The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

by Scott William Carter

  "Most of the time I don't. Hey, I need to talk to you about Laura Ray just for a second."

  "Who?" he said.

  "Laura Ray. The mother of Olivia Ray, the girl abducted on Monday." When he still stared at me blankly, I continued, though I already felt queasy. "She told me she talked to you outside the police station on Tuesday. She said you recommended me."

  "Huh," he said.

  "She also said you'd put the word out about Olivia."

  "Myron, my man, I hate to tell you this, but I didn't talk to no Laura Ray on Tuesday or any other day."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Sure as a shoe shine, my friend. You think maybe she got me confused with somebody else?"

  I felt the cold seeping through the thin fabric of my tennis shoes and numbing my toes. I felt cold inside, too, a growing coldness that started in the pit of my stomach and spread outward, up my body and out my limbs. Grace not remembering what the mysterious woman looked like might have been a strange fluke of a very troubled young ghost. Natalie Corman not remembering her appointment was harder to explain, but still not quite strange enough to make me afraid. But Elvis? I was beginning to question my own sanity. Nobody could confuse him for somebody else.

  "Were you working outside the police station downtown yesterday?" I asked.

  "Sure. But I didn't talk to no woman."

  "Do you know about Olivia Ray?"

  "Now you mention it, yeah, I heard something about that. Somebody told me to keep an eye out for her."

  "Who?"

  He scratched his chin. "Can't really recall. Funny. So you been hired to find this kid, huh?"

  "That's right."

  "And how's it going?"

  "Not so well. Any help you can give me would be very much appreciated."

  "Okay. Well, I'll keep my eyes and ears open. Gotta—gotta run here, pal."

  Pushing his cart away, he looked troubled. I watched the vivid gold and red fade in the thick white air. I listened to his hot dog cart squeaking in the stillness and wondered just what the heck was going on here.

  I turned back to the car and saw a grizzled-looking man in the alcove of the closed laundromat. He wore a black plastic garbage bag over multiple layers of clothing and he had a gray beard so long and thick I couldn't see his neck. He gaped at me, either because he was alive and he'd just seen me having an animated conversation with what appeared to be empty air, or because he was dead and he knew who I was. Either way, he was clearly afraid of me.

  I tried to relieve his anxiety by offering him a neighborly wave. In return, he bolted for the other end of the street, feet slipping and sliding as he scrambled away.

  * * *

  When I pulled into the narrow driveway of my little bungalow in Sellwood, I found Jak's gray Ford Taurus in the driveway but the house completely dark. No porch light, no lights inside. There were no tracks in the snow behind the Taurus, or on the steps leading up to the porch. The concrete under the car was bare, so it had obviously been there a while.

  I checked the mail in the box by the door, found more unpaid bills, and called Jak's name as I opened the door. Against reason, I was still hoping to find her inside, and therefore felt a pang of disappointment when she didn't answer. Even before turning on the lights, I got a good whiff of the fir tree crowding our living room, and remembered, with some shame, that I'd promised that morning to come home early so we could decorate it. It was the same promise I'd been making for the better part of a week, ever since she'd dragged me to the lot down the road to buy it.

  When I flicked the switch, I was greeted by a surprise: the tree had already been decorated.

  It was only with shiny red balls and silver tinsel, but it had definitely been decorated. The tree was broad but not tall, branches so numerous and needles so thick that the trunk was invisible and the tinsel often draped sideways rather than hanging straight. The matching leather couch and loveseat were crowded on the far side of the room to make room for the tree.

  I admired her work, and felt my shame turn to sadness. I felt even sadder when I saw the open box of balls on the floor. The plastic tray was empty … except for one ball.

  Just one. She'd left it for me.

  Grabbing it by the hook, I started to take it out of the box, then changed my mind and left it where it was.

