I’m a dick. A private one at that. P.I. Private eye. Private investigator. Call us what you will, I prefer ‘dick’. It seems fitting given that a lot of the job tends to be poking around in somewhere we aren’t meant to be, doing what we came for, and getting back out without leaving too much behind to know we’d been there. Name just seems fitting.

Job means seeing the worse sides of people, no one hires a dick for a happy reason, you hire one when someone has done you wrong or when something bad has happened that you want made ‘right’. Just your version of ‘right’ ain’t exactly law-abiding or you would go to the police and take it up in the courts instead. So yeah, you never enter anyone’s life until a tragedy has happened or someone wants one to take place. Job doesn’t give you a very good outlook on your fellow man, or woman as the case too often turns out to be.

This case was starting with a woman and her empty house and so far felt so wrong that if I didn’t need the money the job was promising to pay I would be so far gone already. As it was, I had to have been pretty far gone to have taken this job in the first place, bottles of scotch and contract negotiations never being a pleasant mix. But I had bills to pay. Two of them in fact and a Thomas, none of the three being patient men when it came to paying back what was due.

And so here I am, standing in the attic of an old Cape Cod home. Nothing left in the attic but bare floor, the rest of the house wasn’t much better. Mrs. Winters had been living here, she was missing now. The place felt empty. You can tell when a home has been abandoned. Places that people live, even when they are gone, still feel alive. This house felt hollow.

Her four kids were behind me, one of them had called her and she hadn’t answered, they had all gathered here to hire me to find her now that she was missing. None of them were local. One had the tan of living somewhere out West with a lot of sun, the other in an over-tailored business suit, the youngest had the start of an awful Southern drawl, and the remaining of the four had been talking on her phone and swearing in some foreign tongue.

“You see, several days ago we tried to get in touch with mother and she didn’t answer her phone. After we contacted her neighbors we discovered that she had disappeared some few days before,” said the Western child.

“We are worried about her, and her state of mind, that she would leave and disappear so abruptly like this,” said the Eastern child.

“Please, find our mother. We miss her and so do her grandkids,” said the Southern child.

“Merde,” said the Foreign child.

This whole job smelled bad. All four were being ridden by their green demons of envy and want. Wealth, acknowledgement, validation, and closure; they all badly wanted something. And all I had to go on was an empty house and the neighbors mention of a strange man who came by the house.

The mans name turned out to be Roland. He worked for a company that hired people out to clean out attics and basements. Or he had, he quit a few days ago. This lead was taking me no where. Mrs. Winters had disappeared a few days before him, if the neighbors were right about the day her car was last seen. The only clue I had now was that he had been seen going into her house empty handed and had come back out clutching a brochure.

I talked to his dispatcher, a woman with haunted eyes and too much make-up named Judith. She was shaken when I mentioned his name and reached for her drink to cover it up. Something had passed between them, something she was trying not to think about and wasn’t going to tell me. But she did give me a new lead to follow. Roland had still been holding that brochure when he came by here and she had gotten a good look at it. It was for some sort of hotel. The Land’s End Hotel and Resort.

It took a few calls and a bit of searching to turn up an address for the place. It was apparently one of those secrets that were in plain sight, but no one noticed. It seemed to lay between county lines, and no one seemed to know who owned it.

Finally got a lead when a homeless man heard me yelling at someone over the pay phone, was having to repeat the name over and over. Bureaucratic slime at the other end kept hearing it wrong, but the homeless guy knew where it was. He had a brochure for the place and hollow eyes that stared into the sky. He gave it to me and walked away, muttering about having lost it all there.

Not the way I like to work, but the brochure seemed to be of the right place. I had an address now and it was my only lead. Mrs. Winters’ kids were willing to pay to find out where she was, so it was a road trip for me.

I had this feeling as I drove, it settled in a bit stronger when my AC failed an hour into the drive, that they were willing to pay just as much for proof that she wasn’t anymore. At least one of them seemed more interested in finding out where all her money went then in finding her alive. No one hires me for a good reason. Should have mentioned, I am a bit of an ass as well as working as a dick.

