by Catie Rhodes
“Why on earth would I not want to meet your boyfriend?” I saw an ashtray sitting on the particle board dresser and took out my cigarettes and showed them to Mysti. She nodded and went into the bathroom and turned on the light. I lit up and followed her, pulling myself up to sit on the long sink vanity.
“Because you’re lonely, whether you want to admit it or not.” She glanced up from applying her lip gloss and raised her eyebrows. “Plus, he’s not really my boyfriend. Commitment issues, I think.”
“Too bad. He’s cute.” I winked at her.
“He really is.” She giggled and finished putting on her makeup. “Griff’ll want to work after supper. We might be interviewing people. Make yourself presentable.”
I touched up my makeup and brushed my chin-length hair, staring hard at the black for strands of gray, but didn’t change out of my worn-in jeans and beat-up cowboy boots. I bet I’d fit in better than Griff and Mysti did.
We found Griff standing next to a new gray SUV, smoking a cigarillo. He stubbed it out and hurried to open the door for Mysti. Without asking where we wanted to go, he drove us to a diner called Family Home Cooking. The sign out front promised all we could eat fried catfish. We had to circle the full lot several times before someone pulled out, and we snagged their spot.
Griff opened the door for Mysti and went around the SUV’s back and pulled out a black canvas messenger bag. We walked into the restaurant, a large, open room lined with booths. Tables created an obstacle course through the middle of the room. Every head in the restaurant turned to stare at us.
Most of Family Home Cooking’s patrons wore about the same thing I did. Mysti and Griff stood out like a pair of chess pieces on a checkerboard. A young woman wearing a tight, white t-shirt with Family Home Cooking emblazoned on the front hurried over to us.
“Folks, there’s a booth about to open up over in that corner.” She raised one arm to point, and her shirt pulled up, exposing a fish-belly white roll of fat hanging over her jeans. She left the t-shirt the way it was and went on about her business, leaving us to stand like vultures while the elderly couple occupying the booth she pointed out slowly stood and gathered their belongings and finally sauntered off, the woman staring hard at us as they passed. We slid into the booth even though the other couple’s ketchup smeared plates and half-empty tea glasses still sat on it.
“What y’all want to drink?” A middle-aged woman appeared next to the booth and took out an order pad.
“Do you have beer?” Griff didn’t sound or look too hopeful.
“Nowhere in Nazareth has beer. Hall County’s dry as a bone.” She delivered the speech in a bored monotone. “We got iced tea, sweet or unsweet and all kinds of Coke.”
“Water?” I didn’t trust the tea, and soft drinks were too sweet for me.
She scribbled on her notepad without answering.
Mysti and Griff ordered unsweet tea.
“Catfish buffet’s all there is. Go over to the steam counter and tell ‘em what you want. Price is $11.99 per person.” She turned to walk away.
“Ma’am?” Griff called after her. She turned back, her mouth still set in the same grim line. “Can we get the table cleaned off?”
She heaved out the kind of sigh only the truly put upon know how to deliver. “I’ll have it done by the time you get back with your plates.”
Turned out, she didn’t and had to rush over and remove the plates and glasses while we stood there holding our food. Griff had to ask her not to take away the drinks she’d brought for us. We ate our food in silence. When we finished, Griff ordered coffee and pulled a laptop and a few files out of his messenger bag.
“As you probably guessed from the billboard, we’re here to look into the disappearance of Susan Franklin.” He pushed a button to power up his laptop and pushed it against the wall so it faced outward. He tapped a few buttons and a grainy newspaper photo of a smiling girl looked out at us.
“Why after so many years?” I stared at the face, knowing she was probably dead, probably a horrible death.
“Let’s let this young lady serve our coffee, and I’ll tell you a little story.”
The girl with the muffin top set out a thermal carafe of coffee. Then she dug in her apron and set down the bill. Rather than leaving, she stood, staring at us expectantly, until Griff picked up the bill, dug in his wallet, and handed her some bills with a smile. “Keep the change.”
