by Bill Hiatt
He thrust a bony finger at me. “Don’t judge me. You’d be drinking, too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen. Anyway, I’m not an idiot. I didn’t bring my car. I’m taking an Uber over to the Santa Maria airport. I could have gotten a more direct flight from Santa Barbara, but that’s exactly what she’s expecting me to do.”
McBride couldn’t get more than two sentences out without sounding paranoid. He was far thinner than he’d been in the picture, and even in the poor light, I could tell his eyes were so bloodshot the whites were more red than white. His value as a source was dropping by the second.
Only one thing stopped me from making a run for the door—I didn’t want to look ridiculous. I had a good reputation with Silas, but a lot of people at Investigative Oasis saw me as inexperienced, a problem intensified by the fact some of them still had the antiquated notion a woman couldn’t have both looks and brains. Go back and admit I’d screwed up without even trying to find other sources for the story? Not a chance! McBride might not be credible, but he could lead me to someone who was.
“Mr. McBride, I believe you said on the phone you had something else you wanted to tell me—something important.”
“Yeah, I, uh, I wanted to tell you not to follow up on the story. Don’t go to Santa Brígida. I don’t want to be responsible for your death.”
I sighed inwardly. Nothing makes for a more nerve-wracking morning than pointless melodrama.
“You’re the one who convinced me the story was important, that it needed to be told.”
“It still is,” McBride conceded. “The problem is that there’s no way anyone will ever be able to tell it. I realize that now. People have vanished. People have died.”
“Do you have any proof of a suspicious death linked to Carrie Winn or any of her companies?”
“No, but what do you think happened to the people who vanished? Is she keeping all of them prisoner somewhere? I supposed it’s possible, but is it likely?”
The biggest problem was that McBride’s whole story was sounding less and less likely. He’d been far more convincing on the phone.
“I don’t know which theory is more likely, but it’s what we can prove that matters.”
“You’ll never be able to prove anything. Even if she doesn’t kill you, she’ll erase your memories of anything you do uncover. I’ve seen people forget something they told me just the day before—not once, but many times.”
“How does she do that?”
McBride threw up his hands. “I’ve no idea. I told you that before. The mental breakdowns for no reason, the weird weather that can’t be explained, and dozens of other things—none of them should happen, but they do. You know we had a few days in February of 2013 when the temperature dropped below freezing in the middle of the day—so far below, in fact, that we evacuated the town as a precautionary measure. Nowhere else in Santa Barbara was the weather below sixty-five at the same time. How do you explain that? How could anyone?”
I’d verified the odd weather he’d mentioned in an earlier phone call, and there had been surprisingly little press coverage of it at the time. What I hadn’t figured out was any way to pin that on Carrie Winn.
“I know how all this sounds,” said McBride. “I was surprised you believed me in the first place. It wasn’t until later I realized how dangerous investigating this story would be to you. If you leave right now and never come back to this county, you’ll probably be safe.”
I stood. My hope of getting any useful leads from him was melting like snow in August. “Thanks for your concern, Mr. McBride. I’ll consider very carefully what my next move should be.”
He grabbed me roughly by the arm. I flinched and tried to pull away. His hand, though shaky, had a strong grip.
“Don’t consider. Do what I tell you!”
“Let go of me.” I tried to keep my voice calm and even, though I was thinking about pepper spray again.
He considered a moment, then released his grip on my arm. “Remember…remember what I said!”
I made it to the door and managed to avoid running down the street—but just barely. The guy was coming across much more like a serial killer than a source, let alone a credible one.
Stress can do funny things. When I got back to my car, I had a momentary dizzy spell, after which I couldn’t find my keys. How could they have fallen out of my purse, which I only opened for that quick peek at the pepper spray?
Reluctantly, I trudged back up the street, praying that I hadn’t somehow dropped them in the motel room.
Not only did I not find my keys, but if they were in the motel, they were lost to me.
I stared at a large, rose-colored single-family home.
There was no motel.
Landladies and Leprechauns
Motels don’t disappear without a trace. I had to be in the wrong block—except that I wasn’t. I hadn’t passed that ugly blue-gray building on the way back, and there was no sign of it further down the street. It was just gone, as was McBride.
A headache blossomed behind my eyes. My heart beat like a drum—no, more like an entire percussion section. Had McBride’s paranoia been justified?
I took slow, deep breaths as I walked back to the car. I glanced around discreetly to make sure no one was looking at me as if I were crazy. What had I been doing while I thought I was talking to McBride?
I found the keys on the floor of the front seat, right below the ignition. I must have just taken them out when I had—An episode? Temporary insanity? No, I couldn’t have cracked that completely.
What other possibilities were there? A sane person could hallucinate, but what could have caused such a vivid hallucination?
I glanced across the street and froze. A stranger was watching me.
I pretended I wasn’t paying any attention to him. I kept my eyes down as much as I could and glanced up only occasionally, as if I were waiting for someone. During those quick peeks, I noticed as much detail as I could. He didn’t make a move in my direction, but as I watched, I kept my cell phone in hand, ready to call 911.
