The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

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  Quick-Start Contents

  The Myron Vale Investigations

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Books by Scott William Carter

  About The Gray and Guilty Sea

  Chapter 1 (preview)

  The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

  A Myron Vale Investigation

  Scott William Carter

  About The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

  A week before Christmas, John and Laura Ray storm into Myron's office, desperate to find their missing daughter. Money? They don't have any. Clues? They have few. Plagued by mounting bills and a skull-crushing migraine, Portland's only ghost detective wants nothing more than to show them the door.

  But defying his conscience always proves tougher to Myron Vale than saying no, and he soon finds himself embroiled in one of the strangest cases of his career. The more he learns about this unique little girl and all of her extraordinary abilities, the more he feels a kinship to her. Who took Olivia Ray? And why?

  The answers propel him toward a tantalizing solution to all of his problems — and a violent clash with a powerful personality, one who can cause irreparable harm to not just Myron, but everyone he loves.

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  Preview of The Gray and Guilty Sea

  The Myron Vale Investigations

  Ghost Detective

  The Ghost Who Said Goodbye

  The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

  THE GHOST, THE GIRL, AN THE GOLD. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, October 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Scott William Carter.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.

  For Heidi

  Chapter 1

  The girl's parents showed up at my office a week before Christmas. It had started snowing an hour earlier, big heavy flakes, and I was standing at the window watching the world turn white when a shiny black Ford Focus stopped at the curb on Burnside. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, but it was so gray and overcast that the streetlamps were already giving off a faint amber hue. This couple hustled out of the back seat, a spindly man in a brown suede jacket and a woman in a green trench coat and green beret, and made a beeline straight for the front door of my building.

  The man didn't so much as glance behind him—at the driver, at his wife. He was on a mission and he was in a hurry. Not a good sign.

  I wasn't in the mood for a client, even though I should have been. It had been over six weeks since my last paid work, a disability fraud stakeout, and that had paid barely enough to cover the minimum payments on my mounting credit cards. A week earlier, the electric company had finally gotten fed up with my excuses and cut the power on me—right in the middle of a really good game of Minesweeper, too. It was only by selling Dad's Colt Python .357 at a pawn shop that I was able to beat the vultures back another month. Broke my heart to do it, especially since Dad hadn't even been gone a year, but it was hard to make a good impression on potential clients when you were sitting in the dark. More importantly, it was impossible to beat your all-time record on Minesweeper.

  No, the real reason I wasn't in the mood for a client, despite my desperate financial straits, was that I was three days into the worst mental bender I'd ever suffered—and I'd suffered plenty in the six years since a robbery gone wrong had lodged a bullet between the two lobes of my brain. This one felt as if someone was pounding on the back of my head with a baseball bat with every beat of my heart.

  And of course these tortuous spikes of pain caused my heart to beat even faster, which caused the pounding to come even more frequently. Fun times. It was also the other reason the world was turning white; my vision always fogged at the edges during the worst of the migraines.

  In any case, I'd been debating about just closing up shop a few days early—I usually shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year's anyway—and seeing if some undercover activity of a different sort might make the migraine go away. It had never worked before, but my girlfriend Jak was always willing to give it a try. And try. And try. Bless her heart. We had our issues, but none of them were in the bedroom.

  So, when Mister I'm-In-A-Hurry burst through my office door thirty seconds later, I already had my palm in the air.

  "No," I said.

  "You don't even know what I'm going to say," the man protested.

  He bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. As fast as he'd run, a few snowflakes had still managed to find their way into his wispy brown hair. Even stooped, he was impressively tall, but he was also impressively thin, and not in a good way. The only thing holding up his tan chinos was a leather belt fastened so snugly that a broom handle would have felt the strain. Judging by the ample amount of extra belt dangling loosely, his weight loss must have been relatively recent.

  It made me curious as to why, but not curious enough to ask. With the door open, I heard his wife's heels clicking up the wooden stairs. I also felt a cold draft, which irritated me. I could barely afford to heat the place with the door closed.

  "Are you here to hire me?" I asked.

  "Well, that's something I'm hoping to—"

  "See, like I thought. The answer's no."

  "But—"

  "Merry Christmas, sir."

  "Mr. Vale, if you'll only—"

  "Happy Hanukah? Whatever. There's the door. You know the way back down. I'd show you out, but my balance is a little off at the moment. I hope you don't mind."

  By this time, his wife had entered the room. I didn't know for certain that she was his wife until later, but with the way she stopped at his elbow and looked at him, with the kind of concern that only a woman who's in love with a man can have, they were either married or something closely resembling it.

