Despite having a nice home in a beautiful part of the country, Vicki felt nothing – not sad or suicidal – just nothing. It was not even the reality of divorce that floored her; it was the simple fact her parents were equally conspicuous in their absence – as if after years of over-involvement in Vicki’s life, they had identified graduation as their cut-off point. They had freed themselves from the complication of being parents. Sometimes, Vicki thought perhaps each was assuming the other would take on the burden of main parent. At darker times, she believed she was too dissimilar to both parents to be a worthwhile investment of time, or energy.

Her parents, sensing they had somehow contributed to this, took predictably polarised courses of action. Her mother had sent her several packets of mood lifting pills in long white boxes, while her father paid for a cognitive therapist (possibly even the same one he had used to cope with his mock marriage).

Neither of these methods had made any real impact on Vicki, who grew increasingly detached from the world. She remained living entirely in the beach house, and generated a meagre income from simple web design, and providing online support to several businesses. This allowed her to work from home, and, therefore, maintaining her appearance or mood was not a necessity. Some days, she would lie curled on the balcony, watching the waves for hours, growing lost in the sparkle of the sun shaping and reshaping reality in infinitely changing patterns. The pattern seemed as temporal and shifting as her sense of her past.

 In their final support session, the therapist had very calmly suggested it would be helpful for Vicki to reconnect with old friends. The idea was not an attractive prospect. Like most people experiencing depression, Vicki felt she had nothing to offer any friend – old or otherwise. She was, in essence, a ghost; disconnected from the bright world around her, and haunting a beach house devoid of the life it had once known.

But, that evening, she had sat and stared at the phone, until she couldn't stand it any longer. So, she had made contact with Laurie, and invited her down to Oceanside. Of course, she had assumed Laurie would have no recollection of her former roommate, or, if she did, might have no interest in travelling for three hours to visit her. She was wrong on both counts. Her friend had sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, and said she would organise a bus ticket in no time.

The last thing she had heard from her friend was in the form of a text message, which came in just as Vicki was drifting off to sleep. The undulating melody of the cell phone drew her back from the edge of darkness. Her scrambling hand reached for the slim phone in the darkness. Finding the device, she held it aloft in her arm, squinting her eyes against the fierce glow like a lighthouse in the night.

Hi V. bkd amzngly cheap tickt on a Route King bus. Due in2 terminl at apprximtly 4.30pm. C u thn. xxx

Vicki had smiled to herself when she read the message, and slipped easily into her dreams.

The sun was high in the sky, as Vicki eventually reached Victorville Avenue. She pulled off the freeway and parked in the lot behind the bus terminal. Despite the fact that she had arrived in Escondido twenty minutes early, she was now - as always - late.

As she hurried through the terminal doors, she could see the silver bus pulling in to stand twelve. Negotiating her way through the crowd, she kept her eyes eagerly on the bus doors. She was perhaps ten metres away from the vehicle, when the bus slowed to a stop. A smile was already starting to form on Vicki’s face in anticipation of seeing her friend.

However, it was not her friend who exited the vehicle. The bus stop came to a brief stop - pausing just long enough for an elderly man to step off on to the hot pavement. Almost as soon as the man cleared the bottom step, the pneumatic door hissed shut, and the bus began reversing.

Vicki hurried along the terminal, moving parallel with the vehicle, while craning her neck to see if her friend had fallen asleep, but the tinted windows were too dark to give up their secrets. She called out Laurie’s name, but her words were drowned out by the roar of the engine.

Within seconds, the Route King bus had rumbled across the oil-stained lot, and moved out into the busy stream of traffic. Vicki anxiously unclipped her handbag, took out her cell phone, and called Laurie’s number. Holding the phone to her ear, she glanced anxiously from side-to-side. Within a couple of seconds, the phone rang. From somewhere nearby, she heard the sound of “Smoke on the Water” playing in a looped ringtone. It was the same ringtone her friend had used for the last five years.

Vicki turned around, expecting to see her friend grinning at her. Instead she found herself looking at a strange-eyed young man, who vanished into the crowd. She still held the phone hopefully to her head, but the line died.

5

Oceanside Police Station was housed in an attractive sandstone building. The entrance, hidden between large, peach coloured arches, looked more like the façade of a Mediterranean restaurant than the strategic centre of policing in the San Diego area. However, the cream interior, housing numerous wooden desks and grey metal cabinets, was a busy and highly effective centre of law enforcement.

As he filled up the plain cardboard carton with various items from the bottom drawer of his desk, Detective Leighton Jones found an old photograph. He smiled at the image of a young officer with a gleam in his eyes, as he leaned, arms folded, against a cruiser.

For a moment, the Detective smiled wistfully, before slowly letting the picture fall to his side as he gazed straight ahead into some different time.

Leighton was only two days away from ordinariness, and felt as if he was fading into invisibility. It was not an entirely uncomfortable feeling. After a decade in homicide, and being one of the detectives responsible for holding back a tide of murder, he was happy to accept the Chief’s offer, and slip into obscurity. Chief Gretsch considered Leighton as a problem – they had crossed swords in the past, and he clearly didn’t fit with promotion-hungry new generation of unquestioning officers. Being almost sixty-years-old meant Leighton was neither malleable to fit in, nor young enough to justify a further transfer. Therefore, for the previous two weeks, Leighton had been physically present in the building, but was no longer assigned to any investigations. In some ways, it did make sense. No case would be left unfinished when he left, but it also made Jones feel like a ghost, as work in the department carried on around him.

Ever since his retirement became common knowledge, his few friendlier colleagues tried their best to rib him with a mixture of humour and affection. Each morning, he would find an item left on his desk. The first had been a brochure for some coastal retirement home. Rather than simply consigning it to the waste paper basket beneath his desk, Leighton put his feet up, and read the brochure from cover to cover, with a wry smile on his face. Each subsequent day brought more “gifts” to his desk – most of them acquired from the lost property storage room. So far, he had found a walking stick, incontinence underwear, two sets of dentures, and several blister packs of Viagra. He had also been given some more appreciated gifts, including half a dozen bottles of dark rum.

For a man who had spent so much of his life working for the Oceanside Police Department, Leighton’s job of gradually clearing out his desk and two steel filing cabinets had been depressingly simple. Much of the debris of his career had already been consigned to the trash when the station had moved from a rather serious brick building on Mission Avenue to its new home back in 1999. That transition had been almost as psychologically difficult as his retirement. He had spent most of his career driving to and from that building. For at least six weeks after the relocation, whenever Leighton got a late-night emergency call, he would find himself instinctively driving to the dark and desolate building, before realising his mistake, and turning the car around.