Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (20 page)

He parked his bike
outside, locking it to a street lamp, in the downtown area of Knorr.  Just a
few blocks to Jimmy’s right was the spot where the newspaper offices had been. 
Now it was a parking lot.  The restaurant that had been there was long gone,
the owners having decided that when your establishment is literally blown up,
it’s time to leave town.  Now the offices of the newspaper was in a stone and
glass building just a few blocks away that held nothing but offices for
doctors, lawyers, and accountants.  The newspaper held the bottom northeast
corner of the building.

Jimmy stepped
inside.  Upstairs was the office where his dentist plied his trade, and just
off to his left was where his doctor did his work.  Jimmy had never been in the
newspaper offices before.  He turned right, then went down a short hallway, and
then through a very nondescript glass door.

Inside it was
pretty much what every office Jimmy had ever been in looked like.  There were
gray cubicle walls seemingly everywhere the eye could see.  Right inside the
door was a desk and high wall where a receptionist would sit.  Somehow, Jimmy
had expected something more.  He had envisioned a printing press chugging away
somewhere and reporters running around screaming for copy boys.

“Hello, Jimmy,” a
voice said off to his right.  Tabitha emerged from around a corner.  “Not what
you expected, huh?”

Jimmy shrugged. 
“I guess I’ve seen too many newspapers as depicted by movies.”

Tabitha laughed. 
“Well, there may be a lot of action and shouting and running around in some big
city newspapers, but here we use freelancers and reporters who work from home. 
They upload stories to an FTP website, I do edits on the computer and send them
back through email, and our printing press is located outside of town.  Most of
the work is done electronically and we keep desks here for meetings and writers
who want to have interviews or do research.”

Jimmy nodded. 
Modern times.

“You look a bit
pale,” Tabitha said.

Jimmy sighed.  “I
found out some things.  By accident.”

“I found a few
things, as well,” Tabitha said.

Tabitha gestured
and Jimmy followed her down another short hallway to a wooden door at the end. 
Inside was a corner office.  Pictures that should have been hanging on the wall
were leaning against them instead, situated on the floor.  A beautiful wooden
desk that must have been an antique took up much of the space.  Two leather
chairs, a bit beat up, but nice, were situated in front of that desk.  A
leather couch took up one wall just inside the door and a coffee table was in
front of that.  Bookshelves lined another portion of the wall and two sets of
windows overlooking the corner of the street dominated the rest.

“Not bad,” Jimmy
said.

“Thanks,” Tabitha
said, sitting down on the leather sofa.  “So tell me what you found out.”

Jimmy relayed the
story of what had happened to him at the library.  As he spoke, Tabitha’s eyes
grew wider and her mouth more grim.

“That certainly
complicates things,” Tabitha said once Jimmy had finished.  “Devlin Little may
be a complete jerk, but he does have pull in this town.  I am very sorry to
hear that Jesse is involved in this thing at all, but it does help explain how
the archives at the library have been tampered with.  Jesse also has some
computer experience, but I am not sure how much.  Possibly enough to get into
the newspaper archives.”

 “I thought Jesse
was a friend,” Jimmy said, “Since my dad died, Jesse’s been like a father to
me.  He’s one of my best friends.  I feel betrayed.”

Tabitha put a
reassuring hand on Jimmy’s knee.  “From your description, I get the feeling
that Jesse is mixed up in things, but not really at the center of it all. Maybe
he was sucked into this thing after the fact, maybe even years later.”

Jimmy looked down
at his hands, which were fiddling with each other in his lap. 

“OK, let’s look at
what I found,” Tabitha said.  She reached over the coffee table and produced a
very unimpressive looking book with a gray cover.  As she lifted it Jimmy saw
“Knorr High School” stamped in gold lettering on the cover.  “A yearbook.”

Tabitha had marked
a page and she let it fall open.  She handed it to Jimmy.  Jimmy took it with
shaking hands and looked down at the page she had marked.  His breath caught in
his throat.  There she was.

