The Empty Desk

by Steve Lockley

  “Why don’t you give us a moment,” she said eventually. Delia gave her a look to say that she still didn’t understand, but eventually she did as she was asked. She gave a shrug and headed back out of the office and into the workshop.

  “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Melinda,” she said.

  “Tom,” he replied, looking at his oil-streaked hands and not offering to shake hers.

  “There’s nothing wrong in admitting that you’re struggling,” Melinda said. “I’ve got my own business, and I know just how hard it can be sometimes. You have to do everything and take all the blame when things don’t go right.”

  “I only came back to this business because Dad wanted me to. I was happy working on new, modern cars with one of the big dealers, but he said he wanted to take things a little easier and needed someone to take over.”

  “I thought you were the one who told him that you didn’t want him around.”

  “Who told you that?” There was more than a little surprise in his voice. “He was the one who wanted me to come back and work with him. I was more than happy doing what I was doing.”

  “So you never told him that he had to choose between the business and his grandchildren?”

  He looked away from her and picked up a rag to wipe his hands. Was he trying to work out a story, or was he deciding if he should tell her the truth? She hoped that it was the latter. The truth was what she needed if she was going to be able to resolve this situation.

  “We had a falling-out,” he began. “But it was all a misunderstanding. He wanted me to come and work with him for a while so I could take over the business when he was ready to retire. But he didn’t like the way I worked, and I couldn’t do things the way he wanted them done. Whenever I came across something I’d never dealt with before, he didn’t show me how to do it—he just pushed me aside and did it himself without showing me what he was doing. I said that he should either let me get on with it or I would go and look for a job somewhere else. I lie awake most nights wishing that I’d done just that.”

  “Baloney,” said a familiar voice.

  “Will you be quiet?” Melinda said, unable to stop herself from speaking out loud. She was close to just letting it all come out.

  “Sorry?” Tom said.

  “Sorry,” Melinda said. “I wasn’t talking to you.” She was already cursing herself for reacting to the ghost like that. It was now or never. If she was going to tell Tom what had brought her there, she had to do it now.

  “So who were you talking to? I thought your friend had gone outside.” He peered through the door to see if there was any sign of her lurking in the doorway.

  “She has,” Melinda said, taking a deep breath. “It wasn’t her that I was talking to.”

  “So?” He was clearly puzzled, and he had every reason to be.

  “I know this is going to sound weird,” she began. “Really weird. But it’s the reason why I’m here.”

  “I thought you were here because of Delia’s car?”

  “I am, but it’s more than that. I’ve spoken to your father.”

  “My father’s dead, I’m afraid. How long ago did you speak to him?”

  “That was your father I was speaking to now,” she said, fearing that this was going to be harder than she had expected. She waited for the look of puzzlement to change to surprise, then disbelief, before he began to understand what she was trying to say.

  “What on earth are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me that you can commune with the dead or whatever you call it? Have you got a direct line to the other place?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “But I don’t get to choose who I talk to. I can’t talk to everyone who dies whenever I like. They come looking for me.”

  “You’re crazy. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here, but I think you should leave.”

  “Really, you have to listen to me. He was the one who knew you were having trouble with Delia’s car. He wants to help.”

  “Yes, of course he did. I don’t suppose he gave you the winner of this year’s Super Bowl while he was at it, did he? That would be really useful and might make up for saddling me with this place.”

  “I doubt very much if he would know that, but he was convinced that you wouldn’t be able to fix the car.”

  “And you say that you’ve just spoken to him? Was he here? Is he still here now?”

  Melinda was not sure if he was accepting what she was telling him or just making fun of her. Either way, she was having doubts about whether or not she should have told him so soon. She wasn’t convinced that he was taking it well.

  “He’s just worried that you can’t cope. That maybe you need some help.”

  Tom threw the oily rag down on top of one of the piles of papers. “If he’s so clever, maybe he’d like to tell me what I should do. Maybe he can tell me what’s wrong with the damn car. I’ve tried everything I know, and it still makes the noise.”

  Melinda looked at the older man and waited for his response. He had removed his cap again and was scratching his head.

  “Get him to drive it around the block,” Jez said.

  Melinda repeated his request, knowing that this was the same thing that she had asked him to do the last time they had been there, but this time Tom relented. He went back to the car and dropped the hood back down. He fired up the engine and drove out of the bay, revving the engine for a moment before he pulled away.

  “Where’s he going with my baby?” Delia demanded. She had been standing outside in the fading light waiting to be able to leave, with or without her car. Now she was watching it drive away without her.

  “He’s just taking it for a drive. I think Jez wanted to listen to it.”

  “Please, don’t tell me that he’s still here.” Delia looked around as if she was likely to be able to see him. It was starting to wear a little thin.

  “I think he’s gone in the car with Tom.”

  “It’s probably good that Tom can’t hear him either, then.”

