When I first met Mary, more than fifteen years ago now, she was a thin woman, with clear blue eyes, a wide, welcoming grin, and a temper that flared into a frown and nothing more. Normally her skin was pale, accentuated by the bright colors of the plaid dresses she always wore. But when she got angry a bright red flush took over her face and made her skin splotchy, like she had some bad sickness.
I was about Mary’s age, pushing the wrong side of sixty like it was a heavy wheelbarrow too full of my life to move. Why I thought of her as a friend I’ll never know, but I did, and she sometimes beamed a little when she saw me. My wife had died eight years ago of the cancer, and her husband was long gone and she never mentioned him. Just like me she had had no children, and considering what a prude she was, that didn’t surprise me.
Up here in the Idaho wilds, where the snow was six foot deep in the winter and the dust three inches thick in the summer, we sort of leaned on each other. And to be honest, I liked that. And I liked her.
The last day of July started out just like any other day, with the highway running logging trucks off the Sand Creek section down to the mill below Idaho City. All of the drivers knew Mary, knew Mary’s place, but just never had the time or the thought of stopping. Those big trucks, even loaded, roared by at upwards of forty, leaving large clouds of dust to cover everything in the narrow valley behind them. After a few weeks of no rain and dust from the trucks going and coming, everything around Mary’s place looked gray.
Even when I went through the front door and banged it closed, I sent a thin cloud of dust into the air.
Mary during the summer was always in a constant battle with the dust, and since the logging started, this summer was even worse. Since there were no cars in the gravel parking area, I expected her to be madly dusting some part of the restaurant.
But when I went in Mary was sitting at the counter, her head down, like it was too heavy for her neck to hold up right. I moved up beside her and sat down. I hadn’t seen her sit at the counter in all the years I had known her. Usually when she rested she sat at the table near the old jukebox, waiting for a customer to come in, or trying to get up enough energy to clean something.
She always tried to keep a fresh pot of coffee going to keep the smell nice in the place, but today the restaurant just felt hot and dusty.
Mary’s Cafe never felt hot and dusty. I knew right then that something was wrong.
“You need to kick up the air conditioning a little,” I said.
She didn’t move or even say anything, so I asked, “You all right?”
She still didn’t move so I did something that never would have occurred to me with Mary at any other time. I touched her shoulder.
She sort of tipped real slowly and went over sideways.
Now at my age I don’t move real fast, and I didn’t move fast enough to catch her as she tumbled to the floor, hitting with a sick thumping sound.
I went to one knee and moved her gently over so I could see into her face. The moment I touched her I knew it wouldn’t matter. She was cold and dead, her eyes open and staring at nothing.
“Shit, Mary,” I said, swearing in a place that I had never spoken a swear word in before. “What happened?”
I wasn’t expecting an answer, but I half expected Mary to sit up and just scold me for using foul language.
But I think she might even find it in her heart to excuse my one swear word. I was seeing the only friend I had in these damn woods laying dead on the old tile floor. The idea of Mary being dead just sort of took my breath away.
I made her look a little more comfortable even though I knew it made no difference at all to her. And I felt odd not taking her off the floor, because Mary would have never spent any time on the floor. But I left her there anyway, because I would have felt even odder touching her to pick her up and move her.
I went into the back and got her best tablecloth that she kept stored there for special occasions. I figured her passing on was about as special as it got.
As I put the tablecloth over her face I heard her voice from behind me. “Real nice of you.”
I spun around to see her sitting there at her table by the old jukebox, just like she always did.
I stared at her, then back at the body under the tablecloth on the floor. My old brain was just not working today it seemed.
“Wish you hadn’t used my good tablecloth though,” she said. “One of the old white ones would have worked just fine. Now you’ve gone and got that one dusty from the floor.”
This time I slowly looked up at where she sat at the table. She was there all right. Or more likely, her ghost was there. The ghost was wearing the same exact thing the body was. And the ghost was talking to me.
At that moment, to be honest, I thought my old heart might just up and stop.
“You’re dead,” I said.
Not a real bright thing to say, but under the circumstances, it was the only thing I was thinking about.
“No kidding,” she said, sort of smiling at me like she always did when she humored me. “Hurt like all get out for a minute. I must have burst a few blood vessels in my head.”
She pointed at the counter. “The headache came on so fast that I sat down there at the counter and don’t remember another thing until you started covering my body with my best tablecloth.”
I glanced at the body, then back at her sitting at the table.
“So,” I said, glancing once more at the body and then moving over and sitting at my normal spot at the counter on the end where I could talk to her sitting at the table. “How come you haven’t, you know, passed on yet?”
“I don’t honestly know,” she said, shaking her head and looking very puzzled as if I had asked the most difficult question ever thought up. “Maybe it takes a while for the next life to find me way up here in the mountains.”
