Author's Note Born to Make the Kill

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 that not a living soul walked that street that night.

I turned my focus back to the minivan’s taillights. A young, blond woman’s sudden appearance just a few feet from my front bumper was caught in my headlight beams. Her face bore no sense of panic as she strode along a course that alleged she had been running from the other side of the road. My foot reacted on the brake pedal and my hands, oblivious to the approaching vehicle, jerked the wheels left more from instinct than anything conscious.

With a couple of quick strides, she reached the opposite shoulder. Once there, she turned her body with a brisk twist to face me. Her knee-length black-leather coat whipped around behind her like a superhero’s cape. I locked my eyes on her face as the car continued to speed past and my frantic mind processed the thoughts that had been trying to rise to the surface. There’s no way you could have been there. I would have seen you.

Then our eyes met and hers spoke the knowing on her beautiful face. “You see me, don’t you?”

At home a few minutes later, when my wife, who had been driving behind me, jumped from her car and shouted, “Where did she come from?” I grasped there had been no deception in my observation. I now faced a paradigm shift so radical that to this day it still jars my world.

I didn’t believe in ghosts, but with two independent witnesses, this apparition appeared too real to dismiss. It drove me to search. I had to find out about her. 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 a twenty-six year old blond woman whose signature was her 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. She disappeared that day. Twenty years later, experts made a positive dental match to one of the only physical pieces 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, but once identified, a trio of malcontents became the prime suspects. Even though circumstantial evidence placed her with them at the time she vanished, to this day no charges have been filed. 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 that rural road at dusk, for Born to Make the Kill her vision is my muse.

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