The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke)

by Rickards, John

  Someone had been here recently, though not the person I’d been chasing; the prints were different. There was a narrow line of flattened grass and crushed snow running along the edge of the lawn, close to the hotel wall. It was too dark to see how many people had been this way. It could’ve been nothing, tourists or kids from town, hiking round the lake so they can check out the ghost town. I went to see where they led anyway.

  The trail of trampled foliage ran for forty yards or so. The weeds growing in what used to be the hotel's gardens were high, even bowed down with the snow. Without looking straight down the gap they’d made you’d never have known anyone had been this way. I walked along the edge of the snow-blurred patch of indistinct plants, trees and God knew what else. Kept catching glimpses of what looked like blurred dark movement from the corners of my eyes, probably nothing more than deeper shadows or folds in the icy blanket that covered the area, seeming to shift as I trudged along. The old hotel smelled of damp and decay. After passing a half dozen high Victorian windows, all darkened, the tracks stopped at the building’s old back doors. These had once been glass set in wooden frames, now boarded over. There was no lock on them.

  As my fingers touched the cracked wooden surface, I heard a whispering, hissing noise. The treeline that bordered the hotel lawn came alive. Shadows slipped from the darkness between the boughs to the periphery of the lighter open ground before fading back to the trees. They were hard to make out, but they were a variety of shapes and sizes, some as big as people, others smaller like kids or animals. The black shapes writhed slickly on the edge of the clearing, keeping up a low, sibilant murmur, and they seemed totally, utterly real in that moment.

  I didn't run. I slowly took my hand off the door, then backed carefully away to the road with my teeth gritted and heart racing. The primal part of my head feared the things and the rational, sane part said that having hallucinations after a head injury was a bad sign and that if my battered brain wanted to start playing shadow puppets with the scenery, nothing I saw could be relied upon and it was time to head home before I froze to death or passed out.

  I wasn’t sure of the way I’d come, but the tire marks had to lead to the road, so that was the way I went. The hissing from the trees dogged me some way, but I kept my eyes on the path and the noise had stopped by the time I reached the frozen blacktop of Route 100. I vaguely recognized the spot from my hike out to the site of Gemma’s murder. I hadn’t paid any attention to the narrow track then. I was less than a mile from home.

  Adrenaline had turned sour and my head was pounding by the time I crossed the Bleakwater River and the silent town above it. I saw no one and no one saw me. When I reached Gemma’s I searched the entire house as best I could, trying to figure out what the intruder had been after, whether they’d taken anything. Not a clue. They’d broken in through the door to the kitchen and I could still see the tracks they’d left in the back yard. One set, cutting through the snow. Once I was done I threw up, took some tylenol, then bedded down on the couch with an icepack for company on the short march to dawn.

  14.

  Tourist Goes Missing

  LAMOILLE COUNTY

  Authorities are searching for a tourist reported missing while hiking in the area between Belvidere and Windover mountains. According to a statement from Lamoille County Sheriff's Department, Stephanie Markham, 20, was last seen three days ago heading north on Route 100 near the town of Bleakwater Ridge, where she was staying with relatives. Anyone who may have seen Markham, described as having short brown hair, 5’ 4” and weighing 100lbs, should contact the LCSD.

  Morning at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. After a first-thing visit to the hospital to get my head checked out — skull intact, brain shaken but reasonably intact, painkillers prescribed and duly taken — I was running through archived copies of the Burlington Free Press from two years ago. The stories I was interested in started small, becoming larger and more important as time passed. Each concerned the fate of Ed Markham's granddaughter. I still hadn't followed up the idea Ehrlich had planted with me and listened to Gemma's last voicemail again. I hadn’t felt up to it. Maybe, I thought, in the evening.

  Hunt Continues For Missing Hiker

  LAMOILLE COUNTY

  Police and civilian volunteers are still searching for missing hiker Stephanie Markham, 20, in northern Lamoille County. The search, led by officers of the Lamoille County Sheriff's Department, has so far found no sign of the woman. LCSD spokesman Sergeant Ken Radford said: 'As yet we have been unable to find any trace of Stephanie Markham on the listed trails in the area she was known to be heading for. We will be widening our search area with the assistance of Orleans County Sheriff's Department and volunteers, and we have every hope of finding her. Stephanie was an experienced hiker and knew the area well.’ Searchers were yesterday concentrating on trails near Broken Gap, the site of a number of accidents in the past. Stephanie is described as 5' 4", 100lbs, with short brown hair. When last seen she was wearing a red shirt and jeans, and was carrying a dark blue backpack.

  The next story carried a photo of Stephanie, a picture taken with what looked like college friends. It was grainy, but enough to put a slim, pretty face to the name. She seemed happy, grinning broadly for the camera. By the time the story ran it had been five days since anyone had seen her alive.

