Case of the Vanishing Visitor

by Shanna Swendson

  “It’s still a violation of her privacy.”

  I walked slowly around the car, looking for any scrap of evidence that might give him a reason to do something.

  “Don’t you dare open that car, Lex,” he warned.

  “You’d arrest me for trespass or auto theft, or whatever crime applies?”

  “If you’re dumb enough to do it in front of me, yeah.”

  “So, go away and you won’t have to know.”

  He put his fists on his hips and took the kind of solid stance that would probably keep him upright if I charged into him, making it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. With a glare at him, I held my hands up so they were clearly not touching anything and kept searching. There was a light film of dust on the car, but it was otherwise fairly clean, like it had been washed not long before Florrie came to Stirling Mills. This wasn’t going to be a case like on TV in which we found traces of mud unique to one particular location. Was that itself suspicious? If you were going to dump a body and then abandon that person’s car, running it through a car wash first would be a good idea.

  I was about to give up and admit defeat when I got to the driver’s-side door and noticed something dark in contrast to the silver paint just under the door handle. “Wait a second, is that blood?”

  “Seriously, or are you looking for an excuse to search?”

  “Honest, there’s something there, and I’m no expert, but it looks like blood to me.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Wes ordered.

  I stepped back, my hands up, as he moved over and bent to peer at it. “You know, it might be.”

  “Would that be a reason to search the car?”

  “It is worth looking at.” He went back to his truck and returned wearing gloves and carrying an evidence collection kit. The town was too small to have a real crime scene team or even actual detectives, so several of the more senior officers, like Wes, were trained in those functions. He took pictures of the door handle and collected samples before trying the car door. “Hmm, it’s unlocked,” he noted as he opened the door. “That’s odd.” He leaned inside and emerged a minute later, holding a cell phone. “This is all that’s in there. It was under the passenger seat.”

  “I guess a printout of the directions to the place she’s house-sitting would have been too much to ask,” I said. “But this could explain why she hasn’t responded to my calls.” I got out my phone and called Florrie’s number. The phone in Wes’s hand rang. “Yep. That’s why she’s not answering. Don’t tell me you don’t find this at least a little suspicious. She sets an appointment with me, doesn’t show, and then we find her car parked on the side of the road, with blood on the door handle and nothing inside but her phone. They must have wanted to make sure she couldn’t be tracked.”

  “They?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “We don’t know if a ‘they’ is involved.”

  “How many people do you know who’d willingly leave their phones inside an unlocked car?”

  “Anyone who doesn’t want to be reached. Maybe she got fed up with her husband drunk dialing her from Vegas.”

  “But with the door left unlocked?”

  “She might have been absentminded when she shut the door, or had her hands full, or didn’t realize that her key fob clicker didn’t work. That’s just one possibility. But I will look into it, trust me.”

  “And you want me to stay out of it.”

  “I want you to not interfere.”

  I thought that left me a lot of room to work. Doing research wasn’t interfering. It might even be helpful. The main thing I needed to find was who Florrie was house-sitting for. If I could find that, then we could verify whether she was lying blissfully by the pool while doing a digital detox or was truly missing. If there was nothing going on, then my guess was that the place she was staying was close to where the car was parked. I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t parked more directly in front of that house, since part of house-sitting was making it clear that the house was occupied. That was one reason why I still had the nagging sense that something was wrong.

  Jean accosted me as soon as I returned to the office. “Was it hers?” she demanded.

  “Yeah, it was.” She followed me as I made my way through the print room to the archive corner.

  “So you were right. You did talk to a living woman.”

  “I did.” I should have felt a lot more vindicated than I did, I realized. I stopped and turned to face her. “But that doesn’t explain why no one else saw her. True, the restaurant was really busy that night, and she wasn’t all that memorable, but it’s kind of weird that she didn’t seem to have registered on anyone at all other than me. I know that cashier from the grocery store looked right at her, but she said she didn’t see her.”

  “Didn’t you say her parents were from here? It might be a sideshow talent.”

  “The sideshow had an invisible man?”

  “Not literally invisible, just unnoticeable.”

  “What kind of show would that be? I wouldn’t think that being utterly forgettable would be much of a talent.”

  “Not on its own, but there are places where it could come in handy. What about a magician’s assistant who can help set up a trick without the audience remembering seeing him?”

  “Oh, like stagehands wearing black so you don’t see them making scene changes.”

  “Exactly. Someone like that could put a bird or a rabbit in a hat on stage, and even though the audience is looking right at it, they don’t remember seeing it.”

  “They actually did this?”

  With a wink she said, “It’s bad form to give away a magician’s secrets, so I never bothered proving it. Besides, once they settled in town, the magician only did shows at local carnivals and fundraisers, and blowing his secrets would have ruined the fun for everyone. On the other hand, there were shadier things that could be done with that talent. Unfortunately, I couldn’t prove that, either.”

  “I’m thinking that in a carnival, being able to go unnoticed would be good for pickpocketing the audience members during a show.”

