Car Week: A Haunting

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There are two kinds of people in Monterey during Car Week.

Those who come here for it, and those of us who know better than to leave the house.

By Monday, the Ferraris had arrived. So had the Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Porsches, and enough money to finance a small country. The streets were packed. Restaurants had waiting lists before lunch. People who would normally become homicidal after sitting through two red lights seemed perfectly happy to crawl along at five miles an hour as long as the car in front of them cost more than their first house.

I had prepared accordingly.

Groceries: purchased. Coffee: plentiful. Plans requiring me to drive anywhere: absolutely none.

I intended to spend the week at home, safely removed from the parade of chrome and horsepower taking over the Monterey Peninsula. It was perfect. Until the car appeared across the street.

I noticed it just before sunset, parked beneath the old cypress opposite my house. Long, low, and black, with sweeping fenders and enough chrome to catch the last light of the evening, it looked less restored than preserved. As though someone had driven it out of another decade, parked it there, and stepped away for a moment.

I am not a car person. During Car Week, I classify vehicles into three categories: expensive, ridiculously expensive, and don't-breathe-near-it.

But this one was different.

It was beautiful.

I stood at the living-room window longer than I meant to, waiting for someone to get out.

No one did.

By ten o'clock, fog had rolled in from the bay. It drifted between the houses and curled around the convertible's whitewall tires. The top was still down.

That bothered me more than it should have.

Anyone who owned a car like that would probably consider a water spot a medical emergency.

Before bed, I checked again.

Still there.

The next morning, I carried my coffee to the window. The space beneath the cypress was empty. I smiled, oddly relieved, and turned away. Then I saw the envelope on my porch. My name was written across the front in faded blue ink. There was no stamp. No address. Nothing to suggest it had ever passed through a post office. I opened the door and looked up and down the street before picking it up. Inside was a black-and-white photograph. For several seconds, I simply stared. The photograph showed the black convertible parked beneath the cypress tree. My house stood behind it. The porch was different. The landscaping was different. The tree was smaller, its trunk not yet thick enough to cast the broad shadow it did now. And beside the driver's door stood a woman. She was young, perhaps in her late twenties, with dark hair swept away from her face. One hand rested on the car, and she was looking directly at the camera. I turned the photograph over. Three words had been written on the back.

YOU LEFT ME.

I read them twice.

There are moments when your brain behaves sensibly. It considers the facts, searches for reasonable explanations, and refuses to panic. Mine decided to check the street for the car. Nothing.

I carried the photograph into the kitchen and set it beside my coffee. In daylight, the details were even clearer. The house was unmistakably mine. Same porch line. Same windows. Same front steps.

A knock at the door nearly sent my coffee across the room.

My neighbor Hiram stood on the porch with his dog, Roscoe, beside him.

Hiram had lived three houses down for as long as I had owned mine and considered neighborhood business a shared responsibility whether the neighborhood agreed or not.

"That old car yours?" he asked.

"No. Why?"

"Saw you watching it last night."

I narrowed my eyes. "Were you watching me watch it?"

"I was walking the dog." Roscoe looked up at him with the weary expression of an animal accustomed to being used as an alibi. I handed Hiram the photograph. His teasing expression disappeared. "That's your house."

"Excellent detective work."

He ignored me and studied the woman. "When was this taken?"

"I don't know."

He looked at me.

"What?"

"I saw her last night."

Every clever response disappeared from my head.

"The woman?"

He nodded toward the photograph. "Sitting behind the wheel. Around midnight."

"The car was empty when I went to bed."

"Maybe she came later."

Reasonable. Perfectly reasonable. I liked reasonable.

After Hiram left, I did what any calm, rational person would do.

I searched the internet obsessively.

Forty minutes later, I found the photograph in an old newspaper archive.

August 1956.

The woman was identified as Michelle Hart. I kept reading. The article beside the photograph was only a few paragraphs long, the sort of small local story that had probably seemed important for a week and then disappeared beneath newer headlines. One sentence made the kitchen feel suddenly colder.

Michelle Hart disappeared three days later. Her car disappeared with her. I looked toward the empty street.

For someone who had planned to spend Car Week safely at home, I was having a very inconvenient Tuesday.

