Case of the Vanishing Visitor

by Shanna Swendson

  Chapter Twelve

  I hadn’t actually believed that what I’d seen in the alley earlier that day was a ghost, but what I saw now was definitely one.

  I got out of the car and eased the door shut so the dome light wouldn’t show. The glowing figure was still there in the darkness. I moved toward it slowly, not wanting to spook it—which was rather ironic, when you think about it. As I drew closer, I could see that it didn’t look like the woman I’d seen earlier. There was no big sunhat, and she wasn’t wearing a caftan. The silhouette was wrong for Florrie, much younger and trimmer, but then her ghost could reflect her past self. Jean had been in her eighties when she died, but she usually appeared to me as a woman in her thirties.

  “Hello,” I whispered. “Is there something you want to say to me?”

  The figure stood over a row of trash cans set against the fence. It turned to look at me, and I saw that she was the epitome of a fifties housewife from an old television commercial, right down to her ruffled apron over a full-skirted dress. “I can’t seem to find him,” the ghost said.

  “Find who?” I asked.

  “My son. I know he’s out here.”

  This was definitely not the ghost I was expecting, but it sounded like there was a story here, even if it was an old one. “What happened to your son?” I asked.

  “I can’t find him. I’m sure he did something to him and put him out here. I have to find him. I should have saved him.” She moved like she was lifting the lids of the row of trash cans, peering inside, though she didn’t affect the cans that were actually there

  I started to ask a question, but she seemed to see something in one of the phantom trash cans, wailed, and disappeared. It was a hot night, still unpleasantly warm even after sundown, but I shivered and goosebumps rose on my arms. I rubbed my arms as though trying to warm them on a cold day.

  “Is there anyone else out there?” I asked warily. I probably didn’t give any other ghosts enough time to respond before I hurried back to my car and shut the door. Something about that woman had really given me the creeps. I was torn between wanting to look up whatever had happened with her and not wanting to think about her at all because the truth was probably pretty disturbing.

  When I got home, I scooped a bowl of ice cream and covered it with chocolate sauce, then took it to the living room and turned on the TV, finding the sappiest romantic comedy movie that was currently airing. It was going to take some effort to get the look of despair on that ghost’s face out of my mind so I could sleep without nightmares.

  It didn’t take much brainpower to follow the plot—the typical story of the woman returning to her hometown to save her family business and running into the guy she’d liked in high school, who was conveniently still (or again) single—so I found myself pondering the case I was working on. Tonight’s excursion wasn’t absolute proof that Florrie was still alive, but I figured that if her ghost had appeared in the middle of a crowd in broad daylight, she’d have turned up at night. If she was alive and if that was who I’d seen, then I didn’t think she was in danger. She’d watched her husband get busted and hadn’t stepped forward to clear him of suspicion. Had she been behind this all along?

  She probably had the keys to her husband’s car, so she could have put her own purse, shoe, and earring in there. She could even have smeared the blood so that someone would take a closer look at the trunk. Was she trying to frame him for her murder? It wouldn’t do much good if she turned out to still be alive, and eventually someone was bound to notice that she was. Or was this her way of faking her own death so she could start a new life, and setting up her husband to take the fall, while she was at it?

  Okay, that was an extreme way to create a narrative out of the meager facts. Even I had to admit that. But if she was still alive and okay, I was going to look pretty silly when she was found after all my efforts to convince the police she’d disappeared and was in trouble if I wasn’t the one who found her.

  The key to solving this was to find out where she was staying before the police did. I’d have to double down on pursuing that angle—when I wasn’t getting a newspaper written.

  I couldn’t devote much time to figuring out where Florrie was the next day because it was the day of the school district’s kick-off luncheon. I could probably have written the story without attending, since it was bound to be the usual rah-rah speech from the superintendent about having the best school year ever, but my job was as much about public relations as it was about actually writing, and being present at the event demonstrated my commitment to the community. My absence would have been noted.

  Therefore, I was dressed up in one of Jean’s vintage suits, which made me feel like the sassy girl reporter in an old movie, and sitting at one of the front tables in the junior high school’s cafetorium while I took notes on the speeches. I was mostly taking notes to force myself to focus instead of zoning out and pondering the problem of Florrie. I was only partially successful.

  If her luncheon hadn’t been canceled, would Florrie have come to Stirling Mills later, or would she merely have driven back and then returned? Her home was less than half an hour away. In city terms, that would just be an average drive across town. Would she have been reported missing earlier if the luncheon had happened and she hadn’t shown up? People who worked with her regularly might have had more of a case than a reporter she’d met once.

  I jerked my attention back to the event I was attending when a round of applause indicated that the high school principal had quit speaking. I hoped she hadn’t said anything truly newsworthy that I’d missed. So far, this event had gone exactly the way I’d expected it to. The story I would have written without attending wouldn’t have been very different from the story I’d write after attending. Before the next speech, the servers—members of a high school service organization—brought around the dessert, a peach cobbler that smelled divine. I wondered if this was standard cafeteria fare or something made especially for this occasion. As usual at luncheons, they offered coffee with dessert, discriminating against tea drinkers. I had my usual stash of tea bags in my purse, but I didn’t think it was worth the effort to try to get someone to bring me boiling water that didn’t taste like weak coffee. I could have a proper cup when I got back to the office.

