Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (11 page)

“Hello,” George
said.

What followed was
what felt like hours of tortured silence.  In fact, it was probably just a few
seconds. 

“You were right,”
Jimmy said quietly.

George looked
sideways at him and then, very dramatically, turned off the hose and leaned
against his car.

“What did you just
say?” he asked.

“Don’t make this a
bigger deal than it is,” Jimmy said.

“Give me a break,”
George said. “You were the one who was all dramatic about this.  I just want
you to repeat what you said.”

“I said that you
were right,” he repeated.  “Look, that doesn’t mean I’m not seeing her again,
but it does mean that even I have to acknowledge that everything about her and
this whole situation has been weird.”

“And you are
prepared to be murdered tomorrow at school?”  George said.

Jimmy shrugged. 
“I may at least put up a fight.”

George smiled. 
“Well, we’ll see about that.  So tell me what the hell you did last night and what
brought you around to sanity now?”

Jimmy told him. 
He had just spent minutes reviewing every moment of his time with Sapphire and
it was fresh in his mind.  He told George about every detail, including his
fight with his mother and his stop by the bridge.  When he was done, George
stared at him for several seconds and then shook his head and laughed.

“You have landed
headfirst in a mystery, sir.”

Jimmy rolled his
eyes.  George fancied himself a bit of a detective.  He devoured detective
novels and could quote Sherlock Holmes stories chapter and verse.  For much of
their lives, George had been salivating for the opportunity to be involved in a
real life mystery.  Jimmy knew that his brain was already churning.

“Let’s calm down,
Sam Spade,” Jimmy said.  “It’s weird, but it’s hardly a mystery.”

George threw up
his hands.  “It’s the very essence of mystery!  You have a mysterious girl with
mysterious motives that you’ve never seen before.  The first thing we need to
do is figure out who she is and where she came from.”

“How do we do
that?” Jimmy asked.

“I think we start
by looking through the various yearbooks of the schools in this area,” George
said. “She has to be going to school around here somewhere, right?  She’s our
age.  What’s her last name?”

Jimmy swallowed. 
He could feel his face turning red.  He realized he had never even bothered
asking.

“You never even
bothered asking, did you?” George said.

Jimmy shrugged.

“Some Dr. Watson
you are,” George said.  “Fine, but we know her first name is Sapphire.  How
many girls named Sapphire could there actually be in this tiny flea-speck of a
town?  We could probably stand on a street corner downtown and ask three people
at random and find someone who knows her.  Come on, man.”

Jimmy shrugged
again.  “This feels weird, George.  I mean, it’s like running a background
check on your wife or something.”

“Wife?” George
exclaimed.  “Good Lord, you didn’t tell this girl that you loved her, did you?”

Jimmy looked down
at his shoes.

“Jesus,” George
said.  “Did she at least say it back?”

Jimmy nodded and
looked up into George’s face.  George’s look of disapproval and disgust
softened a bit.

“Well,” George
said, “at least that’s something.”

There was silence
again for a time.

“Come on,” George
said, slapping his hand against his own leg.

“Where are we
going?”

“I want to see
what’s down by that bridge,” he said.

Jimmy stood up as
George headed for the driver’s side of the car. 

“I told you,”
Jimmy said.

George was already
opening his car door.  “I want to see it for myself.”

Jimmy opened his
mouth to say something, but decided there was no reason to argue.  He smiled. 
At least things were relatively back to normal between him and George.  He
sighed and got into the passenger seat.

George
was in detective mode.  He was pacing around the surface of the small bridge
like a man in the midst of some kind of fit.  He would pause from time to time
to bend down and look at various things on the ground.  Once he crouched down
and looked at the dirt and grit at the side of the road, and then he got all
the way down on his stomach to peer more closely.  He only needed a fedora and
trench coat, or perhaps a deerstalker cap and a magnifying glass, to complete
the picture. 

He came back to
the car staring down at the dust on his fingers.  Jimmy had stayed behind,
leaning against the passenger side, watching George perform.  With each passing
vehicle and truck, Jimmy felt the flush in his cheeks deepen.  He was
embarrassed, but at the same time, he was vastly entertained. 

“So what have you gathered,
Detective?” Jimmy said as George took up a spot next to him, also leaning
against the car.

“Well, judging
from the footprints, you were here alone last night,” George said.  He paused
and looked up from the dust on his fingers to stare at Jimmy.  “From what you
told me, there should be two sets of footprints here by the side of the road
and down below along the banks of the river.  As you pointed out earlier, there
are none down by the river at all, when there should be two sets.  However,
there should still be footprints up here beside the road.”

He frowned and
looked down at the side of the road.

“But from what I
see here,” he said, indicating the spot beside the road that to Jimmy just
looked like dust and dirt, “there are only prints from your shoes and your
bicycle tires, but nothing else.”

He looked back up
from the road and into Jimmy’s eyes.  The sun was in his eyes, and he squinted
in a way that made him look much older than he was.  His face was suddenly very
grim.

“So either you are
completely crazy,” George said, “or there is something mighty strange going on
here.”

Jimmy sighed and
stuck his hands in his pockets.  “What should I do?”

George shrugged. 
“The library in town has all of the yearbooks from all of the schools in the
area.  I’d start there.  Where the hell is this girl from?  She said she was
from around here, but we would certainly have seen a girl who looked like that
before.”

“If she’s lying
and she isn’t from around here, she isn’t going to be in those yearbooks,”
Jimmy said.