By Wednesday morning, Michelle Hart had taken over my dining table. Printouts covered half of it. Newspaper articles, property records, copies of photographs, handwritten notes. Three coffee cups sat among them because apparently I had reached the stage of research where carrying one cup back to the kitchen before getting another was too much to ask.

I had learned that Michelle was twenty-nine when she vanished. I had learned that friends insisted she would never have left Monterey without telling anyone. I had learned that no body had ever been found.

No wreck. No confirmed sighting. No explanation. And I had learned that the old newspaper reports were wrong about one important thing.

Michelle had not lived alone. The house in the photograph had bothered me from the beginning. Mine had been remodeled over the decades, but the bones were the same. The same front windows. The same porch. The same cypress, only younger. I searched the property records. There it was. Michelle Hart had owned my house for six years.

"Of course you did," I said to the screen. The room remained unhelpfully silent. I went upstairs. At the end of the hallway was a narrow closet filled with old paint cans, Christmas decorations, spare tiles that matched nothing currently in the house, and assorted objects previous owners had apparently decided I deserved.

Near the back sat a wooden box. I had seen it dozens of times. I had never opened it.

The lid resisted at first, swollen slightly with age, then gave with a soft crack. Inside were old receipts, yellowed envelopes, a silk scarf, and a small silver key. At the bottom lay another photograph.

Michelle. This time she was laughing beside the black convertible, her face turned toward the sun. A man stood beside her. Someone had scratched his face away. Not accidentally. Deep lines had been gouged through the paper again and again until nothing remained of his features.

I turned the photograph over. For Thomas. An engine rumbled outside. Not loud. Not modern. Low and smooth. I ran to the window. The black convertible sat beneath the cypress tree. And for the first time, the driver's seat wasn't empty. A man sat behind the wheel. He wasn't looking at the road. He was staring directly at my house. I grabbed the photograph and hurried downstairs. By the time I reached the sidewalk, the convertible was moving.

"Wait!"

For one hopeful second, the brake lights glowed red through the fog. Then the car turned the corner and disappeared. I stood barefoot on the sidewalk holding a seventy-year-old photograph and feeling ridiculous. Back inside, I put the photograph on the kitchen table. Michelle smiled up at me beside the man whose face someone had taken great care to erase.

For Thomas. I opened my laptop again. Finding Thomas took most of the afternoon. His name finally appeared beneath a photograph from 1948. Michelle stood on the steps of my house with her arm around a boy of about eight.

The caption identified him as her son, Thomas. I stared at the photograph. Michelle hadn't lived alone after all. More searching filled in pieces the original disappearance stories had left out. Michelle and her husband, Richard Hart, had separated. Thomas had spent time with both parents. After Michelle vanished, sixteen-year-old Thomas went to live permanently with his father. Richard told reporters his former wife had abandoned them. Thomas apparently never believed him.

As the years passed, his name surfaced again and again. At twenty-three, he offered a reward.

At thirty-seven, he spoke to a reporter after someone claimed to have seen Michelle in Oregon. At fifty-two, he hired a private investigator. At seventy-eight, he was still asking anyone with information about his mother to come forward. The last article was dated only a year earlier.

Thomas Hart had died at eighty-four without ever learning what happened to her. Beside the article was a photograph of him. I almost closed the page. Then I looked at his eyes. My skin prickled. I enlarged the photograph. White hair. Deep lines around his mouth. Age spots across his cheeks. But the eyes were the same.

The man I had seen behind the wheel of the convertible hadn't been young. My mind had simply tried to make him young because he was sitting in a car from 1956. He had been Thomas.

Eighty-four-year-old Thomas. A floorboard creaked upstairs. I froze. Another creak followed. Slowly, I stood.

"Hello?"

I immediately regretted saying it. If someone answered, I wasn't sure what I planned to do. Nothing did.

I climbed the stairs. The hallway was empty. The closet door stood open. The wooden box sat on the floor exactly where I had left it. Except the silver key was gone. I checked the floor. The shelves. Behind the box.

Nothing. Then I noticed the photograph had moved. Michelle and the faceless man no longer lay at the bottom of the box. Beneath it was an envelope. I knew it hadn't been there before.

Thomas was written across the front. My hands shook as I opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper.

