Case of the Vanishing Visitor

by Shanna Swendson

  I was so distracted by the rare physical contact with Wes that I forgot I also had to reach over the bar to hold hands with Margarita. “We must complete the circle,” Lupe said, and I hurried to grab Margarita’s hand. Once the circle was complete, I looked expectantly at Lupe, waiting for her to start the séance.

  “You’re the one who communicates with spirits,” she said. “Call them.”

  “But how? I don’t know how this works. Is there some sort of ritual?”

  “The ritual doesn’t matter. It’s only for show. We’ve done some things that may amplify your call and focus the energy, but you’re the one who can communicate with spirits.”

  Feeling really foolish and self-conscious, I gazed at the ceiling and said, “Florence, are you there? We’ve got a taco for you, and I’d like to talk to you. You seemed to have something left unfinished, and I can help you with that.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Broaden your appeal,” Lupe said. “If she can’t appear, maybe she’s communicated with someone else who can pass on her message.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling even sillier. “Are there any spirits who want to communicate with us?” The only reason this activity was even remotely tolerable was that I knew I could talk to ghosts, so I knew we weren’t about to do any kind of silly table-rapping exercise, and if Lupe brought out a Ouija board, I was out of there.

  The air over the seat shimmered, and I gasped. “Something’s here,” I whispered. “Can anyone else see it?”

  “Sorry, no,” Wes said. “What do you see?”

  “It’s just starting to take shape. Something kind of like an old-timey gangster, maybe?” The spirit wore a wide-shouldered suit and a rakishly tilted hat. Addressing the spirit, I said, “Hello, who are you?”

  “I gotta delivery, toots. You want it in back?”

  “Have you talked to someone named Florence?”

  “Not unless that’s your name. Now, we’ve got to get this stuff unloaded before the cops get here. Jean warned us that they might know something’s up, so let’s get going.”

  “Okay, you go do that,” I said, and he vanished. To Margarita, I said, “I think this place must have been a speakeasy during Prohibition. Or they sold illegal booze here. And I think Jean was in on it.”

  “I’ve heard rumors,” Margarita said.

  “You’ve got a bootlegger ghost, but I hadn’t seen him before, so maybe he’s not a regular. Let’s just hope this little exercise doesn’t bring him back for good. And I need to talk to Jean. It might be fun to do an article about that period of history, but then I can’t exactly use a ghost as a source. Maybe I could say I found some archives she left behind. Anyway, I guess this didn’t work.”

  “Try again,” Lupe urged.

  I didn’t want to go through this again, but then it had worked, bringing up a ghost I’d never seen before. Maybe it was worth another shot. “Is there anyone there who knows Florence?” I asked.

  I saw another shimmer forming. This one looked like she was from around the turn of the century—the previous one. A young woman who looked like a slightly sluttier version of a Gibson Girl sat perched on the edge of the stool, leaning against the bar. Her big, elaborate hairdo had loose tendrils falling from it, like she’d been active and hadn’t touched up her hair. She wore an off-the-shoulder gown that displayed a substantial amount of skin and cleavage, though I thought the cleavage was probably assisted by a corset. She wasn’t quite the saloon girl from old Westerns, but she might have been the town’s equivalent from around 1900. “Florence?” I asked tentatively.

  “She’s here?” Margarita asked in a whisper, but her grandmother quickly shushed her.

  “Here in the flesh,” the ghost said in a seductive purr.

  “I think we have a case of mistaken identity,” I said. “You don’t know another Florence, do you?”

  “Not who works here. I’m the one and only, and it’s going to stay that way.”

  “I’m sorry, I was looking for someone else. You can go,” I said. I glanced away so that I wasn’t looking at her, and when I looked back, she was gone.

  “Who was it?” Margarita asked.

  “Not the Florence I was looking for. This place used to be a saloon, I think, complete with saloon girls,” I said.

  “Saloon girls?” Wes asked, sounding far too interested for my comfort.

  “At least one. And she’s way too old for you. And dead,” I said. “But I thought you couldn’t sell alcohol in this town.”

  “This place was built as a saloon,” Margarita said. “The bar is original. The liquor laws didn’t change until the fifties, well, aside from during Prohibition. It’s like a lot of things that people think of as the way things always were. The ‘good old days’ are just the fifties, when they passed a lot of laws to make things be like the good old days that never existed.”

  “They got a new pastor in town, and he rallied everyone to change the laws,” Lupe said. “I was little then, but I remember all the shouting in church. Not every pastor in town agreed with him, but he thought Catholics were evil, anyway.”

  “I’ve heard people talking about white robes being involved,” Margarita said. “If you know what I mean. I think they tried to run this place as a restaurant after the law changed, but then it went under and the building was just used for storage until I bought the place. Imagine, your business being ruined because someone came to town and declared that you were evil.”

  “If you start that campaign to get the liquor laws changed, that would definitely be a story I’d do,” I said. “If you can tie the passing of the liquor laws to something that’s currently unsavory, then the opponents of change might lose some moral high ground. I wonder if there are any good sources who could provide more than rumor—that are still alive, I mean. I don’t think I can get away with using Jean’s ‘archive’ too many times.” I released Margarita’s hand—Wes was holding mine tight and I didn’t yet want to yank my hand out of his—and said, “I got a couple of good story ideas, so this wasn’t a total waste, but it didn’t work for the main thing we wanted.”

