Samantha Moon Phantasm Page 2

  As he heads toward Starbucks, alternately fuming and worried, he tries to remember if she had shown signs of being sick. They had eaten tacos earlier. Yes, the tacos. He is sure of it. They had tasted funny to him.

  Now, he’s inside the Starbucks. Cool air. People were everywhere. Busy as hell.

  He heads immediately to the bathrooms. His mouth literally drops open when he sees a girl exit the bathroom, drops open because it’s not his wife. The girl avoids eye contact with him and hurries past. He glances inside the open door. It’s empty. He checks the men’s restroom. Empty, too.

  I feel his panic. Full-on panic. He dashes out to the lobby, searching, searching. She is nowhere to be found. What the fuck? What the fuck?

  Now, he’s asking employees if they have seen his wife. It’s a busy Starbucks. People are coming and going. Workers are making drinks fast, taking orders. Everything is mechanical, rote, all done a hundred times a day, a thousand times a day.

  I hear him describe his wife to anyone who will listen. No one remembers seeing her. Wait, one worker does, but she isn’t very forthcoming. No, that’s not it. She just doesn’t remember too much. Yes, she took an order from her. Water only. ‘Water?’ he asks. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, sir. Just water. Then she went in there.’ She points to the bathrooms.

  Henry rushes back to the bathroom. Maybe he missed her. Maybe she is behind the door, or in a stall. Dammit, no stalls. Not behind the damn door. He checks the guys’ bathroom again, too. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Now, Henry is outside, rushing back to his truck, in case she has come back, in case he has somehow missed her. But she’s not there. Now, he’s running around the building, running and running, looking for her. Maybe she had wanted to throw up in an alley? But there’s no alley here. Just a big, hot shopping center sitting on the edge of the desert. He stands on a parking lot curb, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare. Nothing. Then stands on his truck’s bed, searching.

  Nothing.

  Now, he’s on his cell phone calling the police, weeping, fearing the worst. He’s nearly incoherent as he reports her missing.

  And then the thoughts repeat.

  Over and over.

  Chapter Three

  “She disappeared,” said Henry, speaking into his hands, his voice barely audible, his voice barely human. He was unaware that I had just seen the entire scene in his thoughts. “She just disappeared. And I have no idea where she went or what happened.”

  I didn’t know either, of course. I didn’t know all or see all. I was just a woman. Just a mom. Granted, a very freaky woman; and, if you asked my kids, I was a very freaky mom, too.

  I said, “You watched her walk into Starbucks?”

  He nodded. He held a tissue tightly in his hand. The tissue might have been torn to shreds. “Yes. I watched her in the rearview mirror.”

  I could have confirmed this by dipping into his thoughts, but I thought I’d had enough of Henry Gleason’s thoughts for one day. Hell, for a lifetime. I said, “And you watched her enter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see where she went from there?”

  “No. She just, you know, blended with the crowd and I started playing with my phone. You know, wasting time, looking at texts and scores and news and weather.”

  “Angry Birds?”

  He gave me a weak grin. “That, too.”

  “An employee at Starbucks saw her?”

  “Yes. She spoke to the police, but she really doesn’t remember much.”

  “Do you have her name?”

  “Jasmine.”

  “Last name?”

  He shook his head. “The police will have it, but I can’t imagine there are too many Jasmines working at that Starbucks.”

  I nodded. They would. “Anyone else at Starbucks see your wife?”

  “No one.”

  “What about customers?”

  He shook his head. “By the time I went looking for her, anyone who might have seen her was long gone.”

  “Did you ask around?”

  “I did. Like a crazy man. No one had seen her. This isn’t your typical Starbucks, you know. People were coming and going, not staying long. There weren’t, you know, those hipster geeks in there with their laptops. This Starbucks straddles Corona with Yorba Linda.”

  I nodded. I knew the area, of course. It was actually a rather great divide, many miles of empty, although beautiful, land, with one lush county segueing into another, harsher, drier, hotter county. The Starbucks wouldn’t be your typical hangout for moms and students and guys with square glasses and thick, mangy beards.

  No, this Starbucks was a stopover, a place to get coffee while waiting out traffic. Or to use the bathroom. This Starbucks was an outpost. An outlier. Other than the occasional morning commuter who hit up this Starbucks, employees would rarely, if ever, see the same customer twice.

  “So no one else remembered her?”

  “No.”

  “Just the one employee?”

  He nodded, said nothing. His aura was crackling with blue energy, split occasionally with streaks of yellow. I wasn’t sensing any deception on his part. I felt that I could trust his memory, and I felt that I could trust him, too, although I didn’t like the part about him considering hurting her.

  “Did you ever hurt your wife?” I asked.

  “I told you, she just disappeared—”

  “That wasn’t my question. Did you ever hit your wife? Hurt her in any way?”

  “No, never.”

  “Did you fight often?”

  “What’s often? We had your typical fights, I guess.”

  Despite my desire to stay out of his thoughts, I dipped in quick enough to see him yelling at her—“going off” on her, as he called it. Yeah, he fought like a crazy man. His face twisted. And, no, he didn’t hit her. At least, not in the memories I saw. But he was verbally abusive.

