The Girl on the Bus

by N. M. Brown

  Her parents, sensing they had somehow contributed to this, took predictably polarised courses of action. Her mother had sent her several packets of mood lifting pills in long white boxes, while her father paid for a cognitive therapist (possibly even the same one he had used to cope with his mock marriage).

  Neither of these methods had made any real impact on Vicki, who grew increasingly detached from the world. She remained living entirely in the beach house, and generated a meagre income from simple web design, and providing online support to several businesses. This allowed her to work from home, and, therefore, maintaining her appearance or mood was not a necessity. Some days, she would lie curled on the balcony, watching the waves for hours, growing lost in the sparkle of the sun shaping and reshaping reality in infinitely changing patterns. The pattern seemed as temporal and shifting as her sense of her past.

  In their final support session, the therapist had very calmly suggested it would be helpful for Vicki to reconnect with old friends. The idea was not an attractive prospect. Like most people experiencing depression, Vicki felt she had nothing to offer any friend – old or otherwise. She was, in essence, a ghost; disconnected from the bright world around her, and haunting a beach house devoid of the life it had once known.

  But, that evening, she had sat and stared at the phone, until she couldn't stand it any longer. So, she had made contact with Laurie, and invited her down to Oceanside. Of course, she had assumed Laurie would have no recollection of her former roommate, or, if she did, might have no interest in travelling for three hours to visit her. She was wrong on both counts. Her friend had sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, and said she would organise a bus ticket in no time.

  The last thing she had heard from her friend was in the form of a text message, which came in just as Vicki was drifting off to sleep. The undulating melody of the cell phone drew her back from the edge of darkness. Her scrambling hand reached for the slim phone in the darkness. Finding the device, she held it aloft in her arm, squinting her eyes against the fierce glow like a lighthouse in the night.

  Hi V. bkd amzngly cheap tickt on a Route King bus. Due in2 terminl at apprximtly 4.30pm. C u thn. xxx

  Vicki had smiled to herself when she read the message, and slipped easily into her dreams.

  The sun was high in the sky, as Vicki eventually reached Victorville Avenue. She pulled off the freeway and parked in the lot behind the bus terminal. Despite the fact that she had arrived in Escondido twenty minutes early, she was now - as always - late.

  As she hurried through the terminal doors, she could see the silver bus pulling in to stand twelve. Negotiating her way through the crowd, she kept her eyes eagerly on the bus doors. She was perhaps ten metres away from the vehicle, when the bus slowed to a stop. A smile was already starting to form on Vicki’s face in anticipation of seeing her friend.

  However, it was not her friend who exited the vehicle. The bus stop came to a brief stop - pausing just long enough for an elderly man to step off on to the hot pavement. Almost as soon as the man cleared the bottom step, the pneumatic door hissed shut, and the bus began reversing.

  Vicki hurried along the terminal, moving parallel with the vehicle, while craning her neck to see if her friend had fallen asleep, but the tinted windows were too dark to give up their secrets. She called out Laurie’s name, but her words were drowned out by the roar of the engine.

  Within seconds, the Route King bus had rumbled across the oil-stained lot, and moved out into the busy stream of traffic. Vicki anxiously unclipped her handbag, took out her cell phone, and called Laurie’s number. Holding the phone to her ear, she glanced anxiously from side-to-side. Within a couple of seconds, the phone rang. From somewhere nearby, she heard the sound of “Smoke on the Water” playing in a looped ringtone. It was the same ringtone her friend had used for the last five years.

  Vicki turned around, expecting to see her friend grinning at her. Instead she found herself looking at a strange-eyed young man, who vanished into the crowd. She still held the phone hopefully to her head, but the line died.

  5

  Oceanside Police Station was housed in an attractive sandstone building. The entrance, hidden between large, peach coloured arches, looked more like the façade of a Mediterranean restaurant than the strategic centre of policing in the San Diego area. However, the cream interior, housing numerous wooden desks and grey metal cabinets, was a busy and highly effective centre of law enforcement.

  As he filled up the plain cardboard carton with various items from the bottom drawer of his desk, Detective Leighton Jones found an old photograph. He smiled at the image of a young officer with a gleam in his eyes, as he leaned, arms folded, against a cruiser.

  For a moment, the Detective smiled wistfully, before slowly letting the picture fall to his side as he gazed straight ahead into some different time.

  Leighton was only two days away from ordinariness, and felt as if he was fading into invisibility. It was not an entirely uncomfortable feeling. After a decade in homicide, and being one of the detectives responsible for holding back a tide of murder, he was happy to accept the Chief’s offer, and slip into obscurity. Chief Gretsch considered Leighton as a problem – they had crossed swords in the past, and he clearly didn’t fit with promotion-hungry new generation of unquestioning officers. Being almost sixty-years-old meant Leighton was neither malleable to fit in, nor young enough to justify a further transfer. Therefore, for the previous two weeks, Leighton had been physically present in the building, but was no longer assigned to any investigations. In some ways, it did make sense. No case would be left unfinished when he left, but it also made Jones feel like a ghost, as work in the department carried on around him.