My darling boy,

My heart stumbled. The letter was dated August 1956, two days before Michelle disappeared. I carried it downstairs and sat at the kitchen table before reading further. Michelle told Thomas she was leaving Richard. Not Thomas. Never Thomas. She had arranged to meet someone who would help her get away safely. Once she was settled, she promised she would come back for her son. The words became increasingly hurried toward the bottom of the page. Then I reached the sentence that made me stop.

Your father found out about the car. The rest of the page had been torn away. I sat staring at those seven words. 

The car.

Whatever had happened in 1956 wasn't only about Michelle. A knock sounded at the front door. Hiram stood outside. Roscoe was beside him.

"You look terrible," Hiram said.

"Thank you."

He held out his hand. The silver key lay in his palm. I forgot how to breathe. "Where did you get that?"

"Your mailbox."

I took it from him. The metal was cold despite the warmth of his hand. "Someone was inside my house."

His expression changed. "What?"

Before I could answer, Roscoe began to growl. Not at me. At the street. The black convertible waited beneath the cypress tree. This time, no one was inside. Hiram stared at it. The passenger door slowly swung open.

Roscoe backed away.

"Tell me you saw that," Hiram said.

"Oh, good. You can see it too."

The door opened another few inches. I looked at the key in my hand. Then at the car. Then back at Hiram.

"I'm not getting in that car," he said.

"Neither am I."

The passenger door opened wider. I sighed. "Apparently I am."

Roscoe made a sound that clearly communicated his opinion of the human species. I crossed the street.

Up close, the convertible was even more beautiful. The black paint reflected the houses and gray sky with impossible clarity. There was no dust. No rust. No sign that seventy years had passed since it vanished.

I touched the passenger door.

Cold.

Not cool from the fog.

Cold.

I climbed inside.

The leather smelled faintly of old perfume. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then I noticed a tiny lock beneath the glove compartment, almost hidden by the dash. I held up the silver key.

"No."

Hiram remained on the sidewalk. "What?"

"This is the part in every horror movie where everyone in the audience starts yelling at you."

"Very helpful."

I inserted the key. It fit. A small compartment clicked open. Inside were yellowed letters tied with a blue ribbon and a folded road map. I pulled them out. One place along the coast had been circled in ink.

The first letter was from Michelle. Richard knew she planned to leave him. He had taken her keys. He had threatened to keep Thomas from her. He had discovered the friend who had agreed to help her escape.

Another letter mentioned an old garage on property once owned by Richard's family. The final letter ended halfway through a sentence.

A click sounded beneath me. The engine started. I jumped so hard my shoulder struck the door.

Hiram's eyes widened.

"I didn't do that."

"I know."

The steering wheel turned by itself. That was apparently the point at which Hiram's common sense surrendered. He muttered something I probably wasn't supposed to hear, handed Roscoe's leash to a bewildered neighbor who had just stepped onto her porch, and walked around the car.

"What are you doing?"

"You're not riding in a haunted car alone."

He climbed into the driver's seat.

"If we die, I'm blaming you."

"Fair."

Neither of us touched the wheel. The convertible pulled away from the curb. Car Week traffic should have made the trip impossible. Instead, traffic seemed to part. The convertible moved through Monterey as though the roads remembered it. Fog curled across the pavement. Modern cars passed us, their drivers turning to admire what they probably assumed was an immaculate restoration. They couldn't know the car had been missing since Eisenhower was president. We left town and followed the coast.

Twenty minutes later, the convertible slowed beside a rusted gate almost completely hidden by brush.

The engine stopped. For a moment, neither of us moved.

"You first," Hiram said.

"Coward."

"Absolutely."

The silver key opened the gate.

Beyond it, an overgrown road disappeared between cypress and pine. We followed it on foot until the trees opened around the remains of an old garage. The roof had partially collapsed. Vines covered one wall. The wooden doors hung crooked on rusted hinges. Hiram switched on the flashlight from his phone.

"Still think staying home for Car Week was a good idea?"

"I was doing fine until the dead people got involved."

Inside, the air smelled of damp wood and earth. Our footsteps stirred dust that had probably been undisturbed for decades. Then Hiram's light swept across chrome. Another car sat beneath fallen boards and a rotting canvas cover. Older than the convertible. Dark. Forgotten.

