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“Someone’s here to see you,” the building concierge tells her through the intercom.
Drift shifts up in her chair, eyes lighting up. It’s been a rough week for interesting cases. No leads on the blue orchid situation, but no developments either; all she can really do is rearrange the information she’s already got on the metaphorical red-string board and see if it makes any sense from upside down. Beyond that, not so much as a missing cat or a cheating boyfriend - nobody seems to be seeking the guidance of Detective InfiniteDrift, not these days, not in this city. (Which is rough for a couple of reasons, not least of all that her wallet’s developing a thriving population of moths that fly out whenever she wants to buy another bag of coffee. Or pay her rent on time.)
“Oh yeah?” she asks, hurriedly sweeping papers off her desk and into her top drawer for presentability. “What’s the name?”
“It’s a Miss Graces.” That doesn’t mean anything to Drift, which is a good sign. “You happy for me to let her up?”
“Go ahead,” she tells him.
By the time Miss Graces has made it up three flights of stairs to Drift’s office, she’s at least managed to clear the dust from the mantel and cover the pinboard with her spare trenchcoat. There’s no time to get any grime off the windows, so she settles for dropping the blinds. Slatted light looks good on mystery anyways.
Then a knock. “Uh, come in, ma’am!”
So she does. She cuts a striking figure on the doorway, sharp-shadowed, wide-eyed. Red hair - and not the ginger type, but a deep, rich auburn, framing thick coke-bottle glasses and an unassuming green sweater. And, yes, Drift tries not to look too hard at these things, but that miniskirt doesn’t leave much to the imagination; those legs do in fact go all the way up. What a woman to walk right into Drift’s life on a day like today.
“Detective Drift,” she says, wrenching herself back to professionality. “Please, take a seat. Um, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Miss Graces walks hesitantly up to the desk and sits across from Drift. “Good afternoon, detective. I have a, uh… call it a missing persons’ case.”
“Oh? Well, don’t wait around on my account. What’s the story?”
“It’s, uh, pretty long -”
“No trouble at all,” Drift insists, “I’ll - I can make you some coffee?”
“Oh, no thanks,” says Miss Graces, “coffee gives me jitters.”
“Tea?”
“... what kind?”
Only one kind, and it’s the real classy stuff she got for her last birthday. “It’s jasmine.”
Miss Graces raises her eyebrows; Drift marks the animation in her face. She can’t be a good liar, not with big reactions like that. “Jasmine would be lovely, thanks.”
So Drift starts heating water, and looking for the teacup set, and then cleaning the settled dust out of the teacup set, all while Miss Graces settles in behind her. Drift can’t help peering back every so often, try to get a read on the gal - it’s her job, can you blame her? She seems alright, though, if a little lost in thought. And she keeps scribbling words, a few at a time, in a thin brown notebook that seems to have seen plenty of use.
When the drinks are poured and placed, Drift takes her seat again in front of her new client and straightens her monocle.
“So, Miss Graces, you’re looking for somebody?”
“Shelby,” she clarifies, with a mona-lisa smile that makes Drift feel halfway between chastised and invited. “And… yes. I’m looking for my father, and I think that you might be the only person who can help.”
Well, what an opener.
“My father was a researcher, you see. When I was a child, I heard him telling me about all the things that are out there in the wild, things that most people don’t believe are real, but I know what he knew, and I know that this stuff could be really big if he can find the proof he’s looking for. Trouble is… I don’t know if he ever did. He went out twenty years ago, looking for answers, and he didn’t come back.”
… Drift blinks. “If this is your missing person, I think you might be going on a wild goose chase, ma’am.”
“I know, I know, it sounds crazy, and I know everybody else thinks so too. The other folks back home all think he was a drunkard. My mom thinks he was a liar, and that I’m a fool for believing him. But I have his journals that he left behind, and I have… this.”
Shelby slides a card across Drift’s desk. Drift’s fingers brush Shelby’s on her way to pick it up. (She feels self-conscious of her bitten nails all of a sudden.)
As Shelby sips her tea, Drift holds the card up to the light. Through slats of sunshine, dust motes in the office air, she sees a postcard. Welcome to Oakhurst.
And on the back…
“I-I don’t know if this is some kind of crazy coincidence, and it’s unrelated, but - but I looked for the name Oakhurst in my dad’s journals, and I found something he wrote about it. It’s this whole town that vanished a couple hundred years ago, like, everybody just died at once, and nobody knows why.”
“Some kind of… awful mass murder?”
“Yes! But not one that a normal human could have done! This was, like, a couple thousand people.”
“Some town,” Drift mutters into the blinds.
“My dad believed it was… something. He wasn’t sure. It was one of the places he wanted to go looking for evidence.”
“And he never came home.”
