Case of the Vanishing Visitor

by Shanna Swendson

  And, of course, that was when a truck drove between the camera and the restaurant, blocking the view. It even stopped right there, filling almost the entire frame, as a car backed out of a parking space in front of it. We watched awhile longer after the truck left, until I was absolutely certain it was past the time when she’d arrived. “That was terrible timing,” I said.

  “We can catch her leaving,” he said, speeding up the video so that it went by in a blur before he slowed it down again.

  I saw Cissy enter and said, “This is almost it. She left soon after this woman got there.”

  He slowed the video to normal speed. I actually groaned out loud when a truck pulling a camper trailer entered the frame, blocking the view again. “What are the odds?” I asked.

  “Actually, pretty good,” he said. “A lot of trucks, trailers, campers, and the like come down this road. I have the camera set to watch the approach to my building, so it’s not a problem for me. I’m not trying to spy on Margarita. Maybe she’s got cameras.”

  I shook my head, “No. She only turns them on after hours to catch anyone who breaks in. She doesn’t like spying on her customers.”

  “I ought to talk to her about that. They could come in handy for liability issues. Like, if someone tries to say they found something in their food, she could have proof that they put it in there themselves.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “You’d be surprised. That’s why I have cameras in the coffee shop.”

  “Do you have any other angles that might have caught her? The place was really crowded, so the parking nearby was full. She might have had to walk.”

  He scrolled through the feeds from a couple of other cameras, but I didn’t see anyone who resembled Florrie. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said. One nice thing about him not knowing about my talent with ghosts was that it didn’t seem to have crossed his mind that I might have been talking to someone who was never there.

  “Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  “I hope you find her. Someone who considers house-sitting in Stirling Mills to be a vacation would make for a great interview. Of course, we want to encourage people to stay in the motel or in one of our historic bed and breakfasts instead of house-sitting, but if she’s having fun here, maybe that’ll encourage more tourism.” He beamed. “Maybe that’s it, she’s having too much fun to stop for an interview and you’ll hear from her next week after her vacation.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it.” His enthusiasm for the town really was rather endearing. He was doing his best to make it a place where young people could stay and still have jobs. A lot of towns in this area had practically died out so that all that was left were empty storefronts, a few houses, and a church with a dozen members, most of them over eighty.

  “You’re not going to run an article about this, are you? I mean the disappearance. I hope if you do get a chance to talk to her you will write something about her choosing Stirling Mills as a vacation spot.”

  “I don’t yet know if there’s anything to write about. Wes says this doesn’t count as a missing person case yet. If she’s been declared officially missing and hasn’t been found by the time we go to press, I suppose I’ll have to run something, so people will know to look out for her.”

  “Of course. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Keep me posted.”

  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.” I turned to leave.

  He called after me, “Look for those tourists on Main Street. It was a couple, and I think they were headed for the Gallery on Main.”

  “I’ll look for them,” I promised. Downstairs and out on the sidewalk, I glanced around. The potential tourist couple was nowhere in sight, and I did look up and down the street, so I’d fulfilled my promise. With a clear conscience, I headed back to my office. I thought about checking with Ruthie, the artist whose studio was across the street. She was frequently painting by the window and saw most of what happened on Main Street. But since I didn’t think I could give Ruthie a good description of Florrie, I wasn’t sure it would do much good. I thought I’d recognize her, but I still couldn’t describe her adequately.

  I was starting to wonder if maybe Florrie really had been a ghost. Maybe she’d recently died and it was like that movie with the ghost who didn’t know he was a ghost. That was why she seemed to eat and why she got up to leave instead of just vanishing. She’d made an appointment with me because she thought she really could keep it, and maybe her phone account hadn’t yet been cancelled, so her voice mail was still open, but no one was returning the calls.

  If that was the case, I felt sorry for her. Imagine, spending the afterlife stuck thinking she was in Stirling Mills and that was a vacation. I liked the place, and I’d probably rather spend a vacation in Stirling Mills than in Vegas, but I had no intention of spending eternity here. I doubted there was room for more than one ghostly editor at the newspaper.

  Speaking of whom, Jean was at my desk when I opened the front door. “Did you find your missing woman yet?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if she’s missing because I don’t know if she was really there,” I said, taking a seat in the side chair, which wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the one in Jordan’s office. “I tried getting video of her coming or going, but there was always something in the way at the key time.”

  “Or you think there was. There may have been nothing for the video to show.”

  “Now you think I saw a ghost, too?”

  “Just considering possibilities. If you can’t find evidence one way, it could mean the other thing.”

  “So, treat this as though she really is a ghost and see what happens?”

  “If she showed up to talk to you, it’s probably for a reason. She needs something to be able to move on.”

  “Okay, then, what do I do? How do I talk to her?”

  “Try what you did when you talked to her before. Or you could try a séance.”

  “For real? How do I even do that?”

  “I don’t know, but I bet Lupe could give you some ideas.” Lupe was Margarita’s grandmother, and Lupe’s grandmother had been the fortune-teller in the sideshow. I thought she was more of a crystal gazer than a medium, but it was possible that she knew what went into summoning spirits. I still wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a real gift or just a bit of stagecraft. In this town, you could never be too sure.

