Chapter 10
Violet
I took a booth at the Pop-Top Diner, ordered a coffee, and spread out my newspaper. Time to catch up with the news of Fell while I waited for Detective Pine.
A quick perusal showed a town that looked unremarkable on the surface.
A public hearing had been held on a proposed zoning change on East Avenue, which would allow a disused church to be torn down and repurposed for apartments—the dullest news story imaginable.
Only at the bottom of the short article did it mention that the church had a haunted ceiling beam, from which two priests had hanged themselves eighty years apart, and if the beam came down, no one was quite sure how to dispose of it.
Fell was a creepy little town.
On page three of the paper, a small group of students from the Fell College of Classical Education—a tiny, privately owned school that taught many a useless subject—had protested on campus two days ago.
However, as all their protest signs were in Latin, no one was sure what they were objecting to.
When asked by the paper’s reporter, a protester said that the poltergeist in the library—which threw books from the shelves and knocked over students’ chairs—was keeping them from studying, affecting their grades.
The school, they said, refused to hire an exorcist, and they had had enough.
I flipped the page. There had been a smattering of arrests at the Sun Down Motel, the dive motel I’d driven past on Number Six Road on my way into town.
The Sun Down was apparently a hot spot for drug dealers and prostitutes, and the police had broken up a drunken party the night before.
“No one was hurt,” local cop Alma Trent was quoted as saying, “except for one person who fell into the empty pool. He’ll be fine.
And we think the ice machine was damaged. ”
At the bottom of the page, tucked into the corner, was a snapshot of a pretty young woman holding a toddler and smiling for the camera.
Nine years later, still no leads in Caldwell murder, the headline said.
A young wife and mother named Cathy Caldwell had been found stripped and murdered under the South Overpass in 1980, and her killer had never been found.
I was still looking at Cathy Caldwell’s face—something about it was so terribly sad—when a shadow fell over the paper.
I looked up. The man who had taken the seat across from me was in his early sixties.
The top of his head was a shiny bald pate, and a bushy beard—wiry white mixed with the last few remnants of brown—covered the bottom of his face.
Two bloodshot brown eyes stared at me with the power of laser beams, as if seeing through my skull.
He wore an old flannel shirt, and his hands, folded over my newspaper on the table, were knotted and thin, like rope that would never fray.
“It’s really you,” he said without preamble. “The Esmie girl.”
I blinked at him. “Yes, it’s me.”
“The oldest one, or the youngest?”
Dodie and I both had dark hair, so I could see why he wasn’t sure. “The oldest,” I replied. “My name is Violet. You’re Detective Pine?”
The man snorted. “Not Detective anymore. I’m just Gus now. And I remember all of your names.”
The waitress came by—she and Gus were on a first-name basis—and while Gus ordered lunch, I refolded the newspaper. When she asked me what I wanted, I was going to refuse, but then I remembered the sparsely stocked kitchen at the house. I ordered scrambled eggs and toast.
The waitress left, and I looked at Gus’s face, trying to remember if I’d seen it that day. He’d have been somewhere in his forties then, and he’d probably looked different, but I’d remember those eyes, wouldn’t I?
Oddly, what came into my mind about the police that day was feet.
Lots of heavy boots, some of them crusted with snow from the searches outside.
One man’s shiny wing tips. I realized with a start that I must have kept my gaze down, staring at the floor.
I hadn’t looked into any of the men’s faces—that’s why I couldn’t remember one.
“So,” Gus said, ignoring my rude scrutiny. Apparently, neither of us was going to mention the fact that he was meeting me about an old case when he wasn’t a detective anymore instead of sending someone still employed by the Fell PD. “You have information for me on your brother’s case.”
His gaze told me he didn’t believe a word of it. He probably terrified people with those laser eyes, but those people weren’t me. When you see the dead on a regular basis, people who are alive stop intimidating you.
He was right to distrust me, though, considering I was lying. “I’m willing to trade information,” I hedged.
