44 Book Five (8 page)

I inhaled as I sat there, lost in his words. There was so much to say, so much I needed to tell him. That I did love him, that I never wanted him to release me. All these thoughts flew through my head, spinning and spinning and not able to come out. Stuck, stuck, stuck, right there in my throat, even with his desperate eyes locked onto mine, waiting for me to say it. To say something.

But I couldn’t.

I stayed quiet. Again.

“Good night,” I said finally, my heart pounding in my ears, as I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“Good night, Abby,” I heard him whisper sadly.

It wasn’t the way the night was supposed to end.

CHAPTER 17

The morning dragged, not because I was tired from being out late with Ty, but because of the growing guilt over not being able to tell him how I really felt about him.

And an eight-hour shift at Back Street wasn’t helping any.

I finished unpacking the boxes in the back before taking my lunch, trying to focus on all the money I was making for my trip to Barcelona.

I checked my phone and saw that I had missed a call from Paloma. She left a message apologizing.

I thought about Ty and his sad, lonely eyes as he drove away last night. I hoped he wasn’t still upset.

“Hey, you guys going to the Brandi Carlile concert next week?” David asked as I walked over to the door.

“No,” I said. “The guides are having our end-of-the-season party over at Amber’s house that night.”

“Are you talking about Amber Svenson who lives over on Delaware Avenue?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Do you know her?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s a party animal. I see her out all the time.”

I laughed, wondering if he was just joking. She didn’t seem like that at all. She was always quiet and reserved out on the river.

“No way,” I said.

“Total way. Late night, at the clubs, she’s a beast. But the parties at her house suck big wang. I’ve been. Trust me, it’ll wrap up by 10. Just meet us afterwards. We’re starting at Velvet about that time.”

“Yeah, I guess we could do that,” I said. “Sounds fun.”

“Damn right I’m fun.”

Kate pulled up and waited with the car running.

“Say hi to Sista Craig,” he said, a little hurt. “I see she’s avoiding me.”

“I will. See you after lunch.”

I opened the car door, a wave of cold air greeting me.

“Hey,” Kate said.

“You look the part,” I said, staring at her jewelry and lipstick. “Press conference or interview?”

“Interview,” she said. I looked down at her shoes.

“Wow, must be a big story for the Choos to come out,” I said.

“It is Choo worthy.”

She smiled and shifted gears and we zoomed down Columbia.

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“Yeah, it was pretty good,” I said quickly. “But right now I’m more excited to see what’s for lunch.”

A picnic in the park was her idea and I smiled as we sat down and she started bringing out the items from a paper bag.

“Not your school lunch, that’s for sure,” I said. There were falafels, hummus, pitas, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and plain yogurt.

We sat eating, not saying much, watching the kids play and people walking around. It was a nice day, warm and clear. The dried grass dancing in the breeze, the sunflowers in full bloom by the side of the river.

When we finished, I leaned my arms on the table. Maybe she could help.

“It was a good night,” I sighed. “But there’s this weird thing it ended with.”

“What happened?” she asked, putting the little cartons back in the sack.

“Well, it’s this stupid thing I’m having trouble telling him. Ty tells me that he loves me, and I can’t say anything. I freeze. And now I’ve hurt his feelings. It’s a mess. And I think it has to do with…”

I stopped, hoping she’d say something. But she waited for me to finish. 

“I can’t seem to tell him how I feel. And I’m not sure why. I think maybe it has to do with…”

I paused again, watching a lone kayaker paddling downriver.

“Jesse?” Kate said.

I looked at her.

“Yeah. Jesse.”

I put on my sunglasses, hiding my glassy eyes.

“Jesse was your first love. It’s always like that. That’s how it works, whether they’re alive or dead. When you love someone like you did Jesse that love will always be there. But it’s okay to love someone else, too. You don’t have to stop loving Jesse to be with Ty, Abby.”

I sighed.

“It feels like it,” I said. “That if I’m going to be with Ty, I’m ending it with Jesse.”

Kate rubbed my shoulder.

“Abby, it ended with Jesse the day he died in the car crash. He’s not here anymore.”

I wiped my eyes.

“And you’re going to have to either accept it or not, but if you don’t, you’ll probably be letting go of Ty. Nobody wants to compete with a ghost. It’s impossible. Jesse would have wanted you to live your life.”

I realized Kate was only trying to help. She was painting it black and white. But I could see a third color in all this.

Gray.

And gray can be a very complicated color.

CHAPTER 18

I drove over to the Bend Historical Society, which was across the street from the library. I had seen the old brick building hundreds of times without giving it a second thought. It was Kate’s idea to check into the history of Club 6 and what was there before. She had already looked into the bar’s recent past but hadn’t uncovered anything conclusive.

I turned into the parking lot and got out. Paloma was waiting for me in front. She had her hands stuffed in her jean pockets and was looking down at a crack in the sidewalk.

“Sorry I’m a little late,” I said.

She looked up and smiled.

“Oh, that’s okay. Thanks for doing this. I’m sorry again for freaking out the other night. But he had never been that close before. He was in the cage with me. Those eyes. The things behind them. I had to get out.”

She looked tired. But she seemed in control of her emotions. Like the way she had been when I’d met her over at the track. More or less normal.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m not really an expert at seeing spirits or anything. Maybe there was something I missed at the bar.”

I put it out there, mostly to make her feel better. It was true. I knew I still had a lot to learn, but I had confidence in what I saw or didn’t see. My abilities weren’t scientific or anything. But at the same time, I’d been seeing spirits for several years now. I hoped it wasn’t the case, but Paloma’s ghost may only have been in her head. 

We walked up to the counter and an old woman with gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses greeted us. She looked at us strangely for a moment. Maybe it was because of our ages. I doubted anyone under fifty ever came into the place.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, I called earlier about the history surrounding the Club 6 building,” I said.

