by D C Young
I made notes.
“When did you notice the safe had gone missing?”
“Two days ago.”
“Where was it stolen from?”
“My home. A mobile home. I kept it behind the furnace.”
“Behind?”
“The furnace is non-functional and if you remove the blower, there’s a space to hide stuff.”
I nodded, impressed. “Seems like a good hiding spot to me.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Any chance it could have been stolen a while ago and you only recently noticed?”
He shrugged. In fact, he often shrugged, sometimes for no apparent reason. Shrugging seemed to be a sort of nervous tic for Charlie. He said, “Last I saw it was about a week ago.”
“Were you alone when you checked on the safe?”
“Yes.”
I studied my notes...tapping my pen against the pad. My house was quiet, as it should be. The kids were at school. I looked at the time on my computer screen. I had to pick them up in about twenty minutes.
At about this time of the day, my brain is foggy at best. So foggy that sometimes the most obvious question eludes me. I blinked, focused my thoughts, and ignored the nearly overwhelming desire to crawl back into bed...and shut out the world until the sunset.
Then, I became a new woman.
Or at least a new something.
I felt like I was fading but I was holding on desperately. I kept tapping the tip of the pen against the pad of paper until the question finally came to me. Finally, it did. “You’re hiding place seems pretty solid from what you’ve described to me. So the question is; why would the thieves know to look behind the furnace? It seems a highly unlikely place to ever look.”
He shrugged.
I said, “That won’t help me to help you, Mr. Anderson.”
“Well, I don’t know why they would look there.”
“Fair enough. Did you ever tell anyone about it?”
“No.”
“Did anyone ever see you looking at it?”
“I live alone. It’s just me.”
“Any family members know about it?”
“Maybe a few do, but I don’t keep in touch with them and they wouldn’t know about the furnace either.”
“Do you have any children?”
“Yes.”
Bingo. “Where do they live?”
“The Philippines, presently. I’m a retired Navy vet. My ex-wife is from there and the kids stay with her most of the time.”
“But some of the time they come to stay with you?”
“Yes?”
“How long ago has it been since they last visited?”
“A month ago.”
More notes, more thinking. I put the pen aside. I had asked just about everything my dull brain could think of. Besides, I had to start wrapping this up.
“I can help you,” I said. “But there’s one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I get half of whatever is in the safe.”
“What about your usual retainer fee?”
“Consider that waived.”
“But what if you don’t find the safe?”
“Then I guess you won’t owe me anything, Mr. Anderson,” I said.
He looked at me for a good twenty seconds and then he nodded. “I’ve always wondered what the hell was in that thing, anyway.”
“So, we have a deal, Mr. Anderson?”
“We have a deal,” he said.
I’d never struck a deal with a client like that before. Granted, I dealt with every case... every individual… on a strictly one-on-one basis but I’d never waived fees before. Getting on the way to financial freedom must have been taking an effect on my good sensibility.
Nah, that wasn’t likely at that point. But Mr. Anderson had had me awestruck the moment I’d seen him standing on my front step.
He’d been the last client I’d opened my front door to with my skin coated in sunscreen and the drapes were tightly drawn in my living room sealing out the sunlight. As it had turned out, there had been no split of the contents of the safe but as I’d been leaving Charlie’s trailer home that night something had called out to me psychically from the middle of a pile of papers in his living room.
Chapter Two
A few weeks later, we were standing in Mr. Anderson’s living room.
In an effort to explain how I’d managed to get it there, I had told him that a friend of mine had helped me lug the heavy safe onto his deck. For effect, I made a show of pretending to struggle with the safe as we moved it from the deck to the center of his living room.
Amongst the leaning towers of junk which comprised of laser jet printer cartridges, 40’s science fiction magazines, and enough clipboards to last two lifetimes, we set the heavy safe down on the ground.
Earlier in the night, after discovering it, I had given the culprits ten minutes to clear out before I called the police. Most had taken their leave within five. To their dismay, I’d kept their weapons and ammunition, which I later handed over to Detective Sherbet of the Fullerton Police Department.
For now, though, it was just me, Charlie and the safe… not to mention its mysterious contents. Neither of us knew what they were.
It was clearly old and looked like it belonged on the back of a Wells Fargo stage coach. Part of the safe’s dial still gleamed brightly, although most of it was covered in blackened soot from a blowtorch the thugs had used to try to break into it. The handle was also badly dented, a result of the various hammers I had seen lying around their lair.
But it had held fast, and that was all that mattered. Charlie stared down at it and so did I. My compensation was in that safe, whatever it might be; and that could be anything at that point. Gold. Old war bonds, jewelry, gemstones or pirate booty, for all we knew.
I had been tempted to see if my own psychic gifts could penetrate the heavy steel safe, but I had resisted.
“Do you know the combination?”
He pointed to the upper corner of the safe, where, upon closer inspection, I saw a number etched, 14. Two other numbers were etched into other corners, 29 and 63.
