I made it back to where all the excitement was, and now that Hugo had been taken away, the crowd had thinned. There was no sign of the woman I’d seen. Either she hadn’t been there at all or she’d gone back home already. I got my reporter’s notebook and a pen out of my purse and approached one of the remaining onlookers. “Excuse me, I’m with the newspaper,” I said. “Would you like to discuss what you saw here today?”
The woman was apparently waiting for just such an opportunity and gave me a monologue about marital fidelity these days, lying, the foundations of a healthy marriage, and how people weren’t what they seemed. I kept my pen moving, but I didn’t even try to capture it all. I got a quote I might be able to use in the newspaper, depending on what the story ended up being. I didn’t intend to write anything about a cheating husband if that’s all there was to it. It would only go in the paper if Florrie was still missing by the time I went to press or if, God forbid, there was proof that something had happened to her. When the woman paused for air, I asked as casually as I could, “Did you know that woman who was out here who had on the big sun hat and the orange caftan?”
The woman frowned. “I don’t recall seeing her, but I wasn’t paying attention to anything other than what was going on.”
I nodded. “Of course. Never mind. I just thought she looked familiar and I was trying to figure out why I knew her.”
I thought about talking to more people, but I suspected that between Florrie’s possible uncanny talent for going unnoticed and the excitement in Cissy’s driveway, Florrie could have worn a penguin suit and done gymnastics in the alley without anyone noticing her. I’d have thought the bright orange caftan would be memorable, but I didn’t know how her power worked, if people saw the clothes but forgot her or if she could make any clothing instantly forgettable.
I put my notebook back in my bag and began trudging down the alley again. I was feeling a bit lightheaded, either from all the excitement or from my brush with heat exhaustion, so I knew I needed to get back to the office to sit down in the air conditioning and drink more water. I just hoped I could make it to my car without passing out, since Wes was no longer around to catch and carry me. I couldn’t help but drift back to the memory of him carrying me cradled in his arms, nestled against his chest. A soft beep from behind startled me out of that daydream, and I turned to see one of the police cars stopping next to me. The window rolled down and Officer Thornton said, “Hop in. I’ll take you where you need to go. You don’t need to be walking any more in this heat.”
It seemed Wes hadn’t turned the police force against me, in spite of his occasional animosity. “Thanks,” I said as I opened the passenger door. “My car’s just at the end of the alley, so this is probably overkill, though I appreciate it.”
“You gave us a bit of a scare earlier,” she said, driving forward once I’d shut the door. “All this has been crazy, huh? It’s like something out of a soap opera, or one of those TV movies.”
Had I found a kindred spirit who shared my fondness for cheesy cable movies? “Yeah, that husband’s really something. I thought it was bad enough when his wife told me he wouldn’t let her come along when he went to a trade show in Vegas, but it’s worse that he was here with an old girlfriend instead.”
“Oh, you’re the one who was the last person to see the wife?”
“Seems like it,” I said. And if I really had seen Florrie in the alley, it was even more true.
We reached my car, and I thanked her again for the ride. It wasn’t far, but I wasn’t sure I’d have been up to it. My car was an oven after sitting out in the sun all this time, and the air conditioner had barely cooled it to a reasonable temperature by the time I got back to the newspaper building. I parked in my garage in the rear so the car would be shaded and entered the office through the print room.
Both Jean and Charlene looked up expectantly when I entered. “You were gone a long time,” Charlene remarked. “And you don’t look so good. What happened?”
“That cop must have really worked you over,” Jean added.
I poured myself a full cup from the water cooler and drained it, then refilled it before collapsing into my desk chair. So much had happened that I had to think about what they knew. “They found the husband’s car parked at his old girlfriend’s house while I was talking to Wes at the police station, so I went along to the scene.”
Charlene raised an eyebrow. “Hmm, sounds suspicious.”
“That’s what the cops thought, since the husband told them he was in Vegas when they called him about his wife being missing. They found the wife’s purse, an earring, a shoe, and some rope in the trunk.”
“Oh, Lord,” Charlene said, pressing her hand against her heart. “That poor woman. They haven’t found her, have they?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.” I started to share my misgivings with them, but stopped myself before speaking. I felt like I needed to think first. It was bad enough that I’d stirred all this up in the first place. I couldn’t shift gears abruptly. “They’re bringing in the husband for questioning.”
“So he wasn’t in Vegas,” Jean said. “What a rat.”
“Yeah, he’s in trouble for lying to the police.”
“Are you okay?” Charlene asked.
“I did a bit too much running around in the heat without enough water, so I had a bit of a spell,” I said. “I’m already feeling better.” And that was true. Being inside had helped a lot. I’d need to start carrying water with me when I went out on stories in the summer. I’d taken off abruptly this time, but I’d need to be better prepared in the future.
Although my body was doing better, my mind wasn’t at ease. The more I thought about it, the less sense it all made. Officer Thornton’s remark about it being like a TV movie stuck in my head. That was exactly it. It was too neat, too obvious, but if you thought about it, it didn’t make much sense.