“Could be,” I said. No chance I was going to argue with a ghost, so just agreeing seemed to be my best choice.
She smiled at me. I always enjoyed when she smiled at me. I missed the companionship of a woman, and Mary was the closest thing I ever got to that now. Or had been.
“Maybe I’m doomed for all eternity to sit and talk to you.”
She was still smiling, letting me know she was joking. Mary’s jokes were always light and very seldom funny.
“So you’re not upset at dying?” I asked, glancing back to make sure her body was still right there on the floor where I’d left it.
“Of course I’m upset,” she said, shaking her head at me. “I had been looking forward to cleaning up after another day of dust from the logging trucks, and sitting in this place for ten hours without more than five or six customers.”
“Oh,” I said. I said that a lot with Mary, especially when she tried to be sarcastic.
She patted her chest lightly with her age-worn right hand. “I think I have heartburn. And my stomach’s acting up again.”
I stared at her for a moment, not really understanding what she had said.
“Would you mind getting me that bottle of Tums back there by the Coke machine. For some reason I don’t think I can leave this spot.” She shrugged. “Not sure why I know that. Just do.”
I got up and grabbed the bottle of Tums and sort of eased myself toward the table where Mary’s ghost sat.
“Don’t be worrying about me biting you,” she said, smiling. “I have never heard of a ghost biting anyone, have you?”
I couldn’t say that I had, but I still didn’t much like taking any chances. I slid the bottle onto the table and moved back to my stool.
I needed to be calling Sheriff Andrews about Mary. It would take him a good half hour to get up here from Idaho City as it was, but instead I sat down. Even though she was a ghost, talking to her was a lot better than not talking to her, especially when this might be the last time I could ever do it.
Mary tried to pick up the bottle of Tums and her hand went right through it. She tried twice more before saying, “I suppose that’s
not going to work.”
“Heartburn that bad?” I asked.
“Like a bad case of chilly,” she said, pressing her chest. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if this gets any worse.”
Suddenly she just up and burped.
A good one, too. It echoed around the empty restaurant.
I stared at her in complete shock as she turned bright red and covered her mouth. In all my years I could have never imagined Mary letting out a belch like that.
I started to laugh and she just got redder.
But she was also lighter, more see-through, more ghost-like.
“Oh, please pardon me,” she said. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“You being dead might be a fairly large part of the problem.”
I didn’t tell her the burp had changed her as well. She was just too embarrassed to stand any other news. And clearly, from the way her hand pressed against her stomach, the heartburn was still bothering her.
“I need to be calling the sheriff,” I said. “Mind if I use your phone?”
She pointed to the antique dial phone on the back wall. “Be my guest. I don’t think I’m going to be worrying about the bill at this point.”
I moved around the counter and toward the phone as she burped again.
I pretended not to notice, but when I glanced back at her she had gotten a little lighter, a little more see-through.
I spent the next minute telling the sheriff about finding Mary, and promising I would stay right where I was until he got there.
I hung up the phone and looked back at Mary, who was considerably lighter still. She must have been burping those little hiccup-like burps that tight women like Mary used in polite company.
Just as I was sitting back down she covered her mouth and gave out another little one, her face getting even redder.
“I’m really sorry I’m burping like this,” she said. “Guess death just isn’t good on the stomach, and you know how uneasy my stomach can be at times.”
Everyone in the valley, and even some of the tourists who stopped by, knew about Mary’s stomach, and all her problems with the doctors down in Boise, and how they wouldn’t do anything for her to help. The worst fear many locals in the valley had was being trapped in Mary’s place for dinner when she didn’t have a tourist or two. Then all you heard about was her stomach problems.
She covered her mouth again and burped lightly. Again she sort of faded a little.
Finally, after a few more small burps, she sort of stared at her hand for a moment and then shrugged. “Guess I’m slowly going on to the next life.”
“One burp at a time,” I said.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Every time you burp you get a little lighter.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, shaking her head. “I just have a horrible case of heartburn is all.”
“You want to say anything about impossible?” I asked. I pointed at her body on the floor. “I’m sitting here talking to you while your body is stretched out on the tile. I know for a fact that isn’t possible either.”
She nodded. “I suppose that’s true, but I just don’t see how my burping is moving me any closer to heaven.”
“A good belch can sometimes be heaven,” I said, then instantly regretted being so crude to Mary.
“I suppose,” she said, actually seeming to think about what I had said.
I could tell she was in some pretty intense discomfort, and no matter how hard she tried, after a moment she covered her mouth with a see-through hand and burped softly again.
Again she faded a little more.
“You know,” I said, “maybe this burping is just God’s way of having people get the last of their earthly bodies out of their system before moving on. Sort of a letting go of the pressure thing.”