  She had eyes for that kind of look, that was for sure—big brown eyes, doe-like and expressive, what my former partner Alesha used to call No-Lie Eyes because a person with eyes like that couldn't tell a fib if her life depended on it. She was a little on the stout side, and would hav
e looked heavier if not for a hefty bosom that gave her body some shape, but those eyes of hers made her one in a million. If the jewelry store two blocks from my office could sell gems even half as stunning, they'd never have to sell anything else.

  The unexpected glimpse of something so beautiful actually made me forget, just for a second, the pulsing behind my eyelids. I was thankful for that, at least, enough to soften my tone if not to change my mind.

  "I assume you can talk some reason into him?" I asked her.

  The man glanced over his shoulder, his gaze sweeping right past his wife and taking in the room and the hall behind him, before looking back at me.

  "Who are you talking to?" he asked.

  I knew my mistake before he spoke, the mistake I often made, on a daily basis, sometimes many times a day, in all the years since I'd woken from a six-month coma to a world very different from the one before the shooting. At least for me. The woman was already smiling apologetically. I stared at her, wondering if I could tell the difference, scrutinizing her intently despite the migraine-induced cloudiness in my vision, hoping to see some sign. Every now and then, it worked, I could tell, but not this time. Not often, either. Almost never, really.

  "Yes, I'm a ghost," she said, answering my unasked question.

  I didn't answer her. It would only bring more questions. Instead, I looked at the man.

  "Sorry," I said. "Just a little joke. Ha ha."

  "You don't look well," she said, turning a bit of that concern she'd been showing her husband in my direction, those thousand-megawatt eyes making me a bit weak in the knees.

  "I don't feel well," I said, then remembered she had made the comment, not him. Before he could speak, I rushed ahead: "Sorry. Got a hell of a migraine. It makes me act a little strange sometimes. Another reason you shouldn't hire me."

  "Please," he said. "Mr. Vale. Myron. Can I call you Myron?"

  "You can call me whatever you want for the next five seconds you are in my life."

  "Just listen. Please. It's about my daughter. She's been taken."

  "Taken?"

  "Yes. Kidnapped. In the middle of the night." His eyes took on a misty quality and he blinked heavily. Unlike his wife's eyes, his were narrow and flat, too small for me to pick out the color. "She's—she's only nine years old. Please just hear me out."

  Now, finally, he'd said something that cut through my fog of pain. I felt like a jerk. This obviously wasn't the usual insurance fraud case or cheating spouse scandal, my usual fare for the living. Nor was it helping someone make peace with her estranged relatives, a frequent request from the dead, and one I particularly despised. Whatever I was feeling, whatever excuses I had, he deserved better treatment. I still didn't think I was in any condition to help him, but I could at least give him a fair hearing.

  I closed the office door then crossed behind my big metal desk, took a seat in my swivel chair, and gestured to one of the cushioned office chairs on the other side. He stepped forward but did not sit, gripping the back of the chair and squeezing until his fingers turned white. He had the hands of a skeleton, bony but solid. The woman took her place in the other chair, gazing up at her husband expectantly.

  "Sit, John," she said.

  Amazingly, he did, almost as promptly as a pet responding to a command. He did not acknowledge her, however, not even a single glance in her direction. He simply sat in chair, changing from clawing at the back to clawing at the armrests. Most of his fingernails had been bitten down to the nub.

  I glanced at the woman, making sure not to let my gaze linger for long, and she nodded. "We have a connection," she said. "It's very … faint."

  It was not a complete surprise. Though most ghosts—the vast majority of the hundred billion humans who'd ever lived and died, all of whom still walked the Earth—could not affect the living at all, not even in the slightest, a very small percentage could interact with the physical world in the most tenuous of ways, and an extremely tiny percentage of that percentage could do slightly more.

  "It's just with him," she said, as if reading my thoughts. That, fortunately, was something ghosts couldn't do. They were stuck with regular conversation like the rest of us. She took off her beret and shook loose an abundance of curly brown hair. "Only him, no one else."

  "You've got to help me," the man said. "I don't know—I don't know what else to do. The police told me to stay put, but I don't—I can't—"

  "I can't promise anything," I said, "but I'll hear you out."

  "All right. All right. Thank you."

  "How about we start with names? You know mine."

  "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'm John Ray."

  "Laura Ray," the woman said. "I'm his wife. Or was. You know."

  "My daughter's name is Olivia."