I could see finding the earring in the trunk. It might have fallen off without being noticed. But who would leave one shoe in the trunk after disposing of a body or moving a captive to another location? If they were going to dump her, they’d have dumped the shoe with her. Someone might have taken the wallet out of the purse, but then the purse itself would have been dumped, either with the body or in a trash can far away from the killer’s house. Hugo didn’t strike me as a Rhodes Scholar, but someone who’d come up with the idea to tell his wife he was going to a trade show in Vegas while he stayed with his girlfriend surely would have been cautious or paranoid enough not to leave his wife’s belongings in the trunk of the car parked in his girlfriend’s driveway.
Then again, he’d left his car parked in his girlfriend’s driveway, so he wasn’t too cautious or paranoid. But if he’d done away with his wife, would he have been that careless? A murderer would probably be terrified of being caught. He’d have washed the car and scoured the trunk to make sure he got rid of all the evidence.
Then there was the woman I’d seen—or thought I saw.
I felt like I was back where I’d been at the start of all this, having seen and spoken to someone no one else noticed and needing to figure out if she was real, a ghost, or all in my head. After spending the past few days trying to convince people that Florrie was real and possibly in trouble, I couldn’t turn right around and try to convince them that actually she was okay and the whole thing was possibly a hoax, not if I wanted anyone to ever take me seriously again. If she was okay, she was safe. If she wasn’t, I needed the police to be looking for her.
No, I needed to keep this to myself for now, until I’d found some kind of proof, one way or another. I just needed to figure it out before I went to press, so I didn’t risk running a story that would be debunked right away.
Which reminded me, I did have a newspaper to put out. I needed to get to work. I pulled up my futures file to see what stories I had slated to cover. There was the back-to-school luncheon for teachers the next day, our town’s equivalent of the event Florrie was supposed to have gone
to before it was cancelled. Jordan had yet another new business opening, a yarn shop downtown that would be run by the local knitting maven. I wondered if Charlene would be interested in that story. I knew she sometimes knitted at her desk between phone calls when she wasn’t working on anything else. Or maybe I should look into that. It was a hobby that shouldn’t involve running down alleys.
The phone rang, and Charlene answered it, spoke for a while with the caller, then said, “It’s Evelyn for you,” as she transferred the call. Evelyn Novak was the president of the newspaper board, so she was the boss who signed my paychecks. She was also Wes’s grandmother. Needless to say, I had to stay on her good side for multiple reasons.
“Hello, Evelyn,” I said when I picked up the phone.
“I understand you were present to report on that unpleasantness today,” she said.
Wow, word really spread quickly, and I doubted Wes had told her anything. Either she had a source in the police department other than her grandson or she had a source in the neighborhood watch. My bet was on the latter. “You mean the missing woman whose husband was found at his girlfriend’s house here in town?”
“Yes. I’m curious what you’re planning to do with this story.”
“I don’t know yet. A lot depends on what happens before we go to press. If she’s still missing, I’ll have to run an alert so people can know to look out for her.”
“That would be appropriate, though I hate to see it. It makes our town look unsafe, especially for women traveling alone.” That made me wonder if Jordan had gotten to her. “But I also hate the idea of anything sordid and gossipy being reported in the newspaper, even if it does make it clear that this woman was only at risk because of her husband, and other women in town don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I don’t think a cheating husband counts as news,” I assured her. “I might mention that the husband is being investigated in conjunction with her disappearance in any story I run about a missing woman.”
“That seems like a reasonable approach,” she said, sounding greatly relieved. “It sounds like you’ve got a good handle on the situation. Thank you. And let’s hope she’s found safe and sound before then.”
“Yes, that would be the best outcome,” I agreed. As I hung up the phone, I thought that gave me yet another reason to resolve things. I might like watching cheesy TV movies, but I didn’t want that kind of story in my newspaper.
I spent the rest of the day writing the neighborhood watch story. Since I was worried about my credibility, I couldn’t afford to skip it after telling everyone in the neighborhood plus Wes that I was writing that story. When I had a draft done, I uploaded the photos I’d taken with my phone. While I was getting shots of the police at work, I was pretty sure I’d also taken pictures of the crowd, and I thought I might be able to use those to illustrate the neighborhood watch story, since it showed them at work. Most of the pictures I flipped through focused on the police, but there was one showing the crowd behind the crime scene tape, and I recognized a couple of the people I’d interviewed on the front row.
Unfortunately, the woman in the hat wasn’t in the picture, unless that faint shape in the background, barely visible between two heads, was her hat. It was too vague for me to be at all sure. If it was the woman I’d seen, she was about the right height to be Florrie, but this picture wasn’t enough to convince even myself.
I looked through all the photos, but I hadn’t caught the woman in the hat in any other shots. Either she’d managed to always stay just out of frame, or she hadn’t shown up until later. Or she didn’t show up in photos. Could she have been a ghost, haunting her husband or possibly his car? Or had they dumped her body somewhere in that alley? That outfit didn’t strike me as the sort of thing Florrie was likely to spend her afterlife wearing, but then Jean often changed clothes, which meant ghosts weren’t stuck the way they’d died.