Mary looked at me and then half nodded. “I suppose, but it just doesn’t seem right that the stomach problems I had all during my life would go with me into the next.”
“Maybe they’re not,” I said. “Maybe that heartburn you’re feeling is the old problems wanting to leave you. Maybe a few more good belches and you’ll be free to move on into the next world.”
As crazy at it sounded, I actually seemed to be making sense to Mary.
“So you think I should just go ahead and let it all out?” she asked, clearly uncomfortable with the idea.
“I’m the only one here, and I won’t think any the less of you if you do. A couple of good belches and off you go to heaven.”
Even as a ghost, Mary’s face turned bright red with my comment. But I could tell the pain in her stomach was getting worse and she was thinking about it.
Finally she nodded and took a deep breath and looked at me. “You’ve always been a wonderful friend. If this works and I move on, I just wanted you to know that.”
I could feel a little moisture sort of building up in my eyes with her statement. I swallowed and then said, “You’ve been a great friend to me. The valley is going to seem empty without you.”
She nodded, a tear in her eye.
Then she sort of squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and without even covering her mouth, let out the longest and loudest belch I had heard outside of the army.
I wanted to cheer her.
For an instant there, before she disappeared completely, while that huge rolling belch came out of her mouth, she seemed so free, so unencumbered by all the rules she had lived by.
She had finally let go.
As the last memory of her belch echoed through the insides of her diner, I suddenly understood that she was gone.
Really gone.
Only her body remained behind me on the floor.
I put my head down on the counter top and just sat there, trying not to think about how empty my future was going to be. She had been my best friend, a prudish woman who strived to always do everything just right, keep everything clean, keep me on the straight and narrow, yet she was still a good friend.
I had to admit that it was ironic that Mary, a woman who had owned and run a restaurant her entire life, went out in a burp.
Granted, it was one hell of a burp.
I stared at the empty chair at the table where Mary always sat. I was going to miss her more than I could imagine. She had been a very good woman.
Not a great woman, just a very good one.
But I still had no doubt they had heard that burp all the way to heaven.
GUTTER
Her sunglasses hang
from her ears directly under her chin
like a gutter
to catch and filter
through dark glass
any stray word
or stray crumb.
She slips them on
to look back in time
shocked by
all the wrong words
she said
or unhealthy food
she ate.
She would be better served
carrying the sunglasses
in her purse in the dark
tucked away from the reminders
of bad food and slipped words.
It would also look better.
Less stupid.
When Retired Detective Bayard Lott offers to help Retired Detective Julia Rogers search for her lost friend in a remote Idaho lake, they find clues that might lead them directly to the most dangerous serial killer in Las Vegas history.
A twisted mystery that pits the Cold Poker Gang against a master criminal.
Set in the rugged mountains of Idaho, this mystery will grip you until the last plot twist.
COLD CALL
A Cold Poker Gang Novel
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The town of McCall, Idaho, is real and a wonderful place to visit, but all people, businesses, and locations in this novel are simply figments of my overactive imagination and are not based on any person, living or dead.
Part One
THE SET-UP
CHAPTER ONE
May 21, 2002
9:30 P.M.
Lake Mead, Outside of Las Vegas, Nevada
They’d come to the edge of the big lake to celebrate.
It was Danny and Carrie Coswell’s first wedding anniversary, and since the night was so warm and both had just finished another long semester at UNLV, they had decided to go back to the place they used to go while dating.
It seemed right. Danny had loved the idea when Carrie suggested it over great steak dinners at the MGM Grand Hotel. They had gone home and changed clothes after the fancy dinner, changing back into their jeans and t-shirts and carrying sweatshirts in case the night cooled.
Danny loved how Carrie looked with her long blonde hair pulled back and her trim figure. Both of them ran for exercise and at times their class and study schedules allowed them to run together.
Danny really enjoyed being out at the lake, but Carrie liked it even more. She had told him that being along the vast expanse of Lake Mead made her feel part of the world. The silence and the wild of the shores of the lake were a sharp contrast to the constant motion and noise of Las Vegas.
He and Carrie were what some called childhood sweethearts. He knew he had loved her since the very first time he had seen her walking the halls of their high school, her books clutched against her chest, trying to find her locker. They had both been in the tenth grade and he offered to help her find her locker and they had became friends, then dated all the way through school after that.
They had wonderful memories of all the dances together, graduating together, and two years later getting married.
Below them, the lake was calm, its black surface spread out to the outlines of the hills on the other side. The faint moonlight shimmered across the water, making the night feel just a little brighter.
When dating, they would often go down the gentle gravel slope to the edge of the water, maybe even do some skinny dipping. But tonight they were content to sit on a blanket on the slight bluff, holding hands, leaning into each other, just talking about their first year of marriage, and their plans for the future.
Smith's Monthly #15 Page 8
