Secondhand Death
The smoke had never bothered Jake. When the ‘58 Impala went up on the auction block, he knew he had to have it. Driving the car of bombshell Brenda-Jean Russell, dead almost sixty years now, would solidify his bad-boy iconoclast image.
Sure people said it was haunted. She’d died inside it—heart failure, and her just 28. She’d smoked since she was 14 and they found her gold-plated cigarette holder still between her fingers, the cigarette burned down to ashes. Brenda-Jean’s pale corpse reclined on the seat, wrapped in a mink that could no longer warm her.
Jake smelled it from time to time, the ghostly whiff of cigarette smoke. His own career was taking off and he liked to think the drift of invisible smoke was good luck. Someday he’d be as big as Brenda-Jean was in her day, but without the unhappy ending. Without the loneliness of a star that shone too brightly, too soon.
The smoke had never bothered him until that morning, in the doctor’s office. The chest pain and persistent cough had grown too troublesome to ignore and he’d agreed to tests. Now he knew the truth. He left the office and slid behind the wheel of the Impala.
The road and the landscape seemed unreal. Trees blurred by. The setting sun stained the sky a surreal coral. A deer stood on the shoulder and watched him, its eyes big and black and startlingly clear as he drove by.
Jake slammed on the brakes. “You did this!” he shouted. He twisted around, glaring at the empty interior of the car. “This was your fault! You did this to me!”
The wind tore at his jacket as he climbed out of the car. He opened his pocketknife and stabbed the driver’s seat repeatedly, tearing up upholstery and releasing stuffing and springs. “You did this!” he screamed again but a staccato of barking coughs distorted the words. He fell to his knees, tears blurring his eyes.
“I just wanted some company,” came a soft, silvery voice.
He looked up but no-one was there.
Jake knelt for a time, the cold seeping into his bones. His chest ached. When he finally rose, it was to syphon gas out of the tank and into a Jerry can. He doused the seats and floor mat. He lit the Impala up with matches from the roadside emergency kit.
There was a whoosh and a flare of fire that singed his eyebrows. Jake staggered back, coughing.
A pale hand slammed against the driver’s window. Dark eyes bored into his.
The window shattered—not from the heat, Jake thought. It had only been a minute.
Cold fingers reached around his neck and dragged him forward. He tried to fight but his strength fled in another coughing fit. His nostrils filled with black smoke, raw and acrid. He tried to breathe, but his lungs were on fire.
“Smoke inhalation” read the cause on his death certificate.
