The Gathering

by Mary Bowers

  I looked toward the stairs. Still no Michael. I looked out the French doors toward the river. Still no sun, though it was light enough now to see across the river to Route A1A and a thin strip of ocean beyond it.

  I hadn’t really been listening to Ed as he had rattled on about the history of Area 51 and the pros and cons of the theory that the military was just testing a new type of bomber at the time. Ed believed that that was the actual explanation. “Either that, or Project Mogul,” he threw in doubtfully. When I squinted at him, he said, “Big spy balloon. High altitude. Lots of strange-looking fabric and humanoid dummies. Either way, my personal opinion is that they could’ve saved paranormal scientists a lot of grief, time and research if they’d just come out and said so.”

  My personal opinion was that the paranormal scientists wouldn’t have missed it for the world, no matter what the truth was, but I didn’t say so to Ed.

  He was debunking the alien autopsies by the time Michael got up, and my willies of the night before had turned to boredom and a sincere regret that I’d called Ed. The sun had risen and things felt real again.

  Michael dragged into the kitchen, confused and hung-over, and stared at Ed as if he were seeing things.

  He looked at me while working his lips, trying to formulate a question, and I jumped off my chair and wrapped myself around him. He was still warm from the bed, and the heat that I felt beneath that tee shirt was just like I’d imagined it. He was unshaven, blinky, about to become cranky and had dragon breath, but it felt soooooo good to have him in my arms.

  When I had absorbed what I needed from him, I lifted my face and said, “Want some eggs and toast?” His frosty blue eyes looked even more intensely blue against the pretty shade of hangover red that surrounded them.

  “What’s he doing here?” he asked in a voice about a half-octave lower than his usual.

  “Coffee first,” I said decisively. “Here, sit down, Michael. You’re starting to list to one side.”

  “What are you doing here?” he said to Ed. He’s a naturally friendly man, so he immediately added, “Welcome any time, of course,” in a doubtful way. He managed to get himself onto the chair, then stared like a disappointed little boy at the plate from which I’d already eaten everything.

  I swiped the dirty plate off the counter and said yours is coming right up, drink your orange juice.

  By the time I was back at the range-top, the bubbles over his head had finally popped and he said, “Isn’t anybody going to tell me what’s going on here?” in a voice more like his normal one, only testier.

  “Taylor had an alien encounter last night, up by the cemetery,” Ed said. He adjusted his glasses, then rifled through some papers as Michael stared hopelessly. Ed handed a stapled batch of sheets to him. “You might want to read this as you eat. It’s from the Paranormal Society’s Deep Archive, but it’s still fairly up-to-date. Alien encounters haven’t changed all that much in the past sixty years.”

  I put Michael’s plate full of steaming eggs in front of him and took the article away. He looked down at his breakfast with rising confusion.

  “Go ahead, honey, eat,” I said. “I’ll explain as we go along.”

  “Has he been drinking?” Ed asked me in a ridiculous whisper.

  “His golf team won a tournament yesterday. They had a big banquet. Lotsa booze.”

  “Oh. Congratulations.”

  Michael looked at me, looked at Ed, then gave up and ate.

  * * * * *

  “If your mind is clearer now,” Ed said to me after I’d told Michael all about my encounter, “we should get down to basics. Do you think it was a Gray?”

  I’ve seen just enough TV shows to know that a Gray is a variety of alien being. The little gray ones with bulbous heads and big eyes. I forget what the others are.

  Michael had gotten over his outrage that I would go running into the night with nothing but a dog and a flashlight, and was nursing his hangover while apparently trying to ignore both me and Ed. Ed’s next statement brought him back into the conversation.

  “Because that’s what most people have been seeing. Grays. No one has reported being abducted yet, at least nobody credible, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.”

  Michael’s head snapped around to stare at Ed. “Wait – what? People who? What people?”