I said them out loud and he nodded. But the arrangement of the numbers was jumbled. A simple encryption passed down from owner to owner as to what the proper combination to the safe was.
“Twelve, thirty-four and sixty-nine?”
He nodded. “You’re the first person I’ve ever shared that with. I’ve never even told my son.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-one. But it’s too soon to give it to him. My father gave it to me on his deathbed.”
“I feel honored.”
We stood there just staring at it. Charlie made no move to open it, and I wasn’t going to. I scanned the room as one of his piles of junk shifted and I noticed the light particles behind Charlie began to coagulate. They took on shape, and in a moment, two very faint old men appeared behind him. I noticed the hair on Charlie’s arm stand on end, as his body registered the spiritual presence of his father and grandfather, even if his mind hadn’t. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his arms.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” he said, and reached down for the safe.
As he did so, I said, “You really don’t want to open the safe, do you, Charlie? Wouldn’t you rather pass it along to your own boy?”
“Without you, Ms. Moon, I would have nothing to pass on to my kid. A deal’s a deal, and I want to pay you your half. Besides, it’s really a silly tradition.”
“No, it’s not. It’s about family.”
“We’ve been keeping this thing going for years and it’s impractical at best, like some sort of joke from beyond the grave.”
“I think it’s an amazing tradition,” I said.
He didn’t say it, but his body language suggested he thought so, too. He said, “Well, it is kind of fun not knowing what’s in this thing. It could be anything, right? But it’s time to find out once and for all.”
>
He made a move for the safe again, but I grabbed his wrist. He shivered at my cold touch.
I said, “This isn’t right.”
“A deal’s a deal, Ms. Moon. Besides, I have no other way of repaying you.”
“Not true. You have enough junk to stock a dozen houses. There’s got to be something in here that I want. Let me pick something out of your junk. The safe is yours. Keep it in your family. Pass it along to your son.”
He processed that information, and I saw the relief ripple through him and his shining aura.
“But aren’t you a little bit curious what’s in the safe?”
“More than you know.”
As I said those words, I briefly closed my eyes, and expanded my consciousness throughout the room, and as I did so, two things made me gasp.
The first was the contents of the safe, which I saw clearly. The second was what I saw resting inside a wooden box deep under a pile of newspapers.
“I would suggest you find a much better place for your safe. A very safe place.”
“I will.”
“You think the contents are valuable?”
I saw, in my mind’s eye, the tightly rolled vellum document that might just be the rarest of all American documents, a document signed by our founding fathers, centuries ago. A document thought to be lost... until now.
Then again, I might have been wrong.
Refusing to say a word, I moved through the piles of junk and headed to the far corner of the room. I moved aside old newspapers and magazines, until I uncovered an ornately carved box.
Slowly, I opened the lid...
Unbelievable.
Inside was another golden medallion. The three roses on this one were cut from brilliant sapphires.
“Oh, that,” Charlie said. “I got it at an estate sale a while back. In Fullerton. Probably worth a lot. I’ve been keeping it for a rainy day.” He paused. “But honestly, it kind of gives me the creeps. You can have it if you want.”
I closed the lid and held out my hand. “Merry Christmas.”
But instead, Charlie wrapped me in a huge, smothering hug.
“Merry Christmas, Ms. Moon!”
Chapter Three
The sapphire medallion he’d given to me on the last night of his case had brought me the biggest gift that Christmas… immunity to the sun’s rays. You’d think I’d have grown accustomed to getting huge surprises each time I encountered one of those bejeweled medallions but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing one just ‘got used to’. The ruby medallion had saved my son from a rare and deadly disease, the sapphire jewel had allowed me to eat and drink all the foods I had missed out on for the past seven years. My friend Max had fashioned rings for me from the gold of the medallions, each containing one of the four original stones. They didn’t give me the full power of the medallions they’d been fashioned from but they alleviated my adverse symptoms enough to maintain a more normal quality of life.
That sunrise over the desert had been like the very first I’d ever seen. In some ways, it had been. Experiencing the glow of the dawn through a vampire’s eyes had been overwhelming, to say the least, and there was absolutely no way to describe it in layman’s terms.
Epic… is probably what Tammy would have said.
Although she probably would have thrown a hash-tag in there somewhere, I was sure of it.
The rings had been gifted to me at a particularly difficult time for me. I had been struggling against the ever increasing hold of the demon inside me. She had been gaining strength and the urges she caused were becoming undeniable. But I had to fight them and fight them hard or risk losing whatever little was left of my humanity.
It had been a multi-layered conversation, one that had saved my life as recently as within the past few weeks when a coven of witches had kidnapped me and locked me inside my own mind.
As I finished folding the last of the clothes and placed them neatly in the laundry basket, the doorbell rang. I paused.
I don’t have any appointments today… none until next week in fact.
I’d planned on scheduling anything new that came in, that could wait, for after the New Year. Anything urgent I’d planned to refer to Detective Spinoza. I stood up and clicked the remote to turn the TV off. AT the door, I almost paused to look in the mirror.
