"So he never called you back?" Glen asked Molly.

"No, he didn't.  He hung up on me, and said he'd call back in twenty minutes.  Two days ago."  She bit her lip.  "I'm worried.  He's not married and he has no family, so there's  no one that I know to call."

"I'm leaving for Arcadia on Thursday," he replied, "but my Mondays are usually pretty open.  I'll drive past tomorrow, and see if there's anything to see.  Though it's close enough to downtown that if he was mugged or something, I'm sure he would have turned up by now.  What did he drive?"

Molly thought about it for a moment.  "Do you know, I have no idea?  Ajax was a good friend of Warren's, but I wasn't particularly close to him.  Not that I'd have been able to tell what it was anyway.  Are you completely disappointed in me?"

"Deeply disturbed," Glen joked.  He was serious almost immediately.  "I'll see what I can see."

"It's probably nothing," she said with more hope than conviction.  She hadn't told Glen that Ajax had said something about finding weapons.  "He probably got chased off of private property and is too embarrassed to call and tell me about it."

"Probably," Glen agreed.  "But there's no sense in stressing out about it right now, so let's talk about something else."

Molly found herself smiling.  She'd been thinking the same thing, and wanted to tell him about the envelope full of photos, but it was redundant at this point and she didn't want to go round the same carousel again.  "Like what?"

"Well, I'd been wanting to ask you how you tumbled into writing about ghosts."  He sounded genuinely interested.  She also liked that he automatically twigged to the freelancing as her chosen career, even though it didn't currently pay her bills.  He understood the difference between the job that made the money and the one that meant the most, something her parents (and ex-husband) had never seemed to pick up on.

"To skip over the boring childhood crap, let's just say I've always collected ghost stories," she said. "Spooky folk tales, things like that.  I always had a scrapbook full of ghost stories that I copied out of library books, and newspaper clippings of weird happenings.  On a lark last spring, I tracked down the history of a local haunted house, here in Boston, and got an editor to run it.  It re-ran in a few other papers, and so I did a couple more, to see if there was interest in a folksy sort of ghost story column, and it looks like there is, at least in New England.  We like our ghosts on the East Coast."

"Seems like you'd find a market in any region, actually.  You might have to do some traveling."

"Oh, hurt me.  Getting to see the country as a result of my job?  What a nightmare," Molly said, going heavy on the sarcasm.  "I like doing it, anyway.  It's a shame I can't collect ghosts and race them and make millions by selling them, like some folks can do with their obsessions."

"You have clearly been misled.  Who told you that people make money collecting cars?"

"Well, I know we talk about her a lot, but I could bring up Lexi."

"To tell the truth, that was a decent sale, but I'll bet you they paid more for most of those cars than she got out of the sale.  I'd be surprised if she broke even, on the long-term accounting sheet."

"Really?"

"Really.  There are guys who make loads of money trading in classic cars, and then there are people like Lexi and Ren, who love old cars.  The former group is good at buying from the trade sheets that tell them what's going up in value; the latter buys from the heart.  These groups rarely intersect.  I saw that collection, and there were a few significant cars in there but most of them were just vehicles that they loved.  Quirky stuff, personalized stuff."

Molly was confused.  "So, what about the auction.  Ian said that there was enough money for Lex to live off of for the next twenty years."

Glen hummed, thinking.  "I don't know.  Based on what I saw--and mind you, I'm no expert--he may have overstated the case a little.  A lot of those cars went for the bare minimum.  If this auction had been a serious moneymaking venture, they'd have put reserves on more of the cars, and if they had put reserves on them, they wouldn't have sold."

"What's a reserve?"

"A minimum selling price, based on market value.  Most of Lexi's cars went away for less than market value, and it was the five or six percent of them that were actually rare enough to spark some serious bidding that made up the difference so she broke even."

"That's so depressing," Molly said.
"You know what they say about one person's treasure," Glen said.

"Wow, that's dark."

"Sorry.  We haven't seen the sun in Detroit for about a week and a half.  Tends to make folks around here grumpy."

Molly laughed.  "I feel your pain, Glen. We get the same way up here."

"Let's get away from it all.  I'll get us a couple of tickets to San Diego.  I'm sure there's a haunted house down there somewhere, so you can expense it.  What do you say?  We'll romp in the surf and drink wine while watching the sunset."  His enthusiasm rolled along, gaining momentum. 

"It's November.  The water will be freezing."

"Well, that'll make parts of your swimsuit that much more interesting, now won't it?"  Molly burst out laughing, and she could practically hear Glen blush.  "I'm sorry, that was tacky."

"No need to apologize," she said.  His moment of silence seemed uncomfortable, though, so she changed the subject.