“I’m worried that, if I go follow in his footsteps - if I go looking for the truth like he did - I’m not gonna make it back home, either.”
Drift looks at Shelby. Shelby looks at Drift.
“Do you think you can help me, detective?”
Goddamn, that pout could launch a thousand ships. Still, Drift is… much as she hates it about herself, she isn’t the type to take a leap of faith. More often she’s the type to run away, hunker down, keep herself safe until the situation blows over. Leave the drama to the cops - Drift prefers to put the pieces all together and leave it at that when she can.
These pieces…
She’s not sure she likes what she sees. “Do you have those journals you mentioned?”
“Oh! Yes!” Shelby reaches into a bag and pulls out two completely unrelated, even thicker leather-bound notebooks than the one she was already holding.
“And what’s that you were writing there?”
“Uh,” she giggles nervously, “I’m… an author. You know, I feel like a lot of these creatures my dad wrote about get a real bad rap in modern fiction, I kinda wanna correct the record here and there where I can, and hopefully one day I can get it all published, and my memoirs…”
As she explains, Drift leans back over and takes a journal off the top of the stack, flips through it. It’s, uh… interesting. Werewolves, fairies, spirits, Bigfoot. Shelby, I’m not gonna be honest with you because I don’t wanna be rude, but your father sounds like a real crackpot.
“... I just - everybody thinks I’m crazy, and my dad is crazy, and I’m gonna prove ‘em all wrong one day, and I think he sent me that card as a clue that he’s alive and out there and all of it’s really real!” Shelby takes a deep breath and then another drink of tea. “And I know it’s dangerous, I know it could be some kind of ploy or something, but I have to believe in hope. But it would be helpful if I knew I had all my information in order first, so I can go in prepared, and that’s what I want from you.”
Drift thinks about her paycheque. About the case that’s hiding under her coat right now. About what Shelby’s father wrote in his books, and about the fire in her eyes that tells Drift she’s dead serious about going out there on her own if necessary.
She thinks about her future, and her duty to the people who have already died waiting for her to crack the case she’s supposed to be focusing on right now.
“Shelby, I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t think I can help you with this. I think you have all the information you need to make a choice, and that you’re a grown woman who can make her own decisions about what risks to take. You don’t need me to tell you whether or not the choice you’re making is the right one. And… I think your mind is already made up.”
Shelby looks crestfallen. She pulls her father’s journals back across the desk first, then her brows furrow, and she goes to chug the rest of her tea in defiance. (The teacup does not slam against the table, at least. That would’ve been really awkward if it broke.) “I came a long way to tell you this, y’know,” she tells Drift. “I - I guess I thought if I just put enough effort into showing that this was important to me, that you’d… I dunno, be won over?”
“I can tell that this is important to you,” Drift promises, reaching hands across the desk to try to meet her halfway in that if nothing else. “I just don’t know if I’m what you need to make it happen.”
Ink-stained hands creep up from underneath the table, and eventually close over Drift’s. “Then who do I need?”
“I don’t think you need anyone at all. If you’re brave enough to come this far on your own, then you’re brave enough to take that next step too. It’s a leap of faith - and you believe in your dad, right? You believe in his stories?”
“His research,” Shelby corrects. “But yes, I do.”
“Then you can believe in yourself as well.”
For a moment, her face is twenty years younger, full of awe and apprehension. Then it sets again, hard-lined. “Fine. I’ll go to Oakhurst on my own, and if I don’t come back… I guess no one is really gonna notice. Nobody came to wave goodbye at the train station, either, so,” another nervous giggle, “just me ‘n Dad!”
Drift feels bad, but not quite bad enough to go back on herself from here. Better to keep herself focused on the case at hand. Better to try and save more lives where she can.
Miss Graces leaves the way she came, with a pleasant thankyou for the tea, and a dead giveaway that she’s about to break down as soon as she gets out of sight. It’s a shame, but there’s not a lot that Drift could have done to change it. She’s a realist; Shelby’s father probably was a lying drunk and she’s probably not going to find anything out in the sticks. Drift sees cases like these often enough to know when something’s a forlorn hope from the jump.
Her own cup of tea sits untouched on her side of the desk, almost cold, like the space where Shelby’s hands enveloped her own before. Drift drinks sweet and fragrant jasmine. It sours against the back of her throat when she swallows.
And that’s the way that that little story ends. A small shake-up to an otherwise stagnant week; a strange, sad blip on her radar, and then it’s back to thinking about all that information that just won’t line up the right way no matter how she spins it.
Until the morning where she finds that little blue orchid on her doorstep, a warning and a boast in kind.
Drift thinks about her future, and she thinks about her duty, and she thinks about the woman with the coke-bottle glasses who’s halfway to nowhere by now.
She wants to live.
She packs her bags.