The Case of the Vanishing Cadillac

The snow was falling sideways in Detroit, which made no sense but there it was, falling sideways like confetti from a parade nobody remembered attending. I was sitting in my office above the barbershop on Gratiot Avenue, watching the flakes dance their impossible dance, when she walked in. Or maybe she floated in. Dreams make everything possible, don't they?

"Are you the detective?" she asked, but she was already sitting down before I could answer, her coat dripping snow that turned to silver coins on my floor. Silver coins that sang little songs about the Motor City.

"I suppose I am," I said, though I couldn't remember hanging out my shingle. "What seems to be the trouble, miss?"

But she wasn't a miss anymore. She was a Cadillac Eldorado, cherry red with white leather seats, purring in the middle of my office. This happens sometimes in dreams - people become the things they love most. I made a note of this in my detective notebook that was suddenly in my hand, though I don't remember picking it up.

"My husband is missing," the Cadillac said through her radio, static crackling between the words. "He went to buy cigarettes at the corner store on Eight Mile and never came back. That was three winters ago."

Three winters ago. Three winters ago. Three winters ago. The phrase echoed in my head like a song my grandmother used to hum while she ironed shirts that never seemed to get wrinkled. Why do dreams repeat themselves? Is it because we're trying to remember something important, or because we're afraid of forgetting?

I put on my coat - when did I take it off? - and followed the Cadillac outside. The snow was still falling sideways, but now it was falling upward too, creating a spiral of white that made the gray buildings look like they were dancing. Detroit in the seventies was like that, wasn't it? Always dancing, even when it was dying.

The corner store was exactly where corner stores should be: on the corner. But it kept moving, sliding down the block like a child's toy car, and we had to chase it. The Cadillac's engine purred with determination, and I found myself running alongside her, my breath making clouds that spelled out words I couldn't read.

"He always bought Lucky Strikes," the Cadillac was saying, or maybe singing. "Always Lucky Strikes and a Pepsi. Never Coke. He said Coke was for rich folks and dreamers."

Inside the store, the clerk was reading a newspaper that was blank except for the headline: "EVERYTHING CHANGES, NOTHING CHANGES." This seemed profound and silly at the same time, the way newspaper headlines often do when you're not quite awake.

"I remember him," the clerk said without looking up. "Tall fellow, wore a hat like detectives wear in the movies. Bought his cigarettes and walked right into that door." He pointed to a door that wasn't there a moment ago.

"What's behind the door?" I asked, though I already knew the answer would be another question.

"Dreams," the clerk said. "Dreams and more dreams. It's doors all the way down."

I opened the door and found myself in a room full of mirrors, each one showing a different version of the missing husband. In one mirror, he was young and hopeful, counting his paycheck from the Ford plant. In another, he was old and tired, watching his neighborhood change block by block. In a third, he was made of smoke and memory, dissolving at the edges like sugar in rain.

"Which one is real?" I asked the mirrors, but they only reflected my question back at me, multiplied into infinity.

The Cadillac had become a woman again, standing beside me with tears that sparkled like chrome. "Does it matter?" she asked. "In dreams, are we looking for what was lost, or what was never there?"

This was the kind of question that made my head feel full of cotton and wisdom at the same time. I thought about it while the mirrors showed me more versions of the husband: him as a child catching fireflies, him as a young man dancing at the Grande Ballroom, him as an old man teaching his grandson to tie shoes.

"He never left," I said finally, understanding blooming in my chest like a flower made of certainty. "He's here, in all these mirrors, in all these memories. He's the cigarettes he never finished smoking, the Pepsi he left half-drunk on the counter, the hat he wore even when it wasn't raining."

The woman nodded, and for a moment she was both herself and the Cadillac, chrome and flesh, engine and heartbeat. "Sometimes," she said, "the mystery isn't where someone went. It's where they stayed."

We walked back through the door that was always there and never there, past the corner store that had finally stopped moving, through the snow that had decided to fall normally again. The case was closed, though I couldn't say exactly what had been solved. Sometimes solving a mystery means learning to live with the questions.

In my office, I wrote in my notebook: "The missing are never truly gone. They become the stories we tell about them, the dreams we have of them, the empty spaces that hold their shape perfectly."

The woman paid me in silver coins that sang about Detroit, and I used them to buy coffee that tasted like autumn and memory. Outside, the city hummed its electric song, and somewhere in the distance, a Cadillac Eldorado drove through the snow, carrying passengers who were both lost and found, both missing and present, both real and dreamed.

Case closed. Case never closed. Case always closing.

The snow continued to fall, in whatever direction it pleased.

Concept artwork