“Uh-huh.” He was still skeptical. “Tell me why you’re back in town after all this time while I eat. I’m hungry. You’re paying.”
I didn’t argue. I waited while the waitress put our plates in front of us. Then I said, “Why we’re back in town is none of your business.”
“We?” Gus popped a french fry into his mouth. “So it’s all three of you, then. Just the kids, because your parents are dead.”
I picked up my fork, annoyed at myself. That had been a stupid slip. “How do you know my parents are dead?” Neither of them had died in Fell.
“Word gets around in this place.” Gus took a bite of his club sandwich. “Keep talking.”
I shrugged, poking at my eggs and deciding how much to tell him. “Okay, yes, we’re back. We’re going to solve our brother’s case.” I glared at him. “Since you couldn’t do it.”
The shot glanced off him with barely a ping. “Why now?” he asked.
“It seemed like the right time.”
Gus put his sandwich down. “That’s a lie.
” His gaze traveled my face, and then he sighed.
“I spent the first few years of my career in Albany. I got married, started a family. I came to Fell because I thought a small town was safer. It seemed like it would be easy.” He smiled, which made the creases on his face deepen.
He was handsome in his way. “I wanted quiet, and I suppose I got it. No one shot at me. But I ended up with different nightmares than I’d had in Albany.
” He took the newspaper, folded it back so the article about Cathy Caldwell was face up.
“This here,” he said. “I saw you reading this. I worked this case. I worked the others, too.”
“What others?” I asked, though I wasn’t surprised. Some deep, dark part of me knew there would be others.
“Murders,” Gus said. “Disappearances. Suicides. Fell has more than its share. In the last few years before I retired, someone killed a schoolteacher and left her on the construction site where the Sun Down stands now. Victoria Lee’s boyfriend killed her while she was jogging and left her in the bushes.
And there was Cathy Caldwell, who left a three-year-old son behind.
We might have investigated better, except that we also had the disappearance of the motel night clerk on our hands, as well as everything else. ”
“Everything else?” I asked.
Gus was relishing this in a grim way. “Cases that should add up, but don’t.
Things that shouldn’t have happened, but did.
My first year here, we found bones in one of the graveyards that didn’t belong there.
They weren’t part of any grave or in any of the burial records.
Someone had buried them—badly, because they eventually came up out of the ground—without permission.
When we had the bones examined, they were a hundred years old.
” He shook his head. “Did someone take a hundred-year-old body from wherever it was hidden and then bury it? Why? We never solved it. The next year, a girl at the college disappeared while she was studying in her dorm. Her book was open on the desk, the lamp on, a cup of tea sitting there. The tea was full, as if she hadn’t had the chance to sip it.
Her shoes were neatly side by side in the hallway outside the door, which was open.
The shoes just sitting there, as if she’d lined them up.
No one saw her leave. No one ever saw her again. ”
Vail would have his theories about that one. Most people thought his alien abduction cases were nuts. I reserved judgment, because I was too busy seeing the dead and getting locked up in mental hospitals to form a serious opinion.
“And then there was your brother,” Gus continued. “Are you telling me that you and your siblings came back to Fell after all this time at random? Do you expect me to believe it? You think I’ll just swallow that story like a dummy who hasn’t lived in this town?”
“My brother’s ghost has been sighted on the grounds of the house,” I said. “There. Are you happy?”
Gus nodded. “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
I’d underestimated him. He was good—not good enough to find Ben, but good. “He wanted us to come home, so we came.” I scooped up a forkful of eggs and ate them. I was more relaxed now that I’d told the truth.
Gus blinked, and when sadness crossed his expression, I knew what he was thinking—that Ben appearing as he did meant that he was definitely dead, that he’d died the day he disappeared or shortly after.
It was the extinguishing of the faint hope that he’d somehow turned out okay.
I knew the feeling. “You think his body is on the grounds, then?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Don’t ghosts usually appear where their body is left?”
“I wouldn’t know.”