  That meant another night eating at Margarita’s. Mexican food three nights in a row was probably bad for me, but this was work-related. Besides, I’d been eating some of the lighter menu items, with no enchiladas swimming in cheese, so I could indulge one more time. On a Saturday night, I’d need to go later, since the place would be busy during prime dining hours, and this was the sort of activity best reserved for after the guests were gone. Lupe, a classical guitarist, often played in the restaurant on weekends, so she’d probably be there. It was perfect.

  In the meantime, I tried researching how to contact ghosts, but it wasn’t an easy topic to research online. I couldn’t tell how valid any of the information was, since I couldn’t verify the credentials of the people presenting the information. I knew that ghosts were real and that some people could see and hear them, so I knew that people talking about ghosts weren’t necessarily kooks, but I also knew that there were a lot of charlatans out there. The trick was telling the difference.

  I’d never had trouble summoning a ghost. My problem was getting them to go away. If they had something to say, they made sure I heard it. When I wanted to talk to a ghost, I went to where I thought one might be and waited. Or I shouted, “Jean!” and she showed up, then griped about how she didn’t answer to me. I hoped that all I’d have to do to talk to Florrie, if she was a ghost, was sit on a barstool and call out to her.

  This town had earlier hours than Dallas, so unless there was another big party, things would be winding down in the restaurant starting around eight. I headed over there then and, much to my relief, there were no big parties,
just the usual crowd, which was already thinning. It was quiet enough that Lupe’s music was clearly audible as she sat in a corner and played her guitar.

  “Any luck with your interview?” Margarita asked me when I took my usual seat.

  “Nope. Still haven’t heard from her. But I did find that she actually exists. So I didn’t imagine her.”

  “I never said you did.”

  “I didn’t definitively prove that she’s alive, either. There was no obituary that I could find, but she could have died within the past week.”

  “Or, if her husband’s the kind of cheapskate who wouldn’t take his wife with him to Vegas so that she had to house-sit as a vacation, he might not have had an obituary put in the paper.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t charge for obits. I don’t know about other papers around here, but we at least publish the death notices. Families may splurge on something bigger, but her name would be in the paper, regardless, and she’s from another small town. Still, I have nothing proving that she was alive when I talked to her. I even had Jordan check his security footage from the coffee shop, and would you believe, trucks or trailers drove past right around the time she’d have been coming and going.”

  “Jordan has cameras on my entrance?” she asked, frowning.

  “The camera is set to get the approach to his coffee shop, but your door is in the frame. Unless someone’s driving by.”

  “Huh. I guess he’s more paranoid than I am.”

  “He’s worth a lot more, which makes him a bigger target.”

  “True, alas.”

  Lupe finished her set and came to sit by me, in the same seat where Florrie had sat Thursday night. Margarita put a glass of iced tea in front of her grandmother as she said, “Do you think maybe she was a ghost?”

  “Who’s a ghost?” Lupe asked after taking a sip of her tea.

  I filled her in about the mysterious woman I’d spoken to that no one else had seen. “Right now, I don’t have any proof that she was alive, but I can’t find any record of her being dead.”

  “Have you tried contacting her again—and not using the phone, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was thinking about trying that tonight, maybe after closing,” I said, adding to Margarita, “If you don’t mind.”

  “You mean, like a séance?” Margarita asked.

  “I don’t know if we have to get that fancy,” I said. “Usually to talk to ghosts, I just call out to them.”

  “What ghosts are you trying to talk to now?” Wes asked, taking the seat to my other side.

  I tried not to groan out loud. I didn’t want him watching this, and I’d forgotten that this was when he usually came to the restaurant, when it was less crowded. “That lady I was supposed to interview.”

  “You decided she was a ghost, after all?”

  “More like I’m trying to rule that out. I verified that she’s real, but can’t confirm whether she’s currently dead or alive. I figure if I see her again and am sure she’s a ghost, then I’ll know. If not, then I guess I’ll figure something else out.”

  “If you’re going to do a séance, you’ll need some things,” Lupe said. She finished her drink and said to Margarita, “You don’t need me to do another set, do you?”

  “No, the night’s winding down.”

  Lupe stepped down from the stool. “I’ll be back in a bit. Don’t start without me.” She picked up her guitar case and left.

  “A séance?” Wes asked, his eyes wide.

  “Probably not,” I said. “I’m just going to try to talk to her again. I haven’t had to do anything special before to talk to a ghost. My whole life seems to be a séance.”

  In the meantime, I needed dinner. After Wes and I ordered, he said, “This thing has really gotten under your skin, huh?”

  “It’s a mystery, and you know how I get about things that don’t add up.”

  “You dig at them until you find something. Or you make up your own story to fill in the blanks. At least this doesn’t have anything to do with any case I’m working on.”

  “Yet. What if I learn that something did happen to her?”

  “Then I’ll look into it.” He added with a grin, “And then it will be my case and I’ll want you to stay out of it.”

  “And you’ll just have to be disappointed,” I said with a grin of my own.