  “The people of Tropical Breeze,” Ed told him patiently. “They don’t seem to have hit St. Augustine or Flagler Beach yet. As for Daytona Beach, they’re always seeing things down there. I’ve learned not to bother investigating their sightings. I assumed since you attended a banquet last night you had heard some discussion of what’s been happening closer to home, though. The town is all abuzz.”

  “Breezers have been seeing little green men?” Michael said incredulously.

  “Nobody sees little green men anymore, Michael,” I said solemnly. “It’s gray guys now.”

  He threw me the look I deserved for that crack, then a look of realization spread over his face. “So that’s what Bernie was talking about while she was taking pictures. I was holed up in the corner with the mayor, and she was circulating pretty fast, so I didn’t catch much of it, but it sounded weird.”

  Bernie Horning was the octogenarian editor and publisher of The Beach Buzz, our small-town, weekly newspaper. She always knew everything that was going on in Tropical Breeze.

  “Of course!” Ed said, scribbling madly on the back of one of his print-outs. “Why didn’t I think of it before? I’d better go into town and see Bernie about this. The conventioneers have been taking sides, of course, but since this convocation is centered on hauntings, we don’t have the top-flight echelon on hand, and they’re just spitballing.”

  That last part got me a little confused, but at the moment I was more focused on the fact that he was about to take this to the Press.

  “Do not tell Bernie we’re chasing aliens around out here after midnight,” Michael said sternly, while I sat there getting ready to say the same thing. All we needed was a bunch of amateur UFO hunters staking out the cemetery at night. We had enough trouble with rumors of hauntings and buried treasure up there as it was. Every year, the week before Halloween, we had to chase kids out of the cemetery three or four times at least. We were past the Holidays now, into the boring slump between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, and it was a bit cold at night for cemetery-sitting, but kids will be kids. And grown-ups will too.

  “I’ll tell her it’s strictly off the record,” Ed said primly. “You know Bernie; she’s a pro. She won’t breathe a word if we don’t want her to. But she won’t tell me anything unless she gets something in return. Irritating, but that’s the business she’s in.”

  “Dammit, Ed,” Michael said, but I had already decided not to trust in Ed’s discretion, and I put my hand on his arm to stop him.

  “I’m going with you,” I said.

  “You’re going to bed,” Michael ordered. “You haven’t had any sleep and you look like you’re about to collapse.”

  “Talk about the pot and the kettle,” I said, staring at his bloodshot eyes as I stood up. Then I transferred my stare to Ed. “I’ll be showered and dressed in twenty minutes. Less. Do not leave without me.”

  He checked his atomic watch and started to say something, but I cut him off. “And I don’t want you two arguing while I’m out of the room. Zip it.”

  I reinforced it with another stare, then got moving.

  While I was in the shower washing off the cemetery dust, Michael got the phone call that turned the mystery into a tragedy.

  Chapter 3

  I don’t take much time in the shower. My short, blond hair just needs a swish and a toss; I don’t even blow-dry it. The rest of me just got a whiz-over with the bath puff, and I was almost ready to get out of the shower when here came Michael, barging right in under the water.

  “Excuse me, sir, but you’ll have to wait your turn,” I said archly, sliding my wet hands around him and pulling him close. Sure, I was
in a hurry, but . . . .

  The look on his face killed the mood instantly.

  “What?” I asked, backing up.

  “Somebody broke into my house in Tropical Breeze last night. Actually, this morning, I guess. I gotta get into town. Jack’s got her.”

  Jack Peterson was a Tropical Beach Police patrolman.

  “Her?” I asked, turning my head and looking at him suspiciously.

  “It’s Vanessa Court,” he said, as if that cleared everything up.

  “And Vanessa Court is . . .? You sound like you know her.”

  “I went to high school with her. Took her to the prom, actually.” I could actually see a snapshot of that night flitting across his memory, and for some reason it bothered me.

  “And she just broke into your house? Is she down on her luck?”

  He reached around me for his scrubbie, all business. “Not at all. She’s a well-known documentarian. She’s made a terrific career for herself, although she’s gone off on a tangent lately. Anyway, I’m sure it’s nothing. We’d better go into town in separate cars. I don’t know what I’m going to be dealing with. It’s been years since I’ve seen Vanessa – decades, actually – and as I remember, she can be a handful.”