  “You’re likely right,” Melinda said. “I know that I’m glad I’m not sitting in the car right now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Internet search had provided only a few possibilities, and each of them had led to dead ends and did little more than eat up time. Eli’s schedule had been full for the rest of the day, and Ned had found himself having to leave his office to take up a place in the university library, carrying out search after search. Feeding everything they knew about the girl into the parameters of the search produced only a handful of responses, and at first that had excited him. But none of them had led to the death of a young girl in the area in the last twenty years. Clearly it was not going to be as easy to discover her name as he had hoped. It was going to take a lot more than he had to go on so far.

  Students milled in and out of the study area where he had placed himself, some of them a little noisier than they were supposed to be, gaining disapproving looks from those who were concentrating on the books in front of them. Ned turned around to see if there was anyone else in there he might recognize, but there was no one. The problem with his course of study was that he rarely found himself in classes with students from other disciplines. When he did, there was always a moment of embarrassment when they asked him about his major. Sometimes the embarrassment was on the part of those he was speaking to, but sometimes it was his own. On the rare occasion that he had met a fellow student who he had wanted to get to know, he had refrained from revealing what he did. At least that way they didn’t dismiss him as an oddball straightaway. The danger lay in leaving it too long to tell them, as that would almost certainly spell disaster too.

  A few vaguely familiar faces were dotted around the room—students he had seen on campus but had never actually spoken to. One of them sat slouched over a newspaper, his head propped up on one hand
, turning pages with little interest, while everyone else had their heads in a book or were intent on the screen of a laptop. Ned suspected that he was a journalism student paying little more than lip service to research, and yet there was something about the scene that triggered a memory. It was as if a light bulb went on inside his head, and he realized that there was at least one other course of inquiry open to him. He pulled out his phone to make sure that he still had the number he was going to need, then packed away his laptop before heading back outside. His thumb was already on the call button when he stepped outside into the cool afternoon air. He couldn’t help his disappointment when the call went straight to voicemail.

  “Hi. You’ve reached the voicemail of Terri Gordon. I’m sorry I can’t take your call at the moment, but if you leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Leave your message after the tone.”

  There was a flutter in Ned’s chest and his mouth went suddenly dry. He hadn’t given a thought to what he was going to say to a girl that he had always been tongue tied around. He had been just as surprised when she had given him her number, so shocked that he had never been able to bring himself to call it, even long after he had broken up with TJ. Maybe this was all the reason he needed, but at the moment he was starting to look like an idiot without actually saying a word.

  “Um . . . Hi, Terri, it’s Ned. Ned Banks. It’s been a while . . .” He continued to stumble over what he wanted to say, until eventually he burst out with “Sorry I missed you. I’ll try to catch you again sometime.” He hung up with his pulse still racing, cursing himself for not thinking before he made the call; it wasn’t an experience he was used to feeling. But then, if he’d thought about it, he might have found his courage failing. He had barely had the chance to gather his thoughts, though, before his phone rang. Instinctively he answered it without even looking at the screen to see who it was.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Ned,” came the reply, and Ned felt a shiver run through his legs before he recovered himself. It must have been almost a year since he had last heard that voice, but it still had the same effect on him. “I thought you were never going to call.”

  “Terri, hi. How are you doing?”

  “All the better for hearing from you,” she said. “What’s taken you so long? I thought I would have heard from you before now. I’d almost given up.”

  There was a soft playfulness in her voice, but as before he had no idea of how to react to her flirting. “You know me, Terri. It takes me a long time to work up the courage.”

  There was laughter from the other end of the line. A soft, easy laughter that said she was laughing with him, not at him. His shyness started to melt away a little, and his tongue began to loosen.

  “Well, it has certainly taken you long enough,” she said.

  “Actually, I have an ulterior motive,” he said, deciding that it would be best to just come out with it. The longer he spent making small talk, the harder it was likely to be to bring it up.

  “Oh, yes?” she said. “And what did you have in mind, exactly?”

  “Are you still working on the Chronicle?”

  “I am,” she said. “Sadly, none of the big-city newspapers have come calling yet. Have you got a story for me? Please tell me you have.”

  “Ah, no, sorry. I wish I had.”

  “Phew,” she said. “Because then I would have to disappoint you by telling you that I’m only allowed to cover things like church picnics, school painting competitions, and missing cats. Sometimes they even let me write the horoscope if Mystic Margie is on vacation.”

  Her laughter was infectious, and in only a moment Ned was wondering why it had taken the need for her help to make him call her. He should have done it a long time ago.

  “I’m trying to track someone down,” he said, deciding that he needed to start the conversation somewhere. The question was going to be how much he would be able to tell her without getting laughed at.

  “Oh, yes? Is this a missing person? A lost love? An absent father?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said, holding his cards close.