  State Police To Help Hunt For Markham

  by Elijah Charman

  The State Police have taken over the search for missing hiker Stephanie Markham, last seen near the town of Bleakwater Ridge in Lamoille County. Three days of searching by police and volunteers in Lamoille and neighboring Orleans counties have failed to find any trace of the missing 20-year-old. Detective Sergeant Karl Flint, in charge of the State Police effort, said Stephanie was still being treated as missing, and the possibility of her being abducted or murdered would not be considered while there was still hope of finding her alive.

  'I will not speculate on other possible scenarios at the present time,' he said. 'We owe it to her and her family to keep up the search. If she has been in an accident, if she is lying somewhere, unable to move, she would not want us to abandon the hunt or be distracted by wild guesses as to what may have happened. As far as I am concerned, Stephanie Markham is still alive, and she's out there somewhere in need of our help.’

  Detective Flint went on to thank the Lamoille and Orleans county sheriff's departments for their work, and said that since their search of the lowland countryside and mountain trails in the area she was last seen have proved fruitless, the State Police effort would be concentrated further afield.

  Sources in the VSP suggest that police search teams are working on the theory that Stephanie may have tried to reach the Long Trail where it passes west of Belvidere Mountain, but became lost or had an accident. They will also be checking the areas around the trail for several miles north and south.

  Stephanie had been staying in the town of Bleakwater Ridge with her grandfather, local resident Edward Markham. Mr Markham was unavailable for comment yesterday, but friends said they were helping him cope with his granddaughter's disappearance and that they were praying for her safe return.

  I wondered whether anyone else had noticed Flint's self-contradiction. He hadn’t wanted to follow ‘wild guesses’ about her whereabouts, but jumped straight on the Long Trail theory. Maybe the State Police had had access to information not in the press report, and that's what had sent them haring all over the mountains.

  Four days after the last article, there was one final piece on the story, further from the front page than before.

  VSP Launch Flyer Campaign For Missing Hiker

  by Elijah Charman

  The State Police are printing flyers of missing hiker Stephanie Markham in the hope of turning up fresh information. Search teams have found no trace of the 20-year-old despite scouring the area in which she was last seen.

  Detective Sergeant Karl Flint said: 'We'll be distributing flyers with Stephanie's photo and description a
ll over the northern half of the state in the hope of jogging people's memories. We're hoping someone saw her after she left the town of Bleakwater Ridge and maybe they can shed light on her whereabouts.’

  The VSP had been concentrating on a section of the Long Trail until yesterday morning, when the hunt was scaled down. Officials would not comment on the chances of finding Stephanie alive.

  I copied down the phone number of the paper’s editorial department and hoped that Elijah Charman still worked there. If anyone knew any details that weren't in the stories, it’d be him. Or Flint, but I didn’t rate my chances of getting information out of him.

  As luck had it, Elijah Charman not only still worked at the Press, he was also in town and free to meet me for coffee. I was on my third double espresso and starting to get a little buzzed when the journalist bustled in, round and swaddled in bright winter clothing like a beach ball topped with a pudgy bald head beneath a woolen hat. He shed several layers and eventually sat opposite. I asked him what he wanted to drink.

  “Large chocolate with vanilla,” he said, then sneezed. "Sorry, think I'm going down with a touch of flu.”

  I placed the order. Said, “Right time of year for it.”

  “So you're interested in Stephanie Markham, Mr Rourke. What's a private detective from Boston want with a two-year-old missing persons case? I wouldn't have thought your agency did much work up here.”

  “I’m a friend of Ed Markham,” I told him. It was a slight exaggeration, but not an outright lie. “Someone told me what happened to his granddaughter and I thought there was a chance it was connected to a case I'm working on, so I'm checking it out.”

  Elijah's chocolate arrived. “You're lucky I don't often trash my notes. Without them to push my memory, I wouldn't have much to say that you wouldn't already have read. Not that there's a lot worth adding, I should warn you.”

  “So warned.”

  He pulled a wad of folded paper out of his coat and started skimming over the ballpoint scribbles that covered the pages. “Let's see... I don't think there was anything much on the actual disappearance that wasn't in the paper. The last person to see Stephanie alive was a woman called Brenda Ingledow; all she could really give us for a quote was, ‘Yup, I saw a young woman walk up the highway past my house about ten in the morning,’ so we left her out of the story. I got her name from an officer at the Sheriff's Department. No one around town knew Stephanie. There were some who knew the grandfather, though, and that she was staying with him for a couple of weeks.” He flicked forward, running his finger quickly over the near-illegible text as he took an absentminded sip of his drink. “Everyone I spoke to reckoned the police had done a fair job of checking all the local trails. There were quite a few of them thought she might have fallen from some place called Broken Gap. I've no idea where it is, but it seemed to be about the only place people routinely have accidents and such in the area.”

  “One of the stories said the LCSD checked it out.”

  Elijah nodded and momentarily brought his wandering finger to a halt, tapping on one section of notes. “That's right,” he said. “They didn't find anything. I got the impression at the time it was pretty much guesswork, looking for her there.”

  “What happened once the State Police took over?”

