Car Haunt

(July-August 2018)

1

"Gotta do it," Wendy told Dipper on the Thursday afternoon following the Mayoral election in Gravity Falls.

"I don't know," Dipper said. "I've never done it before."

Mabel meandered in. They had closed up the Mystery shack for the day, and she had just seen Teek off. "Knowing how you two behave, I seriously doubt that! What are you so innocent about, Broseph, hmm?"

"Buying a car," Wendy said. "To replace the Land Runner."

"Oh," Mabel said, with an apologetic expression. "I didn't know it was so serious, sorry." With a big grin, she spread her arms wide. "But, hey, Dipman, get back in the saddle! Look at me. Right after Helen Wheels bit the dust protecting me against a saber-toothed deer—"

"You drove off the road to avoid hitting it," Dipper said. "It got across and ran away into the woods, safe and sound. And it wasn't saber-toothed."

"Yeah, well, anyway it had a mean look in its eye," Mabel insisted. "Anyway, Dip, you know you're gonna need a new car."

Dipper squirmed a little. "I suppose so," he said. "But it doesn't have to be right away. I mean, we've got nearly two months before school starts again—"

"Not even seven weeks," Mabel corrected.

"—and the insurance hasn't even paid off yet—"

"Dude," Wendy said, "We can take a down payment out of our savings and then replace it when you get the payoff."

"I—it's a big step," Dipper said.

Soos, humming as he came in from putting the tram to bed, asked, "What's a big step, dawg? Maybe I can, like, build a bridge or a ladder or whatever, or some deal!"

"Buying a new car," Mabel said. "To replace the Land Runner."

"Oh, man," Soos said with a grimace. He looked solemn for a moment, and then he chuckled. "New car purchase time, huh? That's a big headache! My advice? Go ahead and settle on what you want in advance. Then like do some price checking online and junk. And look for stuff like end-of-the-model-year sales and stuff. And if it was me, I'd have Wendy check out any ride you're thinking of buying before signing the dotted lion, or however that goes."

Mabel beamed at him. "Soos, that is all incredibly good advice! And it came from you?"

Soos looked worried. "It did? Probably can't be much to it, then. Good luck, dawgs!"

Up in the attic, Dipper broke out the laptop and sat down at the table to browse, his audience there to cheer him on. Mabel stood at his left shoulder, Wendy on the right. "We could take this down to the dining room table and everybody could sit," Dipper pointed out.

Mabel glanced over. Dipper and Wendy had pushed both attic beds together to make one bed, and Tripper had just hopped up on it. He was sitting with ears perked up, bright eyes on the computer screen. "Nah, we're good, Brobro," Mabel said. "Tripper wants a say, and for some reason Melody doesn't like him sitting on the dining table. Hey, what are we shooting for, another Land Runner?"

"Well—" Dipper opened a page. "The used ones aren't too plentiful, and the new ones—little out of our price range." He showed her a fully tricked-out top-of-the-line model that was a mere hundred thousand dollars.

"Holy moly!" Mabel exclaimed. "Dad paid that much for your car? When he couldn't have paid more than twenty for Helen Wheels? How'd you get to be his favorite?"

"Chill," Wendy said. "First, Dip's Land Runner was already five years and thirty thousand miles old when he got it, and second, it wasn't this model."

"Yeah, but the five-year-old ones are running around forty-five thousand," Dipper said. "Anyway, I'm not sure I'd like another Land Runner."

"Don't get a compact," Mabel warned. "You guys will need more room for my stuff from time to time. Oh, hey, a convertible would be cool!"

"Don't think so," Dipper said. "Maybe an SUV in the Land Runner class but not as pricey. There's a bunch of them. Maybe we should just wait and save up. Wendy, we could probably get along with—"

Wendy shook her head. "Mabes is right. We really need two cars, Dip," she said, rubbing his shoulder. "And I agree with your sister—get something with a little room in it."

"Well—a recent-model SUV might not be too bad."

Wendy insisted, "New one this time, Dip. The Green Machine's practically a museum piece, and we want a nice roomy car we can depend on for a long time to come."

"Anyway," Mabel said, "you're a rich guy! Book royalties and TV residues!"

"Residuals," Dipper corrected. "Yes, and Wendy and I decided before we were married to save and invest ninety per cent of that for when we're out of college and want to buy a house—"

"House later! New car now!" Mabel said, fist-punching the air.

"Woof!" Tripper agreed.

Dipper sighed. "Fine. But we're going to be sensible about this and not sink tons of money into it."

