Cassio P.P.I

SJ Shoemaker
Word Count: 2,439
4/30/2020

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My name is Cassius O’Shaughnessy, yeah real tongue twister. Most of my friends just call me Cassio. I’m a Paranormal Private Investigator. And don’t even ask if I’m one of those ghost hunter nutballs. I lose credibility every time one of those quacks go on TV. I’m a detective, not a freakin magician. I don’t call upon spirits or play with one of them wee-gee board things. I don’t carry a wand or wooden stakes or silver dust, just a pen and notepad. If someone calls me it’s because they know damn well there’s no such thing as ghosts or werewolves, but something strange is going on all the same. They call me when they know there’s a rational explanation, they just don’t know what it is. So I go in, look around, ask some questions, and then show them what’s up. This is an optical illusion. That’s airflow from the fan in the next room. There’s a wild animal burrowed under your floorboards. That sort of thing.

I’m sort of infamous in my little circle for how I approach my business. I’m a skeptic sure, there’s no such thing as ghosts and there’s nothing you can say to convince me otherwise, but I don’t play a cynic. You wanna call this phenomenon a ghost, that’s fine with me. I’ll call it a ghost until I find a better name for it. And I will. I always do. That’s my guarantee. If I can’t explain it by the time I wrap up my investigation not only do you not pay, I’ll quit the business. 30 years, a lot of cases, but nothing ever stumped me. Until the last one.

And that’s why I’m here. To tell the story of the case that finally retired me.

It started, believe it or not, with a call from the police. They had just closed a case and this guy–let’s not use his real name. Let’s call him Chuck. Chuck just kept calling them every day, asking for updates not taking no for an answer. Now, this was a little strange, cops usually yell at me to stay out of their way, but I’ve got some friends on the force and pay for solid leads, so it wasn’t unheard of for a tip, especially if it gets a crazy guy off their backs for a while. And Chuck was proper crazy. He claimed, get this, that he murdered his neighbor, we’ll call him Steve. Even offered to show me where he buried the body not five minutes into our first chat. Could the cops really be that negligent to not investigate a murder? No. Chuck was crazy. Case and point, Chuck himself introduced me to Steve, watched me shake his hand. Chuck’s explanation? Shapeshifter. 

At this point I’m figuring there isn’t a case worth pursuing. Nothing unexplainable here, just a poor guy who has to put up with a crazy neighbor. I chat up Steve for five or ten minutes, not much to report. It’s clear by the glances I get inside his living room that someone had recently moved out. He mentions his brother a few times, sore subject. I put two and two together. When I bring up the “murder” he gets shifty. There’s a story to be told there, but anything involving Chuck likely is. I can’t justify digging any further than that. Probably more than I ought to have anyway. Best to leave other people’s stories alone if they don’t offer them willingly.

Chuck, on the other hand, keeps begging me to investigate this “imposter”, keeps reminding me of the body he has buried nearby. Proof that the neighbor is dead. But he’s obviously not, I just spoke to him. So I… had an idea crazy enough to appease Chuck. I’ll move six feet of dirt if it means being done with it all. Figure, if I can show him an empty hole in the ground, he’d have to admit he was wrong. So he showed me the spot and I… found a body. Spent the rest of the evening at the precinct. There wasn’t much they could do to me giving the circumstances. Chuck told me he murdered someone and showed me his dumping grounds. I just confirmed his claim. Nothing to it. I mean, Chuck was going away for sure, but me, just a night of questions and I’m on my way. But, on my way out, my buddy–same one who phoned me the tip in the first place–pulls me aside. They ran bloodwork on the body. It was freakin Steve.

Strange is the word that came to mind. Confusing. Intriguing. Just to throw a few more at you. The police let me tag along to Steve’s house. They check his ID, ask a few personal questions. Steve answers without issue. They explain the body at the morgue and ask if he has any idea how someone else has his blood. He says no, refuses to take a DNA test, to boot. His right, of course, doesn’t mean anything other than he’s annoyed at how many folks keep claiming he’s dead. That’s when the cops pull out a new lead for me to follow up on. Steve’s brother, the one he had a falling out with, filed a missing person report a few days after Chuck’s murder. Was out of town, he says, big business opportunity with a limited time window, didn’t have time to talk before he disappeared. Misunderstanding was all.

So there I am. Steve’s very much alive, I shook the guy’s hand. But the body on the table back at the morgue is 100% Steve, bloodwork proves it. So what’s the explanation? Chuck could be right and someone assumed Steve’s identity right after his death. The bloodwork could have been contaminated or swapped or something. I’m sure the DNA tests aren’t perfect. What are the chances two strangers have the same blood? If it’s more than one in 8 billion, maybe I just hit a lucky roll of the dice. There’s an earthly answer to this case, I’m sure of it. But that’s not good enough, not with the guarantee I built a career on. So, despite my source of income being behind bars, I keep investigating.
While the cops dealt with complicated paperwork. I took my investigation to the east coast. See, Steve’s brother moved to Maryland during his “business trip”. Steve was missing long enough for his brother to sell the house and move. And since then, poor brother had taken up a bad drinking habit. So I may have happened by his favorite hole-in-the-wall and offered to buy a few rounds. After that, it wasn’t hard to get him to talk. But instead of clarity he… well, he confirmed crazy Chuck’s story. Not the murder part, but just about everything else.

