Chapter 2

Naturally, I was flabbergasted that I could buy the house and its contents for seventy-five grand, and I wasted no time taking possession. I was half way expecting Ms. Trevino to call me and say there had been a mistake and that I'd have to renegotiate the contract.

I was able to pay fifty percent down out of my savings, and based on my current position and salary, my bank was willing to carry the balance as a personal loan at an incredibly low rate, and that beat hell out of going through a mortgage company. Given the current economic disaster we were still recovering from, I could never trust those people.

I didn't even bother moving any furniture from my old apartment. I just sold it all to a second hand store and moved in with nothing but my clothes and a few boxes of personal items.

Within a week, the place was set up with high speed Internet. Within two weeks, all the old kitchen and laundry room appliances had been hauled off to make way for the latest, most energy-efficient models, and the oil-burning furnace had been replaced with a high-efficiency heat pump. With those major things out of the way, I was ready to get down to making the rest of the place exactly the way I wanted it.

I love doing restoration work, and even though the place was basically solid, there were a lot of things I wanted to make better, like replacing all the painted trim with natural wood finish and stripping the walls down to bare plaster before either repainting them or putting up new wallpaper. Not being saddled with a busy social life meant I had lots of spare time after work and on weekends for domestic projects.

There was one other big expense. To the tune of over six grand, I had triple-pane windows installed throughout the house. I'd probably never recoup the cost in energy savings, but I figured it was dumb to skimp on something like that, and besides, once I had new insulation blown into the walls, the place would be easy to heat in the winter and as quiet as a mausoleum.

On a sunny Saturday morning a few weeks after I moved in, I took a walk around the neighborhood to get the lay of the land. Six blocks away on the edge of the residential area, just before you get into the downtown business district, I found a little restaurant called La Cantina Gato Negro. I was feeling a little hungry, so I stopped in to see what they offered on their menu.

It was a family-owned place that looked reasonably clean and well kept. Most of the breakfast business had already been in and out, so there was only one couple occupying a booth. I took a table and ordered huevos rancheros and a breakfast burrito. Outstanding! Before I was halfway through the meal, I'd already decided El Gato Negro would be a regular stop.

At some point while I was stuffing my face, I looked up and saw that a young lady had come in and taken a seat at the table by the door. I was a little surprised to see her sitting there because the door had a little bell on it and I hadn't heard it ring. I would have sworn she wasn't there when I entered.

A quick appraisal noted that she was dressed very retro. The cuffs of her jeans were rolled up a la the 50's, she had black and white saddle oxfords and bobby sox on her feet, and she wore an oversized purple sweater in spite of the warm day. I hadn't meant to stare, but I wondered if it was her normal dress or if she might be headed for some kind of dress-up event. I wasn't aware that my eyes were locked on to her until she smiled and wiggled her fingers at me.

Caught in mid-ogle, I managed what was probably a stupid grin and refocused on my food, feeling the flush of a blush creep up my face. But I was drawn to her. I took a couple of bites and turned my head slightly in her direction trying to get a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye because I thought she was very pretty. But she was gone. I looked around the room and out the front window, but she had completely vanished while my attention was on my plate for no more than a few seconds.

I'm not the kind of person who's given to hallucinations, but I really wondered if I'd imagined her. No, I thought, the details were too clear.

When I walked up to the register to pay my tab, I pointed to the table and asked the proprietor if he'd seen a young lady sitting there.

"No, sir. Nobody has come in since you."

It began to bug me as I walked home. I consider my mind to be my best asset, and hallucinations usually indicated something might be going wrong in the old noodle. Whatever it was, I sincerely hoped it was a one-time thing.

My plan for the restoration was to start on the third floor and work my way down. When I got back to the house, I changed into some ragged jeans and a T-shirt, and got started stripping wallpaper and pulling off all the painted woodwork in the room that was to be my den slash office. The old woodwork was one area where I planned to cheat a bit. I knew a place across town that refinished furniture, and they said I could bring them all my wood trim (it must have had ten coats of old paint, some of it lead-based, no doubt) and they'd soak it in their tank of methylene chloride and strip it for me. The price was fair, and when I took the first piece off a doorframe, I knew I'd made a good decision because it was walnut.

I worked hard all day and knocked off late in the late afternoon. While I was sipping a beer and looking out onto the street from the widow's walk, I spotted a young woman looking through the bars of the cast iron gate. She stared directly at me and waved. It was the same girl! And she was still dressed the same way!

What the hell? I thought. I rushed down the stairs and out the front door to catch up to her and ask if she'd been at the restaurant that morning. I hadn't hallucinated anything! But by the time I got to the street, there was no sign of her anywhere.

OK, was that two hallucinations in the same day? If it was, things could be getting serious.

I walked back into the house and opened the fridge for another beer, then I changed my mind. This thing with the girl really had me spooked, and making my brain fuzzy with alcohol wasn't going to help matters. I made a pot of coffee and nuked a potpie in the microwave for my dinner.

The idea of seeing a shrink briefly flashed through my head, but I dismissed it immediately. It was way too early to be thinking in those terms. If there's one thing a science education pounds into your skull, it's the ability to think critically and rationally. I knew there had to be a logical explanation, and that train of thought led me to Occam's Razor; always a good place to start an analysis of events. If you're not familiar with the concept, it simply says that if you have competing theories leading to the same conclusion, the simpler one is most likely to be correct.

In this case, I decided the girl, for whatever reason, was just messing with me somehow. She was probably someone who lived in the neighborhood and thought teasing the new kid on the block would be entertaining. But how she managed to disappear still escaped me. On the other hand, stage magicians are adept at drawing your attention in one direction while they make something vanish somewhere else. One potpie and two cups of coffee later, I'd settled on that as the explanation and flipped on the TV to see if there was anything on worth my time. As usual, there wasn't.