“No, no, no, no,” Alison repeated, her anxiety growing more and more with each passing second.
“Calm down,” Sonja ordered, feeling frustrated that her own worry and anxiety was rising with her friends.
“Keep warm out there, kiddies, and here is our next song,” Tommy announced, putting on some new pop hit. The raucous sound hardly helped to calm the tension in the van.
“This is going to be a big one, even bigger than the last,” Ally complained, her eyes wide and exploring the torrential downpour around them. The trees seemed to be bowing down under the pressure as if giving thanks to the sky for the moisture.
Little waterfalls came down the mountainside and across the road. Sonja could easily see how they could quickly turn into flash floods.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured her best friend—and secretly comforted herself, “if it makes you feel safer, we’ll find a place to stop to wait out this storm.” Sonja wasn’t going to admit that she herself was scared and was hoping for a place to stop to stay dry until the worst of the storm was over.
“Darn these spring storms.”
Sonja was about to come up with some argument, an attempt to stay positive, about how much they needed the rain and how everything would be so green in the morning, but she didn’t get a chance.
“Sonja, look!” Ally exclaimed, pointing at the side of the road.
Standing in the trees, a thumb out toward passing cars, was a man in a thin coat and brown fedora.
“Holy smokes, what is he doing out here in this?” Alison gasped. “Stop and pick him up. He could die out here.”
“You’re right,” Sonja agreed. “He must have been out hiking or something and just got caught in it.”
Pulling to the side of the road, Alison rolled down her window. “Hey, hop in the back,” she yelled at him over the torrent.
“Thanks a million,” he waved as he ran around to the back of the van and opened the doors, climbing in. Once he had the doors shut, he turned forward and thanked them again. “I thought I was a goner for sure.” His voice shivered from the cold, wet clothes upon his back.
“Sorry, we don’t have any seatbelts back there,” Sonja apologized, indicating the metal cages and straps in the back in place of seats. “This is a catering van.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” he admitted. “It’s a hundred times better than being caught out in this mess.”
Sonja pressed the gas slowly, moving on down the slippery road. “What were you doing out there?”
“Honestly,” he shook his head, removing his hat and shaking it off, “I don’t remember. I just found myself out walking, and then it started to rain,” he sniffed. “What a night.”
“You don’t remember?” Alison asked, her brow wrinkled in concern.
“Nope,” the man said again, taking a glass bottle from his jacket, unscrewing the top, and drinking down the brown liquid inside.
Sonja watched him out of the corner of her eye in the rear-view mirror. Glancing up, the man looked her in the eye, catching her gaze.
Embarrassed, she focused on the wet road again—just as she knew she should be.
“It’s not alcohol if that’s what you’re thinking,” he held up the bottle, which reminded her vaguely of the glass milk jars the milkman left at the diner each week.
“Is it chocolate milk?” Ally asked, her train of thought along the same lines as Sonja.
“Nope, coffee. It’s to help me stay awake while I drive,” at this comment, the man stopped talking, his face twisting in confusion.
“Driving? Were you driving? Where is your car?”
“I-I don’t know,” he admitted.
Sonja glanced at him in the mirror again for a second, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about picking up the hitchhiker. If it hadn’t been raining like this, she would have never once considered picking up someone on the road. She knew it was dangerous—and she’d seen too many horror movies where this exact scenario led to some slasher related trope.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
Fiddling with the cap on his bottle, the man thought harder. “I-I don’t remember.”
This time, Ally turned in her chair toward him. “You don’t remember? Were you in an accident or something?”
The man hunched lower into himself, worry enveloping his whole body. “Maybe,” he paused while he took a moment to think very long and hard. “Wait,” he whispered. “I remember a wolf.”
“A wolf?” Sonja asked.
“Yeah,” he rolled his shoulders, attempting to relax them as a memory returned to him. “But it wasn’t just any wolf. I think it was a man too.”
Alison and Sonja exchanged a glance. Had they picked up some nutcase?
“Did you ever hear the story about the wolf boy in these parts?” he asked.
“N-no,” Alison admitted, silently communicating with Sonja with her hands that they needed to get rid of him.
“Well, there once was this little boy who came up through this pass with his father.”
Where is he going with this? Ally mouthed to her friend.
Sonja could only shrug.
“They were going to go fishing together. However, during their drive through this area, there was a heavy rainstorm.” He looked around out all the windows. “Just like this one. The father lost control of the car and it crashed into a tree. He died instantly.”
Ally was shaking her head.
“The boy, however, survived. He climbed out of the car and hid in a small cave for shelter. What he didn’t know was that the cave was also a wolves’ den, and all of them were in there. They smelled him, and came out to see what kind of morsel had wandered into their midst.” He leaned forward to be closer to the women—something that made them both uncomfortable. “But they didn’t eat him. Instead, they surrounded him on all sides and warmed him against the cold.”
“And then he was raised by wolves?” Sonja continued the seemingly pointless story.