  Ever since his retirement became common knowledge, his few friendlier colleagues tried their best to rib him with a mixture of humour and affection. Each morning, he would find an item left on his desk. The first had been a brochure for some coastal retirement home. Rather than simply consigning it to the waste paper basket beneath his desk, Leighton put his feet up, and read the brochure from cover to cover, with a wry smile on his face. Each subsequent day brought more “gifts” to his desk – most of them acquired from the lost property storage room. So far, he had found a walking stick, incontinence underwear, two sets of dentures, and several blister packs of Viagra. He had also been given some more appreciated gifts, including half a dozen bottles of dark rum.

  For a man who had spent so much of his life working for the Oceanside Police Department, Leighton’s job of gradually clearing out his desk and two steel filing cabinets had been depressingly simple. Much of the debris of his career had already been consigned to the trash when the station had moved from a rather serious brick building on Mission Avenue to its new home back in 1999. That transition had been almost as psychologically difficult as his retirement. He had spent most of his career driving to and from that building. For at least six weeks after the relocation, whenever Leighton got a late-night emergency call, he would find himself instinctively driving to the dark and desolate building, before realising his mistake, and turning the car around.

  It was 6.15 p.m. as Leighton packed a few more items in the box, before placing his car keys on top of it. Hugging it to his body, he made his way through the building to the car park.

  He passed through the report writing area, which was essentially a long rectangular room lined with small wooden booths. Each had its own black swivel chair and laptop computer. However, technology had not quite provided the promised revolution, and Leighton was secretly pleased by the numerous shelves above the booths which were stacked with a variety of report forms and paper documents.

  ‘Good night, Danny,’ Leighton said to a young bearded detective, who had a phone cradled to his ear and was typing into a computer. In response to this, he twisted around in the chair, and nodded and smiled back at the older Detective.

  As he walked towards the exit, Leighton tilted his head in to the dispatch room, where two
female workers were moving their attention between a wall of display screens.

  ‘Hey ladies, thanks for the gift, though you really shouldn’t have.’

  ‘You’re welcome, L.J.,’ said Laura, one of the dispatch officers, without looking around from the screens featuring maps and live feeds from car cameras.

  The other female, Wendy, glanced around for a second, and gave the Detective a warm smile.

  ‘You all set for the big night out, Jonesy?’ she asked with a wink. ‘Maybe if the Chief has forgiven you for upstaging him with that Black Mountain Ranch mess, he’ll hire you a stripper as a parting gift.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be happy, as long as Chief isn’t going to be the stripper.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Laura said cheerfully.

  ‘Not on duty, of course.’ Leighton wagged his finger mockingly.

  ‘Well, you can have one for me tonight,’ Wendy grinned.

  ‘The only drink I’ll be having is cocoa.’

  ‘Ah, old age does not come alone, L.J.’

  ‘Never a truer word,’ Leighton said, with a wave. ‘You girls have a quiet night. Remember, if you can’t be good, get a decent lawyer.’

  All three of them laughed, and Leighton departed, leaving the dispatchers to the busy night ahead.

  In reality, Leighton had no intention of showing up for his farewell bash. His venue of choice had been an unpretentious bar named Red Rooster over on the Boulevard. Leighton had spent a number of his younger years working in the area as part of the Traffic Division. As a fresh-faced officer with nothing but his TV for company, he had finished many shifts there, consumed his fair share of burgers, and sampled most of the tap beers.

  The Rooster was a dive bar, but in a good way, with feisty staff, honest food, and hardworking regulars, who were welcoming to the lonely young officer. More than that, it was a connection to his lost past - when he had first met Rita, and the world had still been good.

  On the rare occasions Leighton had stopped in at the Rooster – finding the place unchanged through the years - he sat at the bar and felt he had somehow travelled back in time. He would sip at his beer, enjoying the seductive feeling he could step out of the door into the past, and drive home to his previous house on Maple Street, where Rita would be bathing their baby daughter.

  In such moments, it was all Leighton could do to stop himself from sobbing into his beer glass. For this reason, the Rooster was more than some random venue; it was a conduit to his lost past, and the only place he would like to raise a glass to the end of his career.

  Unfortunately, Chief Gretsch liked to stage-manage all the Oceanside Police station social events – even to the point of arranging uplifting background music - and the Rooster didn’t fit with his version of a good time. He liked to choose a clean venue he could book solely for the event. That way, there would be little risk of his carefully rehearsed speech being interrupted by catcalls from any cynical retired cops.

  Normally detectives would leave via the staff exit at the rear of the building, but because he was using both hands to carry the carton, Leighton opted for the reception with automatic doors. As he walked towards the front desk, he spotted a girl leaning onto the counter. She was in her twenties and making what looked like an emotional plea to the Janine, the reception officer.

  ‘I’m telling you, I know,’ she said, through the hole in the Plexiglas.

  ‘Well, it’s probably just anxiety,’ Janine said, ‘but it I’ll take your details, and we can register your friend as a missing person.’

  As he passed by the desk en route to the automatic doors, Leighton offered the desk officer a quick smile, and quirked an eyebrow knowingly.

