Jimmy told him. He had just spent minutes reviewing every moment of his time with Sapphire and it was fresh in his mind. He told George about every detail, including his fight with his mother and his stop by the bridge. When he was done, George stared at him for several seconds and then shook his head and laughed.
“You have landed headfirst in a mystery, sir.”
Jimmy rolled his eyes. George fancied himself a bit of a detective. He devoured detective novels and could quote Sherlock Holmes stories chapter and verse. For much of their lives, George had been salivating for the opportunity to be involved in a real life mystery. Jimmy knew that his brain was already churning.
“Let’s calm down, Sam Spade,” Jimmy said. “It’s weird, but it’s hardly a mystery.”
George threw up his hands. “It’s the very essence of mystery! You have a mysterious girl with mysterious motives that you’ve never seen before. The first thing we need to do is figure out who she is and where she came from.”
“How do we do that?” Jimmy asked.
“I think we start by looking through the various yearbooks of the schools in this area,” George said. “She has to be going to school around here somewhere, right? She’s our age. What’s her last name?”
Jimmy swallowed. He could feel his face turning red. He realized he had never even bothered asking.
“You never even bothered asking, did you?” George said.
Jimmy shrugged.
“Some Dr. Watson you are,” George said. “Fine, but we know her first name is Sapphire. How many girls named Sapphire could there actually be in this tiny flea-speck of a town? We could probably stand on a street corner downtown and ask three people at random and find someone who knows her. Come on, man.”
Jimmy shrugged again. “This feels weird, George. I mean, it’s like running a background check on your wife or something.”
“Wife?” George exclaimed. “Good Lord, you didn’t tell this girl that you loved her, did you?”
Jimmy looked down at his shoes.
“Jesus,” George said. “Did she at least say it back?”
Jimmy nodded and looked up into George’s face. George’s look of disapproval and disgust softened a bit.
“Well,” George said, “at least that’s something.”
There was silence again for a time.
“Come on,” George said, slapping his hand against his own leg.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to see what’s down by that bridge,” he said.
Jimmy stood up as George headed for the driver’s side of the car.
“I told you,” Jimmy said.
George was already opening his car door. “I want to see it for myself.”
Jimmy opened his mouth to say something, but decided there was no reason to argue. He smiled. At least things were relatively back to normal between him and George. He sighed and got into the passenger seat.
George was in detective mode. He was pacing around the surface of the small bridge like a man in the midst of some kind of fit. He would pause from time to time to bend down and look at various things on the ground. Once he crouched down and looked at the dirt and grit at the side of the road, and then he got all the way down on his stomach to peer more closely. He only needed a fedora and trench coat, or perhaps a deerstalker cap and a magnifying glass, to complete the picture.
He came back to the car staring down at the dust on his fingers. Jimmy had stayed behind, leaning against the passenger side, watching George perform. With each passing vehicle and truck, Jimmy felt the flush in his cheeks deepen. He was embarrassed, but at the same time, he was vastly entertained.
“So what have you gathered, Detective?” Jimmy said as George took up a spot next to him, also leaning against the car.
“Well, judging from the footprints, you were here alone last night,” George said. He paused and looked up from the dust on his fingers to stare at Jimmy. “From what you told me, there should be two sets of footprints here by the side of the road and down below along the banks of the river. As you pointed out earlier, there are none down by the river at all, when there should be two sets. However, there should still be footprints up here beside the road.”
He frowned and looked down at the side of the road.
“But from what I see here,” he said, indicating the spot beside the road that to Jimmy just looked like dust and dirt, “there are only prints from your shoes and your bicycle tires, but nothing else.”
He looked back up from the road and into Jimmy’s eyes. The sun was in his eyes, and he squinted in a way that made him look much older than he was. His face was suddenly very grim.
“So either you are completely crazy,” George said, “or there is something mighty strange going on here.”
Jimmy sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets. “What should I do?”
George shrugged. “The library in town has all of the yearbooks from all of the schools in the area. I’d start there. Where the hell is this girl from? She said she was from around here, but we would certainly have seen a girl who looked like that before.”
“If she’s lying and she isn’t from around here, she isn’t going to be in those yearbooks,” Jimmy said.
George nodded and walked around the front of the car, stopping at the driver’s side door. “That will at least start answering our questions, though.”
Jimmy nodded. There was a certain logic to that. He opened the passenger door and got in.
“Of course, you’ll have to go somewhere else to find answers if you can’t find them in the library,” George said as he fished out his key and started the car.
“Where?” Jimmy asked.
“You’ll have to visit Tabitha,” George said.
Jimmy nodded. He had guessed that was the name George was going to come up with.