I–I want to… if anyone is out there is looking to get into a detective business, let me give you a piece of advice. Everybody has a story, a truth known to them even if it’s not to the rest of the world. If you ask them about it, and they want to tell you, just listen. You can put on your rational glasses later and pick apart what they said, but in the moment, accept that their truth is the truth. As for the brother, I feel downright dirty stealing his story with a couple of weak drinks. He wanted to tell it, desperately wanted to tell someone. Don’t know how much of a consolation that is. God knows he wouldn’t have while sober. He’d have carried it to the grave. But he wasn’t, so he did.

He and his brother were tight. Grew up together with an abusive father, kept each other safe. Later in life, when their coping mechanism got in the way of life–Steve became a hermit, the brother an alcoholic–they moved in together. Just before whatever happened with Chuck, they fought about nothing, you know how it goes. Tempers flare, shouts fly, no one remembers why. The brother took a weekend trip to cool off and returned to emptiness, Steve was nowhere to be found. After a week, he filed a missing person report, after a couple of months, he moved away from sour memories. Not a week into his new life, a late-night bender takes him on a few wrong turns and into a pop-up plant shop. They’re popular in the northwest, just like 24-hour stalls selling whatever, sometimes they even take over other stores for the day. Weird concept. This one’s a pop-up greenhouse in the middle of the night in frickin Charles Maryland. Keep in mind this is his story, as he told me. Keep the skeptical glasses in their case.

Inside he meets this little wrinkly old woman with one eye, Albanian or something. She offers him some tea and he feels uncontrollably compelled–his words–to just spill his guts. His guilt over his last words to his brother. The lack of closure. You get it. The whole time, she doesn’t say a peep, just nods along sipping her tea, staring up toward the moon. When he’s done, she gets up, walks toward the back, and brings back a flower pot. Blue Lunaria, this thing is glowing. A flashlight flower, this is what he tells me. And she offers it to him The price? just got to listen to her story. He’s got to remember, but never tell her story. And this guy, drunk as all get out, agrees. So she tells her truth then says to water the magic glowing plant, says if his brother is dead, not just missing–I stress, HIS WORDS–his grief will become a shadow in the light of the moon. And if his brother is just missing, all he gets is a trippy plant.

Water. Shadow. Second Steve.

The brother can’t stand this. Real Steve is dead, apparently. He’ll never get to apologize. It’s unbearable, and he tells shadow Steve to never talk to him again. Shadow Steve apparently goes back west and buys his old home back.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. This guy is talking nonsense, but I can tell he believes it. It’s eating him up. I offer my condolences and make to leave. Need a few days to consider this tall tale. Before I do, this guy reaches under the bar and pulls out flashlight flowers. They look like frickin glowsticks. At least part of his insane story is true.

I spend the next several months on chat forums and plant websites and discord servers, I travel all over the United States. Here’s what I find. These glowstick flowers have a nickname of Honesty which is ironic ‘cause everything else about them is a lie. They aren’t in any plant database, they don’t have a Wikipedia page, no plant store in the entire United States sell or have even heard of a glowing Honesty. But I have one, so do hundreds of others. If I stumble across a picture on Facebook or read a Reddit post mentioning these things, I track the owners down. I show them mine in exchange for the story of how they got theirs. Every last one of them has the same story. A dead relative, a closed business, maybe a missing limb. Whatever the reason, they all suffered a loss and then stumbled into the old Albanian woman. Flower for a tale, then a “shadow” appears in the moonlight. They all use that word, shadow. And none of them–not one of them–would tell me a thing about this woman’s story. Sworn to secrecy.

Their story is just as frequent and more consistent than alien abductions. It’s a conspiracy. But here’s the thing, I’ve dealt with conspiracies and large orchestrations and they ALWAYS leave a paper trail. No matter how hard I searched I couldn’t find the one eyed, glowing flower forum anywhere. But it has to exist, people don’t get that organized without one. That or this really happened to all of them. There’s a scary thought.
With my interviews getting me nowhere, I turn my focus to finding this woman and her pop-up greenhouse. But she gets around. One night, she meets a man in Grand Rapids, the next she’s talking to a teenage girl in Carson City. Then Seattle. Then some backwater town in Louisiana. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Almost like it’s not real. But no paper trail. And this flower came from somewhere. I’m ready to go crazy over this case when this woman I’m interviewing gives me a suggestion. Maybe instead of trying to find the old lady, if I suffered a loss like everyone else, the old lady might find me.

I’m not proud of this next part, but I had retirement breathing down my neck. Pride definitely got in the way of reason.

I don’t have much to lose. No friends or family, not much wealth or valuable possessions. But… I have a dog. And, hey, if it’s all real, not really going to… If you don’t mind, I’m going to skip over the gory details but loss: check. It was the next night. The very next night, I found her, in my hometown. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe confirmation bias or something. I don’t know. All I knew, I had one last interview to conduct.

“No pencil. No notes.” She barked at me as I walked in. How could she have known? No, no, I tell myself. Have to stay objective and rational. I show her the plant, tell her how I found her and why I’m there.

What I didn’t understand even after all those interviews, telling her story was always implied to kill your shadow. Many people couldn’t risk that loss again. I understood why their mouths were sealed. But with Steve’s brother, he hated what he created, regretted it by the pint. But even he wouldn’t say a word. Not his story to tell. But she explained it to me. A single word of her story wouldn’t just undo your own shadow. Once her story is seen by the world, once a spotlight is shown on her wandering greenhouse, every shadow that ever was or could ever be would vanish.

Sounds like a crazy story, I know. But it’s my truth. I know what happened to Steve. I know where the plant came from and what story Albanian woman speaks to those who wish to share in her grief. But I can’t–I won’t explain it. So I retired… over a technicality. Gives me plenty of time for dog walking.