And so the search began…

Stanley Pines's first few days as Mayor of Gravity Falls—and Executive Officer of Roadkill County, which was part of the job, the town and county together being less populous than many small American towns—passed with a flurry of activity. Tyler Cutebiker stuck around long enough to transition Stan into the job, and together they took care of all the held-over pending official business.

It wasn't much. Stan approved a reforestation project up in the north part of the Valley, subsidizing loggers who appreciated the value of renewing the woods for the next generation. He and the Council arranged for routine maintenance on three bridges—there were exactly thirty-three bridges within the Valley, and they were maintained in regular rotation, three a year for two years, then four, rinse and repeat, unless some emergency arose and one or more needed urgent repairs. "All thirty-three of 'em already been inspected?" Stan asked as he signed the contract.

"Well, we depend on the public for that," Tyler said.

Knowing the average powers of observation and levels of intelligence among the population, Stan pondered that for a couple of days, then went over to visit Fiddleford. "Every bridge in the county oughta be inspected at least once every six months," he explained. "If somebody who knew engineering could do it, I'm guessing they could review ten or eleven bridges in one day. Say three Saturdays, twice a year. Five hundred dollars per Saturday. I know you don't need the money, but as a public service, are you willing to take it on?"

With a grin, Fiddleford said, "Shoot, shore 'nuff! 'Course, trolls'll run you extry. You might have to hire a few goats to deal with any trolls." Anywhere else in the country, that would have been an idle joke. Anyway, they made the deal.

With Tyler's help, Stan dealt with other odds and ends. By the end of Stan's first week in office, his desk was so clear he could shoot craps on it. After losing three straight games, Myrt, the Executive Assistant to the Mayor, advised him that he could keep up with the job if he'd come in once a week for half a day, except for once a month for the Council meetings or else in times of emergency. That's what Tyler had always done.

"Mondays are terrible days," Stan mused. "Plus, the Shack is closed on Mondays. So I'll come in every Monday at eight A.M, seein' as how those days are already ruined."

As he settled in and reviewed all the materials available to the mayor, Stanley was, frankly, surprised at the surplus budget Roadkill County was carrying over year to year. Taxes weren't high, but expenditures had remained surprisingly low. Lots of money to use, very little to use it on—no major building projects had been undertaken in years, if you didn't count constructing the welcome sign that had replaced the rotting old trestle, and generally thirty thousand a year took care of any public road and street maintenance. A big plus was the fact that the clinic, set up by a couple of anonymous donors (everyone knew they were Stanford and Stanley), had an endowment that meant it consumed no budget money.

The county was sitting on literally a few million idle dollars. That made Stan's fingers itch, but he manfully controlled the urge. "Do it the straight way, Stanley," he advised himself. "Make the family proud for once. And surprised!"

He doodled figures on a pad. Say invest a third of the money, keep a third on hand for the emergency fund he knew he would need, and keep the rest as liquid reserves and operational expenses. Stan was smart enough to consult Ford about investing—Ford himself had built up an astonishing portfolio just over the years since he'd returned from the Multiverse, but then he knew what tech companies were going to be hot.

After receiving the town and county Council's agreement, Stan moved ahead, arranging to hire Winzinger to be Gravity Falls's chief auditor and financial supervisor—he was a Gnome, and while Gnomes are tricky and can be sneaky, they're ridiculously honest about their work. When the portfolio, a balanced one, was ready and the movement of funds was underway, Stan felt almost sad. "I'm getting to be an honest man," he reflected one morning as he shaved. "If it wasn't for my family—"

But it was for his family, and he'd promised Blendin Blandin, and the run for Mayor had been a rough campaign, so he sighed and officially gave Winzinger the title of Treasurer and had him invest thirty-three per cent of the town's and county's funds in the future—and then as a follow-up to dipping into organizational funds, he began pricing out modular homes before realizing, "These are crappy. For the same money or less, Dan Corduroy could build six cabins that'd last more than a lifetime."

To be fair, he bid the project out to any interested contractors, but everybody in the county knew Dan, most liked him a lot, and the few that were in neither of those camps were afraid of him, so he easily won the contract. "Six, huh?" Dan asked at the signing. "Specs?"

"I'll leave that up to you," Stan said. "Just let the Council approve the blueprints when you have them drawn up. What we need is for each cabin to have three bedrooms, don't have to be huge. Two bathrooms, or a bath and a half. Main room, you know, living room-dining room combo, and a kitchen. Maybe a basement?

"Basements are your cheapest footage in a house," Dan said. "I'll do an estimate for finished, semi-finished, and unfinished. What else?"