Her hair was the
same as it was last night.  The photo was in black and white, but Jimmy just
knew that her eyes were green.  Sapphire had a bright smile across her face. 
Her skin looked flawless, again, just like it did last night.  She looked full
of promise and full of hope.  She looked like a girl that any of the boys in
the school would have fought for and would have been proud to have on their
arm.  So much potential was wrapped up in that one photo that it hurt Jimmy’s
heart.

“Wow,” Jimmy said
at last.

“That was her
freshman year,” Tabitha said.  “The sad thing is that she does not appear in
any other yearbooks after that.”

Jimmy shook his
head.  “What happened?  Did you find anything else?”

 “No,” Tabitha
said.  “So much of our actual archives were destroyed in the explosion and
fire.  I put some feelers out to other area newspapers and I am waiting to see
what comes back.  There aren’t many other papers currently active in the
surrounding towns, but there were back then.”

Jimmy frowned. 
“Whom can we talk to about this?  She had to have had a family here.  There
have to be records.  She had to have had friends, and there must be teachers
still around who were at the school then.”

Tabitha smiled. 
“Just one.  One teacher that I think would be of help.”

She paused, and
Jimmy stared into her eyes.  They both said the name at the same time.

“Mrs. Walters.”

Mrs. Walters was a
woman respected and loved and feared and hated.  It all depended on how well
you did in her class and if you were decent at the English language.  She had
taught the advanced English class for as long as anyone could remember.  She
was tall, with a short crop of curly hair, and rail thin.  Those who hated her
said that she had the coldest room in order to keep her corpse fresh.  The skin
on her face was very tight and close to her skull, and gave her a slightly
frightening appearance.  She was tough, hard as nails, and demanding in her
classes.  Many a student had quaked with fear upon seeing the words “SEE ME”
written on the top of their papers.

Jimmy, however,
had always liked Mrs. Walters.  Not only had he done well in her classes, he
had also gotten to know her as a person by doing work around the school.  He
worked in the office at times, helping to answer phones or mail out report
cards.  He found her to be in firm possession of a very wry and dry sense of
humor.  She had a mind like a steel trap.  She would be perfect to talk to and
get the story.

“I’ll go see her,”
Jimmy said.  “What about Sapphire’s family?  She had to have a mother, a father,
and maybe siblings.”

Tabitha nodded. 
“It’s not like she has a normal or average last name.  The name Lumire is
pretty rare.  I ran a check this morning using some databases I have access to,
and I found nothing.”

Jimmy frowned. 
“What about back during the time this photo was taken?”

“You’re right,”
Tabitha said, “but things were not digital back then.  I have some of those
feelers out right now, but have not heard back.  However, there was nothing
even on the various ancestry sites.  No scanned-in copies of birth certificates
or anything.”

“That makes no
sense,” Jimmy said.  “How could that happen?”

“I don’t know,
Jimmy,” Tabitha replied.  “This is weird stuff we’re dealing with here.  You
are in telepathic contact with a dead girl, remember?  We are well beyond
normal.”

Jimmy sighed.  She
was right, of course.

Jimmy began
flipping through the yearbook.  He came across photos of the football team and
saw a young Devlin Little, captain of the team that year.  It was the year they
had won the championship.  Jimmy had heard stories for most of his life about
how amazing that team was.  The town of Knorr was still living off of the high
of that school year.

He flipped a few
more pages.  He was really not reading anything, just looking, scanning, seeing
more faces with sixties-styled hair than he ever wanted to.  Then, as he neared
the back of the book, something caused him to freeze and look back.

“Tabitha,” Jimmy
said, his eyes growing wide.  He held the book out to her.

Tabitha furrowed
her brow and looked at the photo.  Her eyes got wide.