Tabitha Reed was the woman who ran the newspaper. She was basically the town historian. Just about a year or so ago, she had made it into the national spotlight. Apparently she and her now-husband Warren Hollis had tracked down a copycat of a serial killer who had prowled these parts back in the seventies called “the Boogeyman.” Warren had written a book about it and gotten famous, and now they were making it into a movie. Tabitha had lost her original office when the killer blew the place up, but she had rebuilt the paper’s offices in another location and life had gone on. She was still the best resource that anyone had in this town when it came to finding someone or learning a bit of the town’s history.
“Do you think she’ll even want to talk to me?” Jimmy asked as George drove.
“She’s good people,” George said. “She helped me with a term paper once. This might be something even bigger. Heck, she might want to do a story about it for the paper.”
“What do you think is going on here, George?” Jimmy asked.
George sighed. “They say that when you rule out the most obvious things that the most ridiculous thing must be correct. And right now, there are just no obvious reasons. I would have been able to buy the story that a bunch of the jocks hired a girl from a nearby town to play nice with you in order to make a fool out of you. But for her to come back the next night and then for all of the weirdness with the footprints, well-”
George paused for a bit, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. His head was tilted back a bit, his chin jutting out. It was one of his thinking poses.
“The town of Knorr, and this surrounding area, is a strange place,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”
Jimmy shrugged. He knew lots of stories. There was lore about haunted houses, roads, cars, and forests. “Yeah,” he said at last, “I guess I know the stories as well as you.”
George turned his head and looked at Jimmy, raising an eyebrow.
“Come on,” Jimmy said. “So what, she’s some kind of demon or fairy or something?”
George shrugged. “I guess it’s safe to say that we have not yet run out of all of the other possibilities at this point. Maybe there is a more logica
l explanation. I mean, maybe she lives in the water and is a mermaid.”
Jimmy laughed.
George gave Jimmy his most winning smile in return. For the moment Jimmy was just happy to have his old friend back.
They drove around for a while and talked. George was full of ideas, most of them outrageous. Jimmy knew better, of course, and he laughed at George’s suggestions. George was a known skeptic about most things from religion to UFOs. Jimmy figured that George thought whomever Sapphire was, she was very real and had a very logical explanation.
“Of course, the simplest solution might be just that,” George said. The statement came out of nowhere and after he had been quiet for some time.
“What would that be, oh great detective?” Jimmy asked. He yawned.
“You met a nice girl and you fell in love,” George said plainly. “You know what that does to people. People far better and smarter than you have been blinded by love. When you were with her, you probably thought that the swamp land was a road paved with gold.”
Jimmy frowned and thought about that for a moment. Could he have been that blind? Hell, Jimmy had never had a real girlfriend before. He wasn’t sure what to think.
There are a few advantages to being a bookworm in the age of electronic books and in a small town. Jimmy had spent more than a few hours at the Knorr Library and had, over the years, gotten to know the man who ran the library and most of the employees there. The library was only open for a few hours on Sundays, but Jimmy had been given a key to the back door and knew how to turn off the alarm system. Plus, Jesse Karnes, the man who ran the library, actually encouraged him to stop by after hours.
George and Jimmy headed to the small brick building located right on a majestic-looking river. It was a small library, at least on the top floor; however, the place had a huge basement and there were thousands of books, magazines, and the microfilm archives down there. Included in the archives were issues of the local newspaper, many national magazines, and all of the local school yearbooks.
Jimmy and George walked around the side of the building to the back of the library. Out on the river were a few boats and people having parties and barbecues on the water. Next to the library was a restaurant that also served ice-cold root beer out of a fridge near the front door, and sometimes musical groups performed in a small courtyard next to the restaurant. All along the parking lot that went maybe three-fourths of a mile was small shops. Somehow the library stood out here as an oddity amongst the tourist traps all around them.
Jimmy fished out his key and opened the door. As soon as the two entered, Jimmy hit the keypad and shut off the alarm. Jimmy then shut the door and locked it. The whole place was empty and there was stench of paper and dust, and, behind all of those scents, was the smell of mold and old books. It was a smell that Jimmy loved. The lights were off, but the fading afternoon light filtered in through the old, dirty windows, shining off of the dust motes that floated gently through the air.
Jimmy switched on a few lights and he and George made their way soundlessly through the children’s section in the back of the library and into the adult section. Rows and rows of hardback books lined shelves. Paperback books were stacked on racks in the lobby area. There was the desk for the librarian where library patrons could check out books. Jesse often brought in his old black Labrador, Blackie, who sometimes lay down behind the librarian desk and thumped his tail whenever anyone bent over with a treat or a pat on the head.
“This place is creepy when it’s empty,” George said, automatically speaking in a whisper even though no one was there.
“I like it,” Jimmy replied. He had spent many evenings here reading late into the night.
Jimmy led them to an inner door located just inside the front door. He opened that and there were two sets of stairs. One set of stairs led up to a banquet hall with an organ and tables that people often rented for parties and wedding receptions. To the right was a staircase that led down. It was this second set of stairs that Jimmy headed down, and George followed. At the top of the stairs, Jimmy turned on the light.