  The penny had finally dropped. “Vanessa, the local girl who went off to New York and began producing those celebrity exposés, or whatever?”

  “She’s the on-screen talent, not the producer. But she does a lot of the investigative background work herself. She’s brilliant. Hand me the shampoo.”

  “Why bother?” I asked, looking at his short brush-up of pure white hair.

  “You’re right. I’ll just rinse and go.”

  “No, wait –“

  He was out of the shower, dried off and half-dressed by the time I turned the water off and grabbed a towel.

  “Talk about a hit-and-run driver,” I muttered as I rubbed myself dry. By the time I had dried between each toe, he had grabbed his wallet and keys and was gone.

  Vanessa Court. Sounded like a made-up name to me. Way too classy for a small southern town. We had more than our share of Missys and Dee Dees, but she was the only Vanessa that had come up. I vaguely remembered seeing some of her shows, but as I was dressing I picked up my smart phone and searched out a grid of thumbnail pictures of her. There she was, bleached and airbrushed, smiling at the camera and going through the years without getting any older.

  “Had a little work done, have we?” I grumbled.

  In more recent photos, she had adopted a freakish look for her hair – she looked like a pixie that had been electrocuted. Her eyes were such a pale blue they seemed to change color, picking up tints from whatever she was wearing at the time. In one shot where she was in a dark purple blouse, her eyes were a gorgeous lavender. I hit the “Home” button, cleared the search and tossed the phone into my purse.

  Yes. I was already jealous. Any woman who could make a man ignore a wet, naked woman who’s standing right in front of him and get him to come a-running was somebody I was prepared to hate without any other provocation. I’m speaking as the wet naked woman, of course. We don’t like being ignored.

  * * * * *

  Ed had come in his little green car. I’m not sure how he gets all his electronic ghost-hunting equipment into it, let alone himself. I’m a statuesque lady: nearly six feet tall, blond and green-eyed, and toned and fit from working at the shelter all day. I gave the Geo Metro a dark look but didn’t say anything, since the little beast is Ed’s pride and joy. If I made a disparaging remark, he would’ve quoted the gas mileage at me (53 mpg in the city, 58 highway) and I already had it memorized.

  “I’ll drive,” I said, heading for my SUV.

  “Me too,” he said, heading for the Metro.

  Michael had already driven off, leaving a faint haze of dust above the dirt road that led from the house to the coastal highway. A quick turn to the south on Route A1A and we’d be in Tropical Breeze in about ten minutes. Too bad it took about fifteen minutes to negotiate the 3.6 miles of dirt road between us and asphalt.

  “I’ll go first,” Ed said, balling himself up to get into his car and quickly driving away.

  I stood by my SUV a moment listening to the quiet. Slats of sunshine illuminated the coastal scrub that enclosed the estate, and I took a moment to absorb the luminous golds and greens. There was a rustle and murmur from a gentle breeze, but not even a bird was calling. I might’ve been on a desert island, or lost in the deep jungle. The aloneness felt good, but I knew it couldn’t last. I heaved a deep sigh as I got into my Ford Escape, already having premonitions about what a squirrely day it was going to be.

  * * * * *

  Ed got to Bernie’s house first, of course. I gave a glance down the block to where my friend Florence Purdy lived. She was down with a cold, and I would’ve liked to check in on her, but I didn’t want Ed and Bernie to get carried away without me. Then I saw that Bernie was there waiting for me at her door, so I really had no choice. I’d check in on Florence afterward, I promised myself.

  “Never a dull moment,” she murmured, smiling as she let me in. “We’re in the office.”

  Bernie’s office was at the back of the house, and that’s where she produced The Beach Buzz every Friday. It was a cozy, cluttered room with a few old-fashioned steel filing cabinets and a newfangled computer with peripherals from which she sent the weekly editions of our small-potatoes newspaper through cyberspace to be printed into something physical at a print shop across town. Bernie may have been a little old lady, but she was very tech-smart and very alert under that innocent head of fluffy white hair.