  “About the same, really. They made a big speech about doing things right, then took off on a wild goose chase up in the mountains. By the time they'd finished with that, she'd been gone for a week and almost no one was expecting to see her alive again. Not unless she'd gone somewhere else on her own, run away, but that didn't seem likely. So they packed up the search.”

  So I hadn’t been the only one to notice the contradiction between Flint's words and his actions. “I’m surprised there wasn't any criticism of the search effort at the time,” I said.

  “I was planning to write some, but my editor said he didn't want it, not while the cops had more important things to deal with, so I left it. Then, by the time they'd given up and forgotten her, I'm afraid she just wasn't news any more.” I gestured for another double espresso and Elijah raised his eyebrows. “You want to go easy on that stuff, man. Looks like you're missing enough sleep as it is.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You don't just have bags under your eyes, you've got a whole set of matched luggage and a trolley to carry it around on.”

  “You wouldn't believe some of the nights I've had. Did the police ever say why they thought Stephanie might have gone up to the Long Trail?”

  “I spoke to a woman called—” the finger skipped to a different piece of paper “—Detective Saric. She said they'd had a call from someone who thought they might have seen a girl like her heading up that way, and that the description was a fair match. I guess that was as good a lead as they'd got.”

  “She was one of the cops in charge?”

  “There were two detectives running the show, but most of the work was done by state troopers. The other detective, Flint, told me off the record that the search was mostly public relations. Looking for one person in an area that big and that empty without any clue where to go was impossible, but they had to make it look good for the cameras.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” Elijah drained the rest of his chocolate and smacked his lips. Then he brought a second bundle of paper out of his pocket and looked at me. “You said you thought Stephanie Markham might be related to a case of yours?”

  “That's right.”

  “I don't suppose you can tell me what case it is you're talking about?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No matter. It's just that I've brought along some other stuff I gathered at the time Stephanie went missing. About a year before, there was a couple from Minnesota on a hiking holiday in foliage season. Last time anyone heard from them, they were just leaving Jay Peak State Forest, heading south to Hazen's Notch and beyond.”

  He slid across a couple of photocopied photos. It was barely possible to make out their faces such was the quality of the pictures.

  “Will and Althea Haley,” he said. “At the time, there wasn't much publicity — nothing like Stephanie Markham; pretty white girl syndrome — and it was a couple of weeks before anyone wondered where they'd got to; a car rental place in Waterbury called their family when they didn't pick up their Volvo. The only reason anyone knew where they'd last been was because they’d phoned Haley's sister to tell her. State Police posted them as missing, but that was about it. I think the cops back in Minnesota had a look to see if there was any reason they might want to disappear; I don't know what became of that.”

  I thumbed through the sparse information Elijah had collected on the missing couple. “Why didn't this get brought up when Stephanie vanished?”

  “Technically, they went missing in Orleans County, maybe Franklin, but as far as the way the statistics and everything is organized, definitely not from the same area as Stephanie. I thought of writing a piece on them, linking the two together, but I couldn't get nearly enough information to make it worthwhile. You're welcome to keep these copies of what I got, if you're interested.”

  “Sure, sure. Thanks, I appreciate the help.”

  “No problem.” Elijah waved a hand dismissively. “If you want to know any more about all this, you'd be best off talking to the State Police.”

  “I’m planning to. Do you remember who it was who was technically in charge of the Haley case?”

  He shook his head and pulled his hat back on. “Afraid not. If there's anything still posted about them anywhere, it might say who to contact.”

  “Maybe so.” Then something stirred in my head and I didn’t know if it was to do with Gemma or some vestige of professionalism connected to finding Adam Webb. “One last thing,” I said. “You know Burlington much better than I do. Where would I go if I was looking for a cheap bar where I might find out if anyone's offering casual work, or maybe to meet a couple of small-time criminals? Or if I wanted somewhere cheap and anonymous to call h
ome for a while, where would be the best bet?”

  He thought for a long moment, then said, “You might try the Mountain Bar on Patrick. Or there's the Hart, and Cavanagh's. There'll all pretty rough places. As for accommodation, there's not much to choose from. Maybe some of the newer developments in South Burlington, but most of those still wouldn't be cheap. There’s a couple of low-rent apartment blocks and boarding houses that advertise in the classifieds. The kind of places where you can get a room for thirty bucks a week so long as you don’t mind sharing a bathroom with everyone else on your floor and a bedroom with every form of parasite known to man.”

  “Classy.”

  “I can't remember where they are exactly, but they shouldn’t be hard to find. I don't know much about cheap motels. I guess you could try asking around the train station in Essex Junction — there must be plenty of people get into town and need somewhere to stay for a while.”

  “Thanks, I might do that.”

  “Another story?”

  “Maybe. Or another missing person,” I said. “Or maybe one day I’ll need a way to disappear myself.”

  “I’d have thought that would be easier in Boston.”

  “You’d think. But wherever you go, people never seem to have a hard time just up and vanishing into the blue if they try hard enough.”