by Catie Rhodes
“Susie was a senior at Nazareth High. Good student, track runner. She dropped out of high school midway through the fall semester of her senior year.” Griff poured coffee into thick off-white mugs. “We have an appointment to speak with her mother in a few minutes. I’m going to let her tell you why Susie quit school.”
After the ordeal at the billboard outside Nazareth, Griff’s insistence on not telling us the whole story grated on me. “Why don’t you just tell us?”
“Good question. What happened to Susan Franklin is fairly well-documented in the news media. It was a huge scandal.” He stopped to take a sip of his coffee. “But I’ve never heard her mother tell her version of events. Since neither you nor Mysti have heard any of Susie’s story, I’m hoping one of the two of you will hear anything I skim over because it sounds familiar. The small details are what breaks cases like this wide open.”
I was tired of being in the dark, but I nodded. I’d get paid either way.
“Now let’s get down to what I really want the two of you to know. I found out about Susie Franklin while looking into another missing person’s case.” Griff pulled a sheet of paper from his file and slid it across the table to Mysti and me. A picture of a smiling girl took up most of the sheet. Underneath her picture were the words “$150,000 reward for any information on the whereabouts of Kaitlyn Summers who went missing September 16, 2011.”
There’s the real money and the reason he’s willing to hire not one, but two, paranormal princesses.
“I called the number on the flyer.” Griff leaned forward, chest pressing into the hard edge of the table, intent on his story and earnest about telling it. “Talked to Kaitlyn’s father. Nice guy. He said the last time he talked to Kaitlyn she was turning off Highway 69 onto 231 because she saw a sign for a rest stop. She apparently needed a restroom.”
I shivered at the mention of the rest stop. It looked too run down and the vegetation too overgrown to have been open in 2011. Stay out of abandoned buildings.
Griff took in my shiver. “She lost signal not long afterward, and he never spoke to her again.”
“Law enforcement find anything?” My ex was the new sheriff of the county where I lived. If I had any take-away from our almost year together, it was law enforcement got involved in everything.
“Not even her car. Her cellphone last pinged off a tower near here.” Griff stopped talking as a family of four passed our booth. “Thing is, when I started looking into Summer’s disappearance, I learned something funny. Somewhere between forty and fifty people have gone missing in the last thirty years, within a twenty mile radius of where we’re sitting.” He tapped the table for emphasis.
Outsiders have a way of disappearing. The skin on my back crawled.
“Something’s going on here, has been going on for a while. If I can, I intend to find out what it is.” Griff glanced between Mysti and me. “The reward’ll be nice, but this’ll help a lot of families find closure.”
“And get your name on the map.” I smiled to let him know I didn’t think ill of him for it.
“You bet.” He pointed one long finger at me. “Get you ladies on the map, too. Maybe lead to some business.”
He and Mysti high-fived. Watching them made me feel good. Even if Griff wouldn’t commit, they seemed to have a good deal going. My other takeaway from my abortive relationship with Dean was the importance of recognizing when things worked and ending them right away if they didn’t.
“Do you think whatever’s doing this is something paranormal?” All I’d ever seen was ghosts, but some of them pinched me hard enough to leave bruises. One of them made my nose gush blood.
“I just don’t know.” Griff caressed his stubble beard and shook his head. “Mysti told me you’re a powerful medium. I hoped, if nothing else, you’d be able to contact Susie’s spirit.”
The burlap head family popped back into my mind, and I quickly told Grif about seeing them. He shuffled through his papers and showed me a newspaper report about a family moving cross country in the days before cellphones who vanished somewhere between the Louisiana border and Dallas.
“This them?” He tapped a photo of a family smiling in front of an old RV.
“I didn’t see their faces.” I picked up the paper and scanned through it, noticing a PI hired by the family found a truck stop waitress north of Tyler who remembered them coming into the place where she worked. She said the little girl’s dress had sunflowers on it. I handed the paper back to Griff. It trembled along with my hand.
The middle-aged waitress marched over to our table and loomed over us like a schoolmarm who’d caught a bunch of kids smoking behind the wood shop.
“We close in ten minutes.” She bit out the words as though she’d have rather screamed them and marched away.
“We need to get to Margaret Franklin’s anyway,” Griff told us. Mysti and I helped him pack up his things and got out before Miss Meanypants returned.
Click here to buy Rest Stop now.
The Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thriller Series
Forever Road (Book #1)
Black Opal (Book #2)
Rocks & Gravel (Book #3)
Rest Stop (Book #4)
Visit Catie’s website: www.catierhodes.com
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About the Author
Catie Rhodes is the author of the Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers. Her short stories have appeared in Tales from the Mist, Allegories of the Tarot, and Let’s Scare Cancer to Death.
Catie was born and raised behind the pine curtain in East Texas. Her favorite memories of childhood are sitting around listening to her family spin yarns. The stories all had one thing in common: each had an element of the mysterious or the unexplained.
Those weird stories molded Catie into a purveyor of her own brand of lies and legends. One day, she found the courage to start writing down her stories. It changed her life forever.
Catie Rhodes lives steps from the Sam Houston National Forest with her long-suffering husband and her armpit terrorist of a little dog.
When she’s not writing, Catie likes to cook horribly fattening foods and crochet or knit stuff nobody wants as a gift. She also reads a whole helluva lot.
Find me online:
catierhodesauthor
www.catierhodes.com