The girl’s small mouth dropped open, and she drew in a deep breath. “Thanks a lot, mister.” She made a big show of dragging the little sugar holder to the middle of the table and giving us a toothy smile before she walked off. Griff said nothing until she was out of earshot.
“Susie was a senior at Nazareth High. Good student, track runner. She dropped out of high school midway through the fall semester of her senior year.” Griff poured coffee into thick off-white mugs. “We have an appointment to speak with her mother in a few minutes. I’m going to let her tell you why Susie quit school.”
After the ordeal at the billboard outside Nazareth, Griff’s insistence on not telling us the whole story grated on me. “Why don’t you just tell us?”
“Good question. What happened to Susan Franklin was fairly well-documented in the news media. It was a huge scandal.” He stopped to take a sip of his coffee. “But I’ve never heard her mother tell her version of events. Since neither you nor Mysti have heard any of Susie’s story, I’m hoping one of you will hear anything I skim over because it sounds familiar. The small details are what breaks cases like this wide open.”
I was tired of being in the dark, but I nodded. I’d get paid either way.
“Now let’s get down to what I really want the two of you to know. I found out about Susie Franklin while looking into another missing person’s case.” Griff pulled a sheet of paper from his file and slid it across the table to Mysti and me. A picture of a smiling girl took up most of the sheet. Underneath her picture were the words “$150,000 reward for any information on the whereabouts of Kaitlyn Summers who went missing September 16, 2011.”
There’s the real money and the reason he’s willing to hire not one, but two, paranormal princesses.
“I called the number on the flyer.” Griff leaned forward, chest pressing into the hard edge of the table, intent on his story and earnest about telling it. “Talked to Kaitlyn’s father. Nice guy. He said the last time he talked to Kaitlyn, she had turned off the main road because she saw a sign for a rest stop. She apparently needed a restroom.”
I shivered at the mention of the rest stop. Surely Kaitlyn didn’t stop at the one Mysti and I passed earlier. It looked too run down and the vegetation too overgrown to have been open in 2011. Stay out of abandoned buildings.
Griff took in my shiver. “She lost signal not long afterward, and he never spoke to her again.”
“Law enforcement find anything?” My ex was the new sheriff of the county where I lived. I learned during our time together that law enforcement got involved in everything.
“Not even her car. Her cellphone last pinged off a tower near here.” Griff stopped talking as a family of four passed our booth. “Thing is, when I started looking into Summers’s disappearance, I learned something funny. Somewhere between forty and fifty people have gone missing in the last thirty years, within a twenty-mile radius of where we’re sitting.” He tapped the table for emphasis.
Outsiders have a way of disappearing. The skin on my back crawled.
“Something’s going on here, has been going on for a while. If I can, I intend to find out what it is.” Griff glanced between Mysti and me. “The reward’ll be nice, but this’ll help a lot of families find closure.”
“And get your name on the map.” I smiled to let him know I didn’t think ill of him for it.
“You bet.” He pointed one long finger at me. “Get you ladies on the map, too. Maybe lead to some business.”
He and Mysti high-fived. Watching them made me feel good. Even if Griff wouldn’t commit, they
seemed to have a good deal going. Another thing I learned from my abortive relationship with Dean Turgeau was the importance of recognizing when things worked and ending them right away if they didn’t.
“Do you think whatever’s doing this is something paranormal?” It sounded more like human evil to me, like we might be sitting in a serial killer’s favorite hunting spot.
“I just don’t know.” Griff caressed his stubble beard and shook his head. “Mysti told me you’re a powerful medium. I hoped, if nothing else, you’d be able to contact Susie’s spirit.”
The burlap head family popped back into my mind, and I quickly told Griff about seeing them. He shuffled through his papers and showed me a newspaper report about a family moving cross country in the days before cellphones who vanished somewhere between the Louisiana border and Dallas.
“This them?” He tapped a photo of a family smiling in front of an old RV.
“I didn’t see their faces.” I picked up the paper and scanned through it, noticing a PI hired by the family found a truck stop waitress north of Tyler who remembered them coming into the place where she worked. She said the little girl’s dress had sunflowers on it. I handed the paper back to Griff. It trembled along with my hand.
