Rest Stop (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 4)

by Catie Rhodes

  “Margaret, you’re not to blame for what happened.” Griff leaned forward as far as he could and stared hard at her. “None of us here will judge you.”

  Her expression dulled. I suspected it didn’t matter if we judged her or not. She did a fine job of it herself. “The summer between Susie’s junior and senior year, she changed.” Margaret narrowed her eyes at the memory.

  “How did your daughter change?” Mysti asked in her soft, gentle voice.

  “She was thin from running track, but she got downright skinny. And she didn’t act like herself. My daughter was always bubbly and giggling. That year, she got quiet.” Margaret put her hand over her mouth. “She wanted to quit track. God damn me to Hell, I wouldn’t let her, and I never even asked why.” She spoke the last words in a trembling, weepy voice and had to stop. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “First week of October, I came home early from work and found Susie face down on her bed. She’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills. I rushed her to old Doc Rasmussen’s office, and he saved her.” The older woman’s mouth puckered as though she’d tasted something awful. “Next day she told me she’d been sleeping with the coach since the end of her junior year.”

  “Oh no,” Mysti whispered. Fury stormed inside me, and I pushed it down, forcing myself to stay calm.

  “I took all the right steps.” Margaret counted off on her fingers. “I reported him to the principal. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened.” Her gaze settled on the floor, weighted down with events thirty-five years dead. She slumped with the burden of it. “See, the coach—Bobby John Culpepper—was good at his job. We’d had winning seasons ever since he hired on. Principal Thomas didn’t want to do anything at all. Oh, he offered to pay for Susie to go to boarding school in Dallas.”

  I ground my teeth. I knew all too well how small town people could band together to sweep undesirable events or people under the rug.

  “What happened then?” I didn’t like the grit in my voice, knew I couldn’t let it get the better of me, but I had to know how this awful story ended up.

  “I—I got angry. I contacted the Dallas media and hired a lawyer. The story broke and the school suspended the coach.” Margaret twisted her hands in her lap. “But, see, it didn’t end there. Folks in town were mad because they thought I was trying to take away their winning ticket. None of Susie’s friends would talk to her. The football team terrorized her. It was like she’d done something terrible. I suppose, to all of them, she had. She stood it for a few weeks and quit going to school.”

  None of us said anything for several minutes. I listened to the hum of electronics in the house and thought about Susie Franklin.

  “Tell us about the day Susie disappeared,” said Griff, voice soft and full of sympathy. “Was there any sign of a struggle?”

  “No. I came home from work, and she was gone. She’d taken a few clothes, her duffle bag, and her purse. I never found her babysitting money, so I guess she had that on her, too.” Margaret drew in a trembling breath.

  “It’s your opinion she left on her own will?” Griff’s voice never wavered from its sympathetic croon.

  “Yes, she ran away.” Margaret threw up her hands. “But Susie would have called me once she got where she was going. Or sometime over the years. She’d have never left me hanging. She knew I loved her, but I was the postmistress over at the post office. Moving to another town would have meant starting over, maybe a pay cut. We had no savings.” Margaret’s voice rose with each declaration and her eyes shone with tears.

  “What became of the coach?” Mysti put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward.

  “With Susie gone, what little investigation there was died.” Bitterness crept into Margaret’s voice. “Coach Bobby John took the rest of that year off, but he was back the next year coaching the Nazareth High School Fighting Tigers to another winning season.”

  Hurt welled up in my chest and closed my throat. What an awful thing for this poor woman to have to watch.

  Margaret got up and walked to the antique desk behind her. She dug through the drawers and put a few things in a plastic grocery sack. “Mr. Reed? Since you’ve hired psychics, maybe I should give these to you.”

  Griff rose from the couch and took the sack from her, briefly glancing at its contents. To my surprise, he held it out to me. I peeked inside. Inside was a school picture of Susie Franklin. Susie had her white-blond hair styled into Farrah Fawcett waves and wore blue eye shadow to set off her cornflower blue eyes. Griff didn’t sit back down but instead nodded to Mysti and me. We stood.

  “I think we’ve got enough, Margaret.” He held out his hand again, and she took it briefly. She turned to me.

  “I put Susie’s track shirt in there so y’all could remember she was really a person, one who was done wrong by this town.”

  “I will do my best to settle this for you,” I said.

  We left the house in silence and drove through dark streets back to the motel.

  “I feel funny dumping you in here by yourself.” Mysti leaned against the standard hotel room vanity, its edge cutting off the head of the peacock on her white kimono, and piled her hair on top of her head. She flipped on the two curling irons on the counter and glanced at me in the mirror.

  “Don’t. How often do you two actually get to spend time together?” The elaborateness of her beauty ritual both amused me and made me feel incredibly lonely. I didn’t miss Dean so much as I missed having someone to share life with. No matter how awful I felt, I’d break my own back not to let it show. Mysti didn’t deserve to have her evening with Griff ruined with my drama.

  “Not often.” Mysti waved the eyeliner applicator in her hand. “Well, I suspect it’s often enough for Griff.”

