She put on her left turn signal and waited for the traffic on Fort Lowell to clear.
“You should have looked at the fine print.”
The voice came from inside the car. Frank Entwistle’s bulk filled the passenger seat, dressed in a cheap polyester suit jacket and slacks, a brown shirt, and an unfashionably wide tie. He held a breakfast sandwich in one hand. The smell of grease permeated the car.
“You’re not real.”
“So you say.” He leaned over and hit the turn signal lever, switching it from left to right.
“What’d you do that for?” she asked, although she knew.
“Aren’t you going go by your old house?”
“No.”
“Why not? You’re right here in the neighborhood.” He glanced over at her, shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Thanks.” Laura switched on her left turn signal and pulled out, going east on Ft. Lowell Road, watching her old mentor out of the corner of her eye. He’d never learned to chew with his mouth closed and apparently being dead didn’t change anything. “I didn’t know ghosts could eat.”
“I’m not a ghost.”
“What are you? A figment of my imagination?”
“That’s as good an explanation as any.” He reached over and aimed the air conditioning vent toward his face. “Hot in here. Slow down, will you?”
Laura had to slow down anyway. They were approaching the tight curve that bordered the Mexican cemetery.
Frank draped his arm across the seat back. “You ever go in there?”
“No. Why would I?”
“You were a kid back then. You know how kids are, always pushing the envelope, trying to figure it out—about death, you know? When your schoolmate got taken, it would be natural to go there. I know I won’t ever forget the first kid in my class to die.”
“Who’s to say Julie died in the cemetery?”
“Not died. Taken. Why don’t you pull over?”
Although her first impulse was to resist, Laura turned onto the verge at the last minute, tires bumping on the hard dirt, white dust billowing up behind them. “There was nothing in the paper about exactly where she was taken.”
Frank Entwistle crumpled up the grease-spotted paper from the sandwich and shot it at the dashboard. “Then how come you dream about it?”
Laura looked past him at the graveyard. The greasewood and mesquite trees, greener and fuller after the summer rains, mingled with plaster angels, crosses, and graves of heaped dirt and piled rocks. A profusion of flowers—both real and fake—rested on the graves, garish in the unrelenting sun. Laura was parked under a mesquite tree, facing the wrong way to traffic. In the spot where, in her dreams, the orange and white car cruised to a stop, the mesquite tree’s sketchy shade scrolling over the blocky white hood. The girl, hands clasped around the straps of her backpack, leaning down to talk to the man inside.
In her dreams, Laura always heard the car’s rough idling, smelled burning oil, and felt the heat from the Chevy’s engine—details her imagination had conjured from the nightly news and one newspaper photo long ago.
Entwistle said, “No matter how old you get, you always remember.”
“Remember what?”
“The first kid in your class to die.”
Julie Marr was a transfer student from North Carolina. She had a strange accent, stranger hair, and even stranger clothes.
Laura had known what it was like to be bullied, picked on. But she’d made it to the other side; she had friends. She’d felt for Julie, but face it: She wasn’t about to put her own reputation in jeopardy.
Julie Marr lived in the same subdivision as Laura. Laura hated to admit this, but if she saw Julie walking up ahead of her, she would cross to the other side of the street so they wouldn’t end up walking together. It was her damn stride. Her natural stride was long; she covered the ground quickly. So she’d walk on the other side, her eyes straight ahead.
Like Jessica Parris, Julie Marr had disappeared between school and her house. Laura had Press Club two days a week after school. Otherwise, the orange and white car might have stopped for her.
The stiff old latches sprang back like little mouse-traps. Laura sat cross-legged on the floor of the guest bedroom, the late afternoon sun filtering in through Venetian blinds that came with the house, contemplating the old-fashioned suitcase and trying not to sneeze from the dust.
Inside were stacks of files held together by shoelaces. Most of them were marked in ballpoint ink discolored with age, usually beginning with the word “Laura.” Laura–School; Laura–Artwork; Laura–Swimming Lessons; and so on.
But some manila folders her mother had saved for herself.
There it was, toward the bottom. The word “Crime” in her mother’s spidery writing.
Laura knew exactly where to look, even though she had not seen this file in eleven years. She remembered seeing articles on Tucson murders that her mother had clipped, some of them as early as the forties, including the grisly saga of Charles Schmid, who killed three young girls in the 1960s and landed Tucson in
