The Girl on the Bus

by N. M. Brown

  ‘Come on,’ Leighton said, as he stood up. ‘I’ll drop you home.’

  He walked to the door. Vicki, however, remained deliberately seated, as if bolted there.

  ‘No, you go ahead, I’ll take a bus.’ She flashed a bitter smile. ‘Should be safe enough on public transport out here, right?’

  ‘Look, don’t be childish,’ he called back to her from the doorway, ‘You just-’

  ‘Childish!’ Vick’s eyes narrowed. ‘You want to see childish, Detective, how about this?’

  Vicki stood up, picked up the computer, and walked past Leighton. She stepped out of the diner into the hot sun, where, lifting the laptop above her head, she threw it forward, smashing it into plastic fragments on the pavement.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He tried to take Vicki by the arm, but she shook him off.

  ‘She’s been murdered, Leighton,’ she said, her eyes already glazed with suppressed tears. ‘Why the hell can’t you see that?’

  ‘I’m done here,’ Leighton said calmly, stepped off the sidewalk, and crossed the street to his car. ‘I did what you asked, Miss Reiner.’

  ‘Hey,’ Vicki shouted to his back. ‘You were done with this case before you even started,’ she added angrily. ‘God, if this is your attitude, Leighton, the force is better off with you being retired.’

  Dismissing her with a wave of his hand, he opened his car and climbed in.

  He spun the car noisily around, and pulled up next to her. Rolling down the window, he leaned towards her. ‘Are you getting in?’

  ‘Go to hell!’ Vicki said, as she crouched on the ground and began sifting through the pieces of plastic and smashed circuits from the pavement.

  Leighton looked at her for a moment - just long enough to ensure she had her purse over her shoulder - then, without another word, he drove off.

  14

  At 10:15 a.m. Monday morning, Bradley McGhee was one pissed-off man. That swaggering pain in the ass Tony Morrelli should have shown up for work over three hours ago, only he hadn’t appeared. The tourists had bought their tickets in advance from the hotel reception, two dozen of them had arrived at the marina - cameras at the ready, and eager to get out on the water. Only there was no Tony waiting there to greet them. The crowd, who were already pissed off at getting their designer slacks damp from the river water, grew restless.

  Between Sandy - the boat pilot - and Bradley, the two of them had somehow got all the clients strapped in and seated, but the entire process had taken a good forty minutes longer than it should have.

  Damn it, Tony Morrelli could never have won any prizes for sincerity, but he knew how to fill up a boat with out-of-towners in under ten minutes - and that was a skill Bradley valued. Therefore, he would not follow his instinct and tell Tony to stick a flare gun up his ass and pull the trigger; instead, he would simply remind him the working week had started and his presence at the marina was respectfully requested.

  Once the clucking tourists were out on the river, Bradley walked back along the marina to the long white trailer that served as an office. Sitting down in his massage chair, he picked up the grubby telephone, and called Scotty’s Bar to see if his only boatman was enjoying an unplanned Monday of playing skittles with beer bottles. While it rang, Bradley scratched at his crotch with his free hand.

  A female voice answered, ‘Hello, Scotty’s,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Marianne, why?’

  ‘Honey, this is Bradley McGhee of BBM River Tours…’

  ‘Drop off some fliers, I’ll put them out front.’

  ‘Whoa, hang on. Kind as that offer is, I’m actually looking for one of your regulars.’

  ‘Oh, who?’

  ‘Tony Morrelli. Is he up there today?’

  ‘He owe you some money?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He works for me down here on the water, but he didn’t show up this morning.’

  ‘Tony was in Friday night, had a skin-full, as I recall, and stayed till closing time, but that was the last time I saw him.’

  ‘Okay.’ Bradley sighed. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Hang on. Let me just check with Maria. She was on last night.’