  “And outside a carnival, it’s great for shoplifting. But it was less effective once they’d been in town for a while. It doesn’t seem to work as well once people know them. They’re still not entirely memorable, but they’re not essentially invisible once they become familiar.”

  I paused, considering. “I would think that if you didn’t know you had an uncanny ‘don’t notice me’ talent and weren’t trying to slip past anyone, it might be disconcerting. You’d probably have a hard time getting service at bars or in restaurants, people would cut in front of you in line, and getting a job would be difficult because no one would remember your interview to hire you unless you looked great on paper and the other candidates left a negative impression. But if no one else remembered Florrie, why did I? Is it part of my seeing ghosts thing, like Wes not being able to read me?”

  “You talked to her for some time and made an appointment with her, so you remembered her. A waitress who took dozens of orders that night might not remember her among all the other customers.”

  “Even having seen her, she’s kind of a blur in my memory,” I said. “I might be able to pick her out of a lineup if there were pictures, but I couldn’t direct a sketch artist to put together a drawing of her. Yeah, I think there’s a good chance that she’s descended from the magician’s assistant in the sideshow. That’s something else to look up.” I resumed walking toward the archives, Joan floating alongside me.

  “About that car they found,” she said. “Any clues there?”

  I’d almost forgotten the car after learning that being utterly forgettable was an actual uncanny talent. “Oh yeah, get this, there was blood on the door handle, and her phone was in the car.”

  “By phone, you mean one of those portable ones, not like on the desk?”

  “Yes, the portable kind,” I said, forcing myself not to roll my eyes. Considering that Jean had died before cell phones existed,
she was doing pretty well at keeping up with modern times, so I could forgive her occasional confusion about how it all worked.

  “What did your cop say?”

  “Nothing, as usual. He wouldn’t commit to the possibility that there might have been foul play. But he did collect evidence. And I’m going to do a little digging.” I picked up the yearbook I’d been about to check when the news about the car came over the scanner and looked up Hugo Marz. He was in the index, so I took the book to my desk. Jean followed, passing through the wall while I went through the doorway. She hovered just behind me so she could look over my shoulder as I sat down and opened the book.

  The first page listed in the index led to the senior portraits. Hugo had been a stocky boy who was basically square—physically. I didn’t know about his personality, though he didn’t look too exciting to me. He had a square head, broad shoulders, and no neck at all. He wore a mortarboard and graduation gown in the photo, so I couldn’t see his hair. That meant it must have been pretty short. He looked like a buzz cut kind of guy. According to the year on this book, this was the thirtieth anniversary of his graduation, which meant there was likely a reunion. I’d run a number of stories about class reunions this summer and hadn’t paid much attention to them, but I made a mental note to check on this one, in case it had something to do with the situation. At the very least, Florrie might have run into the old friend she was housesitting for there.

  The next index listing led to the football team photo, rows of boys on the stadium bleachers. Following the list of names under the photo, I found Hugo in the front row. His body was as square as his head, and he didn’t seem to be particularly tall. I imagined he was the guy the other team had to get past if they wanted to score. He was basically a human roadblock. He wasn’t featured in any of the action photos from games, so I got the impression he hadn’t been a star.

  I found another picture of Hugo on the prom spread with a girl who couldn’t possibly have been Florrie. She was half a head taller than Hugo, so unless Hugo was really short for a football player, that ruled out Florrie, who couldn’t have been any taller than I was. This girl was blond and had strong shoulders. I would have said she was a swimmer, but this town didn’t have a swim team. She looked awfully familiar. “I think I know her,” I muttered.

  I was talking to myself, but Jean leaned so close, looking over my shoulder at the yearbook, that it sent a chill down my spine. “Who is it?”

  There wasn’t a caption with the photo identifying her, but there was one woman I’d run across lately who was tall and solid. “If I’m not mistaken, she’s the cashier at the grocery store. I think her name’s Cissy. She’s the one who looked right at Florrie but told me she hadn’t seen anyone, and when she showed up, that was when Florrie took off.”

  “Ah, and she’s the old flame,” Jean said. “Do you think there’s hanky-panky going on?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m certain she saw Florrie and reacted to her. I get the feeling she was trying to gaslight me when she said she didn’t see anyone.”

  “Which means she knows about Florrie’s power—she was hoping you’d forget her.”

  “Maybe. If Hugo and Florrie came to his reunion, they must have run into Cissy, so Cissy surely knew her. She had to be lying to me.”

  “She’d be my prime suspect.”

  Feeling like I was channeling Wes, I said, “For what? We don’t know that there’s any crime.”

  “Missing woman, abandoned car, and blood on the car door?” Jean asked, raising a thin eyebrow.

  “Still, there’s a big gap between not wanting to talk about her ex’s wife and murdering the ex’s wife. We don’t even know if she really was an old flame. Maybe she was just a prom date. I didn’t have a deep, long-term relationship with anyone I went to prom with. They were just dates.” I looked through the Seniors section to get her last name—Clancy—and found her in the index. She was only in the prom photo and the Seniors section. That didn’t tell me anything about her or her relationship with Hugo.