  “Why do you stay interested if you don’t want the same thing?” Actually, I knew the answer to this one. Sometimes a guy seems worth jumping through extra hoops in case there’s a chance it might work out.

  “I keep hoping he’ll wake up some day.” She applied thick, black cat eyes and put away the eyeliner. “Griff got married young and divorced after a couple of years. He thinks the problems had to do with his personality flaws.”

  “And he thinks the same things’ll go wrong if you two get serious?”

  Mysti nodded and stroked mascara onto her eyelashes. “I don’t think it was his fault. It was being too young, too poor, and desperately unhappy because of those things.”

  “From what you can gather.”

  “I keep forgetting you went through a nasty breakup not so long ago.” She stopped patting glittery powder over her face long enough to give me a sympathetic smile.

  “I’m sure not one to give relationship advice.” I leaned over the counter and picked up a pot of plum colored eye shadow. I’d never have the nerve to wear something so bold, but it fit Mysti.

  “You want to, though. It’s written all over your face.” She pulled her hair out of its clip and grabbed the larger of the two curling irons.

  “Dean taught me firmly held beliefs don’t change. No matter how much either of you want them to.” I unscrewed the lid off the plum colored eyeshadow and took the eye shadow brush Mysti handed me. I slid off the counter so I could see my reflection and started applying it. I couldn’t help myself, even though I knew I wouldn’t like it. “My advice is to either enjoy the status quo, knowing it’ll never be more, or tell him what you want and see where he stands. Be willing to end it if what he says doesn’t make you happy.”

  Mysti said nothing and picked up the smaller curling iron. She used it to make tiny ringlets framing her face. She unplugged both curling irons and stared at me in the mirror. “That what you wish you’d done with Dean?”

  “Sort of. I wish I had accepted his limitations regarding who and what I am a lot earlier on than I did.” A more truthful wish was never having taken up with him in the first place. I could have saved myself the grief.

  “At least you’re no worse for the wear.
And look at you starting something new using your special talent.” She winked at me and gave my hair a tug. “You’ve even got this new look going with your longer hair. You got the world by the balls.” She grabbed her clothes off their hangers went into the tiny bathroom and closed the door.

  I listened to her rustle around dressing and thought about what I was doing here in Nazareth, Texas. What if I was making another stupid mistake, like with Dean? Just as Dean hadn’t been my dream man, medium-for-hire was not my dream job.

  Cleaning houses and mowing lawns wasn’t either, remember? No, it wasn’t. I learned to look for the positives in the work. Many of the positives of being a medium-for-hire would be the same. Not having to show up and sit behind a desk or stand behind a counter eight hours a day. Choosing my own clientele. Working with different people all the time.

  But what if it doesn’t work out? What’s next? I didn’t know, and not knowing scared me. Too much in my life had changed over the last year, and none of the changes were happy ones. People I loved were dead. I knew secrets I never wanted to know.

  “You can do this.” Mysti’s voice came from right next to my ear. I yelped and tripped over my own feet, adrenaline surging through my bloodstream.

  “I didn’t even hear you come out of the bathroom.” I sat down on my bed and took in her outfit, unable to keep my eyes from widening.

  Mysti posed for me, sticking her knee through the slit in her floor length black, slinky nightgown. She twisted and turned on her strappy, black, and high-heeled, do-me shoes.

  “Wow. He won’t know what hit him.” I shook my head.

  Mysti waved off my compliment. “Sorry I surprised you. You were so deep in thought and worry, somebody needed to break you out of it.” She stood in front of me and met my gaze. “You can do this. Really. But keep one thing in mind. It’s your choice. If you really don’t want to, I’ll take you to the bus station in the morning. But since we’re playing girlfriends and giving advice, here’s mine to you. Give this a chance, a really fair one. Quit worrying and put your heart into it.” She headed for the door, reached for it, and then turned back. “You really think I look all right?”

  “I think you could stop traffic.” I gave her a little wave and watched her step out into the night. A few seconds later, I heard her rap on Griff’s door and his appreciative exclamation as he opened it. The loneliness surged over me again. Mysti left her car keys and instructions to take it out if I decided to.

  The idea was tempting. On the way into Nazareth, I remembered seeing a little honkytonk. It was twenty or so miles south of town. As quickly as I had the idea, I dismissed it. I spent most of my twenties on learning the art of the disposable relationship. I’d either grown out of it or lost my taste for it. Nah. Maybe sometime. But not tonight.

  I should take Mysti’s advice and throw myself into this work. The plastic grocery sack Margaret Franklin gave me sat on the cheap dresser. I pushed myself off the bed, grabbed the sack, and took it to the little two chair table by the window. One by one, I removed the items inside.

  I set the school picture of Susie Franklin on the table where I could look at it. She didn’t look much like the cowering, thin ghost I saw sitting on the top stair in Margaret’s house. I stared hard at the picture, at Susie’s happy blue eyes, at the tilt of her head. She was looking at someone off camera. Maybe the coach Margaret said Susie claimed to have an affair with?

