The Ghost of Las Tunas Drive

A lonely teacher in a new town must convince the living of a decades-old secret.

Rosemead in October smelled of sun-baked earth and fading jasmine. Evelyn Chen, who had moved into the Craftsman bungalow on Las Tunas Drive for its “ proximity to her new teaching job, was beginning to suspect its foundations were built on whispers. It started with the scent of pipe tobacco—Burley and a hint of cherry—that would bloom in her study at dusk, though she neither smoked nor owned a pipe. Then came the cold spot on the landing, a perfect, person-shaped chill that made her breath fog.

Then, there was music.

It was a fragment of melody, soft and yearning, that drifted from the empty sunroom just after sunset. A few bars of a love song from the 1940s, she thought, all unresolved chords and longing. It was this music that finally drew her in, one violet evening, with a digital recorder held in her trembling hand.

“Who are you?” she asked the empty, golden-washed room.

The air shimmered, like heat off asphalt, and a man solidified before her. He was young, perhaps thirty, dressed in a post-war suit, tragically handsome with a dimple in his chin and sorrow deep in his translucent eyes. He wasn’t frightening; he was mournful.

“Henry,” he said, his voice the rustle of dry oak leaves. “Henry Cho. This was… this is my house.”

Over the next week, a fragile routine built itself. Evelyn would come home, grade papers, and then sit in the sunroom as the last light died. Henry would appear, and piece by agonizing piece, his story unfolded. He was a jazz pianist, he told her. He’d played at the Coconut Grove in L.A., but his heart was here, in Rosemead, with his new bride, Lillian. They’d bought this house in 1948. He was fixing it up for her. He’d written her a lullaby, a promise of safety and forever.

“I never finished it,” he whispered, the cold around him intensifying. “He came on a Tuesday. I was staining the porch rails.”

Evelyn listened, her skepticism eroded by the sheer, detailed weight of his presence. She checked the historical society records. Henry and Lillian Cho were listed as owners in 1948. Henry’s death certificate, filed a year later, listed cause of death as “accidental fall, blunt force trauma.” An only child, no other family. Lillian had sold the house and vanished from records.

“It was no accident,” Henry insisted, his form flickering with a blue, cold light. “He was afraid. Afraid I would tell. Afraid the town would see the saintly man behind the smile.”

“Who, Henry?” Evelyn asked, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs.
“The man who built the local park. “

A deep dread began to pool in Evelyn’s stomach. Rosemead was a small town. It still had its founding families, its local legends. The park in the center of town was called Garrett Park.

Mayor Daniel Garrett., now in his late eighties, white-haired and twinkly-eyed, who still cut the ribbon at every school opening and donated turkeys at Thanksgiving. His portrait hung in the library.

“He came about the money,” Henry said, the ghostly pipe-scent sharpening into something acrid, like panic. “He’d embezzled funds from the veterans’ housing project. I’d played a fundraiser for it, seen the books afterward. The numbers were wrong. I asked him about it, politely, privately. He said he’d look into it.”

Henry’s image fractured for a moment, showing a glimpse of the injury—a terrible, dark depression at his temple. “He came with a smile and a contractor’s hammer. Said he wanted to admire my work on the porch. I turned my back to point out the joinery…”

Evelyn felt the horror, slide through her veins. “Why didn’t Lillian tell? Why didn’t anyone believe her?”

“Who would believe the word of a grieving, newly-arrived Korean war bride,” Henry’s voice was a bitter wind, “against the golden boy, the war hero, the future mayor? He told her he’d have her deported, or worse. He made it look like a robbery gone wrong. I’ve been here, waiting for someone to listen.”

The romance of their brief marriage, cut short, hung in the air—a sweeter ghost than Henry. Evelyn’s own loneliness in this new town echoed it. She believed him.

But belief was not proof.

Then she remembered the recorder. She’d captured every session. Henry’s voice, his story. It was thin, but it was a start. She went to the historical society again, digging through microfiche until her eyes burned. She found a small article from 1949 about a discrepancy in the veterans’ fund, quietly resolved after a private donation from the Garrett family. The donation was dated two weeks after Henry’s death.

Armed with the recording and the article, she went to the one person she thought might listen—an old, retired detective named Ruiz, whose name she’d seen on the original, cursory case file. He was skeptical, until she played the tape in his quiet, sunlit kitchen. The voice that wasn’t there, the specific, forgotten details of the wound, the smell of the pipe tobacco Garrett famously smoked in his youth.

Ruiz’s face turned ashen. “I always wondered,” he muttered. “The angle of the blow… it never sat right.”

On a crisp November morning, as Evelyn sat in her sunroom,
Henry appeared, more solid than ever, the deep sadness in his eyes softened by something like peace. The unfinished lullaby began to play again in the air, but this time, it didn’t stop on the unresolved chord. A final, gentle note resolved itself, pure and whole, as if composed by the sunlight itself.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” he whispered, his form beginning to dissolve into motes of golden dust. “For listening. For finishing the song.”

He was gone. The cold spot on the landing was just warm wood. The only scent was jasmine, and the promise of rain. In the quiet, Evelyn felt no fear, only the echo of a kept promise, and the strange, comforting weight of a story, finally told.

Total1000 words

Entry for: "The Writer's Cramp 24th Birthday"  January 23,2026