The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

by Scott William Carter

  "They didn't try to get you to see a shrink?"

  "Oh yeah, they tried. I talked them out of it."

  "Is the bureau all right with that?"

  "Nope."

  "Ah. Did you even tell anyone you're leaving?"

  "Let's just say I'd like to leave sooner rather than later."

  "Gotcha."

  "And this is weird even having to ask, but, um, did we take my car or yours?"

  Her question was so earnest that I had to laugh. I led her to the Prius, parked across the street in the garage. The cold felt harsh on my face, but the fresh air was a welcome change after hours in a stuffy waiting room. The sidewalks were all bare and lightly salted, but snow decorated all the landscaped areas. We'd barely gotten outside and Alesha was peppering me with questions. Why were we even at Oregon State Hospital? Who was this escaped prisoner? And why, on Earth, had she forgotten everything?

  I told her I'd explain once we got on the road. I knew this was coming, and I'd been preparing for it the whole time I'd been in the waiting room, but I still wanted a few more minutes to gather my thoughts. It wasn't enough. By the time we were buckled and puttering out of the garage onto the empty street, I still didn't have a clue what I was going to say. I'd planned to lie, of course. Why not? It would be much easier to reset everything between us back to where we had been on Thursday.

  Looking at her now, though, the whites of her eyes so bright in the darkness as she waited for what I was going to say, I couldn't do it. I didn't care if it would be easier, I just couldn't lie to her anymore. The question wasn't about what to tell her. The question was where to start.

  But in the end, only one place made sense.

  "I see ghosts," I said.

  About the Author

  SCOTT WILLIAM CARTER’s first novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, was hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “touching and impressive debut” and won an Oregon Book Award. Since then, he has published many books, including the popular Garrison Gage mystery series set on the Oregon coast, as well as the provocative Myron Vale Investigations, about the private investigator in Portland, Oregon who works for both the living and the dead. His most recent book for younger readers, Wooden Bones, chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio and was singled out for praise by the Junior Library Guild. In past lives, he has been an academic technologist, a writing instructor, bookstore owner, the manager of a computer training company, and a ski instructor, though the most important job — and best — he’s ever had is being the father of his two children. He lives in Oregon with his family. Visit him online at www.ScottWilliamCarter.com.

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  A special request from the author: Word of mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other retailer; even if it’s only a line or two, it would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated.

  Books by

  Scott William Carter

  Garrison Gage Mysteries

  The Gray and Guilty Sea

  A Desperate Place for Dying

  The Lovely Wicked Rain

  A Shrould of Tattered Sails

  Myron Vale Investigations

  Ghost Detective

  The Ghost Who Said Goodbye

  The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

  Other Novels

  The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys

  President Jock, Vice President Geek

  The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens

  Drawing a Dark Way

  A Tale of Two Giants

  Wooden Bones

  Short Story Collections

  The Dinosaur Diaries

  A Web of Black Widows

  The Man Who Made No Mistakes

  While you’re waiting for the next Myron Vale novel,

  you may want to check out the first in Scott William Carter’s

  other mystery series, THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA.

  A brief preview follows.

  About The Gray and Guilty Sea

  A curmudgeon. An iconoclast. A loner. That's how people describe Garrison Gage, and that's when they're being charitable.

  After his wife's brutal murder in New York, and Gage himself is beaten nearly to death, the crippled private investigator retreats three thousand miles to the quaint coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs, Oregon. He spends the next five years in a convalescent stupor, content to bide his time filling out crossword puzzles and trying to forget that his wife's death is his fault. But all that changes when he discovers the body of a young woman washed up on the beach, and his conscience draws him back into his old occupation — forcing him to confront the demons of his own guilt before he can hope to solve the girl's murder.

  Chapter 1 (preview)

  The woman washed up on the beach at sunset—a girl, really, eighteen or nineteen by the looks of her, dressed in black lace panties and a white tank top. No doubt she was dead. Gage had seen enough dead bodies to know.

  A fierce wind blew back his hair. His bare hand, gripping his cane, was numb from the cold. The approaching storm stretched along the horizon like an old metal coil, the hint of orange like rust in the dark, tightly-wound clouds. Above the clouds, the sky was flat and sterile like dull silver; beneath the clouds, only the white-capped swells broke up the gray monotony of the ocean. It would be dark in twenty minutes. Gage, groggy from an early bourbon, had almost skipped his evening walk. How different his life would have been if he had.

  The girl had the look of an exhausted swimmer, body half out of the surf, half on the sand, head resting on one outstretched arm. But one ankle was tangled in sea kelp, sand and mud streaked her milky skin like paint splatters on white porcelain, and both eyes were wide and unblinking. Even from twenty paces, he could see her eyes—two slashes of white in all that gray.

  The beach was deserted. Far to his right, two miles away, Gage could make out the twinkling lights of the Golden Eagle Casino. To his left were the beginnings of the many cliffs that gave the city of Barnacle Bluffs its name. Gage hesitated, watching the girl, hoping for some sign of movement even though he knew there would be none, then ambled toward her.