He was tall, black-haired and olive-skinned. He looked handsome in a middle-aged way, though from a distance, it was hard to estimate how old he was. His suit looked expensive, but it also looked old-fashioned, even more so than Silas’s leisure suits. Those suggested the 1970s. The stranger’s suit, its gray reinforced by a matching tie and a hat and contrasted with a white shirt, reminded me of outfits I’d seen in 1950s movies.
The intensity of his stare, though, took me back much further—to the horror classic, The Mummy, from 1932. Yeah, those eyes staring at me reminded me of Ardeth Bay, the Boris Karloff character who was the risen Egyptian in the title. Oddly, I hadn’t seen the film in years, but now I couldn’t get that image out of my head.
I forgot to look away, and the stranger became aware I was watching him. His eyes widened in shock—but not as much as mine did when he faded into nothingness right in front of me.
If I had any doubts, that sight destroyed them. I had to be hallucinating.
I couldn’t help thinking about some of the stories McBride had told me during our earlier phone conversations. There had been instances of hallucinations, even mass hallucinations, in Santa Brígida. In fact, at the 2013 Valentine’s Day dance at the high school, virtually everyone in attendance, including adult chaperones, had experienced some kind of vivid hallucination. A stranger had allegedly spiked the punch, but the perpetrator was never caught. Nor did anyone ever figure out what substance had been used. There were no lasting effects reported, so the initial panic died down fairly quickly. Like McBride’s other stories, the events were real. It was his explanations for them that were completely unprovable.
I checked my phone. The text message from McBride giving me directions to the Final Rest Motel was still there. At least I hadn’t imagined that.
A quick internet search confirmed what I already knew—there was no Final Rest Motel in Orcutt or anywhere else. Either McBride was insane, or he w
asn’t the one who sent the message. But what did anyone have to gain from sending me to a nonexistent motel?
I hadn’t told Silas because I didn’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I strongly suspected some kind of illicit scientific research was going on in Santa Brígida. Winn Industries had handled a number of defense contracts over the years. It wasn’t that big a stretch to theorize that some off-the-books projects could have been involved as well.
Even if there were experimentation going on, though, that didn’t explain what had happened to me. I drove straight up from Los Angeles to Orcutt without even passing through Santa Brígida. How could a drug have been administered to me? Even if Winn had figured out McBride was in touch with me, and even if she knew I was supposed to meet him in Orcutt, I couldn’t think of any plausible way for a drug to be delivered. Did Winn have agents running around the city, covering every possible route, armed with dart guns or something?
I took a short walk to clear my head. If I had, despite all the logistical problems, been drugged, there didn’t seem to be any lingering effects.
I did feel hungry, though. Hoping I wasn’t having some kind of drug-induced munchies, I drove to a restaurant which I’d seen on the way to my appointment. I surprised myself by ordering an oak-grilled steak sandwich. I seldom ate that much for lunch, but some of my fellow reporters had spent so much time going on about Santa Maria-style barbeque that I thought I should try some while I was in the area.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened while I was there, and I started to relax a little. I pulled out my phone and tried giving McBride a call.
The number was no longer in service.
I felt myself tensing up again. Of course, McBride could really have gone into hiding, as the imaginary McBride had said he intended to do, but there were more sinister possibilities to consider. Had McBride become another unexplained disappearance in Santa Brígida?
Pursuing this story was looking far more dangerous than I had expected. However, it was too early to panic. I’d come this far. I might as well get a look inside the Winn subsidiary, go through the interview, and see what happened. Nobody was going to make me disappear in a busy office in the middle of the day. Anyway, I was never going to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning story if I weren’t willing to take a few risks along the way.
It took about half an hour to get to Santa Brígida, giving me enough time to get set up in the town’s only motel, where I paid cash. I had spoken to Helen Doyle, an incredibly obliging landlady, about renting an apartment, but I thought it would look strange if I rented it before I actually had the job. She was more than happy to hold a unit pending the result of my interview—looking back on it, suspiciously happy. The rent was also suspiciously cheap.
I tried not to think about those details as I prepared for my interview. I changed clothes, abandoning my comfortable travel outfit in favor of upper-end business casual, in this case, a matching skirt, top, and jacket. The first two had a blue-and-white swirl pattern, and the jacket was solid blue. I stayed away from high heels, which really pained my feet. The interview was likely to be painful enough.
After inspecting myself in the mirror a couple of times, I decided not to unpack the rest of my clothes. If I got the job, I’d just have to repack for the move over to the apartment.
Yeah, the apartment. After the morning I’d had, the place seemed too good to be true. I should have been focusing on the interview, but I decided I had the time to drive over to the Irish Gardens and take a quick look.
The place was only five minutes from my motel. On the plus side, it was either new or well maintained. It was a two-story structure with white stucco and a reddish-brown tile roof that matched the town’s original houses. It was also near the edge of town and close to the nearest freeway onramp—good for a quick escape, though that wasn’t what I was thinking when I first found it.
A woman out front caught my eye. Her once-red hair that was now turning gray and her plump body told me she was middle-aged, but the way she was waving at me with almost teenage exuberance was odd.