  It was a warm afternoon and a slight haze from the ocean hung in the air. Leighton liked it like that - finding something clean and optimistic in the quality of the light. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter was droning out towards the sparkling Pacific.

  Stepping around to the side of the building, Leighton opened his car, and deposited his box of memories on the passenger seat. He walked around the rear of the vehicle, and climbed into the driver’s side. Sliding the key into the ignition, he did not turn on the engine. For a moment, he simply held on to the steering wheel, and stared into the past, as if, in some way, given the right conditions, he could put the car in gear and drive towards it. Despite the light and heat of the day, his internal vision was consumed by a dark, rainy stretch of highway and the bitter stench of burning tyres.

  The sound of the sirens in his memory merged with the wail of a cruiser leaving the station behind him. Leighton blinked away the memory, turned on the engine, and rolled smoothly out of the station car park.

  It was then, as he turned on to Mission Avenue and was about to accelerate, Leighton noticed the girl from reception. She was sitting on a park bench across from the station, staring at her feet, but her hunched posture told the nearly-retired Detective she felt utterly defeated.

  Leighton checked his mirror, pulled his car alongside the kerbside, and got out.

  As he walked over the lawn towards the girl, a driver of BMW, who was irritated at the location of Leighton’s car, honked his horn, and began shouting abuse at him. Without turning around, Leighton withdrew his badge, and held it backwards. The BMW driver fell silent, and drove off, revving his engine as he went.

  ‘Can I help you, Miss?’ Leighton asked from a comfortable distance.

  ‘What?’ She blinked, and wiped her eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘My name is Leighton Jones, I’m a detective.’ He turned the badge around so she could see it, and moved a tentative step closer to her. ‘I overheard you speaking to my colleague at reception.’

  ‘For all the good that did,’ the girl sniffed, and rubbed at one eye, smudging her eyeliner into a bruise.

  ‘What was the problem?’ Leighton persisted.

  ‘The stupid woman at the desk didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down, Miss?’

  He took a seat next to the girl, but was careful to maintain a non-threatening distance from her. He could see by her folded arms she was already reluctant to trust him.

  ‘Were you reporting a crime, back there at the desk?’

  ‘Trying to.’ The girl wiped again at her smudged eye make-up, and looked wearily at the detective’s face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the girl shrugged, ‘I was supposed to meet my friend yesterday, and she didn’t show up.’ She leaned forward a bit, and held her face in her hands. ‘Have you ever had a feeling something just wasn’t right?

  ‘Many times – comes with the job. So, this friend didn’t show up.’

  ‘I know how it sounds,’ she sighed, looking at the ground. ‘I’m not a total idiot, but something’s not right.’

  ‘Look, Miss, it is Miss, isn’t it?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Well, Miss, people go missing all the time. Most of them just have a change of plan, and forget to tell anyone. On occasion, they forget by accident; mostly, it’s a choice. Some are runaways, some are lost, but they almost always show up again.'

  ‘This is different.’

  ‘Okay,’ Leighton spoke slowly. ‘Tell me what happened.’ He mentally produced a notepad. It was a visual technique he had used for years. All too often, witnesses would clam up when an investigating officer started writing down details. So he created a strategy to get around this. Instead of a physical pad, he would imagine a black leather notepad, and open it to a clean white page and record the details as he spoke to the witness. Then, in the privacy of his car, he would commit the information to paper.

  ‘I arranged to meet my friend off the bus yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Leighton relaxed. In his head, he closed his notepad. There was nothing to worry about in this type of case.

  ‘Who is your friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Laurie… Laurie Taylor. She’s a college friend, from Barstow – well, from near to Barstow.’

  Leighton s
uppressed a flicker of emotion. Most of the older officers associated the town of Barstow with one of their colleagues, who had raped and murdered a young woman there back in the 1980’s. He had been sentenced to ninety years, but died in jail. The association was just a trace memory - nothing more.

  ‘And where were you meant to meet this friend?’

  ‘At the bus station, but she didn’t show up,’ the woman breathed in shakily, trying to contain her tears. ‘And I know that’s nothing major, but it’s the other stuff that’s wrong.’

  ‘What other stuff?’ Leighton produced a neat handkerchief and gave it to the girl.

  ‘She told me she had booked a ticket on some new bus company. She was pleased because it was a cheap ticket.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘She sent a text message to my cell phone.’

  ‘Could she have changed her mind?’

  ‘Maybe, I guess.’ The woman’s voice took on a doubtful tone.

  ‘Well, have you tried calling her?’

  ‘I did at the bus station. Her phone rang a couple of times, then cut out.’

  ‘Okay. What’s your name?’

  ‘Victoria Reiner – Vicki.’

  ‘Well, if I’m honest, Vicki, it all sounds pretty normal to me. You might find that in a couple of days she gets in touch.’

  ‘I went home to look at the bus company’s web site, but it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Maybe your friend made it up. Perhaps she was a bit strapped for cash, and invented the company.’

  ‘But I saw the bus come into the terminal. The doors opened, but she never got off.’