  His right knee throbbed. It was always worse in the winter, when the damp air seeped into all those cracks in his surgically repaired knee. It never got that cold on the Oregon coast, which was one of the reasons he'd moved there after Janet died, but it got cold enough. It didn't take much for Gage to feel cold. Not anymore.

  When he reached the girl, his heart was pounding, and he knew it had nothing to do with physical exertion. He'd thought he was past all this.

  It was only up close that he saw the lacerations on her wrists and ankles, the bruise-marks on her thighs, the sunken eye sockets that made her face look like a skull. Her dark blonde hair tangled around her face and neck like seaweed. Her mouth was open in a silent scream. She was maybe five-two, a hundred pounds at most. He doubted she'd been dead more than twenty-four hours. She didn't smell like death yet. She just smelled like salt water.

  "Where did you come from?" he said.

  There was no answer.

  * * *

  It was raining by the time the police arrived. Gage didn't own a cell phone, or any phone for that matter, but there was a pay phone at the gas station across the street, just on the other side of Highway 101. Gage could have made the call from Mattie's house, up the hill behind the station, but that was another ten minutes of painful walking and he'd wanted to be back at the beach by the time the police arrived. He didn't know why. It wasn't like he wanted to be involved. It was more that he felt obligated by finding her.

  That had been his second mistake.

  There was still enough light to see, though barely. Two police cars arrived, sirens blaring, the threads of rain visible in the beams lancing over
the beach. The parking lot was up ten feet on the bluff, behind the metal barricade. Seconds later two officers charged down the grassy dune. Both ran with their right hands over their holsters. One of the officers was much heavier and shorter than the other.

  Gage's leather jacket had no hood, and the rain quickly soaked his hair. Cold water dribbled down his forehead. The thin cop, a kid with a Brad Pitt face, continued to the body while the larger one approached Gage. He had a doughy face, a thick brown mustache, and no hair except for a fine brown ring around his scalp. The brass badge on his navy blue coat shimmered in the rain.

  "What time did you find her?" he asked.

  "What time did I call it in?" Gage said.

  "Are you trying to be a smart aleck?"

  "No, I just don't wear a watch."

  More sirens, more headlights appearing up on the bluff. The young cop dropped to his knees and felt for a pulse on her wrist. He looked at them.

  "She's dead," he said.

  "Well of course," Gage said. "Isn't that what I told you on the phone?"

  The heavier one blinked a few times at this, then looked back at Gage. There were more cops barreling down the dune, and two paramedics carrying a stretcher. The heavy cop in front of Gage flipped open a little black notebook. Water speckled the white paper.

  "Your name, sir?" he said.

  Gage shivered; the rain dribbling down his back was ice cold. There was commotion all around them now—the paramedics trying to revive her, the cops conferring. Up on the bluff, a few looky-loos had come of the houses lining the beach and peered down at the spectacle from their decks. The heavy cop slipped the little pen from the side of the notebook. When he noticed Gage hadn't answered, he glanced up with a questioning look.

  "Problem?" he said.

  "Oh, no," Gage said. It was a lie. He hadn't planned on giving his name, and now he saw how stupid it had been to wait around. An anonymous call would have been fine. But what could he do now? "Gage. Garrison Gage. I live just on the other side of the highway."

  "And you've never seen this girl before in your life?"

  "No."

  "Why do you think she was here?"

  "How the hell should I know?"

  The cop grimaced. "What's your phone number?"

  "I don't have a phone."

  "You don't have a phone?"

  "No."

  The cop sighed. "What about an address, Gary? Do you have one of those?"

  "Don't call me Gary."

  "Okay. What should I call you?"

  "Don't call me anything."

  The cop narrowed his already narrow eyes. Gage felt his frustration rise, creeping into him like the coldness in his knee. He'd forgotten what most cops were like. One of the other cops was taking digital pictures of the girl, the flash strobing the body. The paramedics were readying their stretcher for her.

  "Are you trying to be a problem?" the cop said.

  "No. I'm not trying to be anything at all."

  Then he gave the cop his address. He answered the rest of their questions. And when they said he could, he went home.

  Chapter 2

  A little after nine the next morning, someone knocked on his door. Gage was nearly finished with the crossword in the latest Oregonian. The first knocks were tentative, three gentle raps that he could barely hear over the whistling wind. But when Gage ignored these, the next knocks were more forceful.

  He put down his pen. Looking beyond his dining room table, piled with enough books and magazines that someone might have mistaken it for a library rummage sale, he saw the wide expanse of the ocean through his bay window, above the rooftops of the houses on the slope below. The clouds had cleared overnight, the sky a bright cobalt blue. It might as well have been summer. But it was a deceiving sky, because he knew from when he'd stepped out to get the paper how cold it had been, how strong the breeze.

  When he'd moved to the coast, he'd disabled the doorbell and put up both No Solicitation and Beware of Dog signs. That had mostly done the trick. But there were always a few people who knocked anyway. Illiterate fools.