George nodded and
walked around the front of the car, stopping at the driver’s side door.  “That
will at least start answering our questions, though.”

Jimmy nodded. 
There was a certain logic to that.  He opened the passenger door and got in.

“Of course, you’ll
have to go somewhere else to find answers if you can’t find them in the
library,” George said as he fished out his key and started the car.

“Where?” Jimmy
asked.

“You’ll have to
visit Tabitha,” George said.

Jimmy nodded.  He
had guessed that was the name George was going to come up with.

Tabitha
Reed was the woman who ran the newspaper.  She was basically the town
historian.  Just about a year or so ago, she had made it into the national
spotlight.  Apparently she and her now-husband Warren Hollis had tracked down a
copycat of a serial killer who had prowled these parts back in the seventies
called “the Boogeyman.”  Warren had written a book about it and gotten famous,
and now they were making it into a movie.  Tabitha had lost her original office
when the killer blew the place up, but she had rebuilt the paper’s offices in
another location and life had gone on.  She was still the best resource that
anyone had in this town when it came to finding someone or learning a bit of
the town’s history.

“Do you think
she’ll even want to talk to me?” Jimmy asked as George drove.

“She’s good
people,” George said.  “She helped me with a term paper once.  This might be
something even bigger.  Heck, she might want to do a story about it for the
paper.”

“What do you think
is going on here, George?” Jimmy asked.

George sighed. 
“They say that when you rule out the most obvious things that the most
ridiculous thing must be correct.  And right now, there are just no obvious
reasons.  I would have been able to buy the story that a bunch of the jocks
hired a girl from a nearby town to play nice with you in order to make a fool
out of you.  But for her to come back the next night and then for all of the
weirdness with the footprints, well-”

George paused for
a bit, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel.  His head was tilted back a
bit, his chin jutting out.  It was one of his thinking poses.

“The town of
Knorr, and this surrounding area, is a strange place,” he said quietly.  “You
know that, right?”

Jimmy shrugged. 
He knew lots of stories.  There was lore about haunted houses, roads, cars, and
forests.  “Yeah,” he said at last, “I guess I know the stories as well as you.”

George turned his
head and looked at Jimmy, raising an eyebrow.

“Come on,” Jimmy
said.  “So what, she’s some kind of demon or fairy or something?”

George shrugged. 
“I guess it’s safe to say that we have not yet run out of all of the other
possibilities at this point.  Maybe there is a more logical explanation.  I
mean, maybe she lives in the water and is a mermaid.”

Jimmy laughed.

George gave Jimmy
his most winning smile in return.  For the moment Jimmy was just happy to have
his old friend back.

They
drove around for a while and talked.  George was full of ideas, most of them
outrageous.  Jimmy knew better, of course, and he laughed at George’s
suggestions.  George was a known skeptic about most things from religion to
UFOs.  Jimmy figured that George thought whomever Sapphire was, she was very
real and had a very logical explanation.

“Of course, the simplest
solution might be just that,” George said.  The statement came out of nowhere
and after he had been quiet for some time.

“What would that
be, oh great detective?”  Jimmy asked.  He yawned. 

“You met a nice
girl and you fell in love,” George said plainly.  “You know what that does to
people.  People far better and smarter than you have been blinded by love. 
When you were with her, you probably thought that the swamp land was a road
paved with gold.”

Jimmy frowned and
thought about that for a moment. Could he have been that blind?  Hell, Jimmy
had never had a real girlfriend before.  He wasn’t sure what to think.

There
are a few advantages to being a bookworm in the age of electronic books and in
a small town.  Jimmy had spent more than a few hours at the Knorr Library and
had, over the years, gotten to know the man who ran the library and most of the
employees there.  The library was only open for a few hours on Sundays, but
Jimmy had been given a key to the back door and knew how to turn off the alarm
system.  Plus, Jesse Karnes, the man who ran the library, actually encouraged
him to stop by after hours.

George and Jimmy
headed to the small brick building located right on a majestic-looking river. 
It was a small library, at least on the top floor; however, the place had a
huge basement and there were thousands of books, magazines, and the microfilm
archives down there.  Included in the archives were issues of the local
newspaper, many national magazines, and all of the local school yearbooks.

Jimmy and George
walked around the side of the building to the back of the library.  Out on the
river were a few boats and people having parties and barbecues on the water. 
Next to the library was a restaurant that also served ice-cold root beer out of
a fridge near the front door, and sometimes musical groups performed in a small
courtyard next to the restaurant.  All along the parking lot that went maybe
three-fourths of a mile was small shops.  Somehow the library stood out here as
an oddity amongst the tourist traps all around them. 

Jimmy fished out
his key and opened the door.  As soon as the two entered, Jimmy hit the keypad
and shut off the alarm.  Jimmy then shut the door and locked it.  The whole
place was empty and there was stench of paper and dust, and, behind all of
those scents, was the smell of mold and old books.  It was a smell that Jimmy
loved.  The lights were off, but the fading afternoon light filtered in through
the old, dirty windows, shining off of the dust motes that floated gently through
the air.

Jimmy switched on
a few lights and he and George made their way soundlessly through the
children’s section in the back of the library and into the adult section.  Rows
and rows of hardback books lined shelves.  Paperback books were stacked on racks
in the lobby area.  There was the desk for the librarian where library patrons
could check out books.  Jesse often brought in his old black Labrador, Blackie,
who sometimes lay down behind the librarian desk and thumped his tail whenever
anyone bent over with a treat or a pat on the head.