The middle-aged waitress marched over to our table and loomed over us like a schoolmarm who’d caught a bunch of kids smoking behind the wood shop.
“We close in ten minutes.” She bit out the words as though she’d have rather screamed them and marched away.
“We need to get to Margaret Franklin’s anyway,” Griff told us. Mysti and I helped him pack up his things and got out before Miss Meanypants returned.
2
Griff drove us through a maze of narrow, blacktopped streets. Trees hung in a canopy over the road. The dying sunlight streaked through the branches, dappling light and shadows in front of us. He pulled to the curb in front of a tall, skinny Queen Anne style Victorian with a for sale sign in front.
Despite the sunny yellow and sage paint, obviously fresh, and the brighter than bright white picket fence, a pall hung over the house. The house itself seemed to sit alone and apart from the other tidy houses on the street. It seemed like the loneliest kid in school, which I knew more than a little about.
Griff held open the picket fence gate for Mysti and me and followed us up the walk and onto a tiny, rounded front porch. A hanging bench swing took up most of the space. He edged past us to knock on the front door, the white columns on either side dwarfing him. The light fixtures set into the columns were already lit to welcome the oncoming darkness.
From inside the house, soft, quick footsteps approached the huge door. It swung open and we stood face to face with a white-haired woman wearing paint stained blue jeans and a matching t-shirt. Her canvas shoes must have started out white but dirt and stains had turned them the color of dishwater. She struggled to smile but never got both sides of her lips to cooperate and finally settled on a kind of grimace.
“Griffin Reed?” She settled her gaze on each of us in turn, lingering the longest on me.
“Call me Griff.” He held out his hand for her to shake, which she did after staring at it for a while.
“Y’all come on in, I guess.” She held open the door for us to pass.
The house’s interior was as smartly spiffed up as its outside. I thought I smelled the scent of refinished wood floors and fresh paint. The bannister on the stairs to the second floor held my attention the longest. The wood’s rich, flawless stain gleamed in the lamplight, casting the room into a sort of golden hazed shadow world. Despite how pretty everything looked, the same sadness permeated the rooms. I glanced at Griff and Mysti and saw they’d locked hands, both their faces set in grim discomfort. The right buyer for this wonderful home would be a long time coming.
“Come on in my office.” Margaret Franklin led us down a narrow hallway off the foyer, moving faster and more gracefully than I’d have imagined a woman her age capable.
As I passed in front of the beautiful stairway, I saw the outline of someone sitting on the top step, arms hunched over her legs, the glow of evening sun glimmering over a headful of blond hair. Must be Susie Franklin’s ghost. Maybe she would be willing to communicate with me. Some spirits resisted. I hoped she wouldn’t be one of them.
Margaret Franklin showed us into her office. The narrow room, with its tall windows and white painted brick fireplace, might have originally served as a parlor. She motioned us to sit on a worn leather couch positioned in front of a bank of filing cabinets. I sat on one end, next to Mysti, and Griff sat on the other end. The freshly painted walls were naked, but posters of Susie, most of them emblazoned with the word missing, lay everywhere. They must have been the former decor. Margaret watched me looking around.
“Can I get y’all Cokes or anything?”
“No, but thank you.” Mysti said. “We came from eating supper.”
Margaret rolled an old-fashioned wooden desk chair in front of the couch and sat in it, her gaze finding me again. “I know you,” she said finally. “You’re Peri Jean Mace from Gaslight City.”
My cheeks got hot. I squirmed on the couch, looking for a comfortable position and not finding one. “Yes, I am.”
“I agreed to hire a private detective, not a psychic.” Margaret glared at Griff.
“Her fees come out of mine. There won’t be any extra charges.” Griff’s face remained impassive.
I wanted to know how Margaret knew who I was, what I was. Had I been on my own, I’d have asked. No, demanded. This situation, working for Griff, required I shake it off. I did so reluctantly.
Margaret focused on Mysti. “And you, little miss tie-dye hippie, what’s your part?”
