empty and his feeling of unease ramped up.

  ‘Maybe he’s on the playground?’ Rose suggested helpfully.

  ‘Let’s go and look.’ He took her by the hand and they walked between buildings in the direction of the playground. Before they could get there Reed popped out of the door to the administration office.

  (See, I told you.)

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Reed said glumly.

  ‘Are you alright, buddy? What happened?’

  ‘You weren’t here,’ Reed said with a hint of tears in the corner of his eyes.

  Oliver pulled his son into a hug. ‘I told you to meet me at the gates.’

  ‘I forgot,’ came the muffled reply.

  Oliver ruffled his son’s hair. He was up to his chest now and Oliver sometimes forgot the boy was still only eight. ‘It’s okay, Reed. Let’s go play on the playground for a bit, eh?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Rose immediately skipped ahead.

  (Don’t we have to go and see Nick?)

  ‘Damn, I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten what, Dad?’ Reed asked.

  ‘I have an appointment in the city. Rose, let’s go. We can go to the seagull playground after my meeting.’

  Rose who had prepared to present a well-considered argument against leaving, in the form of “But Daaaad”, promptly closed her mouth again and skipped happily down the path to the gate.

  (What’s the seagull playground? Do you get to play with seagulls?)

  Only if you can catch them. No, it’s on the waterfront so there’s always seagulls hanging around and there’s a giant seagull on top of the lighthouse. The kids started calling it the seagull playground when they were younger and the name stuck.

  (So it’s just a normal playground.)

  ‘Dad, did you bring anything to eat?’ Reed asked.