  The next item I pulled from the bag was Susie’s track shirt. It was a simple white t-shirt—no microfiber or fancy materials back in 1980—with the words Nazareth Girls Track Team printed on it in red letters. I set it aside on the table and grabbed for the next item, which was a hard object wrapped in newspaper. Margaret hadn’t mentioned this.

  I unwrapped the newspaper, careful not to tear it, and found myself holding an inexpensive souvenir snow globe, the kind with the cheap plastic base. This one advertised Reno, Nevada. Why would Margaret include this? Was it a favorite trinket of Susie’s? I glanced back at the track shirt. Margaret told me about the track shirt and why she included it. Why didn’t she tell me about the snow globe?

  Next door, Mysti and Griff must have dispensed with the preliminaries and gotten down to business. They themselves weren’t loud. But the headboard banging against the wall was. Sitting there listening made me feel like a nasty, voyeuristic intruder. Mysti said I could use her car, said to put my best effort into doing this job. I was going to do it. I grabbed the car keys and the room key and slipped out as quietly as I could.

  A few minutes later, I parked the car at Margaret Franklin’s curb. The lights were on in the house, but I sat behind the wheel, doubting my decision to come over here. Margaret might resent me intruding on her a second time. I picked up the snow globe and held it up to the dim light coming into the car from the streetlight. I still didn’t see the significance. I turned my gaze back to the house. Someone stood from the swing on the porch.

  My heart went into overdrive, stealing my breath away. I put my hand on the key, still plugged into the ignition, and started to turn it. Then Margaret stepped out onto the steps leading up to the porch. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face, but she had her hand clutched at the neckline of her shirt. She deserved to know who was here at the very least. I got out of the car, still holding the globe in my hand.

  “It’s Peri Jean Mace, Mrs. Franklin.” I called in a low voice.

  “I was sitting out here enjoying the night. Would you like to join me?”

  There was no answer but yes. I trudged up the steps and sat next to her on the swing. She turned to me, ready to say something, and gasped.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “It was in the sack you sent.”

  “No, ma’am, it wasn’t.” Her voice rose. She took a deep breath, as though calming herself. When she spoke again, her voice went back to normal volume. “I promise you I didn’t put it in the sack. I haven’t seen that thing, well, since Susie disappeared. I don’t really know when it was gone, just that I never found it again.”

  I held out the globe to her, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “No. Maybe Susie wanted you to have it.”

  I cradled the globe in my hands. Maybe she was right, although that thought gave me a shiver. “You seemed unhappy earlier about Griff hiring a—what was your word?—a psychic. Now you think Susie’s ghost made sure I got this. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  Margaret leaned back on the swing, letting her head fall backward. “I was an ass. I’m sorry. The way I reacted to seeing you was really a reaction to the reminder Susie is dead, not doubt of your powers.”

  “How do you know I see the dead?” Now was my chance to find out how she knew me. I’d be dipped in double doo-doo before I let it pass.

  “I visited Gaslight City a year or so ago.” She glanced at me. “My retirement from the Postal Service was coming up fast, and I briefly entertained the idea of turning this place into a bed and breakfast.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Doing a little market research, I guess.”

  I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest, hoping it was too dark for her to see the sea of unease churning inside me. Lots of people in my hometown thought bad stuff about me. No telling what Margaret heard.

  “I stayed in a different bed and breakfast every night. The last one, the one called Gardenia’s Rest, had a cocktail hour. You served.”

  “Don’t tell me I spilled your drink on you.” This conversation dug painful claws into my pride. Those little jobs used to make up a livelihood for me. They were lost to me forever because of my ability to see ghosts.

  “No, you were very good. But after you left…” She trailed off and squirmed. “One of the other guests told me about you. She was about your age, had moved away, and was in town for a wedding or something. Said her cousin died under odd circumstances. Family thought he’d been murdered. You stopped by her aunt and uncle’s house one day and told them what happened to him. I think she said it was s
ome kind of freak accident.”

  I dug my elbows into my knees, putting all the weight I could on them to distract myself from the sick feeling building in my stomach. I remembered the situation well and still felt the burn of embarrassment over the way those people looked at me. Disgusted, yet curious. It reminded me of the way Dean looked at me the day he dumped me. I couldn’t look at Margaret and regretted coming here. This was a mistake, all of it. I stared at the snow globe in my lap, focusing on it until it was all I saw. Distantly, I felt the black opal I wore around my neck heating up the way it always did in response to my otherness asserting itself.

  The snow globe lit up from the inside, but the snow and the skyscape of Reno I’d seen back in my cheap motel room was gone, replaced by the inside of Margaret Franklin’s house. Only this version of Margaret’s house looked lived in and loved with outdated wallpaper, shag carpet, and cheap furniture mixed in with the antiques. Late afternoon sunlight streaked in through the windows. The vision built itself around me, erasing the real world piece by piece.

  3

  I stared into the world inside the snow globe, and it became more real each second. I smelled something cooking in the kitchen. Pot roast and carrots maybe. A doorbell rang.

  My insides jolted at the sound, almost pulling me out of the vision. How did I hear that? My visions were usually like silent movies.