  She had told me to grab some coffee if I wanted it as I passed the kitchen, and I decided I’d take her up on it. By the time I got into the office and set my cup down on the desk, Ed was already finishing up his narrative (with digressions) about my encounter.

  Bernie transferred her mild brown eyes to me. “Now you. What happened?”

  I gave it to her straight, no digressions, and when I was finished I said, “Now, what’s this about people seeing aliens all over town? What is this, a bid for the tourist trade?”

  “Excellent idea, but no. I don’t really know what’s going on. It might just be a classic case of mass hysteria, or it might be a hoax of some kind. In one case it was definitely phony. Cindy Shortner stayed out all night with her boyfriend, then tried to tell her parents she’d been abducted and given a really intense physical by aliens. She claims they did everything but clean out her earwax, and her folks didn’t believe it for a minute. They caught her trying to sneak back into the house at 5:30 am, and I guess that’s the best story she could come up with on short notice.”

  “Yes, that was definitely bogus,” Ed said. “Odd behavior on the part of people of Ms. Shortner’s age can always be explained by their juxtaposition to other young people of Ms. Shortner’s age.”

  “Hormones,” I said, putting it more succinctly.

  “Um, yes. The others, however, are harder to explain. Of course, none of the others claim abduction. They’re merely sightings. Close encounters of the third kind.”

  “I thought that was being abducted,” I said, momentarily distracted. “In the movie –“

  “That would be a close encounter of the fourth kind,” Ed said pedantically. “There are actually seven categories of close encounters, with more subcategories suggested, which personally, I consider useful. So far, the Tropical Breeze sightings are of the third kind: sightings of an animated being.”

  “Some of them by fairly dubious characters,” Bernie said.

  “Ah. You’re speaking of Jasper. I’ve interviewed him myself, and I’m convinced that he actually did see something.”

  “Jasper the jack-of-all-trades guy who lives right across from the beach?” I asked. Jasper is an old coot with a strange sense of humor, and it would be just like him to get on board with the alien sightings. On the other hand, he did tend to wander around the town and the beach at strange hours of the day and ni
ght.

  But Ed was dead serious about this, and he answered me in a way that said he was leveling with me. “Jasper sometimes speaks in riddles and poetry, but I’ve gotten to know the man pretty well. He’ll describe things obliquely and leave things out, but he never tells a flat-out lie. I believe him.”

  “Just what does he say happened?” Bernie asked.

  “He was doing what he calls ‘setting the sun down,’ so it happened just after sunset, say around 6 pm.”

  “Early in the day for aliens,” I commented. Ed nodded, as if I’d made a shrewd observation.

  “He also rises the sun in the morning. He takes his guitar out to the beach and sings at it. Anyway, when he got back to his bungalow, he heard something strange that seemed to be coming from behind his house. He went to investigate and something stood up, stared at him, then skittered away. His word: skittered.”

  “Did it make a noise?” I asked in a slightly rising voice. I’d managed to brush off the fear I’d felt in the dark of the night. Phantoms tend to disappear in the daylight. But when Ed described Jasper’s encounter, it brought back that feeling again. I even had a clear replay of the grunting noises I’d heard as the thing retreated into the brush.

  “Similar to what you heard,” he said, nodding. “He made the sound for me. It was kind of a regular puffing and grinding noise.”

  “A series of grunts,” I said. “Like an exhausted animal trying to catch its breath.”

  “Precisely. Can I warm up your coffee for you, Taylor? Perhaps Bernie has some cookies. You look a bit ashen.”

  “Can I get you anything?” Bernie asked gently.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. Thanks. Both of you. What about the other sightings? How many people are claiming they saw this . . . alien thing, whatever it is.”

  Ed looked at Bernie and said, “I’ve heard of two others. You?”

  “Jasper, old Janet McCann, and the Shortner girl. Were you counting the Shortner girl?”