  “Why don’t you tell me all about it over a drink?”

  “A drink?” The offer caught him by surprise, not having thought that far ahead.

  “You do drink, don’t you? I mean, even fish have to drink.”

  “Sure,” he laughed. “I drink.”

  “Well, I’m manning the phone this evening for a while in case there is some dire emergency, like the fire department having to rescue a cat from a tree, but I get off at seven. Maybe you could swing by and pick me up then?”

  “Sure,” he said. “That sounds great.”

  “Then I’ll see you later,” she said. “It’s a date.”

  She hung up, but those last three words were still ringing in his ears long afterward.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I can’t hear anything out of the ordinary,” Melinda said as the car swung past them and backed into the service bay once more.

  “You can only hear it when you’re inside,” Delia said. “There’s this strange rattle every time you go over a bump or use the brakes. It may be nothing, but it doesn’t seem right.”

  Tom climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked toward them as they waited.

  “Still there?” Delia asked.

  The man nodded but said nothing for a moment. He had done what had been asked of him and now he seemed to be waiting to be told what to do next. “Well?” he said eventually. “What do you want me to do now? Shake it to see if anything falls out? Tip it on its side?”

  “Get him to open the trunk,” Jez called to them, appearing beside the vehicle. Melinda had been right. He must have ridden along while the car had been driven around the block. She only hoped that he had been able to work out what the problem was. Maybe then they would be able to get out of there.

  “Would you mind opening the trunk?” Melinda asked. Tom shrugged but returned to the car and popped it open. The trunk was spotless. It was as if someone had run a vacuum cleaner over it recently. Melinda wondered if Delia had cleaned it before taking it in just in case the mechanic thought badly of her, like someone employing a cleaner but tidying up before they arrived.

  They waited while Jez stuck his head in the space, but he was unable to lift any of the lining.

  “Ask him to lift the mat,” he said when he stood upright, extracting himself carefully from a position that seemed completely natural, as if catching his head would be painful. Clearly he had forgotten that was no longer something he needed to be worried about.

  Melinda passed the message on and received only a deep sigh in response from Tom before he did as he was instructed. Beneath the mat lay a piece of board which he removed without being asked, revealing the spare wheel. He stepped back, motioning for anyone who wanted to inspect it to take a closer look. The wheel fitted snugly into its housing, and a small tool bag was wedged into place beside it. Once again Jez peered inside.

  “Do you need a light?” Melinda asked.

  “Crazy, the lot of you,” said Tom, turning on an inspection lamp and directing it inside. “It’s secure. There’s no way that the wheel or even the tool bag could be moving.”

  “Lift the wheel out,” Jez said, a little too smugly. There was a change in the tone of his voice, as if he had found what he was looking for and was satisfied that he had discovered the cause of the noise. Melinda shrugged in apology and asked Tom if he could take it out. She was tempted to try to do it herself, but she knew that she would only manage to get herself dirty in the process, while Tom was better dressed for the task. It also took him a fraction of the time that it would have taken her.

  Even as he lifted the wheel out from its resting place, they all heard the sound of something moving inside it.

  “What the heck?” he said. He s
hook it for a moment, and two lipsticks clattered to the ground, skidding across the floor of the workshop.

  There was a moment of silence followed by a burst of laughter as Delia bent to pick them up. “I wondered what had happened to these.”

  “But how on earth did they get in there?” Melinda asked.

  “I dropped my handbag in there a few weeks ago, and a few things I’d tucked in there must have fallen out.”

  “I’m starting to think that you’ve just done this to set me up,” snapped Tom, all sign of his willingness to go along with their suggestions fast disappearing. “All this talk of ghosts is just a load of garbage, isn’t it? You knew it was there all along and just set out to make a fool out of me. This is all just some kind of game to you.”

  “Please,” Melinda begged. “That’s not true at all. We didn’t know that they were there.”

  But he wasn’t listening to her. He was fixing the spare wheel back into place, and she could almost feel the anger radiating from him. As soon as he had returned everything to its former position he slammed the trunk closed and turned to face them.

  “Well, you’ve had your fun now, so you can get this thing out of here. I’ll be sending you my bill.”

  “Bill? You didn’t do anything,” Delia said. She wasn’t making the situation better, and Melinda tried to hush her.

  “Call it a garaging fee then,” he snapped. “And the use of a loan car.”

  “It broke down!”

  He turned away from them and headed back inside, the conversation clearly over as far as he was concerned.

  “I told you that he had no idea what he was doing,” Jez said. “If the boy can’t sort out a simple problem like that, how’s he going to manage if it’s something serious?”

  “You’re not helping either,” said Melinda. She could not get over the fact that Jez still called his son a boy, even though he must have been edging toward forty. “I don’t know what I can do to help you if all you’re going to do is belittle him. All you’re doing is making things worse, not better.”