  “Give it one more shot,” Lupe urged.

  “I don’t know . . .” I hedged.

  “Go on,” Margarita said. “I’m curious to learn who’s living in my restaurant.”

  “Might as well try,” Wes said with a shrug.

  “Okay then,” I said, taking Margarita’s hand once more. “Is there anyone else out there who can talk to me? Florence Marz, are you there? Do you need help?”

  Nothing happened for a long moment. Then it suddenly got cold. “Did your air just kick on?” Wes asked. “I must be standing under a vent.”

  “Hush,” Lupe chided.

  A rush of wind blew through the restaurant, and I instinctively ducked. When I straightened and looked at the barstool, there was something there. Every other ghost I’d seen had looked like a person—wispy and insubstantial, but recognizably human, and I could even tell what they were wearing. It wasn’t even about how long they were dead, since my childhood imaginary friend when my dad was stationed in England had been what I’m pretty sure was a medieval pikeman. But this ghost looked like the kind of thing that would be in the amusement attraction kind of haunted house, the sort of ghost played by a person wearing a sheet thrown over their head, only it didn’t have any eye holes cut in the sheet, just a big, gaping maw of a mouth.

  It strained against the invisible barrier that rose from the salt circle on the floor. That now didn’t seem like overkill. Whatever this was, it was no longer human in any way, and it was angry. Really, really angry. The wind blew out one of the candles, and the overhead lights flickered.

  “What is that?” Wes asked.

  “You see it?” I asked.

  “A ghost right out of a movie?” Margarita said. “Yeah, I see it. Is that what you see all the time?” I felt her shudder through our clasped hands.

  “No, I see wispy people,” I said. “I don’t know what this is.
How do we make it go away?” Ghosts normally didn’t bother me too much, but this was truly unsettling.

  “Tell it to go,” Lupe said. “Then everyone release your hands. Don’t break the salt circle, whatever you do.”

  “Get out of here!” I shouted at the ghost. “I wasn’t talking to you. Go!”

  “Three, two, one, let go!” Lupe cried out, and we released each other’s hands. It might have been my imagination or wishful thinking, but I thought Wes had been a little slow and reluctant to release my hand. Lupe blew out the remaining candles, and the thing over the barstool vanished with a final gust of wind. When it was gone, Lupe reached over and grabbed her crystal ball, tucking it away in a velvet pouch. “Well, now, that was interesting,” she said.

  “That thing is living in my restaurant?” Margarita asked, her voice shaking.

  “It took some effort to bring it here, so I don’t think it’s here all the time,” her grandmother said reassuringly. “Even so, I’ll get a friend to come over in the morning and cleanse the place. Leave the salt until then.”

  “I think it’s safe to say that either Florence really doesn’t want to talk, or she isn’t dead,” I said. Or she’d been alive when I’d talked to her and had died since then but wasn’t haunting this place, but I didn’t want to consider that yet. I was gratified that none of them brought up the possibility that I’d imagined her to begin with. Yes, I’d had imaginary friends at various points in my life, but I was fairly certain they’d all been ghosts, and even then I’d known they weren’t real, living people.

  “Then the question is, what happened to her?” Margarita said.

  “My guess is she chickened out of the interview but didn’t want to admit it to you,” Wes said. “She may not be a ghost, but she ghosted you.”

  No matter what Wes thought, I was still concerned. If Florrie had changed her mind about the interview, she could have texted me without talking to me. The fact that she hadn’t, when she struck me as a conscientious person, made me feel that something must have happened to her. Since the séance hadn’t worked, I’d need to find another way to track her down, dead or alive. The first step would be to find any friends or family she had in town.

  The next morning, I went down to the office with my tea and looked up that wedding announcement again. The wedding attendants would be a good place to start. I made a list of the bridesmaids and groomsmen. There were no other mentions of any of the bridesmaids in the newspaper archives, which meant either they were from out of town or they hadn’t done anything else to get in the newspaper during the years that were digitized. The groomsmen were the groom’s brothers, and I doubted she’d be house-sitting for her in-laws while her husband was in Vegas.

  I headed to the newspaper morgue in a corner of the press room. That was also where we kept the archives of school yearbooks and other references that came in handy for researching the townspeople. I might be able to find out something about Hugo Marz that would help me learn about Florrie. Jean was back there, hovering near the scanner.

  “Were you able to contact anyone?” she asked me when I entered the archive corner.

  “Yeah, but not the person I wanted to talk to. Was Margarita’s place really a speakeasy during Prohibition?”

  “That place down the block that was a saloon?”

  “Yeah.”

  She winked. “Let’s just say there were a few friendly gatherings held there. Unfortunately, Prohibition came back to this town. I never could get those laws changed, no matter how many strongly worded editorials I wrote.”

  “Well, that may be a project for the next local election cycle,” I said. “The demographics have changed, and we’ve got Jordan to bankroll a campaign. But what does it mean that I wasn’t able to contact a ghost who was talking to me there earlier?”