  The house was warm; the heat had not been turned low, as I had repeatedly asked her to do when she was leaving so we'd save money. On another day, I would have been irritated, but I was too worried about her to care. Some leftover teriyaki chicken and a bottle of local amber made do for dinner. I sat on the couch, ate my food and drank my beer, waiting for Jak to come home. After I finished eating, I played her Bing Crosby Christmas CD and stood sentry at the living room window, watching the street.

  Snow blanketed the grass, the bushes, and all but a thin gray line of the retaining wall at the end of my yard. I saw the Tulleys, my neighbors three houses down, walk by hand in hand, both of them bundled up so much they could have rolled themselves down the sidewalk rather than walked. A moment later, a man in eighteenth-century trapper clothes, complete with deerskin cap, leather moccasins, and a long-stemmed rifle strapped to his bag, trudged past pulling a wooden sleigh with what looked like a black bear tied to it. The sleigh left deep tracks in the snow, and I watched those tracks for a long time, knowing they weren't real but not being able to convince my eyes to stop seeing them.

  The pain in my skull flared up again, so I had another beer. I thought of Olivia out in the cold along with Jak and I had another. I mulled over the case, tried to see something I was missing, but all I could think about was the strange phrase Olivia had said. Make merry with merry riddles. There was something there, if only I could see it.

  Somewhere along the way I must have shuffled off to bed, because the next thing I knew I felt a tremor on the mattress, a shifting of weight. My lips felt puffy when I tried to speak, and my voice sounded slurred even to my own ears.

  "Jak?"

  "Shh," she said. "It's me."

  I wanted to say something about the tree, apologize, but before I could clear away the comforting fog that clouded my mind, I felt her body press up against me, skin naked and warm. She nuzzled her head under my chin. Her hair was wet and smelled of the lavender shampoo she often used. I let my hand drift down her back, all that bare, smooth flesh, over her thigh, down her leg, not finding any clothes at all, and felt that old animal desire start to take hold.

  I still didn't know what kept us together, but I knew exactly what had brought us together. We were wrong for each other in so many ways: age, temperament, life experiences. I'd grown up the son of a cop and a homemaker, not without its problems but as close to a Leave it to Beaver existence as was possible in the real world. She was the daughter of a hack journalist who'd abandoned her as a baby and a drug addict mother who'd bounced in and out of jail, both of them dead, Jak barely surviving the trials of foster care and spending a stint as a stripper before finding her place as something of an Internet personality, one who went undercover to expose all of life's seedy secrets. We fought more than we got along.

  And yet, as I felt her hands move down to the waistband of my Jockey shorts, fingers slipping between fabric and skin, none of those inconsistencies mattered.

  The first time we had made love, and just about every time since, was a whirlwind event, lots of grabbing and scratching, clutching and pushing, more an act of violence than one of affection. This, now, was even more so, and Jak was the primary aggressor. As she climbed on top of me, I caught glimpses in the darkness of that compact but voluptuous body of hers, so many luscious curves packed into such a small frame. She was one of those rare people that actually looked better naked than dressed, and that was saying something for Jak because she looked damn fine clothed as well.

  Bands of moonlight shining from the half-closed blinds fell across her breasts like a striped shirt. I tried to reach for her, but she batted my hands away and pinned my arms to the bed, as i
f any participation on my part was only a nuisance. Her strength always startled me, not just because she was a small person but because someone with those kinds of curves shouldn't also be strong. It was like finding out a belly dancer could also bench press two-fifty.

  She kept me pinned like that until she'd worked us both into a feverish delirium, and well past it too, on and on, until finally she collapsed next to me in the bed. We lay like that for a while, spent, breathing hard, listening to the creaks and groans of the house shifting in the cold. I rolled my head to the side and looked at her. She had the sheets twisted around her legs, but the upper half of her body was exposed. She stretched out with her hands behind her head, her breasts flattened, in the way a woman will lie only when she's truly comfortable with the man beside her. Satiated. Satisfied. Unselfconscious.

  Without turning her head, she glanced at me from the corner of her eye. Smirked. I loved the way the skin around her eyes crinkled when she was happy.

  "See something you like?" she said.

  "I see a lot I like."