The man looked up with wide eyes at her, wild eyes sunken with stress. “Yeees. He was raised by them. He ate with them, learned their ways. Eventually, people say, he even became so ingrained with them that he is now part man, part wolf. One side human, the other animal.”
He shivered at his own story as if he’d frightened himself. “Truly disturbing don’t you think?
“I guess,” Sonja agreed.
“And he’s wandering these woods and mountains at this very moment.”
“Oh, thank goodness, a gas station,” Sonja exclaimed, noticing the light just off the side of the road like a beacon of safety. A large neon arrow arched around the side of the building and pointed at it. Roadside Gas and Restaurant, it said in blue and yellow.
“Yes,” Ally celebrated a little with a clap of her hands. “I thought we’d never find a place.”
“It’s no hotel, but it will be warm inside.” Pulling into the lot at the side of the road, Sonja parked. “All right. This is where you get out buddy,” she said, turning in her seat to the hitchhiker.
As she did, she gasped.
“What, what is it?” Ally asked, turning around.
The hitchhiker was gone. He had vanished into thin air.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
“Do you mind telling me what just happened?” Ally blurted out as the two women stared at the empty van behind them.
Sonja had a good idea that they’d just experienced was a ghost, but was afraid to tell her best friend. She herself had spent the last year dealing with ghosts face to face. Very few people knew she had the power to see and talk to them.
Most of the time, ghosts came to her for help. Was this man a murder victim of some sort? Was he seeking Sonja’s sleuthing expertise the way other ghosts had? She thought of the accident up the road and considered that perhaps he was the victim who died in the blaze.
More importantly, how could she explain this all to Alison? Knowing her friend’s anxiety, she would freak.
“He must have just gotten out as we pulled up,” Sonja explained.
“Then why aren’t the back doors of the van open?” she blurted out. “How did he get out?”
Sonja shrugged. “He probably hopped out and shut them before we knew it.”
“How did we not notice?” Ally cried.
“Well, the storm is pretty loud. Maybe that’s why we didn’t hear.”
Alison’s eyes searched the darkness of the van, and her fear began to subside slightly. “Okay,” she whispered. “Maybe.”
“Let’s forget about him and get inside where it’s warm,” Sonja patted her friend's shoulder.
“Okay, let’s go.” Opening her door, the sky began to let out little pellet sized pieces of hail.
“Come on,” Sonja urged, putting her coat up over her head. “Let’s get inside.”
Running, both girls darted for the building.
Going through the glass front door, an electronic ding filled the air, announcing their presence.
“Oh, ladies,” were the words of a cheery woman from behind the counter. “You look completely soaked through to the bone.” She was portly, with a fitting warm smile across her lips, and wore a floral top with tight fitting jeans. The button on the pants looked like it was ready to fly off and take someone’s eye out at any moment. Her hair was red and curly, looking almost like a clown wig atop her head. “Come in, come in,” she insisted, guiding them further in. “Sit down for a while and dry off.”
“Thank you,” Sonja replied.
The building was split into two parts—the convince store and the restaurant. Just across from the door they entered was the glass checkout counter which doubled as a display case for cigarettes, cigars, and other items you had to show an ID to buy. To the left of the counter was a small store area with only three aisles worth of merchandise—chips, bagged cookies, and candy mainly.
The back corner, next to a dark hallway with a sign to the men’s bathroom, housed a collection of different Colorado and Rocky Mountain souvenirs including keychains, bottle openers, branded playing cards, fur skins, and even animal skulls—normal fare for tourists driving through the area. Sonja assumed the furs and skulls were fakes, copies of the real thing. They had a skull of a cow, wolf, rabbit, and more all jumbled together.
It wasn’t the tidiest of places.
The far end of the store had a line of coolers filled with various sodas, beers, and energy drinks.
To the right of the counter was the restaurant, a little hole-in-the-wall style eatery with wood paneling along the bottom half of the walls, peeling floral wallpaper along the top, and cheap woven tapestries featuring mountain landscapes and wolves. They looked generic, like the ones you could buy from any catalog.
The dining area had an arrangement of beat up looking wooden tables as well as a wooden counter with a service window behind it that looked into the kitchen where they prepared food.
Now, if ever there were a greasy spoon this was it. Sonja felt like she could sit on any one of the chairs and feel the thin layer of invisible stickiness of years gone by.
“This way, my dears,” the woman offered, sitting them down at a table closest to the store. There were a few other people in the restaurant as well, all of them clearly there for the same reason as Sonja and Alison—to escape the storm outside.
At one table was a handsome looking older man with salt and pepper colored hair and an angular face. His clothes didn’t seem to match his professional aura, a brown fishing vest with little hooks and tackles hanging off the front. A matching hat, one of the floppy brown ones worn by many fishermen, sat on the table in front of him next to his coffee.
At the next table sat a young woman, with a copy of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe in front of her and a cup of coffee on top of it. She had striking blue eyes and perfectly managed locks of brown hair, but she looked distressed, a grim expression that marred her overall beauty. The jacket around her shoulders was too large for her and Sonja guessed it was designed for a man.