It was a shot of
the football team playing.  Most of the offensive line was sitting on the
sideline.  The photographer grabbed the photo at just the right time, catching
Devlin standing there, yelling commands to his team on the field.  They included
the current mayor of Knorr, several prominent businessmen, and a man who had
gone on to be a state senator.  Yes, the team that year had won the
championship and the hearts of the people all across this area.  They had then
parlayed that into success in business, politics, and more.  There was one
other person there, standing next to the bench, a towel over his shoulder and
holding a metal basket holding plastic containers of water.

It was Jesse.

“They knew each
other back then,” Tabitha said, “from the football team.  That lends credence
to the idea that Jesse was there when Sapphire died.  It also starts pointing
towards murder.  And if you look at all of those people on the bench, there
could be some very powerful people involved in this.  Of course, we already
suspected that because of the rather elaborate attempts to cover up the
incident and wipe out any trace of Sapphire.”

Jimmy and Tabitha
stared at each other.  They still had nothing that amounted to solid proof. 
Not a thing they had found meant a damn thing in a court.  They had nothing
they could bring to a cop or the FBI or a courtroom, but it still seemed to
confirm things in their own minds.  They were on the right track.  How far did
this reach?  It reached perhaps as far as a state senator, a man who had the
potential to wipe out Sapphire, and Sapphire’s family, and their entire past. 
Jimmy felt chills run up and down his spine.

“I know a few
people at the FBI,” Tabitha said.  “So does Warren, for that matter.  We might
be able to dig pretty deep, but I am not sure how deep.”

 “I think I need
to talk to Mrs. Walters,” Jimmy said. “I also think someone needs to talk to
the senator and some of these other people.”

Jimmy grabbed the
book and flipped a few more pages.  It was only a few page turns before one
more photo grabbed his attention.  It was the homecoming dance.  His blood
turned to ice.

“Son of a—” he
muttered.

It was Jesse.  He
was smiling at the camera.  Behind him was some kind of arch with flowers.  He
was wearing a suit, probably his best one.  What had stopped Jimmy, however,
was the girl on his arm.  There she was, smiling, looking radiant even in a
black and white photo.

Sapphire.

Jimmy
stood up and walked toward the front door.  It took a moment for Tabitha to
determine what was going on and she stood up and followed him.  She held the
yearbook in her hand and had a worried look in her face.

“Jimmy, what are
you doing?” she asked.  “Where are you going?”

“I need to talk to
Jesse,” Jimmy replied.  “I should have stayed there at the library earlier, but
I was scared.  I was so freaked out, I just had to come see you.  I need to go
back and find out what’s going on.”

Tabitha reached
out and grabbed Jimmy’s arm.  She had a surprisingly strong grip, and Jimmy
stopped in his tracks.

“Hang on a
second,” Tabitha said.  “You just left there, and you just found out that Jesse
was involved in something that may have included the murder of a young girl. 
He also may have been covering this thing up for a very long time.  What does
that mean?  That means that your friend, Jesse, a man I know you feel betrayed
you, might be dangerous.”

Jimmy shook his
head.  “He was crying.  I don’t think he was involved in the murder.  Hell, we
don’t even know for sure if there was a murder.  We know nothing, and besides,
Jesse and I have been friends for years.”

“But he’s been
living with this, dealing with this, for much longer than he’s known you,
Jimmy,” Tabitha said quietly.  “It’s second nature to him at this point.  And
he’s been involved in cutting away the people who were there from newspapers
and history books.  That means he has no problems with eliminating anything
that might expose this whole thing.  You never know where it might come from,
Jimmy.  Trust me, Warren and I found out the hard way when we were involved in
the whole Boogeyman thing.”

 “I know what it’s
like to deal with things from the other side, too” Tabitha said, and Jimmy saw
fear in her eyes.  “The Boogeyman was punching through to this side and
controlling people.  We kept that out of the books and the press coverage,
because, well, it sounds insane.  My point is that things happen here in Knorr
and not all of them make sense, and not everyone is who they say they are.”