Phantom Prey

became apparent that the bartender was at the center of the plot—the fulcrum of Frances’s Goth world. He took in people, places, events, and plans, and passed them on. He knew what was happening, knew the history.
    Fairy talked to him three times: once on the sidewalk, when he passed her, looking her over, and she passed by and then turned and called, “Excuse me, are you Mr. Ford?”
    He walked back to her and grinned, shoulders up, hands tucked in his jeans pockets. A charmer. “Yeah. Have I seen you around?”
    “I was over at the A1 a few weeks ago with Frances Austin,” Fairy said. “Did you hear about her?”
    “I did. There’s been a lot of talk.”
    “I can’t imagine what happened,” Fairy said, shaking her head. “Some people say drugs, some people say she must have had a secret lover.”
    “She used to smoke a little, I know that,” Ford said. “But . . . I’m not sure she even had her own dealer. She didn’t smoke that much. I can’t believe it was drugs. Must’ve been something else.”
    “The police think . . . I don’t know. Because she was one of us”— Fairy patted her black blouse—“that maybe somebody sent her to the other side, to see . . . what would happen.”
    “Well, that’s scary,” Ford said. “What’s your name?”
    She made up the name on the spot: “Mary. Janson. Mary Janson.” They shook hands. “Some of the people have tried to get in touch with her. On the other side.”
    Ford’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled. “No luck, huh?”
    “You don’t believe?”
    “Oh, you know. I used to, I guess. Used to talk about it, anyway. With me, it’s more of a hang-out thing,” he said. He looked away. “I used to listen to the people talk about . . . you know. Life, death, crossing over. It’s interesting, but, I don’t know. Too depressing, if you do it for a long time.”
    Fairy shook her head again, the black hair swirling around her shoulders: “It bothers me so much. If I could find out why she’s gone, what happened to her, I’d be fine. I could sleep.”
    Ford leaned closer to her: “If you want my opinion, it was a money deal.”
    “A money deal?”
    “You knew her pretty well?” Ford asked.
    “I did,” Fairy said.
    “Then you gotta know she was rich.”
    “I knew she was well-off.”
    “Rich,” Ford insisted. “She told me that when her father was killed, she inherited, like, two million. She already had money from trusts her parents set up when she was small. She said they put in, like, ten thousand each, every year; during all those big stock market boom times in the nineties, she had a million of her own, before she inherited. So I know she had that much.”
    “A lot more than I knew,” Fairy said.
    “We joked about starting a club,” Ford said. His eyes drifted away, seeing another reality. “She’d back it, I’d run it. We’d bring in some dark music; change the scene around here. It would have been a moneymaker. ”
    “Sounds wonderful,” Fairy said.
    A rueful smile: “Yeah: she gets killed, and my life flashes in front of my eyes.” Ford looked at his watch: “Shoot. I gotta go, I’m late for work. Are you going to be around? Mary Janson?”
    “I’ll be around,” Fairy said.
    He leaned closer again. “You smell wonderful.”
    She twiddled her fingers at him, and went on her way. “I’ll see you at the A1.”
    Loren had been leaning against an old elm, listening. He caught Fairy down the sidewalk and said, “You smell wonderful.”
    “I do.”
    “You heard what he said.”
    “Money,” she said. They seemed, now, to pick things out of each other’s minds.
    “She must’ve talked it around,” Loren said. “You know how she liked to talk—and so, what happened is, she got some of these people all cranked up about starting a club, a new scene, but you know how conservative she really was; so it comes to the moment when she has to produce the cash, and she backs away.”
    Fairy frowned: “How do you know so much about her?”
    “Why, from you,” Loren said. “All you do is talk about her. All day, all the time.”
    Back home, in bed, they made love in his cold, frantic way. Loren’s fingernails were an inch long, left scratches on her rib cage and thighs. And afterward, she said, “Ford knows.”
    “Yes, he does. We should see him again; and some of the others. Patricia . . .”
    “I don’t think she’d be involved,” Fairy said, tentatively.
    “She’s involved,” Loren said, sitting