Author's Note

In the final leg of my homebound commute at dusk, my car ambled just a few car lengths behind a minivan in a moderate stream of traffic. My headlights, and those of an approaching vehicle, bathed the western Washington rural road in light making it obvious not a living soul walked the street that evening.

Just as I turned my focus back to the minivan’s taillights, a young, blond woman appeared just a few feet from my front bumper. She jogged in front of me as if she had trotted from the other side of the road. I slammed the brakes and, oblivious to the approaching vehicle, jerked the wheel to the left. Despite my panic, her face bore no alarm.

When, after a couple of strides, she reached the opposite shoulder, she turned with a brisk twist and faced me. Her knee-length black-leather coat whipped around behind her like a superhero’s cape. I linked eyes with hers as I drove past needing an answer. “There’s no way you could have been on the opposite side of the street without me seeing you.” Her eyes, though, resonated in my mind with the question, “You see me, don’t you?”

At home a few minutes later, my wife, who had been driving behind me, jumped from her car and shouted, “Where did she come from?” Still stunned beyond understanding what I believed I saw, her question voiced the real question. The question that both acknowledged “what I saw is what I saw,” and forced a paradigm shift so radical it still rocks my world, “Where did she come from?”

I didn’t believe in ghosts but, with two independent witnesses, this apparition appeared too real to dismiss. It drove me to search. I asked a friend, the former chief of police in the community, about a murder involving a young blond woman. He knew of none. So, I turned to the internet. It led me to the disappearance of a twenty-six-year-old blond woman. If her abductors traveled the path of least resistance, chances are she passed through my city some twenty-two years before I saw her. Her signature; a long black leather coat.

In 1980, Valarie McDonald answered a casting call for a walk-on role as a dead girl in a Dustin Hoffman film—a screenplay never written. Until that day, she lived in the Bay Area of California. Twenty years after her disappearance, experts made a positive dental match to the only physical piece of evidence remaining of her in life. Her skull, found in a floodplain in north-central Washington State, had eluded identification for nine years. Without a name, the authorities couldn’t call it murder. Once identified, though a trio of malcontents became the prime suspects. Even though circumstantial evidence placed her with them at the time she vanished, no one has paid the debt for her death.

I still don’t know if I believe in ghosts but, whatever happened that night on a rural road at dusk, for Born to Make the Kill her vision was my muse.

—Jearl Rugh—