Nearly Departed Read online

  As usual, the tavern was sparsely populated. A lemony scent of wood cleaner added to the usual spicy aroma, making Dennis feel oddly hungry. An attractive blonde-haired girl named Christina, with whom Dennis was casually acquainted, scrubbed at the bar with a stained cloth. She was humming an upbeat tune to herself and didn’t look up when Dennis slid onto one of the barstools.

  “Is Luke around?” he asked.

  The girl continued to polish the wood. “Who?” Dennis rolled his eyes and tried to stay patient. Christina was nice enough, but her brain often seemed about as functional as a cardboard lifeboat.

  “Luke Colby,” clarified Dennis. “Blonde hair? He’s worked here for something like six years.” Christina looked up with an expression that teetered between confused and absent-minded, the wheels in her head clearly working in high gear to process this new and complex information.

  “Oh,” the girl replied. She looked down at the spot on the bar she had been polishing, made a thoughtful noise, and then jerked her head back up with a bright, triumphant smile. “You can ask the manager! He’ll know!” She dropped the rag and skipped through a doorway behind the bar.

  “He is the manager!” Dennis called after her. “Oh, never mind…” He drummed his fingers on the bar, and received an annoyed frown from an obese man in a sweat suit. Dennis gave him a humorless smile before turning his attention back to the doorway, just as Luke came sauntering out.

  “Hey, Luke,” Dennis greeted him. Luke said nothing, but looked his friend over with an expression of detached scrutiny. “I could use a drink, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “You look like you’ve had enough,” muttered Luke. He pulled a squat glass from a cabinet and splashed some brown liquid into it from what looked like an opaque beer bottle. “Seriously, dude, I’ve seen suicide victims looking less depressed than you.”

  “I’m not depressed,” Dennis countered, pulling the glass towards him. “I’m incredibly frustrated, rather tired, and a little bit irritated, but I’m not depressed.” He took a tiny sip of the chocolate-colored fluid and let it roll down his throat, rather than actively swallowing it.

  “Gosh, and here it is, almost two in the afternoon. What a horrible day you must have had.” He picked up the rag where Christina had left it and set himself to finishing the task of polishing the bar. Dennis ignored his friend’s sarcasm and regarded his drink suspiciously.

  “Luke, what is this?” he asked.

  “Root beer.”

  “It’s not bubbling.”

  Luke looked up. “That’s because it’s flat.”

  Dennis sat for a moment with an arched eyebrow. Then, despite Luke’s indignant protests, he climbed over the bar and pulled down a bottle of expensive rum.

  “Damn it, now you got the bar all dirty again!” Luke complained. He threw the cloth at Dennis’ head, where it landed with a happy flopping noise and filled his nostrils with the smells of lemon and dust. “If you want free drinks, you can work for them.” He turned his back and rummaged through a drawer at the opposite end of the shelves, muttering audibly.

  Dennis peeled the cloth from his head with a smirk, well aware that his antics had caught the attention of everyone in the tavern. Despite there being only half a dozen or so people present, he felt a psychological spotlight pointing at him, and kept the performance going. With a look of feigned seriousness, he removed the cap from the rum and dumped a liberal amount onto the bar. Luke turned at the sound of the liquor splashing onto the wood, and made a noise like a choking foghorn. Dennis fought to keep a straight face as he started rubbing at the sodden area with the rag, sloshing the spilled alcohol across its entire surface.

  “Hey!” Luke yelled. He rushed over and snatched the bottle from Dennis’ hand. “Do I come in and mess around at your job?” he demanded. “Oh, wait, that’s right, you don’t have one.” He replaced the cap on the bottle and gingerly returned it to its place on the shelf. “Some of us have to work for a living, you know.”

  Dennis continued to suppress any traces of amusement from his face as he scrubbed at the bar, sopping up the rum with the already dripping cloth. “What about that time that you glued all the pages of my manuscript together?”

  Luke went slightly red in the face. “That hardly counts.”

  “Or the time that you changed all of the characters’ names to ‘Carlton’?”

  “Hey, that was funny…”

  Dennis leveled his gaze at Luke. “Of course, there was also the time that you replaced all of my notes with excerpts from –”

  “Alright, alright!” Luke exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “Jeez, you’re completely intolerable sometimes, you know that?” He jerked his head towards the spot where Dennis had been seated. “Go sit back down, you’ll get your goddamn drink.”

  Dennis responded with a polite smile and a nod, and then went back to his stool, although he walked around the bar this time rather than climbing over it. By the time he arrived, there was a second glass waiting for him, this one filled with an amber liquid. Luke snorted dismissively, and went back to cleaning up Dennis’ mess. Dennis waited until there was a dry spot on the bar, then placed a small stack of bills down on it. Luke eyed the money suspiciously.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Dennis shrugged. “Adding insult to injury, I suppose.”