The only other person was a man Sonja felt she should recognize but couldn’t quite place his face. He wore a fancy suit of sorts, with a puffy down jacket that hardly matched. It was almost as if he’d run out the door and grabbed the first coat he saw—instead of selecting a rain slick or other item that would better match his suit.
His balding head shined in the fluorescent light of the room.
“Coffee is on the house,” the woman who had seated them announced.
“Stop saying that, woman,” came a gruff complaint from the kitchen. An older gentleman in a paper hat and sporting a full white beard poked his head out. “We aren’t giving coffee to the masses here.”
“There is no harm in offering help to some cold and hungry people, P.J.” she argued.
The man grunted and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Don’t mind P.J., dears.” The woman waving her hand dismissively toward the kitchen. “He is just a bit of penny pincher.” Grabbing two mugs from the stack on the end of the counter, she brought them over with a pot of hot coffee.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Sonja shrugged, thinking that more people she knew could stand to spend a little less and save a little more.
“Well, I suppose it’s good if you want to save for a new RV,” she laughed quietly. “Which he does, but if it means we can’t share some coffee—some cheap coffee we got on sale, I might add—then I don’t want the darn thing.”
“I suppose not,” Sonja agreed with a smile, drawing the warming, welcoming cup of coffee close to herself.
“Did a man come in here just before we did?” Ally jumped in, “wearing a brown coat and fedora?”
The waitress straightened up and flattened her painted lips together. “No, dear. Everyone who has come in is right here in this room.” She motioned to the sparsely filled tables.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Alison moaned, taking a deep drink from the mug of coffee.
Sonja reached over and patted her friend on the hand. “Try not to think about it.”
“Did you two gals lose someone?” she shivered. “I’d hate to think of anyone caught out in this mess.”
“It’s no one,” Sonja offered. “We just saw a hitchhiker on the way here.”
“Well, I hope he is okay,” she bowed slightly. “By the way, my name is Brenda. Give me a call if you need something.”
“We will,” Sonja agreed, nodding at the waitress. As she watched the woman walk back across the room, she caught the glimpse of someone staring in one of the rain coated windows.
When she looked again, they were gone.
For a second, she swore it was the face of their hitchhiking ghost returned again.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
As the storm wore on, Sonja snuggled up closer to the wall heater, basking in its warmth. The storm didn’t give any sign of letting up, and in fact only got more intense with each passing minute.
“Looks like we might be here all night,” Ally muttered disappointedly.
“Well, there are worse things,” Sonja admitted. “We could still be driving, or worse we could be huddled in our van on the side of the road while we tried to wait for this to clear up.”
“Or we could be dead like that poor driver in that crash.”
Sonja shook her head. “Try not to think of things like that, okay.” She reached over and rubbed her friend’s shoulder. “This place has its own rustic charm. It’s cozy, we have coffee, and the owners seem really nice.”
“The owners?”
“Why, Brenda and P.J. of course.”
“How do you know they own the place?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, but there is an old black and white picture of the two of them together above the checkout counter. That, and the way they bantered back and forth, I can only assume they are an old married couple and that they own this place.”
Ally perked up a little and smiled at her friend. “You sure have
an eye for details, Sonj’. It’s no wonder Frank values all your help on those murder cases.”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure values is the right word. Maybe he resents it?”
Ally shook her head. “How could he not be grateful?”
“Because maybe I get in his way, make him worry.”
“I guess so,” Ally nodded, drinking up the rest of her coffee. “But everyone in town knows you’re a great sleuth.”
“Or they know I’m an incessant busybody.”
“Well, don’t think about those people.”
Sonja shrugged. “I can’t help it. I just notice things that other people don’t.”
“Oh? How about this? What can you learn just by looking at the people in this room?”
Sonja smiled embarrassedly, glancing around at the people. “I really shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” she asked eagerly.
Shrugging, Sonja decided it couldn’t cause any harm—especially if it helped keep her friend’s anxiety down. “Well, that gentlemen over there,” she nodded toward the man in the fishing getup, “is probably on one of his first ever fishing trips, if not his very first.”
“How can you tell?”
“Well, look how nicely his hair is done, and his completely clean shaven face?”
“Yeah?”
“And how about that nice leather suitcase he has with him? He seems more like a well-respected businessman or a doctor, not a fisherman. The getup doesn’t fit with his overall persona. Heck, the flies he has on his jacket aren’t even crafted properly. My guess is he’s having a mid-life crisis, decided to look for a new hobby, and fishing won out.”
“Wow, Sonj’,” Ally gushed quietly. “Now, do that guy,” she pointed at the man in the suit.
“Also, a well-respected businessman of sorts. He looks vaguely familiar to me, so perhaps he’s been on the TV at some point or in the newspaper. He isn’t here on any vacation. It’s probably a last-minute, emergency business trip or something.”
“Why?”
“His jacket is a fluffy down coat that doesn’t match the rest of his ensemble. Maybe a last-minute meeting in Denver or something, so he threw on the only jacket he could find and ran out the door.”
Scary Sausage Waffle (The Diner of the Dead Series Book 13) Page 2