13 Queer Ghost Stories

The Future is Deadly-4

“Willowcreek Road?” Boo-Boo said. “That’s this road. Is that this house?”

“No,” Tucker said. “It’s next door.”

He carefully unfolded the yellowed newspaper, revealing the rest of the article as well as the black-and-white photograph of a face he knew only too well.

“What’s wrong?” Boo-Boo asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Tucker shook his head, back away from the photograph. “It can’t be. It isn’t possible.”

“What’s not possible?”

Pointing, he said, “That’s her. That’s Betty. That’s the woman next door, the one I saw hit by a car.”

“Struck and killed,” Boo-Boo said, his eyes widening in terror. “Just like it says in the article.”

“But that happened in the fifties!”

Boo-Boo and Tucker both stared at the yellow newsprint, as if they were expecting a genie to rise from the words and explain what was going on.

“Unless...” Boo-Boo began.

“Unless what? Unless what?”

Boo-Boo gripped Tucker’s arms, shook him a bit. “Maybe what you saw in those sunglasses... maybe it wasn’t the future. Maybe you were seeing the past.”

Tucker gave those words a moment to sink in, then shook his head. “No, no, that’s impossible. Because I saw this Betty woman. I talked to her. She lives next door.”

Boo-Boo’s words kept ringing in his ears: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Was that true? No, it couldn’t be. She’d looked so solid, so real. Nothing faint or phantom about her.

And yet her clothing, her hair, her general sense of style... she certainly looked like someone locked in the fifties.

“This is crazy,” Tucker said, taking a seat across the room. “It’s impossible. How could I have been talking to a lady who’s been dead for, what, sixty years? Plus, she was on the bus! Ghosts don’t ride the bus. Why ride when you can float?”

Boo-Boo picked up the book with the article still resting inside it. “Hey, listen to this: The only witness to this terrible crime was Betty Turtle’s neighbour, a Miss Margaret Dumas, who reported to police that she saw a blue Chevrolet speeding away from the scene of the crime. The lady who lived her was the sole witness! Maybe that’s why you saw the accident when you looked through her sunglasses. She must have been wearing them at the time of the hit-and-run, and the sight was so alarming it imprinted itself on the lenses.”

Tucker hated to admit it, but what Boo-Boo was saying—it made a lot of sense.

“Wait a minute,” Tucker said. “What was that bit about the blue Chevrolet?”

Boo-Boo squinted and read it again: “...reported to police that she saw a blue Chevrolet speeding away from the scene of the crime.”

“No,” Tucker said. “That’s wrong. It was a pink Cadillac, not a blue Chevrolet.”

Boo-Boo launched him a dubious glance. “Are you sure about that? You’re not exactly Mr. Car Guy.”

“Maybe not, but I know the difference between a pink Cadillac and a blue Chevrolet.”

“Well...” Boo-Boo’s shoulders fell. He couldn’t seem to make sense of the situation either.

“I saw her, Boo. I saw this Betty woman her get hit by a pink Cadillac, not a blue anything.”

“I wonder if they ever caught the guy did it,” Boo-Boo mused.

Tucker launched himself from his chair. He couldn’t just sit there.

He marched from the house, down the lawn, and around the fence. Betty had to be home. He’d walked with her from the bus stop. Maybe it was Betty’s grandmother he’d seen getting hit by a car. That would explain the similarity in their looks. Maybe the house had stayed in the family.

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

He knocked at Betty’s door and waited on the stoop. Waited. Waited. But he could hear someone moving around in there, so he knocked again. “Betty? I know you’re in there! It’s just me, Tucker, the guy who’s clearing out Margaret’s house. Would you open up for me, please? Betty?”

The door swung open, but it wasn’t Betty who’d opened it. Tucker recognized the Asian woman in the bathrobe, hair in a towel. He’d seen her somewhere before.

“You again,” she said. “What are you, some kind of door-to-door salesman?”

“Me? No.” Now he knew where he’d seen her. “You’re the nurse. With the old man. I saw you two streets up from here.”

“Yeah, and if I don’t jump in the shower first thing when I get home, I spend the whole night smelling like humbugs and ointment.”

Tucker glanced over her shoulder. “And you live here all alone?”

“Me and my husband, but he’s not home from work,” she said, and then corrected herself. “Oh, wait, I’m supposed to say we have a big attack dog. Ruff, ruff! Hear that? He’s a killer.”

The smirk on her lips told Tucker she just might be flirting with him. He always found that odd. Could women not tell that he was gay, or did they just not care?

“I mean... do you have a roommate, maybe? Does a woman, Betty, live here? That’s who I’m looking for. Betty.”

The girl in the bathrobe shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, bud. There’s no Betty here.”

“Are you sure? She’s your height, maybe a little taller, blonde, curls in her hair, dresses like it’s the fifties?”

The young woman shook her head. “Sorry. No Betty here. Only Veronica.”

Tucker flinched. “Your name’s not really Veronica.”

Rolling her eyes, the girl said, “What do you think?”

“Okay, well, thanks.” Tucker backed away from the house. “Sorry to interrupt your shower.”

As he made his way across her front walk, she called out to him, “Did you find the alleyway you were looking for?”

“Yes,” he said, and for clarification, added, “I’m not casing the neighbourhood, if that’s what you’re thinking. I run a business, my partner and I, Tea and Bee Estate Sales. We’re clearing out the house next door, used to belong to Margaret Dumas.”

“Oh,” she said, looking slightly puzzled. “Then I’m surprised you didn’t already know about the carports, because there’s one at the end of the old lady’s yard. Doubt she’d used in fifty years, but it’s still there.”