  “Most likely, it means she isn’t actually dead.”

  “That’s what I thought. Which means I need to find out where she is. I’m going to start by tracking down anyone she or her husband might know around here.”

  I’d just pulled a yearbook off the shelf when the scanner squawked and I heard the dispatcher say, “Anyone near the historic district? I got a call about an abandoned car on Avenue G and Cottonwood. Neighbors say it’s been parked there for several days, and the people whose house it’s parked by don’t know anything about it.” The radio chatter in Stirling Mills tended to be casual, without the codes and formality that came with larger departments.

  Jean and I looked at each other. “You think . . .” she began.

  Wes’s voice came over the radio. “I’m not too far away. I’ll stop by and check it out next time I go through there.”

  I was already heading for the garage in back. An abandoned, unfamiliar car sounded like the sort of thing that might go with a woman who’d vanished, and I wanted to be there in case in case it did have something to do with Florrie.

  I got to the address before there was any sign of a police car. It was on the edge of the historic district near downtown, where the houses were long and low mid-century ranch style rather than the Victorian and Arts and Crafts houses in the core of the district. A car was parked on a side street, not directly in front of any house. It wasn’t blocking a mailbox, driveway, or fire hydrant, so I didn’t see what the problem was. I wouldn’t have thought it was all that suspicious, but I didn’t know what was customary. Not a lot of cars were parked on this street. Maybe it was one of those things that just wasn’t done, an unwritten neighborhood rule. I parked behind the car and got out to investigate. The car itself wasn’t too remarkable, an ordinary silver sedan, no bumper stickers or decals. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. Maybe a body in the driver’s seat? There wasn’t one. I did check.

  While I was trying to peer through the windows without touching the car, a police SUV pulled up. “Really, Lex?” Wes said when he got out of the truck. “Must be a slow news day if an abandoned car brought you out on a Sunday.”

  “Summer is dreadfully slow,” I said with an elaborately casual shrug.

  He gave me a suspicious side-eye. “Did you think this had something to do with that woman who didn’t show up for an interview?”

  “Maybe,” I hedged. “We did prove that she’s probably not a ghost. It was worth checking out, anyway. There isn’t a body inside, in case you were wondering.”

  “Unless it’s in the trunk. But it would have to be really fresh for that not to be obvious in this heat.”

  I gulped. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I felt like my curiosity about the missing woman—who might not actually be missing—had taken a dark turn. “Can you run a plate to see who it belongs to?” I asked.

  “I will, eventually.” He pulled an orange sticker off a pad and stuck it on the rear window. “This isn’t technically a no-parking zone, and it hasn’t been here long enough to be considered abandoned, but if it isn’t moved in the next day or so, we’ll have to do something about it.” He bent and marked one of the tires with orange chalk.

  “Isn’t parking enforcement beneath your pay grade?”

  “I do a little of everything, whatever’s needed.” He gave a friendly wave, and I turned to see a woman standing on the front porch of the house on the opposite corner, watching us. She must have been the one who’d called it in. He jotted down the license number and headed back to his truck. I was dying to follow to see what he came up with when he ran the tags, but he didn’t invite me, and I suspected he’d tell me if it was nothing, just to tease me.

  I tried to look patient, like I didn’t really care, but it’s hard to stand by the side of the road looking like nothing’s going on. If you’re standing by the side of the road, then it’s generally because there’s something happening, and few of those things are good.

  When Wes emerged from his truck, he was frowning. “What did you say your no-show’s name was?”

  “Florence Marz. Her husband’s name is Hugo, in case it’s registered in his name.”

  “Well, this car
belongs to her. Maybe you’re right that something’s happened.”

  Chapter Six

  I barely had enough self-control not to pump my fist in the air, shout, “Yes!” and do a victory dance right there on the side of the street. Instead, like the mature adult I was, I folded my arms across my chest and said, “Ha, told you. Are you going to search the car? There may be clues there.”

  “I don’t have a good legal reason to do so,” Wes said with a shrug. “It’s not even illegally parked.”

  “Even if it belongs to a missing person?”

  “She hasn’t been reported missing.”

  “I don’t count? Or did that not count as a formal report? I can do that if you need me to.”

  “She hasn’t been reported missing by anyone who would expect to be in regular contact with her.”

  “But everyone she would have regular contact with is out of town, so they may not even notice she’s missing until it’s way too late. Aren’t the first forty-eight hours supposed to be the most important? We’re already past that.”

  “How would you like it if I just opened your car and looked around inside after you didn’t show up at Margarita’s for dinner one Thursday? Wouldn’t you feel violated?”

  “If I’d been kidnapped and you found something that helped find and rescue me, I’d be grateful.”

  “And what if you just weren’t feeling well, stayed in that evening, and left your car parked in front of your office? It’s not as though you’re obligated to inform anyone when you decide to change your routine. Wouldn’t you consider it a violation if I took it upon myself to search your car?”

  “Well, maybe . . . But you might be able to find information on where she’s house-sitting and confirm that she’s okay. That wouldn’t have to hold up in court as a legal search since you’re not investigating a crime.”