I killed the engine as the building came into sight. Indian summer, hot fall day. The road ahead of me could be used to bake on, if the heat shimmer rising from it was any sort of sign. Place seemed more perched upon the hill then built their, large cluster of buildings all stitched together with halls and walls, looked like something a mad man or a drunkard would have built. The Frankenstein’s monster of resort architecture.

Engine sputtered once as I turned the keys before it kicked back in and I started the slow drive up the hill. I didn’t like the place, it had a sense of being out of place somehow in the countryside. It reminded me of dark alleys, of times spent hunkered down behind a steel dumpster and hoping that it would stop the lead flying through the air. The building felt occupied, it felt alive before I even walked through the doors. A predator, a lion transplanted from the savannah to some wilderness with plenty of prey and little competition.

The girl at the desk had the look of someone I had seen a thousand times before but never talked to. She reminded me at once of the girl who grew up three doors down and the one I saw at the bar every night in the city, in the cornor drinking alone.

She looked up as I walked in, slipping a thin little paperback back into a drawer behind the reception desk. Her brows furrowed a moment as I crossed the room, she pulled the ledger on the desktop open, flipping through it, probably checking to see if I was expected.

I had just driven here in a car without AC in a hotter day then felt right this time of year. I likely didn’t paint the picture of their usual clientele, shirt stuck to me with the sweat from the drive, tie knot loose and pants that looked more wrinkled then creased. I had left my piece in the car, no reason to carry it inside just then. Didn’t like being without my revolver but I didn’t need to make a worse impression then I already was. I couldn’t risk playing this straight, I doubt I looked the picture of respectability just then and the place probably had a policy against revealing who was staying there.

“Hi. I’d like a room please,” I put on my best sales smile just then. Better to have her thinking I was some sort of shuckster then something more sinister.

She just kept frowning at me, glancing from my face to my shoulder. I had to double-check then, the way she was looking at me had me thinking for a moment that I hadn’t left my piece and holster in the car. The she glanced over my shoulder and sighed, “We have one room sir, a single. If that will be alright?”

I nodded my head, agreeing with her but more to steal a glance behind me. The only other people there were an old man and what looked like his grandkids. They were clustered around him and seemed to be listening intently to what he was saying.

She said something that I missed, turning back to her I rocked back on my heels a moment. There was a man behind the desk by her now with a monocle covering one eye. He looked as out of place as she seemed to fit in. Tux and tails and tophat and monocle and he had somehow gotten behind the desk when I glanced away for a moment.

“Sorry, I missed that. What was that again?”, I was fumbling this and knew it. Whole point of doing it like this was to not draw attention to myself, but I couldn’t stop staring at the man with the monocle. He seemed not to notice.

“Your name sir, for the room. I need to know what name to put it under,” she still had a frown on her face and I looked back to meet her gaze, as if she saw something in me she didn’t like.

“Ian. Ian Hughes,” I could read as she wrote it down that Mrs. Winters had checked in here. Roland’s name wasn’t on the register but hers was clear even upside down. I had found one of them at least, the one I was paid to find but not the one I was expecting to see.

“Here is your key then, sir,” she dropped the key in my hand rather then give it to me. Her required tasks done she looked back down at her ledger as if trying to pretend I wasn’t there any longer. Not sure what her problem with me was, I am not a bad-looking man. Not the sort to have women lining up to spend time in my company, but nothing was wrong with me I thought that would have her reacting like this. The man with the monocle simply stood their impassively staring back at me.

I had only the one bag out in the car, by the time I got it parked and was making it back inside the kids had all gone leaving the man to his reading. The girl behind the desk glared at me as I came in, something about her was familiar and frustrating at the same time. I had a job to do though, the ledger had listed Mrs. Winters room number when she had checked in, easy enough to take a walk by and see if it was her once I got settled in and figured out where her room was.

The man with the monocle smiled as I passed the desk again, white teeth on his face, that black glass lens over his eyes, “I hope you find what you are looking for Mr. Hughes.”

• The Man Who Lost Everything
• Green Demons
• Mrs. Winters from Blue Iron Dreams
• Roland from The Bellboy
• Sarah from Sarah at the Desk
• The Man with the Black Monocle from Maybe Not Tonight
• The Grandfather and Grand-Kids from The Story of the Black Monocle

- Hythian

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