Stan said, "I'd like each cabin to be able to sleep eight people, maybe even a dozen, if absolutely needed."

That made the big logger scratch his red head. "Where you gonna put these cabins?"

When Stanley pulled out the survey map and pointed out the location, Dan shifted from his scalp and scratched his beard. "Ten acres so close to the cliffs? Not real scenic, Stan. Ain't gonna be an easy sell for tourist cabins."

"They're not tourist cabins," Stan said. "And the county owns all this land, the utilities can be run in from the town down along the highway out of the Valley, so—OK, that's the word. You get the blueprints drawn up, I'll check 'em and get the Council to approve, but I know I can trust you, and get at least two crews to work. The one thing—the most important thing—is they gotta be finished and ready to occupy before the first snow in the fall of next year."

"Can do," Dan said. "Thanks for the business, Stan. I'll do you proud."

Though Mabel liked to tag along to the office with Stan now and then, helping him make tough political decisions, Dipper and Wendy couldn't spare the time since their big search preoccupied them.

They'd explored the limited resources of the Valley and then driven miles and miles every Monday, which was a day off from work in the Shack, without success. By August they were getting antsy.

The problem was that Dipper had wrecked his Land Runner—no, that's not fair, a creep named Punt had forced him off the steep drive up to the McGucket mansion, the car had rolled badly, and too many things had been broken to repair. The insurance check came through—the dashcam that Wendy had insisted on had been a big help—and the two agreed the amount they eventually got, between seventeen and eighteen thousand, would go toward a replacement. That wasn't entirely fair. With Wendy's expert loving auto care it probably was worth a good deal more than the insurance paid. For his part, Dipper was willing enough to replace it with a used vehicle, but still, stubbornly Wendy insisted, "New one this time, Dip. For me as well as for you."

They had gone as far afield as Portland, but they were a young couple, dealerships were loath to offer an attractive payment deal even with a huge down payment, and so one Monday morning in August they wandered the only Drudge dealership in the Valley, talking it over.

Wendy paused beside a gunmetal-gray car that, according to the sticker, was a bargain. "What about this one?"

"Brand-new and a lot cheaper than a Land Runner," Dipper said, reading the info. "Less than half. What do you say?"

Wendy didn't even have to think. "Yeah, I'd go with this Manitou," she said. "Little smaller than your Runner, but not by much. Nicely tricked out, all the bells, most of the whistles. These get reasonable mileage, reliability's up there—matter of fact, the Manitou's electrical system is more reliable—"

Dipper laughed. "OK, you're the expert. I'll take your word for it. But I'll want you the check it out, even though it's new."

"That's why you married me," she said cheerfully, kissing his cheek.

They attracted the attention of a salesman, who came over and asked, "Looking for a car, young people?"

"We're interested in this one," Wendy said. "Why is it marked down so much?"

The man fiddled with his tie, as if nervous. "Oh—well, this is last year's model, and the new ones will be on the lot in a couple of weeks—have to make room. Uh, are you sure you want this one? It's the R/T, but I have a nice black one that's the SXT edition for nine thousand dollars less."

Dipper reached for Wendy's hand. —That would put it at only a bit over thirty thousand. We could take twelve thousand out of savings and not have to work out a loan.

Dip, I still think this is the car. Something just tells me.

How could he not give in? "May we test-drive this one?" Dipper asked.

The salesman, a husky, broad-shouldered guy with a red face, began to sweat. "Uh, Test-drive this one?"

"Just a short spin," Wendy said. "Up to the Mystery Shack and back."

"Uh—I'll ask."

He nearly ran away from them and ducked inside the dealership. "Wonder what's got him spooked?" Dipper asked. "I do like the way this one looks." He bent down and peered through the driver's side window.

Wendy ran a hand over the hood near the windshield. "Yeah, it looks pretty—"

"Whoa!" Dipper said, straightening up with a gasp.

"What? You startled me!"

"I saw someone standing on the other side of the car," Dipper said. "I thought I did. I could see them through the passenger window!"

"Nobody there," Wendy said.

Dipper walked all the way around the car. No one was on the far side, and there was nowhere for anyone to have hidden—just the asphalt between the passenger-side door and the brick wall of the dealership. "Odd."

"Another salesman?" Wendy asked.

"No, just—just a figure," Dipper said. "Uh, OK. Let's look around. Maybe another car. The CE, maybe."

"Dipper, why are you so nervous?" Wendy asked.

Dipper admitted, "The person—the thing I saw—it wasn't clear, it was blurry, but—I think it might have been a ghost."

To be continued