"Richard's?" Hiram whispered.

"Maybe."

The beam moved lower. A woman's shoe lay beside the passenger door. Neither of us spoke. Beside it, half buried beneath dirt and leaves, something silver caught the light. I crouched and picked it up. A bracelet.

Two words were engraved inside. For Thomas. My throat tightened. A sound came from behind us. The convertible's headlights switched on.

We turned. A woman stood in their glow. She looked exactly as she had in the photograph. Dark hair.

Young face. Twenty-nine forever.

Michelle Hart.

For a moment, I forgot to be frightened. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking beyond me.

A second figure appeared beside the convertible. Thomas. Not eighty-four. Not the man I had seen behind the wheel. A sixteen-year-old boy stood in the rain. His face crumpled.

"You left me."

The words were barely a whisper, but they seemed to fill the ruined garage.

Michelle shook her head. "No."

She stepped toward him. And suddenly the fragments of the week weren't fragments anymore.

The letters. The hidden garage. Richard's car. The torn page. The scratched-out face. Images moved through my mind with the force of memories, though they weren't mine. Michelle driving through the rain. Richard following. His car blocking hers near the garage. An argument. Michelle trying to get away. Richard grabbing her arm. A fall. The sickening strike of her head against the edge of the concrete floor. Silence. Richard standing over her. Then panic. Not grief. Panic.

He hid what happened. Hid the car. Hid Michelle. 

And when his son asked where his mother was, Richard gave him the cruelest answer possible. She left you.

Thomas had carried those words for sixty-eight years.

Michelle reached for him. "I came back for you."

Thomas stared at her. He looked sixteen, but his eyes held a lifetime. All those years of searching were there.

Every unanswered letter. Every false lead. Every birthday. Every time he had wondered what he had done to make his mother leave him. His hand trembled as he lifted it. Michelle took it. The old garage seemed to exhale. Wind moved through the broken rafters. The fog shifted.

For one instant, Michelle and Thomas stood together in the headlights.

Then they were gone.

Hiram and I remained in silence. After a while, he cleared his throat.

"So."

"Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

"I was just going to ask whether you think the car is going to drive us home."

I looked toward the convertible. The driver's door opened. I sighed.

"Apparently."

The police came the next morning. Explaining how we had found the garage required some creativity.

We left out the self-driving seventy-year-old convertible and the conversation between two dead people.

Even Hiram agreed there were limits to what Monterey County law enforcement needed to hear before coffee.

Beneath the collapsed floorboards, investigators found human remains. They found Michelle's belongings.

They found the letters. They found Richard's car. And slowly, after nearly seventy years, Michelle Hart stopped being a woman who had simply disappeared. She became a woman who had tried to leave an unhappy marriage. A mother who had intended to come back for her son. A woman whose story had been buried with her.

By Sunday afternoon, Car Week was still roaring through Monterey as if none of it had happened.

Engines growled in the distance. Tourists wandered the sidewalks. Somewhere nearby, somebody was undoubtedly paying more for valet parking than I had spent on groceries.

Hiram stood beside me on the porch.  Roscoe sat between us, maintaining a dignified distance from both humans.

"So that's it?" Hiram asked.

"I hope so."

Across the street, the cypress moved gently in the afternoon breeze.

No convertible. No ghosts. No mysterious envelopes. Just an empty curb. Peace. Hiram started home.

Then stopped.

"Uh..."

I closed my eyes. "No."

"You haven't even looked."

"I don't want to."

"You should probably look."

I followed his gaze. Parked beneath the cypress tree was the black convertible. The top was down.

Hiram and I crossed the street together. This time, I wasn't afraid. A single photograph rested on the passenger seat. I picked it up. Michelle and Thomas stood beside the car. She looked twenty-nine.

He looked sixteen. Both were smiling. Not posing. Smiling.I turned the photograph over. Two words were written on the back.

Thank you.

I stood beneath the cypress for a long moment, holding the photograph. Then I looked up. The street was empty. The convertible was gone. A laugh escaped me.

Hiram glanced over.

"What?"

"Nothing."

I slipped the photograph carefully into my pocket and looked toward the distant line of traffic crawling along the coast. Maybe Car Week wasn't so bad after all.

The End