  “Fine,” Luke growled. He swept the cash into his hand and dumped it into the old-fashioned register. “But the joke’s on you.”

  Dennis took a sip of his drink and eyed his friend coolly. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” The twinkle of mischief in Luke’s eye betrayed his otherwise stoic appearance, and his lips twisted into a wicked smirk as he answered.

  “Because I wrung out the dishrag into your cup.”

  There was a snicker from further down the bar, and Dennis caught sight of the overweight man in the sweat suit sneering at him with a snotty expression. Dennis’ right eyebrow crept higher than its twin, and he turned to directly face the man, who let out a hissing laugh from between putrid teeth. Without saying a word, Dennis brought his glass back to his lips. Then, his eyes not leaving those of the piggish man, he drained all of the liquid into his mouth, and grinned evilly.

  The man’s neck quivered as he gulped, and the color drained from his face. For a moment, it looked as though he would simply turn back to his drink and ignore Dennis’ obviously deranged expression, but some inner thought seemed to persuade him to do otherwise. He pulled a wad of bills from a pocket, tossed them onto the bar, and then trundled towards the door, staring straight ahead. Luke watched the exit with an expression that was a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.

  “So, you’re scaring away my customers now,” he said, turning back to Dennis. “That’s nice.” He stooped beneath the bar, and came up with a blue plastic bucket. “Here. Spit.”

  Dennis leaned over the bucket and emptied the contents of his mouth into it. “Yuck,” he said, smacking his lips. “I guess that’s why people don’t order rum-and-wood polish very often.”

  “It’s called a Jamaican Lumberjack, actually.” Dennis couldn’t tell if his friend was joking or not, and decided that he really didn’t care either way. Luke emptied the bucket into the nearby sink, lazily washed it, and then returned it to its unseen home beneath the bar.

  “Is there any chance of you giving me a real drink?” Dennis asked.

  “Fine, I’d say you’ve earned it,” replied Luke. He collected the cash that the fat man had left and stuffed it into the register. “What do you want?”

  “Actually,” Dennis murmured, “I think I’d like a root beer.”

  Luke dropped his hands to his sides and stared. “Okay, you are going to go sit in a booth now. I’ll be over in a minute.” He disappeared into the back doorway, and returned a moment later with Christina in tow. She retrieved the cloth and resumed wiping down the bar, furrowing her brow as she moved.

  “Why is it all wet?” she asked.

  “It rained,” Luke r
eplied. He knelt to rummage for something and missed the look of utter bewilderment that his comment brought to Christina’s face.

  “Oh.” She continued to stare at one spot on the bar. “That’s weird.” She cocked her head and shrugged, and seconds later was humming again as she mopped up the remainder of the Jamaican Lumberjack.

  “I thought I told you to go to a booth!” Luke’s voice barked. Dennis watched as two brown bottles appeared on the bar. He grabbed both of them and moved towards the tavern’s back corner, where he maneuvered into one of the surprisingly spacious alcoves. Luke followed a moment later with a third bottle clutched in his hand, this one sporting the label that marked it as the beer that he brewed. He slid into the seat opposite to Dennis and regarded him with a thoughtful expression.

  “Okay,” Luke said. “Spill.”

  “I did that already.” Luke rolled his eyes and took a swallow from his beer.

  “You know what I mean. You look like shit, and you’re taking it out on everyone.”

  “I’m taking my appearance out on everyone?”

  Luke made a motion as if to slap him. “Would you stop being so difficult? Seriously, what’s going on?”

  Dennis took a sip from one of the bottles in front of him. “Alena caught me with a check for a thousand dollars in my pocket last night. It didn’t go over well.”

  Luke let out a low whistle. “Something tells me that it wasn’t a royalty payment.” Dennis shook his head.

  “Remember that lady I told you about? The one who called me yesterday?”

  Luke nodded. “Yeah, the one you thought was an FBI agent or something. What happened?”

  “She offered me a thousand dollars a week to help her.”

  “What, are you a gigolo now?”

  Dennis snorted at the comment. “Let’s just say that she’s pretty serious about getting rid of her ghost problem.”

  “I’ve never heard it called that before.” Luke drank some more of his beer, slurping at the lip of the bottle. Dennis leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

  “Have you ever tried to research anything about ghosts?” he asked. “It’s bloody impossible. Everyone has something different to say, and nothing has even the slightest basis in reality.” He dropped his hands and looked back at Luke. “I found an article that said that the only way to deal with a ‘marauding spirit’ is to seduce it. There was another claiming that I should bake some kind of almond cake and leave it as an offering.”

  “Hey, dude, I’ve had your cooking. That shit would scare off a horde of marauding Vikings, much less spirits.” Luke paused for a few seconds and tapped his fingernail against his drink. “What are you going to do with the money?”