  There was a dull clatter as the phone was laid down, then Bradley could hear the clinking of glasses being stacked and the distant strains of “La Bamba.” After a few moments, the phone was picked back up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Okay, I couldn’t find Maria - probably out back having a smoke - but I checked with Janine; she was on last night, too. She said Tony wasn’t in at all yesterday, or last night. You tried his house?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bradley lied. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Okay, I’m sure he’ll turn up.’

  ‘Listen, honey, if he does show up, and if he’s been on the sauce – can you please dump him into a cab, and send him back down this way?’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Bradley hung up the phone and dragged a hand over his weathered face. In six years, Tony had never taken so much as a sick day. Something was wrong here, but in his mind, Bradley assumed Tony Morrelli had found a new job, or a woman with a hot body, or something good enough to keep him away.

  He reached into a drawer in his cheap desk, and pulled out a sheet of A4 paper and a Sharpie pen. He yanked the cap off, the pen releasing a vinegar vapour. Then, he wrote out four words in block letters: HELP WANTED ENQUIRE WITHIN.

  15

  As he negotiated a worn cassette tape into the player, Leighton sighed. Vicki’s bloody-minded fixation on her friend’s unlikely demise bordered on obsessive. As the twang of “Delta Blues” filled the car, Leighton set his eyes on the road ahead, and tried to let the miles drift by. However, the emotional fallout from his departure was still bouncing around in his restless mind - drawing him back to his past like a bungee cord.

  Leighton would have questioned why he had ever agreed to go along to Barstow in the first place, but he knew the answer to that. Nothing about the missing girl in any way interested him, but Vicki herself was quietly fascinating. Five decades earlier, when Leighton had been a child attending junior school, his teacher was a dark-haired, softly spoken woman, who smelled of lavender. On some occasions, she would come to sit by Leighton, and show him how to sketch, or read. In these moments, the small boy would feel a strange, tingling sensation, as if an aura of energy emanated from the woman. He would feel his skin fizz in response to her soft voice, as she drew shapes for him to follow, or guided his eyes along unfamiliar words. Now, all these years later, something about Vicki recreated that strange feeling - a simple sense of connection with another human being. It felt strangely right.

  Despite this, she was still an absolute pain in the ass.

  That fact did little to ease Leighton’s guilt at abandoning a girl in her twenties to make her own way home, especially up here along Route 1. An image of a stormy night filled his mind. The recollection was so real, he could feel the warm, thrumming rain battering down like bullets.

  Leighton breathed out and gently pushed the thought away until later. That was what his grief counsellor had taught him to do. Trying to suddenly block out the thought didn’t work; he had to blow it away softly, otherwise it would bounce right back into his mind.

  An impatient truck horn blasted him back into the moment. Leighton slowed down, and allowed the heavy, rumbling vehicle to pass him.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to the air, thinking he could come up with a way to help Vicki.

  Leighton decided to approach it from a new angle. He would assume Vicki was somehow correct in her suspicions, and consider what he would do, if that was the case. It was, of course, a simply academic exercise. The girl was clearly blowing things out of proportion, but fully investigating her flawed beliefs would throw up a set of facts she would not be able to ignore. That way, at least he wouldn’t just be asking Vicki to ignore a situation. Instead, he’d provide her with evidence of an entirely different,
and less dramatic, situation altogether, which would hopefully be more realistic.

  Leighton needed to consider the starting point of the investigation. As he cruised along the highway, he decided he would speak to the ladies down at Oceanside dispatch. If this bus had shown up in the terminal, like Vicki had claimed, they should be able to track its journey. A pre-booked bus would also have a passenger record, which meant they would discover if Laurie was even on the bus - something that seemed increasingly unlikely.

  That was fine. Leighton smiled, and began to drum along on the steering wheel in time to the music. He felt confident he was on the verge of giving Vicki her life back.

  As the car curved along the smooth road, it moved out of the warm sunshine and into the relative shade of the National Park. The fragrance of desert lavender wafted through the air conditioner. Within a kilometre or so of entering the park, Leighton noticed a Highway Patrol motorcycle parked in a lay-by on the opposite side of the road.