  After finishing my meal, I ate far too many tortilla chips while I waited for the last of the customers to leave. I was starting to feel like that couple in the corner booth was hanging around on purpose. They’d already paid their bill, so now they were just loitering. Margarita had released the wait staff and the cooks, so the only employees left in the restaurant were the dishwashers, who were waiting for the couple’s glasses to run a final load. It was getting harder and harder to resist the urge to go over and tell that couple that surely they had something better to do when they finally got up and left. Margarita rushed to turn off the “open” sign, and Lupe slipped in before she locked the front door. “I think I have everything we’ll need,” she said, raising a large tote bag with a beach resort logo on it.

  “Let’s start by doing this the easy way,” I said. “I’ve never needed candles and chanting to talk to a ghost before.”

  “Hang on a sec,” Margarita said as she cleared off that last table. “I need to get this wrapped up.” She rushed off to the kitchen with the dirty dishes, then came back, wiping her hands on a towel. “Okay, they should be done and out of here before anything truly weird starts happening. I don’t want to freak out my staff. I’ve got good people, and I don’t want to risk losing them.”

  “I guess me sitting here and seeming to talk to myself isn’t too weird,” I said. I’d have preferred not to do this around Wes, but he showed no sign of leaving. He’d seen me talk to a ghost before, but it was still something I felt self-conscious about.

  “They won’t notice,” Margarita said. “If they even see what’s going on out here, they’ll think you’re talking to us.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, bracing myself. I wiped my sweaty palms on the thighs of my jeans and faced the empty stool where Florrie had sat the other evening. “Florrie, are you here?” I said. “We talked the other night, and I wanted to hear some more about your vacation.”

  I held my breath, waiting, but nothing happened. Part of me didn’t actually expect anything to, since I still thought she’d been there and alive, but I tried to keep an open mind.

  “Florrie?” I asked again. “It’s Lexie. We spoke before.” Ghosts usually appeared when they were angry about something, so I said, “Your husband went on a business trip to Vegas and didn’t want you to go, so you ended up coming here. Do you want to talk about that? Surely you were angry.”

  Nothing.

  “Maybe she wasn’t a ghost,” I said with a shrug.

  Lupe began pulling things out of her bag. “Not so fast.”

  Chapter Five

  “Do we really need to do an actual séance?” I asked as an uneasy feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. I was getting used to talking to ghosts, and I even tried to do it on purpose every so often because they could be good sources of information, but doing it as some sort of ritual seemed weird. “I thought most of the people who did séances were charlatans, anyway.”

  “You know you can talk to ghosts, so you’re not a charlatan,” Lupe said. She arranged candles on top of the bar and lit them. “This is merely creating an ideal environment for ghosts to appear. Now, where was it that your ghost last manifested?”

  “She was sitting on that stool,” I said, pointing. I resisted the urge to say that Florrie really had been sitting there and wasn’t a ghost because I knew Lupe would tell me that my bad attitude would hamper the success of this operation.

  She moved the candles close to that stool and draped a shawl over it, then set a crystal ball on the seat. “Now I need someone to make a salt circle around that seat.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If anything ma
nifests, we don’t want it getting away. Since you don’t have anything physical belonging to her, this is going to be a more general summoning, and we have no idea what will show up.”

  Even though I lived and worked with a ghost I spent most of my days with, the idea of something showing up that was so scary that we’d need to keep it within a barrier gave me chills. And then I wondered if I could use the salt trick to keep Jean out when I wanted privacy. Probably not if I wanted things to remain happy within the newspaper office, I decided.

  “I needed to freshen up the salt shakers, anyway,” Margarita said as she unscrewed the top of the one on the bar. She poured a circle around the barstool, and I scooted my seat back a few inches. I wanted to be well on the outside of that circle.

  Lupe inspected Margarita’s work, then stood, frowning, as she stared at the setup. “It would really help if we had something to draw her. What meal did she seem to be eating?”

  “She had the street tacos” I said.

  “I could throw one together,” Margarita said. “I set some of the ingredients aside to make a snack.” She started to head to the kitchen, but paused, looking back. “She must have died pretty recently because I didn’t add those to the menu until late last year.”

  Or she hadn’t been dead at all, I thought, then tried to purge the thought. Negativity might ruin things, even if I was still pretty sure the woman I’d had dinner with had been alive.

  Margarita returned a moment later with a taco on a small plate, which she set on the seat of the stool, next to the crystal ball. “Good,” Lupe said with an approving nod. “That smells enticing enough to summon someone. Now, let’s arrange ourselves around the seat. This is going to be awkward working around the bar. Margarita, you go behind the bar. Wes here behind the seat, and I’ll take this spot.” She moved to the other side of the stool. “Everyone, hold hands.”

  This arrangement meant I’d be holding hands with Wes. I wished I’d had a chance to wash my hands, and I was afraid they might still be greasy from eating chips. I wiped my hand on my pants leg as surreptitiously as I could before I took his hand. It was warm and strong, and my hand almost disappeared into his grasp. I couldn’t recall if we’d ever even shaken hands before. When we met, I’d just found a body and he’d treated me as a suspect, so I didn’t think there had been any handshakes.