  Once the dessert and coffee had been served, the superintendent got up to speak. I started taking notes before she opened her mouth—the children are our future, best school year ever, blah, blah, blah. But instead of speaking, she began singing in a rich contralto voice. I didn’t recognize the song, so it might have been original. It did say something about children and school. I started recording on my phone because this was definitely different. After the first verse, students appeared from the wings, singing backup. Then members of the marching band entered from the rear of the room. By the end of the song, the superintendent had urged the teachers to stand and join in the chorus. The whole thing gave me the good kind of chills. I wasn’t a teacher, and I wanted to run out and educate the masses.

  Now I had a story, something fresh and unexpected, something I’d have missed if I’d assumed what would happen and skipped the event. There was an object lesson in there. I’d need to interview the superintendent about how it all came about and the work that went into the musical flash mob. Would that be a sidebar to the story about the luncheon or the focus of the main story? A sidebar could highlight the various student groups involved. The singers looked like they ranged from elementary to high school, so the whole district had participated.

  “How was the lunch?” Charlene asked when I got back to the office after interviewing as many people as I could get to.

  “The lunch itself wasn’t bad. Is that cobbler the sort of thing they serve all the time?”

  She chuckled. “Heavens, no. What they do isn’t terrible, but you got the good food. They make it with canned peaches during the school year.” I got the impression from her tone and expression that using canned peaches was some kind of sin. �
�And I bet the speeches haven’t changed since my day.”

  “Did they sing them in your day?”

  “Oh, Doctor Baker did her thing?”

  “Her, the combined school choirs, and the marching band. What’s she doing running a school district with a voice like that? She could be on stage at the Met.”

  “She’s a soloist in our church choir. She can sing, but education is her real passion.”

  I took off my dashing fedora and poured myself a cup of real tea. “You know, if I’d thought about it, I should have sent you to cover this. You have a better background in that area.” Charlene was a former teacher who’d quit to raise a family and now had gone back to work to get out of the house.

  She shook her head. “Uh huh. You don’t pay me enough to send me back to school. Besides, I wouldn’t be objective enough to cover it.” She stood and picked up her purse. “And now that you’re back, I’m off to lunch. Oh, there was a message for you. I left it on your desk.”

  “Thanks. And take your time. I was gone long enough that I owe you for having to take a late lunch.”

  “My husband’s cooking for me, so I may need that extra time.”

  When she was gone, I sat at my desk and looked at the message slip she’d left for me. It was from the editor of the paper in the town where Florrie lived. I was sure he was calling to talk about that situation, but I wondered what, exactly, he wanted from me. With some trepidation, I picked up the phone and called the number he’d left. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,” he said when he answered and I identified myself.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  “I’m sure you know about our missing person.”

  “Yes, I’m aware there’s an investigation going on,” I said, fighting to keep my tone neutral. I wondered how much he knew about my involvement.

  “I was curious how you’re planning to handle it. I mean, is it a story yet?”

  “It’ll depend on where things stand by the time I go to press Thursday evening. If she’s still missing then, I’ll run a missing person notice. Everything else relating to the case sounds more like gossip at this point.”

  “You’ve got until Thursday? Lucky. I publish on Thursdays, so I have to get to the printer tonight, and that means things are likely to change by the time anyone sees this issue.” I was fortunate that Jean had invested her personal fortune in her paper, leaving a foundation that helped cover operating expenses and making sure we had our own press. That gave me a lot more flexibility.

  “You’re probably better off calling the police directly to get the latest,” I said. “Lieutenant Mosby is your best source at the police department.”

  “Yeah, I’ve talked to him. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming.” He’d definitely talked to Wes, then. “You don’t have anything else? Nothing about this husband being up to something shady?”

  “I don’t run a gossip rag, so I don’t report on husbands being shady. Right now, there’s no real evidence that there even was a crime, so I’m not going to take any chances and run any allegations. At best, the husband is a person of interest.”

  “Oh well, it was worth a shot. I just wanted to make sure we’re not contradicting each other. And it’s not as though we’re directly competing, so maybe we should share info.”

  “If I hear anything definite before your deadline, I’ll let you know.”

  “Same here.”

  “Don’t tell me some other editor is trying to horn in on your story,” Jean said, materializing next to my desk as I hung up.

  “We’re not direct competitors,” I said. “That paper is a good thirty miles away, and we probably don’t have any subscriber overlap.” Now that I thought about it, it could help during slow news weeks to do some kind of reporting exchange and call it regional news. I jotted a note on the message slip to remind me of the idea.

  “Did he know anything about your missing woman?”

  “Not that he shared. And I didn’t tell him anything, either.”

  She draped herself across my guest chair. “You’re not willing to blame the husband?”