  "Olivia Alexis Ray," Laura added.

  "Olivia Alexis Ray," he said.

  I nodded, keeping my attention focused on him even though he was so distraught he probably wouldn't have noticed me looking in Laura's direction. Faint traces of the neon orange bar sign across the street glowed on their skin. The outside world, draped in snow, was so quiet we could have been sitting in an underground bunker. Even my neighbors down the hall, the Higher Plane Church of Spiritual Transcendence, who liked to sing and chant at odd hours, must have taken the day off, because all I heard from the building was the occasional creak of old wood shifting in the cold.

  "How long has she been gone?" I asked.

  "Two days," he said. "It happened on Monday."

  "Monday night," she said. "At our house. Right after midnight."

  "And the police—"

  "Yes, yes," he said. "They're—they're doing everything they can. But I didn't—I didn't know until morning. If I'd seen someone take her, or a car, anything, they might have done an AMBER Alert, but…" If he had any fingernails left, he would have torn my armrests to pieces, he was digging into them so hard. "I didn't hear anything. I can't believe I didn't hear anything. I had … I had the most awful dreams, but I didn't wake up. I didn't…"

  He bowed his head. Laura reached for him, then seemed to remember her limitations and let her arm fall. The snowflakes on her green trench coat had completely melted, leaving spots like tiny lily pads. It was interesting, seeing those watermarks. Because she was a ghost, the snow didn't really touch her, so it wasn't water in the actual sense, just water she imagined being there—and if she saw it, then I saw it. Such was the case of my condition. It never ceased to amaze me the lengths ghosts would go pretending they were still alive.

  Up until now, she came across as much stronger than him, but when she spoke next, her voice was high and strained.

  "I tried," she said. "I tried to get him up. I screamed at him. But he'd had so much to drink. He always drinks so much."

  "I was drunk," John said. "I was so drunk I didn't hear anything. That's why she's gone."

  "No, no," she said, "it's not your—"

  "It's my fault."

  "No, John, no."

  They fell silent, her staring at him helplessly, him hunched over on himself. Sitting, he seemed even more spindly and frail, his thinning brown hair going white at the edges, his face gaunt and tight, as if his skin had been painted on his bones. I waited, letting him gather himself. I wasn't a psychologist. I wasn't a marriage counselor. I wouldn't have been good at either, but I could wait. In my line of work, sometimes knowing when to wait was the most valuable skill of all.

  "Does it always snow like this in Portland?" he asked.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "It used to snow like this back in Wisconsin. I just didn't think it snowed like this here."

  "It's rare, but it happens. Not usually like this, though. Not so much at once."

  "Rare," he said, nodding. "She wanted to move here, you know. My daughter. I thought it would be good for us to … to start over. She said this was the place. I don't know why. We'd never been here. We didn't know anyone. But Olivia insisted."

  "Start over from what?"


  "If I would have known … If I would have known this was going to happen … Maybe Miami? I always thought, someplace warm…"

  "John," Laura said.

  "I don't have a lot of money," John said. "I should tell you that right now. I don't know how much something like this costs, but I don't have much. I even had to sell the Subaru a few weeks ago—I took an Uber here. I just—I just haven't been able to get a lot of work lately. "

  "Join the club," I said.

  "But I will pay you. It might take me a long time, but I will pay every cent I owe you. I'm a man of my word, Mr. Vale. I just want my daughter back. I will pay any price. Whatever it takes."

  I drummed my fingers on the desk. "I haven't even said whether I'm willing to help you yet."

  "But you will? You will?"

  "Why did you come here?"

  "Sorry?"

  "You said you came to Portland to start over."

  "Oh. Right. That was because of the accident. A year ago—no, no. Almost two now. I can't believe it's been that long."

  "Seventeen months," Laura said. "Not even a year and a half yet."

  "We were coming home from this Fourth of July thing in Milwaukee. The three of us. You know, fireworks over Lake Michigan. We thought Olivia would enjoy it." He swallowed hard. "We should have just stayed the night instead of driving home to Madison, but, well, I kind of pressed it. Money was tight then, too."

  "No," Laura said, "I was the one who pressed it."

  "An accident had really backed up I-90, so I suggested—"

  "I suggested," Laura said.

  "—we take Highway 18 to get around it. It was really late. I was tired. I probably shouldn't have been driving, I was so tired."

  "He's lying. I was the one who was driving."

  "We came around a corner—"

  "No."

  "—and this big RV, it must have crossed into our lane."

  "Nope. No corner. No crossing into our lane. I just fell asleep."