No makeup or sunscreen. I chuckled. Old habits and such, I thought as I opened the door and let in more of the radiant Californian sunlight.
Chapter Four
On the front step, there stood a well dressed man. He was absentmindedly brushing down the front of his suit jacket with one hand, while looking out at the blooming Mandeville plants along the white fence. I felt proud for a moment seeing him admire the brilliant colors of the thriving flowers… I’d put those in myself six months ago. In his other hand, he held a briefcase that looked more like a weirdly shaped saddle bag and made of genuine leather.
With the fence no longer serving the purpose of corralling small agile children and pets, I thought I’d set it to a new job of brightening up my front lawn instead of just being a partition between property and street. The plants had grown beautifully with no more help than they received from the twice weekly turning on of the sprinklers and for that I was happy.
The sapphire ring I wore made it so I could stand to be in the sunlight but I was far from regaining my long gone sunbathing days. I planned time in the garden as carefully as a vacation and when I emerged from the house to work out there, I looked like a Japanese tourist; decked out from floppy sun hat to gloves and socks and sneaker.
No flip flops and bare arms for me. No, siree.
“Good afternoon,” I said, trying to get the man’s attention. “May I help you?”
“Sure can!” he said smiling. The southern accent took me by surprise based on his clothes. He sounded like he should have been wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt, not a bespoke business suit. “Only if I’m speaking to Miss Samantha Moon, that is.”
“You sure are!” I replied matching his enthusiasm. I couldn’t tell if it was his clearly upbeat personality or the beautiful blue aura that shone around him like the sun-repelling gem on my finger. I made to step back and invite him in when I saw something wriggle briefly through his cerulean halo of light… something like a tiny worm… something grim and black. I took a small step back in shock and closed the door a little.
He must have noticed the brief hesitation because he reached out with his right hand and said, “My name is Earnest Cumber. I heard about you and what you do from Miss Lochner.”
“Miss Lochner?” I said, wracking my brain to think who he was talking about.
“Ummm, Dani. Dani Lochner. She’s a really good friend of mine from Savannah… says she met you and your family driving her Uber car.”
“Oh, of course,” I replied. “Of course, I remember Dani! Are you the gentleman she said might contact me about finding some lost property?”
“Sure am!”
Quickly, I searched his glow again for the sign of the dark entity but it was gone. I could only guess that may have something to do with why he was here to see me. I stepped back and invited him in then lead Earnest through to my office. I indicated for him to sit in any of the four client chairs while I made my way around the desk to my new ergonomic desk chair that didn’t make any off the wall sounds like my old leather one did. The air cylinder on the old chair had finally given out and I kept sinking to the floor when I sat down. At my height that was a very disconcerting experience, so I’d quickly replaced it with the help of Amazon.com.
“So. Mr. Cumber…”
“Please call me Earnie, everybody does.”
“Okay, Earnie. How can I help you?”
“Well, just the other day I was talking to our mutual friend Miss Lochner about how my ranch was doing up near Modesto, when I mentioned to her that we lost about a third of our herd recently.”
“Lost? A third?” I asked as I furiously jotted down notes from our conversation. �
�When you say lost, do you mean they wandered off? And how many heads are we talking about here exactly?”
Earnie raised an eyebrow at my tiny use of ranching terminology, then replied, “Lost as in disappeared... without a single hoof track or trace, Miss Sam. And a third would be just about a hundred and eighty. That’s what we counted as missing anyways.”
A whistle escaped my lips before I could stop it. Depending on breed and breeding, he was probably talking about almost a million dollars worth of livestock vanished into thin air.
“How did they disappear? Were they on their way to slaughter on a truck or something?” The thought of cattle going to slaughter made me think of my food stash out in the garage refrigerator. I shuddered slightly and glanced down at the opal ring on my hand with a smug smile. I’d been able to actually eat my rare steaks at the Mulberry Street Café for a while now instead of just slurping up the blood gravy that oozed out of them. I kept the refrigerator stocked in the garage though… you never can tell.
“No, ma’am. They were headed to the winter grazing pastures we share with a neighboring ranch just east of our stretch. The boys were running them over there on horseback.”
“What happened to them then?”
“Well, ma’am...”
“Please, Earnie. Call me Sam.”
“Okay, ummm, Miss Sam…” I decided to let it slide. I knew it was just the man’s southern sensibility that wouldn’t allow him to address me as anything less than Miss or ma’am even though he himself had insisted that I use his first name. “You see that’s just it, none of my cowboys saw any cows wander off or report anything out of the ordinary happening. But when they got to Blue Corn Ranch the next morning, the cattle were unaccounted for in the count.”
“Do you at least know which ones disappeared?”
“Well, of course I do, Miss Sam. What kind of rancher would I be if I didn’t try to get some sort of a roll call on the herd? It’s a very valuable herd, you know. Very unique.”