Rocks & Gravel (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 3) (27 page)

* * *

I
stood
in front of the car and smoked while Mysti checked us in. She emerged from the motel office holding an actual brass key. I dug my wallet out of my bag and opened it.

“No, I told you expenses are on me.” Mysti walked down the single row of rooms until she came to number eight. She used the key to open the door, and the smell of old carpet rolled out to greet us.

“I’ll get our bags.” Maybe Mysti would leave the door open to let the room air out. I lugged our two suitcases into the room and found Mysti kissing—and I mean really kissing—a tall, wiry guy with short, slicked down black hair and one of those sexy stubble beards. His slim cut slacks and suit jacket clashed comically with Mysti’s hippie wear. I tried to back quietly out of the room, but the guy, whom I assumed was Griffin Reed, saw me and pulled away from Mysti.

“You’re Peri Jean?” He held out one long-fingered hand. His fingernails had been buffed to a shine.

“Nice to you meet you, Griffin.” I returned his hard handshake. He grinned. “Sorry to walk in on you guys.” And I was. I missed having someone to kiss. Especially the way Mysti kissed Griffin.

“No worries, and call me Griff. My father was Griffin.” He grabbed Mysti’s suitcase from me and set it on the bed nearest the door. His knowing the right one amused me more than it should have, and I had to bite my cheek not to smile on my way to putting my suitcase on the bed nearest the bathroom. “Not too many places to eat in Nazareth, but I’ll take y’all to an early supper. Give you ten minutes to freshen up. Meet me in the parking lot. We’ll ride together.” Griff gave me another smile and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you we were a thing.” Mysti opened her suitcase and grabbed a little plastic zippered bag. “I was sort of afraid you wouldn’t want to come, and I wanted you to do this with me so you could see how satisfying it is to make money with your gift.”

You mean my curse?
I already knew not to say those words to Mysti. They pushed her hot button.

“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 thought the look very Hollywood movie star.

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. The lot was so full we had to circle 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.

Though 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 checker board. 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 to- hopeful.

“No where 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 Grif 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 is 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 the two 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 was turning off Highway 69 onto 231 because she saw a sign for a rest stop. She apparently needed a restroom.”

I shivered at the mention of the rest stop. 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. If I had any take-away from our almost year together, it was 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 Summer’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. My other takeaway from my abortive relationship with Dean 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?” All I’d ever seen was ghosts, but some of them pinched me hard enough to leave bruises. One of them made my nose gush blood.

“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 Grif 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.

F
orever Road (Book
#1)

Black Opal (Book #2)

Rocks & Gravel (Book #3)

Rest Stop (Book #4)

C
atie Rhodes is
the author of the Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers. Her short stories have appeared in
Tales from the Mist
,
Allegories of the Tarot
, and
Let’s Scare Cancer to Death
.

C
atie was born
and raised behind the pine curtain in East Texas. Her favorite memories of childhood are sitting around listening to her family spin yarns. The stories all had one thing in common: each had an element of the mysterious or the unexplained.

T
hose weird stories
molded Catie into a purveyor of her own brand of lies and legends. One day, she found the courage to start writing down her stories. It changed her life forever.

C
atie Rhodes lives
steps from the Sam Houston National Forest with her long-suffering husband and her armpit terrorist of a little dog.

W
hen she’s not writing
, Catie likes to cook horribly fattening foods and crochet or knit stuff nobody wants as a gift. She also reads a whole helluva lot.

Find me online:

• catierhodesauthor