  "I bet you do. In ten minutes, we'll find out if you just talk big or if you can … get big."

  "Wow. Did you spend all day thinking that one up?"

  She giggled and rolled onto her side, cuddling against me. Feeling those wonderful breasts press against my side was almost enough for me to skip the ten minutes. Almost. I always had to balance the challenge of keeping up with a sexpot like Jak with the potential for disappointing a sexpot like Jak. I feared that if she found out I lacked the endless supply of masculine fortitude that she thought I possessed, she'd leave me. Despite our differences, despite our seemingly endless spats and conflicts, the thought of my life without her left such a gaping black crater in my heart that I felt panicked each time the possibility even crossed my mind.

  "Jak?" I said.

  "Mmm?" she murmured.

  "I love you."

  "Mmm. I like the sound of that."

  "And I'm sorry."

  "Sorry? For what?"

  "You know, the tree. Other stuff."

  "Ah. Well."

  I felt her shrug against me. I also heard the slight change in tone, the hint of exasperation hidden inside what remained of that purr of contentment. I held her close. We lay like that for a long time, our breathing falling into rhythm, the digital clock on her side of the bed casting its green glow on the wall. I glanced at it and saw that it was half past three in the morning. The world outside was still. We could lie like this for hours and no one would bother us.

  "Jak?"

  "Mmm. Call me Jacqueline."

  "Really? Why?"

  "I don't know. I'd just like to hear you say it."

  "You've never liked anyone calling you Jacqueline."

  "You're not anyone."

  "Okay … Jacqueline."

  With her face pressed against my chest, I felt her smile. "I like the way that sounds. Can you call me that? Just when we're together, I mean."

  "Okay."

  "Say it again."

  "I love you, Jacqueline."

  "Mmm. You know, I bought your Christmas present today."

  "You did?"

  "Yeah, you're really going to like it."

  "So sure, are you?"

  "Oh yeah. Let's just say I know you had one like it in the past."

  "Really? Huh."

  "Yeah, and that's all I'm going to tell you. It's in my laptop bag, so you better not go snooping in there or I'm going to kill you. Now hold me tighter."

  I felt guilty because I still hadn't bought her a present. We lay like that for a while longer, then she asked me about the case. I caught her up on what I'd learned, which wasn't much. I told her about the merry riddles line and asked her if she had ideas, but she didn't. She was as befuddled as I was about Laura's disappearance, Natalie Corman's poor memory, and Elvis's strange behavior. She said maybe I should talk to John again in the morning, see if there was anything else to learn, and I agreed. I asked her how her new piece was coming. She laughed and made a crude comment about how I'd already gotten a piece.

  I told her about Grace, how I wished there was something I could do for her. We debated contacting the Department, but I still resisted bringing them in on this. Jak suggested having my mother talk to Grace, and I reminded her about Mom being on a cruise. When Jak didn't answer, I realized she was asleep.

  A few minutes later, I must have joined her, because the next thing I knew my cell phone was ringing.

  I opened bleary eyes to gray morning light shining through the blinds. Jak, still snuggled against me, murmured but didn't wake. Trying not to disturb her too much, I groped for the phone on my nightstand and managed, through some half-asleep fumbling, to answer it. It wasn't until the person on the other end spoke that I realized I'd forgotten to say hello.

  "Myron?"

  It was Alesha. There was something in her voice. I'd known her long enough to know that something terrible had happened, jolting me back to consciousness.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "Well … it looks like we might be working together on your Olivia Ray case after all."

  "What do you mean?"

  On her end of the line, I heard voices in the background, heavy footsteps echoing off walls, a particular clink and squeak of metal. I knew that sound. From my years working as a police detective, I knew it very well. It was the sound of a gurney. A gurney meant a body. A body, if Alesha was involved, almost always meant a death.

  Next to me, Jak must have picked up on the frantic tone in my voice, because she sat up in the bed and blinked at me.

  "It's your client," Alesha said. "John Ray. He's dead."