  “Nothing, apparently,” Dennis replied. “I told Alena that I would tear up the check.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” said Luke, a hesitant tone in his voice. Dennis only shrugged.

  “As far as she knows, I’m conning Elspeth.”

  “That’s the lady?”

  Dennis nodded. “The thing is, I didn’t even want to take the money. She forced me to, more or less.”

  “Let me see if I have this right,” Luke said. He folded his hands in front of his face, reminding Dennis of what seemed to be Harding’s default pose. “You got mugged by an old lady who forced you to take a thousand dollars, and now your wife thinks that you should just throw it away?”

  “I’m… not sure that I’d put it quite like that,” Dennis responded. “But sure, that’s about the size of it.”

  “Dude, what planet are you from?”

  Dennis ignored the comment. He looked out across the tavern and watched as Christina, apparently oblivious to the eyes on her, cupped her breasts and examined herself in the mirror behind the shelves. When he turned back, Luke had averted his eyes, and was staring intently at the surface of the table.

  “So, you’re not going to cash that check, then?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  Luke shrugged. “Well, I mean, if you don’t need the money...” he trailed off. For a few seconds, Dennis felt that he had missed something. Then, realization dawned.

  “Are you still in gambling debt?” Dennis asked.

  “Yeah,” Luke replied miserably. “I have to pay up pretty soon.”

  “How did you even get into this?”

  Luke drained the rest of his beer before answering. “There were a couple of guys in here awhile back that had some inside information on something or other. They were regulars. They asked if I wanted in on the action, and I figured, well, what the hell. It went well, I made some money, and it turned into a bit of a habit.” He regarded his empty bottle forlornly. “Then it stopped going so well.”

  “What happens if you can’t pay?” Dennis asked.

  “Bad things,” replied Luke. “This wasn’t strictly legal, you know? Anyway, I talked to Sam about lending me some cash, but he says he needs a few days to get it together. I think that’s a shrink-talk suggestion that I handle it myself.”

  Dennis shook his head. “I know Sam. If he says he’ll help you out, he will.” He dug out his wallet and pulled the check from its hiding place. “I didn’t think you guys were that close, though.”

  “He came in last night and wouldn’t stop asking what was wrong,” Luke explained. “I figured there was no sense in lying to a shrink, so I told him.”

  “Well, here, take it,” said Dennis, thrusting the check forward. “I’ll sign it over to you. Just don’t tell Alena about it.”

  Luke hesitated, but then hurriedly took the check and examined it. “She’s pretty steamed about this, huh?”

  “You could say that. To make matters worse, I still don’t know what’s going on with that detective,” Dennis said. He glanced back at Luke, and felt a subtle rush of fear at the look on his friend’s face.

  “Dude, don’t you check your voicemail?” Luke asked quietly. Dennis started to answer that he hadn’t received any phone calls, but remembered that his phone was still in his car’s glove compartment.

  “Why? What happened?”

  Luke licked his lips and took a breath. “What did he look like?” he asked. “The guy you said was a cop, I mean.” Dennis struggled to picture the man from Harding’s office.

  “Uh… He was big, as in muscular. Dark skin, and he had a short mustache.”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Luke said, looking worried. “He was in here yesterday at about seven. He asked about your picture.”

  Dennis felt his face tighten angrily. “How many times have I asked you to take that thing down?” he demanded. Luke leaned forward slightly.

  “Hey, don’t lose your head, dude,” he said firmly. “The guy obviously knew where to look for you. He would have asked whether he’d seen the picture or not.”

  Dennis took a breath and tried to latch onto one of the thoughts that were making kamikaze runs through his brain. “What did he want?” he asked. “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “No, he just asked who you were, and if you came in here a lot. It was right after Sam left.” Luke wrapped his hand around his bottle, but didn’t move it from the table. “I could tell that he wasn’t one of your fans, though. Remember that lady with the suitcase full of board games?”

  “Can we focus here, please? Tell me about the cop.” Luke made a skeptical face.

  “For starters, dude, he’s not a cop.”

  Dennis shook his head, confused. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I asked him as a joke, and he told me that he wasn’t.”

  “What does that prove?” Dennis asked, his tone going sour.

  “Come on, dude. Everyone knows that cops have to say yes if you ask them that. There’s a law or something.”

  “You’ve been watching too many action movies.” Luke shrugged, but didn’t reply. “Besides, Sam said that he was retired.” Dennis breathed out and tried to steady his nerves. “What happened next?”

  “Nothing much,” Luke responded. He released his empty bot
tle and shook his hand a few times. “He had a drink, made some small talk, and then he left. I remembered what you said about that guy from the shrink’s office, so I called your phone. You’d know all this if you checked it once in awhile.”