Still, I thought I ought to at least make certain I hadn’t seen her ghost. If I had and she was willing to talk, I might learn something about what happened to her. I needed to rule out every other possibility before I told Wes I didn’t think she was missing, after all.
That meant I needed to make a return trip to the alley that night, and at this time of year, I’d have to go fairly late for it to be dark. I thought for a moment about inviting Margarita, since it was her off night, but I felt like Florrie’s ghost was more likely to appear to just me, and it would be bad form to tell anyone else about my theories as long as I wasn’t telling Wes. He needed to be the first to know.
Later that evening, I was trying to decide what to wear—looking like a burglar would probably mean another call from the neighborhood watch, but I didn’t want to stand out, either—when I heard a knock on my front door. A glance through the door’s window showed Wes standing there. I felt a surge of adrenaline and couldn’t tell if it was because of Wes or if it was the usual reaction to seeing a cop and wondering what I’d done wrong. There may have been a dash of guilt, though I reminded myself that I didn’t actually have any information I was hiding from him. He was likely to say that all I had was theories, a story I was telling myself.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said when I opened the door. “Two nights in a row must mean I’m really getting on your nerves.”
He ducked his head, looking a little bashful. “I just thought I’d stop by to check on you. I was a bit worried about you this afternoon. I don’t often have women faint in my arms.”
It was my turn to duck my head. I couldn’t believe I’d done that, though it hadn’t exactly been planned and wasn’t the sort of thing I was likely to plan. “And I don’t often swoon like a damsel in distress, but I’m fine. I probably got a little overheated. I need to be more careful in hot weather. Note to self: Drink more water. And there was the shock of seeing what was in the trunk. I know I’d spent days worrying that something horrible must have happened to Florrie, but then seeing those things . . .” I waited to see how he responded, and I was glad that I supposedly had some kind of shield against his ability, something to do with me having to be able to shut out ghosts.
“You’ve felt better since then? I probably should have sent you to a doctor to check for heat exhaustion.”
“If I did have a mild case of heat exhaustion, I’m better now. Officer Thornton drove me back to my car, and I drank plenty of water when I got to the office. I stayed inside the rest of the afternoon.”
“You still look a little flushed.”
I pressed a palm against my cheek. It felt warm, but I suspected that was mostly about finding Wes on my doorstep, concerned about me. Apparently, he actually cared. “Well, it is a warm night,” I hedged. Abruptly changing the subject, I said, “Hugo didn’t do it, did he?”
I was surprised that he didn’t hesitate at all before saying, “I don’t think so. I don’t have anything to charge him with, aside from lying to an officer and impeding an investigation, so he bonded out pretty quickly. So far, there’s no body, no evidence of foul play. There’s nothing to suggest a dead body was in the trunk of that car. It’s pretty clean. Bodies make more of a mess than that.”
“And if she was wrapped in plastic, then her earring and shoe wouldn’t have fallen off into the trunk.”
“Right.” He shook his head. “I have to say, this case doesn’t add up—or it adds up a bit too well. It sounds more like something out of one of those ‘evil husband attacks woman in jeopardy’ thriller movies. Hugo’s a jerk, but he has no clue what’s going on. And I probably shouldn’t be discussing this case with you like this,” he said with a groan. “Is it too late to ask for this to be off the record?”
“I don’t really have a story yet. I guess if she’s still missing by the time I go to print, I’ll run a story about her being missing and what’s been found so far. Of course, if you find a body, that will be a story. Right now, there’s not much to write about. A husband cheating on his wife isn’t the sort of news I cover. I already had to reassure your grandm
other about that.”
“Good. Thanks. Did Florence sound at all like she suspected her husband of cheating when you talked to her?”
“No. She didn’t even find it all that suspicious that he didn’t want her coming with him to his event in Vegas. At least, not that she admitted to me, a total stranger. I think she was irked, but she didn’t say anything about any suspicions about why he didn’t want her there.”
“Well, if she didn’t know, and if she’s still alive, she’s going to find out. I don’t think anyone is going to come out of this case a winner.”
“Maybe she’s okay,” I said. “It’ll be like you said, she’s lounging by a pool, cut off from the world. And I can’t blame her, given what her husband’s like.”
“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound too convinced. “Well, take care. You should get plenty of rest tonight.”
For a moment, I thought about inviting him in, but then I remembered I had other plans. “Thanks. You too.”
I gave him enough time to get to his house before I headed out. I decided to stay in the clothes I was wearing that afternoon, so maybe the neighborhood watch would recognize me and assume I was working on a story instead of calling the police on me. I drove down the alley, which was now empty. The crime scene tape was gone from Cissy’s driveway. Her car was parked there, but Hugo’s was gone. I drove past the driveway and stopped behind a fence, so I wasn’t so visible from any of the surrounding houses. I killed the engine and opened the door, but stayed seated in the car.
“Florrie? Are you there?” I whispered.
Nothing happened.
“Is anyone there?”
I couldn’t help but gasp when I saw something shimmer in the air ahead of me. There appeared to be a ghost in the alley.
Case of the Vanishing Visitor Page 11