  He glanced for a moment at the bike parked at the side of the road, and slowed long enough to confirm there was no visible officer or other vehicle nearby. For a second, Leighton considered turning around to check out the situation, but then, he shook the thought away. The biker would be talking a leak, or having a smoke. In either case, he wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion of some paranoid ex-detective stalking him through the trees.

  He smiled a crooked smile, and thought to himself seeing danger on every highway was simply a sign he had spent too much time with Vicki.

  16

  It was one of those fresh early mornings, where a bright haze gave the air a cool quality with the promise of certain heat to come. The moisture, which was still rising like a phantom from the sandy earth, would probably burn off by noon, leaving a clear blue sky over Nevada.

  At 5:45 a.m., Jennifer Sanchez stood on a dry footpath in the Mojave National Park, and peered intently in all directions. The area surrounding her was full of silent cacti, and, moments earlier, her dog had vanished amongst them. She wasn’t sure of the exact moment he had vanished, because once off the lead, Rasputin would race off in crazy loops - darting ahead, then swooping into the boulders and shrubs, only to appear moments later behind her. She had thrown a couple of arid sticks for him, which he had obediently retrieved, but Jen could tell he was more interested in burning off some energy speeding around beneath the trees. So, she had let him go. It had been a bad move. The excited dog thundered into the tangle of bushes five minutes earlier, but then failed to reappear again.

  Sighing in frustration, Jen felt a sudden dip in early morning temperature, and zipped up her red Nike top. Stamping her feet impatiently, she peered around, but found no sign of her dog.

  ‘Ra!’ she called loudly. The eruption of sound startled a cloud of birds from a nearby bush.

  Still nothing.

  The walk through the park was a journey Jen would make every morning. Usually, she would feely utterly safe as she wandered the dusty, desolate paths, which sliced through the rocky landscape National Park. This was because she was accompanied by Rasputin - a four-year-old, long-haired German shepherd.

  Each morning, she would leave her Jeep in the westerly parking lot, which was really nothing more than a large clearing hemmed in by rough wooden fences. There were rarely any other vehicles there, other than the odd people-carrier with a bike rack, or the previous day, when a random old bus had appeared in one shadowy corner of the clearing.

  At that end of the car park, almost touching the fence, was a small roofed shelter. One side of this structure featured a laminated map of the various walking routes fastened with brass tacks to the wooden wall; the opposite wall was lined with a rack of fire brushes - the old broom style - made by tied twigs. This feature always freaked the child within Jen out a little. Even now, at the age of forty-three, she clearly remembered seeing them as young girl when her parents had taken the family for fresh air and summer picnics. She recalled stepping out of her father’s stifling car into the bustling excitement of the National Park, where she would creep up on whirring crickets, and chase butterflies in the dappled light. When she had asked her older sister what the shelters were, she had told Jen in a conspiratorial whisper the ragged structures were where desert witches would park their brooms, before creeping amongst the boulders to gather snakes and lizards, or, if they were lucky, lost children.

  After that, Jen would only go into the park if she held her mother’s hand, and picnics became more about scanning the shadows beneath the trees than enjoying the food. Thankfully, the fear of dark witches dissolved as she grew older, and it was not until Jen bought the retired police dog from the shelter and began frequenting the park again she even thought about it.

  As an adult, Jen had rediscovered the pleasure of the wild outdoors as part of her recovery. After spending ten years in a miserable marriage, in a claustrophobic little house, she had somehow found the strength to get divorced, and take back her life. The anti-depressants she had swallowed nightly during her marriage were poured down the sink and replaced with early morning walks, carrot juice, and fifteen minutes of nightly meditation. Whether it was being rid of her sulky husband, or simply her new routine, Jen had felt less anxious and much happier than she had in months, possibly even years.

  Usually, she loved starting her day with fresh air and a bit of easy exercise. However, today, the woods felt different somehow. Perhaps it was simply quieter than usual.