She gave me the slightest of nods. Then she bent over and reached under the counter. A moment later she handed me a file stuffed with papers and old clippings.

“You can read this in that room,” she said, pointing to a door behind us. “But you can’t take anything from this file out of this building. If you need a copy of something, just let me know. They’re 25 cents per page.”

I thanked her and grabbed the folder and we went over to the room. Dark carpeting covered the floor. There was a strong musty smell inside, like we had stepped into the oldest room in Oregon.

Paloma sat down next to me.

“I’ve never been to one of these places,” she said, setting her bag on the table.

“Me neither.”

She rubbed her arms.

“Kind of gives me the heevy jeevies,” she said.

“The what?”

C’mon, girl. You know what I’m saying.
Piel de gallina
. Goose bumps.
The creeps. The willies. The heevy jeevies.”

“Oh, the heevy jeevies,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did.”

We both smiled. It was the first real smile I’d seen from her. I wondered if this was how she normally was before she began being haunting.

I opened the file and we shuffled through the papers. They were arranged chronologically. There were old newspaper stories from
The Bugler
about the building that went as far back as 1910.

I plowed through some of the polite phrasing of the time and got the gist hidden between the lines. We read a few of the articles, trading them when we had finished, and after a few minutes reached the same conclusion.

“So back then it was called the Silver Dollar and, what, it was a place for ladies of the night or something?” Paloma said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It sounds like it was a brothel. They used the Club 6 area as a bar and the upstairs rooms were… you know. The brothel part.”

“Club 6 feels shady as shit sometimes. But I had no idea it used to be a whorehouse.”

For a moment I tried to imagine what things must have been like in Bend 100 years ago.

“So, Abby, what do you do when you’re not making coffee or ghostbusting?” she said, looking up at me.

“Ghostbusting?”

“You know,
Ghostbusters
was one of my favorite movies growing up. Me and my sister must have watched it a hundred times. Bill Murray’s so cool. Still.”

“When he’s on there’s no one better,” I said. “Anyway, when I’m not playing Dr. Peter Venkman or river guiding on the Deschutes I’m usually playing soccer.”

“
Orale.
”

“How do you do it?” I asked her. It had been on my mind since visiting the club. “I mean how do you get up in that cage and dance like that?”

“After a while you don’t think about it. The people looking at you and all that. I didn’t look around when I first started, but after a while I noticed that most of them don’t even look at me and if they do it’s usually for just a few seconds. Now I just get lost in the music and tune the rest of it out. I imagine it probably isn’t that different from when you play soccer. I mean, when you’re on and feeling it, I bet you don’t notice much else.”

“I guess,” I said.

We went back to the file. There was another article that mentioned the owner of the Silver Dollar, a man named Clyde Tidwell. He had been shot in the head and killed during a heated poker game.

I handed the story to Paloma.

“This is some real Wild West stuff right here,” she said.

A minute later she handed me one of the other clippings. Her hand was trembling.

It was a story about the murder of one of the prostitutes. She had been strangled. The story said that the killing followed the same pattern of two earlier murders. The police had no suspects.

We kept reading, but didn’t find any other mention of the murder of the three women. I assumed the killer was never caught.

Near the bottom of the file I found a photo of one of the victims. Her name was Inez Morales. I blinked hard in disbelief. She looked a lot like Paloma.

It wasn’t just because they were both Hispanic. The woman had short hair, which I thought was unusual for back then. She appeared to be around Paloma’s age. And there was something about the eyes.

I wasn’t sure if the stale air of the place had gotten to me, but the more I looked at the picture the more I felt like they were dead ringers.

Paloma didn’t seem to notice the resemblance, so I let it go. I didn’t need to add that worry to her plate on top of everything else she was going through.

We finished reading and learned that the building housed a restaurant after Tidwell’s death. Following that it became a country western bar. From the 1970s up through Club 6, several different bars had come and gone in the spot, none staying for very long.

From the accounts it seemed like there was always violence associated with the place. Fights and stabbings and assaults plagued whatever establishment set up shop there.

“It seems cursed,” Paloma said. 

At the very bottom of the pile, there was an old photo of the Silver Dollar from the early 1900’s. Several men were standing out in front, dressed in top hats and clothing from that era. The photo was grainy, and their faces were hard to make out. All I could really tell was that no one was smiling. They just all stared at the camera, serious, hollow expressions on their faces.

I always thought there was something unnerving about old photos. How no one ever smiled in them.

I pushed it over to Paloma.

“Do you recognize any of them?” I said.

She studied the picture for a long time, looking into the face of each of the men. Finally, she let out a long sigh.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “I want to… I want to recognize one of them so bad, Abby. But I just can’t tell. The photo’s too old.”

I nodded.

“So what does this mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment at not having found something more concrete. “I think it’s a good start.”

“Does that mean you believe me? Even though you can’t see him, you believe me that I see a ghost?”

I hesitated for a moment with my answer. I wanted it to sound right.

“I think it’s possible. I didn’t see him, but like I said, I’m not a professional. There’s still a lot I don’t know about that world. Maybe he’s able to show himself just to you for some reason. I don’t know. I don’t know how it all works over there.”

Paloma looked down and nodded.

“That means a lot, Abby,” she said. Her voice shook a little, like she was trying to swallow back tears. “Everyone else just thinks I’m crazy.”

“I know how that feels,” I said.

I organized the clippings and put them back in the folder. We left the room, and I placed the file back on the counter where the old lady came out to retrieve it.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

“Some of it,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”

She nodded. We walked out the door.

It felt good to get outside into the bright sunlight, away from that stagnant air.

“Well, thanks again, Abby,” Paloma said as we walked to the parking lot.