“I have a business specializing in séances, among other things. I’m here to assist Peri Jean if she needs it.” Mysti said the words in an even, professional tone I envied and wanted to learn how to emulate. I had to find it within myself to do this, to make this work. It was my last chance before I started wearing a uniform and a name tag to work.
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me you were bringing these two,” Margaret told Griff. “I’d have probably told you not to bother. You’ve got to understand, after Susie went missing, I got hit on by every crackpot in the country. Folks claiming to be psychics would call me up … at first I was really gullible.”
“I’m sorry if you were swindled,” Griff said. “I assure you I am honest. The rate I quoted you won’t go up. Sometimes I do employ traditional investigative methods. On a case this old, however, the trail is cold. Mysti and Peri Jean might give me the advantage I need to help you. Are you ready to talk about Susie? Maybe tell me what your dream outcome to all this is?”
Margaret nibbled on her bottom lip for several seconds. Her eyes clouded with some sort of internal debate. Finally, her face hardened, and she spoke. “I’m sure you saw the for sale sign out front. This town is full of bad memories for me. I’m retired, and I want to move on. Before I do, I want to find my baby’s remains and give her the burial she deserves.”
“We will do our best to help you achieve that goal.” Griff pulled his messenger bag into his lap and dug out some papers. “This is a standard contract for my services. Why don’t you look it over, sign it. Then I’d like you tell us everything you know about Susie’s disappearance.”
Margaret put on a set of reading glasses and pored over each page of the contract, brow furrowed. She got to the last page and sat there chewing on her lip and staring at it. Drawing a deep breath, as though fortifying herself, she scribbled her name. She held out the papers to Griff, and he slipped them back into his messenger bag. He took out a small, digital recorder.
“Do you mind if I record our conversation? I use the recording to make my notes.”
Margaret waved off the question, nodding. “I suppose I should tell you this ain’t my first experience with a private investigator.”
“That so?” Griff leaned forward, his handsome face set in concerned lines, gaze fixed on
Margaret.
“I hired Phil Cotton out of Dallas. You ever heard of him?”
“Actually, I have. He was one of the first people I met when I started doing this work. He and the guy who trained me were like those old-style TV gumshoes.” Griff chuckled.
Margaret nodded, allowing herself a small smile.
“How soon after Susie’s disappearance did you hire Mr. Cotton?”
“Within a month. The police force wouldn’t help me look for her. They said it was because she ran away, but it was really because of her trouble here in town.” Anger flared in her eyes and cheeks, and she shook it off with an air of resignation I knew by heart.
“Did Phil learn anything useful? I’m sorry to say he died several years ago, and I have no idea if I could get my hands on his records. Anything you remember would be a great help.”
“I got his report in one of those file cabinets behind you.” Margaret stood, walked around the couch and began opening and closing drawers. I twisted in my seat to watch her. She took out a yellowed file and handed it to Griff.
“Phil checked area restaurants, bus stations, the like. Nobody’d seen her. It was like she walked out of this house and fell off the edge of the earth.” Margaret sat back down in her rolling chair.
Remembering Griff’s similar comment about the other disappearances, I shivered. Margaret watched me, her eyebrows knitting together. She turned back to Griff.
“You told me when you contacted me you’d found Susie’s website and then did some research. What do you know about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance?”
“Just what the newspapers printed at the time,” Griff said. “I’d like to hear you tell me everything you remember. Mysti and Peri know nothing about Susie’s disappearance, so please start from the beginning for their benefit.”
Margaret’s face twisted. She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Susie’s father was a long-haul truck driver who got killed in an accident when Susie was starting high school. He didn’t have insurance, and he hung on for about six weeks on life support. His death ate up everything we’d put away to send Susie to college.” She spoke the words as though she’d either said them often or thought them often. I’d guess both. She took a deep breath and started speaking again. “I encouraged Susie to find something she could use to get a scholarship to college. We’d gotten a new football coach, and he started a girl’s track program. He was outgoing and good-looking, and Susie signed up. She ended up running track all through high school.” She sucked her upper lip into her mouth and mashed her bottom teeth into it, staring at us as though deciding whether or not she could stand to continue.