When I didn’t wave back, she started walking in my direction. Since I didn’t know her, my first impulse was to drive in the opposite direction as fast as possible, but that might have looked strange. The last thing I wanted to do was call unwanted attention to myself.
When she reached my car, she tapped on the window. I rolled it down and tried to look calm. Up close, she didn’t look menacing at all. I was just being silly.
“Amy?” she asked. “I thought your job interview was later. I didn’t expect to see you until after.”
“Mrs. Doyle? How did you know it was me?”
The woman gave me a knowing smile. “You’re either dressed for an interview or for work, dear. If you worked in town, I’d probably already know you—and you’d have no reason to be gawking at my building, now would you?”
I forced a smile. She was friendly enough, but far too observant for my current situation. I’d hoped for a relatively detached landlady, and I’d gotten Miss Marple instead.
“When is your interview at…Gwraig y Llyn Consulting, wasn’t it?” she asked, handling the Welsh much better than I could. As well as being observant, she had a good memory. Just what I needed!
I glanced at my watch. “In about an hour.”
“In that case, you’ve got time for a little tour, don’t you? It’s the perfect thing to keep you occupied if you’ve got pre-interview jitters.”
I was beginning to have more jitters about her than the interview, but I couldn’t think of any polite way to decline. I got out of the car and let her lead me into the building.
Like many apartment complexes, it had a central garden with the apartments enclosing it in a rough rectangle. In most of the ones I’d seen, though, the garden looked like an afterthought—a few plants gathered together like a last stand against the urban desert. In this case, the apartment looked as if it had been built around the garden.
Near the center of the garden grew two coast oaks, both tall enough that their top branches were level with the second-floor apartment doors. In their shade cast by lots of long, irregular branches, the soil was carpeted with what looked like golden currant and some other plants I couldn’t identify. In the sunnier edges of the garden grew manzanitas entwined with California honeysuckle. The growth was so luxuriant that I couldn’t spot an inch of bare soil anywhere.
The vegetation was all native to California, but Mrs. Doyle couldn’t resist one old world touch. Barely visible among the leaves and flowers were small stone leprechauns, staring in our direction with watchful eyes.
“Carrie Winn gives grants to local businesses that help keep Santa Brígida green,” said Mrs. Doyle. “Of course, these days it’s all drip watered and drought tolerant, but one can still do quite a bit.”
“It’s lovely,” I said. “The leprechauns are a nice touch. It’s almost as if they’re watching us.”
“Oh, they are, dear. They’re part of my security system.”
She looked serious, but she had to be joking—right?
I laughed first, but she joined in a few seconds later.
“Oh, my, you looked so shocked that for a moment, I thought you believed me.”
“I guess you were right about my interview nerves.”
“I was going to show you your apartment—assuming you get the job, which I’m sure you will. But perhaps you’d like to come to the office with me and have a cup of tea?”
What I really wanted was to get away from her observant eyes, but again I could think of no polite way to decline. At least in the office, the sightless stone eyes of the leprechauns would no longer be upon me.
The office walls were done in shamrock wallpaper. That could have easily looked tacky, but somehow Mrs. Doyle had made it work. She led me past the counter into a back office that included a small kitchen, table, a couple of comfortable chairs, and a desk.
“Have a seat, dear. I was just making tea, anyway. I’ll pour
you a cup.”
“I don’t want to get in the manager’s way,” I said, looking around.
“You’d have already met him if he were here. It’s his day off.”
I sat in the chair nearest to me and glanced at my watch. I was still forty-five minutes away from my interview. Less than a minute later, Mrs. Doyle served the tea in china cups with a shamrock pattern.
“Forgive an old woman her eccentricities,” said Mrs. Doyle. “I suppose I do go a bit overboard on my Irish heritage.”
“I think it’s charming,” I said. “And you aren’t old. Were you born in Ireland?”
Mrs. Doyle smiled. “If I had been, I’d have at least a little accent. My parents are both from Ireland, though.”
Since I was stuck here for a few minutes, I might as well make the most of it.
“I notice several Welsh references in the Santa Brígida area,” I said. “Did a lot of Welsh people settle here at some point? Or is it that Carrie Winn is Welsh?”
“I don’t know her personally, but I’ve heard she may have some Welsh ancestry. That was…far, far back, though.”
“Then why give her new subsidiary such a Welsh-sounding name?”
“I have no idea, dear.” Her smile faded, but I decided to press just a little harder.
“You seem…very observant. I just thought—”
“That I was an old busybody?” Her tone wasn’t hostile, but the smile hadn’t returned.
“Not at all. But what Carrie Winn does is big news here, isn’t it?”
The bell in the outer office jangled as if someone had hit it rather than tapping it.
Mrs. Doyle scowled. “Coming!” she yelled to the impatient ringer. “Please excuse me just a minute, dear.” She hurried back into the outer office, and I heard an angry male voice. Upset tenant, most likely. Whatever the case, I now had the chance to look around.
There was a desk at the back of the office, right next to a window. Still holding the teacup, I got up, walked to the window and angled myself so that I’d appear to be looking out while I was examining the paperwork on my desk.