  Turning to my computer, I looked up the class reunion articles from recent issues and found one for Hugo’s class. There had been a reunion party at the Old Mill restaurant about a month earlier. I didn’t find either Hugo’s or Cissy’s name mentioned among the organizers, and I didn’t see them in the photo that ran with the article. The organizers had submitted their own photo, so I didn’t have any unused pictures from the photographer I could check. I jotted down the names of people who were mentioned in the article, in case I needed to interview someone who’d been there.

  I looked up Cissy to find an address and phone number. I didn’t yet know the town well enough to recognize all the street names, so I had to search that address on an online map. “Whoa!” I said, leaning back in my seat, when I saw where the little flag appeared on the map.

  “What is it?” Jean asked.

  I pointed to the flag where Cissy’s house was. “This is Cissy’s address.” I dragged my finger around the corner and across the street. “This is where Florrie’s car was left.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Aha!” Jean said. “The plot thickens. The girlfriend got the competition out of the way. She must have seen the wife at the restaurant and gone after her.”

  “Or the wife saw the girlfriend, followed her, and the girlfriend caught her,” I said. Having a ghost around to bounce ideas off of took musing aloud to a whole new level. “It makes me wonder if the husband actually went to Vegas. Florrie said he didn’t want her coming along on the trip. Either he was planning to get up to something on the trip and thought she’d cramp his style, or he wasn’t actually going to Vegas. The business trip might have been a cover for spending a few days with his old girlfriend.”

  “And the wife got wise to it and they did away with her.”

  “Maybe.” I absently twirled my pen between my fingers as I thought. “But they’d have had to be pretty dumb to leave her car that near the girlfriend’s house when they abandoned it.” I looked at the map again. “Unless she parked around the corner to go spy on them, and they didn’t realize her car was there when they caught her.” I picked up my phone and pulled up my contacts.

  “You’re not calling the cops, are you?”

  “There’s not a lot I can do about this, and if I clue Wes in, I can make his job easier.”

  But apparently he didn’t feel the same way. “I told you to stay out of it, Lex,” he said when he answered.

  “How do you know why I was calling you?”

  “I’ve met you.”

  “Yeah, well, what if I was calling to ask you to dinner?”

  “Were you?” Did he sound eager? Excited? Or maybe worried.

  “Well, no,” I admitted, wondering if this had been my opening to ask him out. “But I was doing some research—which doesn’t count as getting into it since reading isn’t interfering with anything—and I found something that might be relevant. I thought I’d do you a favor and share it with you so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Florrie’s husband’s thirty-year class reunion was last month here in Stirling Mills. His prom date was Cissy Clancy, and she lives just around the corner from where Florrie’s car is.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, come on, you don’t think there might have been conflict between the wife and the high school girlfriend he may have reconnected with?”

  “You’ve been watching too many of those woman-in-jeopardy TV movies. You don’t know that Cissy was anything more than a prom date or that they reconnected at the reunion. Do you even know if Marz went to the reunion?”

  “No,” I said reluctantly. Maybe I should have done more research before calling him.

  “Okay then.” He sounded like he thought he’d won the argument. More gently, he added, “I’ll keep this in mind. It may help if I need to explore that avenue. Thank you for sharing it with me. But don’t get any more involved than that.”

  “You aren’t the least bit concerned that Florrie might be tied
up in Cissy’s garage or buried in her garden?”

  “Not at all.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that Florrie’s husband actually went to Vegas. What if he’s here in town with Cissy?”

  “You really are making up stories now. Have you considered writing a book or a screenplay instead of journalism as a career? You’ve got the imagination for it.”

  “I know Cissy saw Florrie at Margarita’s the other night, and then she lied to me about not seeing her. That wasn’t my imagination. Her lie was part of why I started doubting whether the person I’d talked to was alive. She was gaslighting me, and innocent people who have nothing to hide have no reason to gaslight someone.”

  “Again, you don’t even know for certain that Cissy ever met Florrie or has any idea who she is. This is all in your imagination. Florrie hasn’t even been reported missing. We know she doesn’t have her phone with her, wherever she is, so surely someone would have noticed by now that she’s not answering her phone.”

  “They’d probably have reported her missing to the police in her town. Have you checked there?”

  “Gee, that never occurred to me,” he said, the sarcasm coming through loud and clear. I took that to mean that he had checked, and that warmed my heart ever so slightly. He might not be conducting an official investigation, but he was taking me somewhat seriously.

  “She hasn’t been reported missing, even at home?”

  “Nope.”

  “That abandoned car doesn’t have you worried?”

  “She’s probably doing exactly what she told you she was doing. She’s hanging out by the pool at her friend’s house, having warned her family that she’s disconnecting, and doing the healthy thing by spending a few days without social media. They may have the landline number where she’s staying and have been in touch with her that way.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me, since I hadn’t had a landline other than at the office for years. The newspaper phone had an extension in my apartment, but I never used it for personal calls. “What about her not showing up for the interview?”