  “So what happened next?” I asked, easing back out of his mind again, to my great relief.

  “I called the police. Reported her missing.”

  The police had come out. Had interviewed him and the workers. A massive search had been conducted. The search had lasted for days, and I even remembered it. Whether or not she had been found hadn’t made the news. Or, if it had, I was too knee-deep in my own issues to have noticed.

  After three days, the search had been called off. There were no leads, nothing to indicate that his wife had ever left the Starbucks. There was video surveillance of her going in, but none of her leaving. A true mystery.

  “I didn’t kill her, Ms. Moon.”

  I knew that he didn’t kill her. But there was always the slim possibility that his memory had been replaced with a false memory, one so powerful that even his own mind believed it. But I doubted that. Then again, he could have been delusional, of course. Mentally ill. But I doubted that, too. His aura was normal enough. Those with mental health issues had very erratic, scattered auras. Distorted auras that flashed with many colors. His pulsed blue and yellow, and mostly blue. Blue was the color of trust. At least, according to my own experience.

  Not to mention, I had seen his memories. Hell, I had lived through them. And then, there was the minor issue that his wife was never seen leaving Starbucks.

  “My wife needs help, Ms. Moon. Something has happened to her. Something very, very bad, and the police aren’t doing a damn thing about it.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. The detective on the case, last I heard, was dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “I have no clue. They won’t tell me anything, other than they’re working on it.”

  “Are you a suspect?”

  “They say only that I’m a person of interest. That all husbands are when wives go missing.”

  True enough. And as I contemplated his words, I checked the time on my cell. Ah, hell. I was going to be late again. Damn.

  “Will you help me?” he asked.

  “Yes. But first, I need to pi
ck up my kids.”

  Chapter Four

  Principal West was a middle-aged man with whom I once had a run-in when Danny had told me I was not allowed to pick up our kids from school. Today, the principal gave me the eye, but this time, he did not try to prevent me from picking up my kids.

  I waved politely, ducked my head a little, and mouthed, “Sorry I’m late” through the minivan windshield. The principal wasn’t happy—and probably made a noise that sounded like, “harrumph,” although I could only guess at the noise, since my hearing, although enhanced, wasn’t magical.

  When I came to a full stop, the principal, who always waited with students for their delinquent parents—I was late far, far too often—finally released my kids to me.

  Anthony’s jeans might have been hanging down a little in a style that I didn’t approve of. Anthony slid into the back seat, and immediately went to work on his Game Boy.

  Tammy was sporting a frowning face, in a style I definitely didn’t approve of. Since it was her week to sit in the front seat, she rode shotgun.

  “I’m almost thirteen, Mom. Thirteen. I don’t need a principal to wait with me for my mother. It’s so embarrassing.”

  “Your face is embarrassing,” said Anthony.

  I waved to the principal again, who gave me a tight, half-smile and turned his back on me as I pulled out of the parking lot.

  Once we were cruising down Rosecrans, I looked at Anthony in the rearview mirror. “Apologize to your sister,” I said to him.

  “No.”

  Aghast, I looked in the mirror again. “What?”

  “Just playing. Sheesh, can’t you take a joke?”

  “No, I can’t. Now apologize.”

  “Fine. Sorry, butthead,” he said in Tammy’s direction.

  “Give me your Game Boy.”

  He did, passing it to me between the seats. I opened the center console and deposited it within, along with untold work-related receipts, boxes of gum and one mostly covered box of cigarettes. I quickly shut the console again.

  “He just called me a butthead, Mom.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You said it and thought it.”

  “I can think anything I want. There’s no law about thinking.”

  “He just mentally flipped me off, Mom!”

  Anthony giggled in the back seat. I told Tammy to get out of her brother’s head and for Anthony to quit mentally flipping off his sister. He giggled some more, then settled down. Tammy pouted, crossing her arms, making her own harrumph noise. At least they were mostly quiet. It was about all I could ask.

  About a minute later, Tammy said, “I saw them, Mom.”

  “Saw what?”

  “The cigarettes. Whose are they?”

  It would do no good to give Tammy a line, or tell her anything other than the truth, although I’d rarely made it a habit of lying to my kids. Of course, keeping my vampiric nature hidden from them as long as I could was one thing, but that cat had been out of the bag for some time now. Also, Tammy was as telepathic as I was. Perhaps even more so, since she could read other family members’ minds, including her little brother’s, and he was about to hit puberty. I prayed for her soul.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said.

  “What are you two talking about?” asked Anthony. Now that he was no longer physically attached to a game console, he had joined the land of the living.

  “Mommy has a pack of cigarettes in the car,” said Tammy.

  “I want one!” said Anthony, leaning forward between the two seats.

  “No, you don’t,” I said to him, and then glanced at Tammy. “See what you did?”

  “I didn’t do anything except tell the truth, Mommy.”