In the basement were boxes and boxes of magazines, newspapers and books. However, it was not haphazard or disorganized. In fact, the boxes were stacked very neatly, and there were computers along the wall that you could use to look up periodicals. Jimmy headed there, while George began looking through old green books that held information about older periodicals that had not been uploaded to the computer database.
They worked for hours. They began by searching for the word “Sapphire.” They then had to sort through dozens and dozens of stories about the gemstones; there were few mentions of people with that name. At some point, Jimmy was left to keep looking through periodicals while George began looking through the yearbooks. The two of them did not speak much.
Jimmy began going back one year at a time. He went much further back than it appeared Sapphire’s apparent age. George’s theory that Sapphire was some kind of specter nagged in the back of Jimmy’s mind.
Jimmy eventually reached the year 1964, and suddenly the computer archives came up with numerous local references to Sapphire. The name Sapphire Lumire popped up. Jimmy was intrigued, but the records were so old. Was this someone related to the Sapphire that he had met? Although George had suggested that Sapphire was some sort of ghost, Jimmy was not quite ready to believe that yet.
“Hey, George,” Jimmy said. “I found a Sapphire here, but it’s from 1964.”
George put down the yearbook he had been looking through and headed over. He had a puzzled expression in his face. George came up behind Jimmy and leaned against the back of Jimmy’s chair.
Jimmy began paging through the local paper. He found the months that seemed to be thickest with the mention of the name. Most of the news stories were from the late spring. Jimmy scrolled through, letting the pages fly by. When he reached the month of May, Jimmy slowed the pace down. Finally, he stopped on the date where there should have been a story featuring someone named Sapphire Lumire.
It was blank.
“What the hell?” Jimmy said.
He paged up and down repeatedly. Jimmy frowned and went through the spring archives again. Once again, pages of the local, regional, and a few national magazines from that time purported to contain stories featuring the name Sapphire, but were blank.
“This is very odd,” Jimmy muttered.
“It’s like she’s been erased,” George said.
Jimmy nodded and slid his chair back and stood up. “Jesse hasn’t thrown away all of the microfilm and microfiche in this place yet. He says he just doesn’t trust the computers, and I think I see why. It has to be some kind of glitch.”
“Whatever it is, this is damn weird,” George said. “Let us not overlook the fact that this story is more than forty years old. Kind of lends credence to the whole ghost theory.”
Jimmy laughed. “I’m not ready to go that far just yet. I am thinking this might be a relative of hers or something like that. The name Sapphire seems like it might be a family name or something, doesn’t it? Have you met many people named Sapphire before?”
George shook his head to indicate he had not. He began shuffling through the online periodicals.
Jimmy made his way to the back of the basement. The dust was collecting in his nose and he could sense a sneezing fit coming on. However, Jimmy was too curious and too puzzled to worry at that point. He reached a wooden door at the back of the room and swung it open. The musty smell from inside was almost overwhelming. Jimmy reached in and flipped on the light switch, and a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling burst into life.
The room was crammed with boxes, each of them meticulously labeled with month, day, and year, as well as the name of the publication. There were two rows of boxes on either side. There was a larger aisle down the middle.
Jimmy, muttering to himself, began walking down the rows. He finally came to the right year and the right publication. Lifting several boxes and moving several more out o
f the way, he finally opened the right box and Jimmy began lifting smaller white boxes out of the larger brown cardboard one. He finally found the box he was looking for, grabbed it and headed back toward the door. Once there he took a left and found an old covered microfilm machine.
Jimmy checked to make sure that the machine was plugged in and still worked. When he was satisfied, Jimmy threaded the microfilm and sat down at the controls. This end of the room was even dustier than the other one had been, and Jimmy’s eyes were starting to water. He barely noticed as he sped up the machine, the print and photos rushing by in a black and white blur, until he found the right month. Jimmy slowed the machine down, the photos and print now crawling past.
“What the hell?” Jimmy muttered, his eyes wide.
The month that had the story he wanted was gone. It appeared as if the microfilm had been spliced and then hastily taped back together.
“George,” Jimmy said.
George took a moment before sliding his chair back and making his way toward the back of the room. Jimmy turned and watched him come. George had a strange look on his face. George was always the type to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Currently, George’s face was a mixture of confusion and concern. Jimmy knew that meant that George was trying to work things out, but nothing was adding up.
“It’s just that one edition,” George said. “All of the rest of them are there.”
Jimmy pointed to the screen. “It looks like someone went through the microfilm, cut out the edition on here, and taped the damn thing back together. It’s a half-assed job at best.”
George and Jimmy stared at each other for a while.
“What does this mean?” George said finally, after the silence had stretched out to a point that both of them were getting nervous.
“I have no idea,” Jimmy replied. “I mean, I hate to state the obvious, but it seems like someone is covering something up.”
“But why? What the hell have you stumbled onto here, Jimmy? And what does it have to do with the pretty young thing you spent last night with?”
Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance Page 8