  Dennis sighed and slumped backwards in his seat. He took a drink and grimaced as the cold beverage stirred a mild cramp in his diaphragm, but continued to swallow until the bottle was empty. Luke looked on with an expression of concern.

  “Do you want something stronger?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Dennis replied, shaking his head. “Why the hell would he come looking for me here? How did he even find this place?”

  Luke shrugged. “Maybe he followed Sam. Hell, he might have even come in on his own. It was pretty crowded last night.” He leaned forward and looked at Dennis with an uncharacteristic amount of compassion in his eyes. “Look, don’t let this get to you. We’ve both done crazier things than your Doctor September act, and nothing bad ever happened.”

  Dennis nodded inattentively, still trying to calm the storm of urgent warnings in his head. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and even if he had, he doubted that a retired detective would be the one to pursue him. Still, something felt suspicious, even if he couldn’t put a finger on what it was.

  “I think you had better get back to the bar,” Dennis sighed. Luke arched an eyebrow.

  “Oh, really? Are you my boss now?”

  “No.” Dennis smiled weakly. “But I think that I could use a drink after all.”

  Several rounds of liquor and a package of stale chips later, Dennis was feeling moderately better. Luke had managed to juggle his bartending duties with frequent attempts at jovial commentary, following each new witticism with another offer of free alcohol. It seemed pointless to wave him off, and Dennis had – not entirely unwillingly – imbibed far more than he was accustomed to. The effect was both pleasant and disconcerting, especially when the room seemed to spin each time he moved his head. A crowd of blurred faces rushed through the room, as though Dennis was watching animated frames from a slide show of time-lapsed photographs. More than once, a patron recognized him from the picture above the bar, but on each occasion, Luke was quick to distract the inquisitive customer and rescue Dennis from the impending threat of intoxicated conversation.

  The evening rush rolled in just after five, and suddenly the tavern was a fashion show of suits and business wear. The change in pace also heralded the arrival of another bartender, a spry young man whose name Dennis had never managed to catch, leaving Luke free to dedicate himself to bothering Dennis full time.

  “Here’s an idea,” Luke said, plopping himself down in the chair adjacent to Dennis’. “Why don’t you bring Alena along with you tomorrow? She can meet this Ellen lady –”

  “Elspeth.”

  “Yeah, her. She can meet this Elspeth lady, see that you’re not up to your old tricks, and you can accept any further payments with a clean conscience.”

  Dennis shook his head and immediately regretted it, the motion having disturbed his increasingly delicate equilibrium. “Bad idea. Alena doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Neither do you, dude.”

  “Well, I do now,” snarled Dennis. He played with his eyelids, alternating between blinking, squinting, and opening them as wide as he could manage. Around anyone else he might have been more wary of making such bizarre expressions, but he was confident that Luke had seen far stranger staring at him from across an empty glass. “Yeah, I believe in ghosts now, and I don’t know the first thing about killing them.” He pointed a finger in Luke’s general direction. “Don’t say it.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Because I know that ghosts are already dead. You know what I meant.” He suppressed a burp and adopted a serious expression. “I think,” he added thoughtfully, “that I may throw up.”

  “You’ve been doing that a lot lately, huh?” Luke was smiling, but Dennis didn’t share his good humor. Apparently sensing as much, Luke tried a different tactic. “Well, look, I still don’t have the whole story here. Maybe I can help.”

  “She’s a memory-impaired ghost haunting a piece of antique furniture,” Dennis replied. “What more is there to tell?”

  “Are you sure you’re an author? How about why she’s a ghost, or something about what makes that chair special?”

  “I don’t know. And neither does Elspeth.”

  Luke seemed ready to respond, but a sudden look of realization crossed his face. “Oh, shit, I forgot about that. Hang on a second, okay?” He stood and rushed towards the bar, where he pawed through a drawer beneath the cash register. When he returned, he was carrying a birthday card-sized flyer emblazoned with bold, dripping text.

  “What’s this?” Dennis asked, looking over the paper. “‘The Golden Gate Ghost Tour?’”

  Luke nodded enthusiastically. “Some guy dropped it off the other day. Apparently you get taken around to all of these haunted mansions and stuff. Good thing I didn’t throw it away, huh?”

  “Why? Are you out of toilet paper?”

  “Come on, dude!” Luke flicked the top of the flyer. “It says the guy in charge has been hunting ghosts for thirty years. I bet he’d know how to deal with a possessed armchair.”

  Dennis considered. He was skeptical, to say the least, that any self-proclaimed ghost hunter could possibly be legitimate, but he had seen things at Elspeth’s house to make him doubt his original assumptions. Not everyone, he reasoned, was necessarily a con artist, and if there was even a chance at finding some information that was actually useful, he would probably do well to pursue it.

  “Alright, fine,” he said finally. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his keys. “But you’re driving.”