  “Mommy smokes?” said Anthony, perhaps in a higher voice than was necessary. He looked from me to Tammy. “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tammy, holding my gaze. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  I looked at my daughter some more, then over at Anthony’s too-eager face, then sighed and pulled the minivan over to the side of the road, where I parked in front of a beautiful, two-story home that was probably even more beautiful inside. My own neighborhood was about two miles away, and was filled with older homes that looked nothing like the ones that lined this street. My small home was the most that Danny and I could afford, and we had been happy to have it. Truth was, I was still happy to have it...but now I associated much pain with it, too. After all, I had been living at that home when my life had been irrevocably changed, when I had gone from being mortal to immortal, when my days were stolen from me, when my husband had rejected me and cheated on me, where my kids had been taken from me, and where I had cried often and still cried to this day. Of course, there were a lot of good memories in that home, too, but with Danny now gone, those memories were getting harder and harder to access.

  Perhaps I should have been delighted that Anthony seemed to be coming out of that dark place he had been in for the past few months. In fact, just hearing him playing with his Game Boy was a major step in the right direction. And hadn’t he gone many months without teasing his sister? He had, and I had feared that I had lost my kids forever.

  But here they were, teasing each other like old times. Yes, I had missed their teasing and fighting and bickering and...

  “Don’t say it, Mom,” said Tammy giggling, and obviously following my train of thought.

  “Say what?”

  “Farting. You were going to say you even missed Anthony’s farting.”

  “How could I miss his farting?” I asked. “When it never stops.”

  They both giggled, and I turned in my seat and hugged them both, which was kind of hard to do in the minivan, but we managed. No words were spoken for a few minutes, but we were all soon crying, Anthony the hardest of all. We did this often, now that their father was gone. My tears, however, weren’t for Danny. They were for my kids who had lost their father. Danny, in the end, had dug his own grave.

  It didn’t have to be this way. Danny could have stood by my side, through thick and thin, and through hell and back. We could have stayed a strong family, an unstoppable family.

  Such an idiot, I thought, and hugged my kids tighter.

  A moment later, Tammy pulled away and said, “Now, about those cigarettes, Mom...”

  Chapter Five

  The anticipated one-hour drive from Fullerton to Corona took four hours, due to a tractor-trailer accident that had blocked several lanes.

  Luckily, I had peeled off the freeway before I peeled off any faces. Now, with the sun setting, and me at my jittery worst, I finally sat in the Starbucks parking lot and did my best to calm down, to relax, to breathe.

  This was always the worst time of the day for me, the time just before the sun set. It was a time when I felt less than human, when I felt weak and vulnerable.

  As I waited, I cracked my neck. I drummed my freakishly long fingernails on the steering wheel. I breathed through my nose, in and out, in and out, rapidly. Faster, faster.

  Pacing sometimes helped, but not always. I could get out and pace next to the minivan, but then, I would look like the freak that I am. I stayed inside and waited it out.

  Breathing.

  Drumming.

  Fidgeting.

  Last week when I had been pacing, I had inexplicably driven a fist through my bedroom door. I’d regretted that. And it had cost me about a hundred bucks’ worth of handyman services.

  So I waited in the minivan, now gripping my steering wheel.

  It would do me no good to step out now, not with the sun just minutes from setting. Minutes that felt like forever. Minutes that were truly torture for me.

  Now, the setting sun was at the point where I could no longer think or focus on anything else. I just needed to power through the next few minutes.

  I breathed and ran my fingers through my hair. I was aware of someone sitting in a nearby car watching me. I didn’t want them to watch me. I wanted them to go away. Or I
would make them go away.

  Breathe, Sam. Breathe. Forget them.

  Fuck them.

  Breathe, Sam.

  And with that last thought, I felt a sudden deep calm overcome me. I didn’t have to look up to know the sun had set. My weird, immortal, cursed, supernatural body was hyper-aware of the sun. Attuned to the sun.

  I took a deep, full, useless, beautiful breath and felt my lungs expand, and as they expanded, I felt myself expand, too. I felt my energy, strength and vitality noticeably increase.

  I went from a shell of a human, to something unstoppable.

  Just like that.

  I stepped out of the minivan and surveyed the Starbucks where, three weeks earlier, a woman had gone missing.

  Chapter Six

  Unlike some movie vampires, I could go for a few days without eating.

  I abhorred the word feed. Hell, if anything, what I did was closer to drinking. Now, I imagined going an eternity and never really chewing on anything ever again.

  It was not my idea of fun, although a brief image of nibbling on Kingsley’s fat lower lip did pop into my mind. And I left it there, in my mind. Where it belonged. Hidden and buried.

  No, I had nothing against Kingsley. Not even these days. But our time might have come and gone. He had had every chance to be with me, and, in a moment of weakness, had decided that some young floozy was worth more to him than me.

  Yeah, it still rankled, and, yeah, I might never truly forgive him for it, even though he had been set up by Ishmael, my one-time guardian angel. Set up to fail.

  Still, I happened to believe that his feelings for me should have been stronger than a few minutes with some stranger. But it hadn’t been, and to this day, we weren’t together because of that.

  One strike, I thought, as I stepped into the middle of the mostly empty parking lot, and you’re out.