Dakota

Take my advice, when the wind blows a chilling breath, and the birds scream, heed the warning and change course. I wish I had. It started with a simple letter from a long-ago friend. Dakota was a presence even in just a few lines on a page. Maybe it was the shine that life had in her proximity, but when she wrote offering me a position at her company, I accepted. My freelance writing was dead, and I needed the work. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been in a new city with only a green hat and a key.

"Excuse me," my voice echoed through the cavernous entryway of the highrise condo building overlooking Central Park.

The doorman didn't need to speak when he looked up, I read his thoughts on his face, and I agree that I was a mess. Traveling coach from LA to New York, sharing a van with a boisterous family of five on vacation, and schlepping around all of my belongings in a tattered duffle bag showed all the cracks of a broken woman.

"I'm here to see Dakota Jennings," I spoke confidently, but it hung falsely in the air.

"Dakota Jennings?"

"Yes, this is her building, right?"

"Yes, your name?" His tone curled the words in an unsettling manner.

"Tam Oliver," my voice cracked on my name.

"Please hold a moment, Miss Oliver."

He eyed me suspiciously as he called up to the unit. A mumbled exchange was shared as his eyes clung to me. My temperature rose under his scrutiny, and my eyes darted around, noting the exit. My feet itched to carry me away, but my mind stalled the flight.

"Someone will be right down."

He was correct. Moments later, the elevator doors opened, but Dakota didn't appear. Two men in wrinkled suits with tired faces exited.

"Miss Oliver," the older of the two gentlemen greeted with a slight glance to a notepad.

"Yes, do you work for Dakota?"

"No, not exactly. I'm Detective Payer; this is my partner Welles."

"Detectives?" Instinctively my spine stiffened as though good posture were a sign of good morals. "Is something wrong?"

"Exactly how did you know Ms. Jennings?" He continued.

"Did I know? Has something happened?" Panic rose in me with an acidic burn.

"I'm sorry, but Ms. Jennings was killed last week."

"Killed? She was..." The room spun around me.

Payer lent me a stabilizing hand before adding, "I'm sorry for the shock. How was it that you knew Ms. Jennings?"

"She was my college roommate. She offered me a job. I just got into town... I was here to... Killed?"

"Yes, unfortunately, she was struck and killed by a car." Payer's hand constricted harder around my arm to prop me up better. "Perhaps you should sit," he offered as he motioned to a nearby loveseat.

My legs moved as though encased in cement, but we made it to the loveseat, where I collapse. My mind spun on the turn my life had taken. I should've been thinking of my dear deceased friend, but instead, stranded in New York; my mind whirled on paying for a hotel room.

"Is there someone we can call?" Welles, a younger man with kind eyes, offered.

"No, I don't know anyone else in the city. I was going to stay with Dakota."

"Unfortunately, we can't allow for that. Her apartment is closed while we review the nature of her..." Payer's voice dropped out, but we all know 'death' was the period of the sentence. "We're sorry for your loss," he added before drifting a pace away.

Welles linger for a moment, his eyes inspecting me pitifully. The ding of the elevator pulled him along after Payer leaving me gutted on in the lobby.

I stumbled like a drunkard to the street, watching the cars careen by and wondering what Dakota's last moments were like. The gleaming cars passed in a steady stream giving only glimpses of Central Park between them. But in one such glance, the scarlet hair of Dakota haunted me. My gaze drove between the cars, starved for another glimpse. She was there, her flame-red hair twisting out from beneath an emerald hat that set off her ivory skin and green eyes. Her mouth twisted open in a laugh that, as impossibly as a dead woman standing yards away from me, landed in my ear with a haughty pitch.

The ghost pulled me to her. My ears erupted in the orchestra of horns from cars that were dangerously close to pulling me to an early grave. Still, my eyes clung to the spot, now devoid of the mirage. The pounding of my heart should have quelled at the safety of the sidewalk I reached, but it only thumped harder at the lingering smell of electric pink rose, Dakota's distinctive scent. Crows crowded a nearby tree screaming at me to run as the cold February wind ripped the last remnants of rose mixing with green tea and violet away from my nose.

"Hey," a voice sliced through the haze of my ghost story, Welles' voice. "Hey, do you need help?"

"Help?" My mind clung to the question. Did I? I was seeing apparitions of a dead woman. "Dakota is dead?"

He cocked his head as though he wanted to prod further, but instead, his eyes soften, and he added, "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thank you, I just need to clear my head," I washed the vacancy from my mind and my tone for his benefit.

Welles eyed me suspiciously but let me slip away from the moment into the clutches of the park. The shadows were growing long from the setting sun.

The trill of laughter called to me, and in the distance, a flicker of crimson hair. I quickened my pace. Just one more glimpse, and I would be satisfied. I would resolve that it was a stranger, not a haunting. But the next hint of her propelled me further into a rage of footsteps. Then a twist of the path ahead stole my hope. I doubled over, clinging to the biting cold breaths I forced into my lungs. Dakota loved games; cat-and-mouse. It made her alive once again, if even as a fiction of my mind.

A deceptively warm breeze carried the rose mingling with green tea and violets to my nose again, and another twist brought me to the ghost sitting on a bench smiling at me like an old friend.

"You're dead," I stammered between gulps of thin air.

"It looks good on me," her smile cracked with something nefarious.

"There are detectives...."

"My death was suspicious; I'm sure you would agree."

"You faked..."

"Faked is so superficial, I prefer orchestrated."

"But..."

"Life is like a summer rose, best with the dew of the morning. You wouldn't expect me to be like that tired bush, would you?" She nodded behind me.

My eyes fell on the gnarled remnants of a rose bush, but when I looked back, all that remained of Dakota Jennings was an emerald hat and a key.