  “No, I don’t think so. There’s something that doesn’t sit right there. The clues are all a little too obvious—the car left near the girlfriend’s house with blood conveniently smeared near the door handle. The obvious blood on the husband’s car. One shoe, one earring, a purse, and rope in the trunk. You might as well put up a sign saying, ‘The cheating husband did away with her!’ I’m sure that’s what we were expected to think. It’s all just enough evidence to get him questioned and expose his affair, but probably not enough to get the husband actually arrested. If he had killed her he’d have to be the dumbest criminal ever to abandon her car near his girlfriend’s house instead of off in the middle of nowhere, and if he was dumping the body, why not dump the shoe and the purse there?”

  “You know what it sounds like to me? Agatha Christie.”

  I frowned. “I don’t remember that book, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read them all.”

  “Not a book. Her life. Her husband told her he was divorcing her for another woman and went to one of those country house parties with that woman. Then Agatha disappeared. Her car was found near where the husband was with his mistress. He was questioned and the whole area was searched. It was in all the newspapers—the bestselling mystery novelist who disappeared. Someone finally spotted her at a nearby spa hotel, where she was registered under a different name. She said she was distraught and didn’t realize what was going on, but I always figured that lady knew how to plot, and she’d cleverly set it up to drag her husband through the mud. Thanks to her disappearance, everyone knew about her husband and the other woman. There was no chance of a discreet divorce.”

  I could feel the pieces of the puzzle snapping together in my head. “You know, that’s the one explanation for all this that adds up,” I said, wrapping my hands around the tea mug and inhaling the vapor. Something about the smell of tea made me think more clearly. “She leaves her car—and her phone, so she can’t be tracked—near her husband’s girlfriend’s house and goes to hide out at the place she’s house-sitting. She’s not at a hotel, so her credit card can’t be traced. Then she disappears and waits for someone to notice. She probably has the keys to her husband’s car, so it would be easy to dump some of her things in there to be found. Once she’s sure everyone knows what her husband’s been up to, she can reappear and claim she’s been off the grid and blissfully unaware of all the fuss. I’m not sure how she’d explain her belongings being in the trunk. That may have been a desperation move when no one seemed to be doing anything. I don’t know that it would be a crime, though. She has legitimate access to the car, and putting her belongings in a family car isn’t a crime. She hasn’t filed any kind of false report. It’s just other people filling in the blanks and coming to their own conclusions.” And I’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  “If that’s what she’s done, hats off to the lady. I admire a good vengeance scheme.”

  “I bet her original plan was to not show for that luncheon so the people she worked with would notice she was missing, but then they cancelled it. I was probably her plan B.” I shook my head and sighed. “She wasn’t excited about being interviewed. She was excited about having something she was expected for that she could skip and someone would notice so she’d be reported missing. I bet she was getting really frustrated when nothing seemed to be happening. It’s rather sad, when you think about it, that she could vanish for so long without anyone noticing.”

  “But you.”

  “Yeah, and I played right into the scheme because I couldn’t resist connecting the dots to make up my own story, the way I thought it should go. If that’s what’s going on. It’s just as neat a story as every other theory I’ve had, and I have even less evidence than for any of my other theories. If I go to Wes with this, he’ll laugh me out of town. I’ve already told him too many tales.”

  “Then you know what you need, don’t yo
u?”

  “Proof. I need to find Florrie.” And I wanted to do so before anyone else did. If I was going to be wrong about all my earlier assumptions, I wanted to be the one proving myself wrong.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I still felt the best way to find Florrie was to find where she was house-sitting. I’d already knocked on the doors of most of the houses in that neighborhood without any luck. I couldn’t expect Florrie to come to the door while she was playing missing and waiting for her husband to get in trouble. In the jurisdiction of the town’s most active neighborhood watch, I didn’t dare peer over all the back fences, looking for her. If I was going to climb a fence and catch Florrie lounging by the pool, I needed to be sure I was at the right house first.

  That call from the other editor gave me an idea. I wondered if Hugo’s company knew anything about what was going on. If Hugo had a secretary, she might be clued in to his life. Hugo struck me as the kind of guy whose secretary managed his life for him and arranged things in cooperation with his wife. She probably booked his travel, made his reservations, took care of his calendar, and bought gifts for his family. Florrie had said something about him running an alarm company, so I looked up alarm companies in that town. There was just the one, and it was called Marz Alarms, which was a pretty good sign. I called from my personal cell phone so the newspaper name wouldn’t show up on caller ID.

  A woman with a deep Texas drawl answered the phone. Since I wasn’t planning to quote her in the paper, I decided I didn’t need to be up front about who I was. “Hi, I’d like to speak to Hugo Marz, please,” I said.

  “I’m afraid Mister Marz is out of the office this week,” she said.

  “Oh, is he at Alarm Expo in Vegas? I should have realized that.”

  “Nooo,” she said, dragging out the vowel. “You know, it’s funny, his wife thought he was going, but if he made any plans, they weren’t through me, and I make all his travel arrangements. I’m not sure where he is. I only know he’s taking some personal time.”