  He limped to the foyer, the peeling linoleum like ice against his bare feet. The smell of burnt toast hung in the air; he could never get that damn toaster working right. He tied his bathrobe and flung open the door.

  "What is it, then?" he said.

  He expected a vacuum salesman or a kid hocking magazine subscriptions, a frivolous interruption. Instead a sober-faced man in a gray trench coat stood on his concrete stoop; he wore a narrow blue tie, a white shirt. He had thinning gray hair and bushy black eyebrows, his face long and gaunt. He made Gage think of a slightly heavier version of Mister Rogers. Still, there was no denying he was a cop. Gage had seen thousands of cops over the years and they all had the same look about them—a wary earnestness.

  The arbor vitae at the back of Gage's property swayed in the breeze. The frigid air penetrated his thin cotton robe, making him shiver.

  "More questions?" Gage said.

  The man smiled kindly. He had yellow teeth, and one of his incisors was capped with gold. "Garrison Gage?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "I'm Percy Quinn. Chief of Police in Barnacle Bluffs."

  It was a small town, and deaths like the girl on the beach were rare, but he was still surprised that the Chief himself was paying a visit. "Well, thank heavens," he said. "You're a few months late, but the kids playing the loud music live just down at the end of the drive."

  Quinn chuckled. He had that look about him of a patient grandfather. "Can I have a few minutes of your time?"

  "Why?"

  The man's smile stayed the same, but his eyes changed; it was like watching water freeze. "Humor me," he said.

  Gage shrugged and stepped back so Quinn could enter. Standing close, Gage caught the whiff of cigarette smoke, and he could just make out the outline of the revolver holster beneath Quinn's coat.

  Without a word, Gage limped to his table and settled into his chair. He took a drink from his coffee, which had grown cold; it was black, except for just a splash of Irish cream, just the way he liked it. A log in the stove crackled. Quinn stood behind one of the other chairs, hands gripping the walnut frame. He glanced at the coffee cup as if waiting for Gage to offer. Gage didn't.

  "I don't want to take much of your time—" Quinn began.

  "Well, that's good," Gage said.

  The man looked a bit pained. It really was like insulting Mister Rogers. "I'm hoping we can be friends."

  "Hope can be a dangerous thing."

  "Man, you're not going to make this easy for me, are you?"

  "Make what easy?"

  Quinn pulled out the chair. He turned it around backwards and straddled it. "You see the news this morning?"

  "I don't have a television," Gage said.

  "No television. No phone. You're quite the character."

  "Thank you. I mean that sincerely."

  "Look," Quinn said, "this is really just a courtesy call, that's all. I want you to know that we didn't give your name to the media. We just told them a homeless man stumbled upon the girl."

  "Well, that's an upgrade for me," Gage said.

  "I thought you'd appreciate it. You see, I . . . I know who you are, Gage. I know all that business you were involved with before. The work you did with the FBI. I . . . know what happened back in New York. I am sorry about your wife. About what they did to you. Everything."

  Gage said nothing. He looked at his crossword. Ironically, the theme was the ocean. The clue was broken boat. Eleven letters, and it ended with a "d."

  "Shipwrecked," Gage said.

  "Huh?"

  Gage wrote it in.

  "Oh, right," Quinn said. "My wife's into those, too. Though she's more into that other thing—what's it called? The thing with numbers."

  "Sudoku," Gage said.

  "Right. Look, here's the deal. You kind of slipped into Barnacle Bluffs under the radar. That's fine. I can see why you're here. Lots of folk
s come here for the same reason. To get away. To forget. Whatever."

  "I just like the view," Gage said.

  "But here's the thing," Quinn went on, "we're a small town. We might seem big because of all the tourists, especially in the summer, but when you get down to it this place is just a village. This thing with the girl, it's already all over the news. A Portland crew showed up here this morning. It'll be front page in tomorrow's Oregonian. That's more than enough attention. We don't need your name getting mixed up in this. It'll turn this place into a circus."

  "Who doesn't like the circus?" Gage said.

  "Can't you be serious? Even stupid reporters can type your name into Google. Then they'll be swarming this place, getting the wrong idea, wondering how you're mixed up in the girl's death when we both know you got nothing to do with it. I'm just asking you to lie low, that's all. I don't mind you living here—"

  "That's very generous of you."

  "—but if you could just, well, stay retired, I'd appreciate it. And we'll keep you out of it."

  Finally, Gage looked up. "Do you know who she is?"

  "What?"

  "The girl. Who is she?"

  Quinn's brow furrowed, his enormous eyebrows like mirrored checkmarks. "Why?"

  "Just curious."

  "Well, we don't know yet. No ID on her, obviously. And nothing came up in the databases on her fingerprints. They're doing an autopsy on her now, so maybe we can find out more."

  "They know the cause of death?" Gage said. "Was it drowning, or did she die beforehand?"

  Quinn hesitated. "I'm getting a bit uncomfortable with these questions, Mister."

  "I'm a bit uncomfortable when a girl washes up on a beach below my house—especially one like that with marks on her wrists and ankles."

  Quinn offered up a tight-lipped smile. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were opening up an investigation."