Vanished

CHAPTER 2

Two days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles and sharing my row with a dripping-wet dead teenager. She was pissed. I almost wished I’d driven down from Seattle, but the temptation to dawdle might have been overwhelming. So instead my sleep-deprived self was wedged up against the window seat to avoid the creep on the aisle and the glowering ghost in the middle.

She was about thirteen years old, I’d guess, and soaking wet. Her very long blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail so her angry face was unobscured. She’d appeared somewhere over Oregon and didn’t say anything for a while; she just scowled. I wanted to talk to her and get her story, but the man on the aisle was already giving me more attention than I wanted and might take it as an invitation. Instead, I got up and went back to the lavatories. The dripping specter followed me.

“What do you want?” I asked when we got to the back of the plane.

“It’s all your fault,” she hissed back.

“What’s my fault?”

“It’s your fault, Harper.”

She didn’t tell me what was my fault. She only repeated her accusation over and over for the rest of the flight. Even retreating to the mindless noise of in-flight music couldn’t block her out of my head, since ghosts seem to have an affinity for electronic equipment and her uncanny voice seeped into the headphones to harry me.

There are a lot of types of ghosts, from the nearly alive to the merely present. Repeaters—ghosts that are essentially memory loops on endless play—are among the least annoying most of the time. They don’t interact with anyone. This dreadful drowned child was something a bit more than that, but not a lot. She annoyed the hell out of me while instilling the discomforting sensation that I’d done something wrong. But I couldn’t recall having anything to do with any drowning victims, so I didn’t know why I should feel guilty, though for some reason I did. The ghost disappeared somewhere over Santa Barbara, but by then it was too late to rest.

After my unpleasant flight, I was not in a good mood when I arrived at LA International. The baggage people at LAX added to my irritation by refusing to hand back my bag. It seemed that the X-ray tag that let them know there was a properly inspected and secured firearm in the case had gotten buried, and someone had freaked out when they saw the shadow of my pistol in the scanner. I had a long, boring, and circular discussion with everyone at the baggage office about handing it back. When they wanted to read me the riot act because they’d bungled the tagging and given some poor monkey on the X-ray machine a fit, I got a little testy, and that’s not a good idea with security people. By the time the luggage supervisor was involved, everyone was beyond pissy and I’d spent an extra forty minutes just trying to get my property back.

Therefore I was a bit short with the car rental clerk. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening and I had very little tolerance left, so when he smirked at my chest, I snapped at him.

“What?” I demanded.

“Umm. your shirt’s funny. ”

I looked down, having forgotten what I’d thrown on under my Seattle-necessary leather jacket for the flight to the warmer climes of Los Angeles in mid-May. It was a dark blue T-shirt with van Gogh’s famous evening sky above a picture of a giant, gore-fanged bunny menacing a tiny human figure. “Starry Starry Night. of the Lepus!” it read. My bookstore-owning friend Phoebe had given it to me for my birthday on the principle that if you won’t shop for yourself, your friends have carte blanche to give you things they think you should wear.

“Oh, gods,” I groaned. The shirt was too conspicuous. I’d have to dump it at my first opportunity and hope Phoebe would forgive me.

“I wasn’t checking you out, I swear!” the young man objected. “I’m just kind of into schlock film,” he added, pink-faced and defending his casual glance at my chest.

“Right.”

“Hey, it’s Night of the Lepus! One of the worst films ever made—mutant rabbits attack Arizona. It’s—umm. ” He could see me losing interest and patience. He shifted back to business, and I wouldn’t have thought anyone’s face could have gone that shade of red without makeup. “So. would you like to upgrade to a midsize car for only six dollars more per day?”

“No. Thank you.” We wrangled for a while longer before he let me have the compact car I’d reserved and I set out into the spring twilight looking for my hotel.