The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) Read Online Free Page A

anything else about her?”
    “Nah, not to me. Sent me the two hundred, though. I hope he's OK.”
    “Why wouldn't he be?”
    “I dunno.” He sniffed. “Just that when people need to come asking about someone, they usually end up on the evening news, y'know?”
    “I hope he doesn't. Look, if he gets in touch again, or if you remember anything else, give me a call. He's not in any trouble, and I'm not a cop.” I handed the kid a business card wrapped in a fifty.
    “Sure, man. No problem.”
    Downstairs, I called Adam’s mom and asked if she ever heard him mention a girl called Jessie. “No,” she said. “I don't think so. You think he could be with her, whoever she is?”
    “It’s possible.” I played safe, didn’t want to get her hopes up. “All I’ve got, though, is her first name and the notion that she was maybe with him in Burlington. I’ll need more to have any real chance of finding either of them.”
    “But you’re going to try, aren’t you?”
    “Sure. I’ll be going up to Vermont next week to see what I can find out on the ground. I’ve eliminated a few possibilities, but who knows what else will turn up. I’ll keep you posted.”
    She thanked me and I hung up. I felt a little bad, sounding so optimistic when I spoke to her, but I guessed I wanted to put her mind a little at ease. No sense making things out to be worse than they were before they were.
    I spent the walk home after work making a list of places where he might have stayed or worked around Burlington. I was hoping that the more I completed before I left, the more extra time I’d have with Gemma. The idea of a night or two spent by the fire with a bottle of wine instead of trawling dive bars had a lot of appeal.
    At eight thirty in the evening the phone rang and I listened, stone-eyed, as a total stranger told me Gemma was dead.

4.

    In my memory, the air was full of the taste of spruce bark, dry and earthy and bitter. It mingled with the scents of a hundred other plants and flowers I couldn't name, combining in harmony to form a singular perfume which, for some reason I couldn't place, reminded me of old wine casks. Grass stalks rattled beside my head. July sunlight flushed warm against my skin. The hum of insects going about their daily lives formed a chorus line for the sound taking center stage: a woman's laughter.
    I knew that if I opened my eyes now, I’d see a pair of red-brown butterflies marked with patterns like orchid blossom skipping through the air above me in a complex, whirling, mating dance. Then I’d shade my eyes against the glare of the sun, watching them until they passed behind the tall grass. And then I’d hear...
    “Mr Rourke.”
    I wouldn't. I wouldn't hear a thing except the sound of my own thoughts beating against the inside of my head. There were no butterflies and that sun went down a long time ago. I couldn't go back to that hiking trail near Smuggler's Notch, not without going alone and in the cold. The memory was all I had.
    “Mr Rourke.”
    I looked up at the white-coated figure in front of me. A grey-haired woman in her sixties. Lined face, wide brown eyes with the studied sympathy of a professional. She had blue doctor's coveralls beneath her lab coat. “Mr Rourke,” she said, “I’m Dr Kingsley, the Chief Medical Examiner. If you're sure you want to do this, follow me.”
    I said nothing, just stared bleakly at her as I climbed out of my seat. She led me down the hallway to a small office. A couple of desks with computers sitting on them. Textbooks, papers. Everything was clinically clean and so tidy you'd have thought no one ever worked here. The air carried the faint ammonia odor of disinfectant. A door in the far corner led through into what looked like a laboratory. The adjoining wall had a large window running a good ten or twelve feet along it. There was a surgical screen across it but bright blue-white light bled around the edges. A set of aluminum double doors led from the