  Chapter 7

  Twenty minutes later, the cut on my neck from my hasty shave still stinging, I parked the Prius next to two police cruisers at John's apartment complex. It was snowing again, and the quarter inch of snow on the hoods of the police cars told me they'd been there a while. I saw Alesha's unmarked Crown Victoria parked a few spots away, and another one just like it parked nearby.

  Motley groups of people gathered on both the first- and second-floor landings, many of the people dressed in pajamas and robes, shivering in the cold and occasionally pointing at John's apartment. Among them, I saw the two teenagers I'd scared the previous day, and I was sure there were lots of other ghosts in there, too. Death by gunshot tended to bring out the gawkers from both the living and the dead.

  Jak, who'd just finished tying her still-damp hair in a ponytail, gave my leg a reassuring squeeze.

  "There a lot of them watching?" she asked.

  "Lots," I said. "How many do you see?"

  "About a dozen," she said.

  "I see three times that."

  She nodded and zipped up her jacket, a slick green winter coat that she'd bought a week earlier, as bright and clean as her jacket from yesterday was drab and dirty. The contrast in her appearance couldn't have been starker. Hip-hugging jeans, designer boots, diamond stud earrings—she looked like a totally different person, a young woman who would turn heads no matter what room she entered. She may not have had time to dry her hair, but she'd still put on a touch of makeup on the way over. It wasn't something she did all that often, and she had the kind of face that allowed her to get away with it, but I had my hunch why she'd taken the time to do so today. Her next question confirmed it.

  "Alesha still here?" she asked.

  "Most likely."

  "She going to be okay with me being here?"

  "Probably not."

  She smirked and got out of the car. I followed. The truth was, I probably shouldn't have brought her, but I couldn't see how I could say no to her after our spat the previous day. And I wanted her there. This thing had shaken me in a way few cases had.

  We trudged up the snow-covered steps to John's apartment. Under the overhang, protected from the falling snow, it seemed as if a white curtain rippled around us. I saw the little boy from yesterday, the one who'd asked me who I was talking to, being held by a w
oman who wasn't much beyond childhood herself, both of them dressed in matching blue snowsuits. He looked mesmerized, probably too young to fully grasp what was happening, while the mother looked the way I was sure I did: eyes glazed, face as hard as ice, the appearance of someone in shock. If she knew about Olivia's disappearance, which I was sure she did, she was probably wondering how so much tragedy could befall one family.

  The ghost teens, seeing me, bolted. A uniformed cop, a burly guy with a big handlebar mustache the color of polished copper, stopped me at John's open door, asking who I was. I didn't know him. A camera flashed behind him. I heard voices. Before I could answer the cop, Alesha appeared just behind him in the doorway.

  She wore a black trench coat only slightly darker than her skin. Black pants, black boots, black collared shirt buttoned all the way to the top—she looked like someone attending a gangster funeral. Even her hair seemed darker than usual. She'd been straightening and growing it out lately, and it was now long enough that it curled just beyond her jaw.

  "It's okay, Frank," she said. "He's with me. This is Myron Vale."

  I saw recognition dawning in the cop's eyes. Oh yes, he was probably thinking, this was the one he'd heard all the stories about, the young detective who'd got shot in the head, spent months in a coma, suffered years in and out of psychiatric facilities, and dropped out of the force to become a two-bit detective whose quirky behavior had made him something of a laughing stock among his former colleagues. Have you seen this guy? He talks to himself. He stares at things nobody sees. He was the son of one our greatest, and look at him now.

  With a barely suppressed smirk, he stepped aside. He'd been blocking Jak, and when Alesha saw her, she frowned. Everything about Alesha was intense, but her eyes were the most intense of all: irises almost as dark as the pupils, but shiny and radiant as if they burned with an inner heat. I'd seen tough-as-nails thugs confess to crimes they hadn't been asked about when staring into those eyes. I'd also seen men at bars, after one glance from her, beg her for a dinner date. You wanted her to look at you with those eyes even when you knew you might lose yourself in them.