  ‘Ra, come on boy!’ she called again.

  There was an excited bark from somewhere nearby. Jen turned around to see the big dog leaping through the long needle grass, like a dolphin breaking through a yellow sea.

  ‘Come on, you silly big mutt,’ Jen laughed.

  At a point about ten metres along the path, Rasputin burst out of the undergrowth. Jen felt her shoulders slump with relief. The dog looked towards her, and began to excitedly wag his tail from side-to-side. Still, he did not move towards her, so Jen called again.

  ‘Come on, Ra, come on,’ she called, and patted her leg.

  In response to this, the big dog came running excitedly along the path towards her. As he grew nearer, something bizarre caught Jen’s eye. At first glance, she thought the limp grey object dangling from Rasputin’s mouth was a glove or perhaps a Halloween prop, but then, he reached her, and dropped the object at her feet.

  The bitter sweet stink of decay from the mottled hand caused Jen to instinctively turn away towards the undergrowth and retch. She waved a flapping hand back towards the dog, who promptly picked up the hand again, then dropped it even closer to her. Jen moaned again, and forced her eyes away from it. Rasputin, who believed his mistress was pleased, barked excitedly, and rushed back into the undergrowth to retrieve the rest of the body parts.

  17

  Vicki exited the cab, and slung her bag over her shoulder. The last couple of days had taken its toll on her, but she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. If anything, the trip to Barstow had given her a new resolve to uncover the truth. However cathartic it had been, her tantrum outside the diner had been the quickest way she could retrieve the SATA hard drive from the laptop. As she had cleaned up the debris from the street, she had slipped the thin metal case into her bag. If she had in any way believed Laurie was alive, Vicki would not have been so destructive with her property. As it was, she had no doubt of the tragic nature of her friend’s absence.

  The initial shock and pain of Laurie going missing had strangely been put on pause, replaced by frustration and a burning commitment to find out the truth. Leighton’s dismissive attitude was only a blip. Vicki knew she had the technical expertise to investigate what happened herself. Now she had the hard drive, she would be able to locate the precise cluster and host of the bus website. More importantly, she could run a bloodhound programme to tear through any encryption, and discover the name of the web author who maintained the site.

  As she struggled to turn her key in the lock, she could hear the telephone ringing from the other s
ide of the door. Fumbling, she opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it with her foot. She then punched a four-digit code into a small touchpad panel in the hallway.

  The phone continued ringing insistently, until Vicki stumbled towards it, and picked up the handset.

  ‘Hello?’ she panted.

  ‘Victoria. It’s your mother.’

  ‘Hi, sorry, I was just getting through the door.’

  ‘Are you sitting down yet?’

  ‘Why?’ Vicki felt a sudden rush of adrenaline flood her body.

  ‘I have some rather unpleasant news for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your father’s dead,’ her mother said.

  Vicki felt the ground soften then melt beneath her feet. ‘What did you say?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘He was found this morning.’

  ‘What happened?’ Vicki was speaking, but she was not thinking about anything; all her thoughts had simply stopped.

  ‘Apparently, he had taken to gathering herbs from around the cabin, and infusing his own tea. We won’t know for certain until the toxicology report is completed, but it looks like he included belladonna amongst his mint and nettles.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Yes, honey, he’s dead. I’m sorry.’

  Vicki’s mother continued speaking, twittering on indifferently about the lack of funeral plans, but her daughter had slipped silently on to the floor. She let the telephone fall from her hand. Her mind was consumed by a distant memory from the first summer they had moved to Oceanside. Back then, her mother was already perpetually lost to her career. Her father, who perhaps in some cosmic way sensed his limited time, was more content to collect his daughter from kindergarten, and spend afternoons on the beach digging for treasure with plastic spades and wooden spoons. Now, two decades later, Vicki sat - half a kilometre from the spot where she and her father had gathered shells and followed in each other’s footsteps spiralling around the sand - and wept.