That One Case...

It’s a common story line in fictional detective stories. And it’s somewhat true for many real-life police detectives as well.

There’s always that one unsolved case that stays with them, even long after they’ve retired.

It almost always involves a murder victim whose murder went uncaught. Or a person that went missing and was never found, dead or alive. The reasons why vary from case to case, but there’s something about the case that lingers.

Oddly enough, it is a phenomenon not limited to law enforcement.

I’ve got my own case that lingers still. If you’ve read my short story, Phantoms’ Lodge, you’ve already got most of the story. Now, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story.

In Phantoms’ Lodge, Eric Christopher is an heir finder looking for Michael Collier, a reporter for a newspaper in San Francisco who mysteriously vanished over two decades before.

His search brings him to a remote location near Half Moon Bay named “Phantoms’ Lodge”, owned by Collier. There he discovers the reason why Collier disappeared and what he’d been up to all those years.

In the end, Christopher discovers a new calling in life and is introduced to the ghost of a young woman whose identity he’d never been able to discover.

That’s the fictional story. Here’s the real-life version.

Back in the late 1990s, I took a break from the newspaper life so I could attend my kids after-school functions. The job I took was — an heir finder.

It entailed taking the available information of a person who died without leaving a will and who the county authorities couldn’t locate any next of kin. Then we went about finding said missing kin.

It was a challenging job and I enjoyed it. But the writing bug kept nagging at me and I left it behind. All except this one case.

It was a young woman who died in San Luis Obispo County. She’d hooked up with a career robber and gotten herself killed during one such robbery that went south.

She was travelling with fake identification and no one could ever figure out who she really was.

When I went to work for the firm that case landed on my desk because no one else wanted it. Over the years, when I had free time, I’d dig it out and go over it. Looking for anything new that might have turned up since the last time I’d checked it.

Needless to say, I never cracked it. No one ever did as far as I know.

But even now, a quarter-century later, every so often, I catch myself thinking about that file, and that unknown woman buried under a name that really isn’t hers.

It was the inspiration for Phantoms’ Lodge, and the ending to that story is the one I could never write for myself in real life.

And that’s the rest of the story…