As the girl next door closed her door, Tucker gazed across the fence dividing her property from Margaret’s. The backyard was expansive and planted with numerous established trees, but when he strained to see what was at the very end of the yard, yes, he could just make it out: a dilapidated shack. Looked like no one had been over back there in ages.

It called to him like a siren’s song, drawing him perhaps to danger, perhaps to doom.

But he had to find out for sure.

Chapter Seven

“What do you think is in there?” Boo-Boo asked, sticking close to Tucker’s side.

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

The old shed, carport, whatever you’d call it, obviously hadn’t been accessed in years. There was moss growing on the low roof and climbing plants blocking access. The door didn’t need to be locked, what with all those vines growing across it, but it was locked nonetheless. No problem for Boo-Boo. After shearing the vines with poultry scissors, he put those rhinestone high-tops to good use, kicking in the old wooden door.

It was dark inside. No electric lights. No windows, even.

But that’s what flashlights were for.

A number of rusty old tools hung from the walls, but Tucker was more interested in the car-shaped object draped in a tarp.

“Did the niece tell us about a car?” Boo-Boo asked.

Tucker shook his head. “I doubt if she knew about it.”

Boo-Boo clutched Tucker’s shirtsleeve as they stood together, staring at the car. Tucker felt locked in place. He wanted to approach the vehicle, but something held him back, a force he couldn’t name. He’d never felt anything like it.

“Do you feel that?” he asked Boo-Boo.

“Yeah,” Boo-Boo said. “What?”

“That... I don’t know. That heavy feeling.”

“That? Yeah, I feel that.” Clinging tighter to Tucker’s clothing, Boo-Boo said, “I feel it in my heart. Ache. And over my eyes, it’s like a dark shroud.”

Tucker nodded slowly. “We need to lift this tarp.”

“You first,” Boo-Boo replied with a tense laugh.

They stood together a moment longer, staring at the car-shaped mass in the middle of the shed. Tucker remained still as water. There was a fear that went beyond trembling, and that’s where he was at. Boo-Boo too, he would guess.

“Enough!” Boo-Boo announced, breaking away from Tucker. “This is ridiculous. We’re afraid of a tarp?”

The word “Noooo!” came soaring out of Tucker’s throat as Boo-Boo threw down the tarp. He didn’t know where it had come from. He didn’t mean to say it. And when he saw what was beneath the tarp, he was silenced by the sight. His knees felt weak, like the world had been yanked out from under him.

“A pink Cadillac,” Tucker said, flashing back to the vision he’d seen while wearing Aunt Margaret’s glasses.

Boo-Boo grabbed his hand, and they both shone their lights on the vehicle as they crept toward the front end, which was pointed at the set of chained up stable doors. You’d need bolt cutters to get through that mess.

And talk about a mess! The front end of the pink Cadillac was pretty busted up. Not as bad as it would be if the driver had smashed into a light pole. More like if she’d collided with a neighbour lady crossing the street.

Clinging to Boo-Boo, Tucker said, “It all makes sense, why Aunt Margaret told the newspaper it was a blue Chevrolet, not a pink Cadillac. She wasn’t just the only witness, she was also the driver. Aunt Margaret killed her neighbour in 1956, and she lied to the police to cover it up!”

The shed seemed to grow darker as he spoke.

An eerie mist crossed paths with their torch lights.

Boo-Boo clutched Tucker tighter. “Did you see that?”

Tucker was too scared to answer. He had that feeling in his chest, the one Boo-Boo had described like an ache in his heart.

Without delay, he grabbed Boo-Boo by the arm and pulled him from the claustrophobic shed, out into the light of late afternoon.

There was a pinkish haze on the horizon when Tucker and Boo-Boo stepped out among the ancient trees in Aunt Margaret’s backyard. But another light drew his gaze across the fence, and what he saw in the adjacent yard stopped him in his tracks.

Pointing over the fence, Boo-Boo stammered, “That’s... that’s... that’s the lady from the newspaper!”

“That’s Betty!” Tucker said, rushing toward her.

There was the neighbour lady, dressed all in white, head to toe, like a Christmas angel. Her sweet curls wafted virtuously across her shoulders as she turned away from the laundry she was in the process of hanging. White sheets fluttered and flapped in a breeze they couldn’t feel, could only see.

“Betty!” Tucker called to her across the fence. “We know what happened. It was Margaret who killed you. Margaret and her pink Cadillac. They never caught her, did they? She lied to put the police off her scent.”

When Betty met his gaze across the fence, her smile brightened his heart, driving out the ache and making it feel warm instead. Boo-Boo clasped Tucker’s hand, and he felt a tingle right through his body.

As they watched the neighbour lady, her skirt flapping gently against her thighs, something strange started to happen. Her whole body grew whiter. Not just her clothing, but her skin, her hair. She wasn’t even a colour anymore. The whiteness was pure light, so bright it should have hurt their eyes, and yet they couldn’t look away. They stared at Betty as her body dissipated into... what? Nothing. Everything. Until all that remained were the white linens fluttering on the line.

“Tell me that didn’t just happen,” Boo-Boo said, still clinging to Tucker’s hand. “Tell me we didn’t just see a ghost.”

Tucker held on tighter. “I can’t tell you that, because we did. And we both know it.”

The funny thing, strange thing, was that rather than feeling afraid by the experience they’d just shared, the vision of Betty’s physical form disappearing into thin air put Tucker at peace. There was warmth in his heart, love in her smile, and that brightest of lights.

Tucker had never felt so calm in all his life.