Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Riley laughed, picturing Michael’s orange cat stretched out on his back on a therapist’s couch, yowling his complaints.

  “Did this ghost seem angry or anything? Demonic?” Michael asked when Riley hadn’t said anything for several long seconds.

  “Not at all,” Riley said. “She’s … sad. Miserable might be a better word.”

  “I’m going to be devil’s advocate here because you’ve probably automatically jumped to her death being the result of foul play. But remember Nick Button from your old place? His death was tragic, but it wasn’t murder. That could be the case here, too. Maybe this lady was a photographer and you have one of her favorite cameras. Her unfinished business could be totally benign, like she just wants to make sure the camera finds a good home,” he said. “Maybe Nina could help you figure that out.”

  As a car headed her way through the parking lot, Riley stepped up onto a curb that surrounded a row of small shrubs. Once it was out of her vicinity, she resumed pacing. “That’s true. I’m just assuming the worst. Should I give the cameras back to Jade and pretend this never happened?”

  “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to not tell her the things are haunted,” he said. “You’re a horrendous liar.”

  “You are very rude this morning.”

  The smile was evident in his voice. “You can tell her you can’t keep them with you because you don’t want ghosts in your apartment.”

  Riley nodded. “Yeah. Yes, you’re right. I’m worrying over nothing.”

  “You’re also doing a very good job of not committing to calling Nina.”

  “I’m working up to it,” Riley said. “I’m standing on the edge of the deep end. I just haven’t jumped in yet.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Try to get some more sleep. We still on for tonight?”

  Since they still lived an hour apart—he in Los Lunas, and she in Albuquerque—they alternated sleepover weekends, this weekend being an exception for Tiana’s Circle. As much as she adored Michael, a lady had her priorities. They’d only get late Saturday evening and Sunday this weekend.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good. Baxter and I were very lonely here last night.”

  She smiled. “Poor Baxter.”

  After ending her call, she crept back up the stairs, hoping the rattly outdoor staircase wouldn’t wake Rochelle. But as Riley eased her way through the front door, she found her friend already awake, her phone in hand.

  “Oh, hi,” Rochelle said, waving her cell. “I was just about to text you. Where’d you go?”

  Opening her door caused a brief flash of memory to flit through her head of the woman in the yellow dress leaving her own apartment. She had been leaving for … what? A date? The woman and Bruce were planning to meet in a parking lot—but an endless number of places had parking lots.

  Nope, she said, shaking her head. Don’t think about it.

  “I was just talking to Michael,” Riley said, and plopped onto the couch with Rochelle. She stared straight ahead at the black TV screen and willed her gaze not to travel down to the right and land on the box of cameras. “Ready to start episode five?”

  Rochelle propped her elbow on the back of the couch and her head on her fist. “Something’s up.”

  Riley chewed on her bottom lip. When she’d been forced on the trip to the Jordanville Ranch, Riley had kept her psychic medium abilities a secret—even from Jade. When she finally told her group of friends, including Rochelle, that she could communicate with spirits, they hadn’t looked at her like she’d lost her mind. She knew Rochelle wouldn’t bolt out of the apartment if she told her what had happened last night, but she was reluctant nonetheless. It was less about the fear of being judged, and more about how much more real it became when she talked about it. And the more likely it was that the lady in the yellow dress would reappear.

  “A ghost showed up here last night,” she said to her lap.

  Rochelle lightly smacked her shoulder three times. “Tell. Me. Everything.”

  Turning to glance at her friend, she found her expression open and curious, not suspicious and dubious. So she told her.

  “Oh wow,” Rochelle said, staring at the box as if the young woman would be standing beside it. “And you don’t know anything about who owed the cameras, since they came from a storage auction?”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “And what Michael said is true: it could be something benign. The woman could have died of natural causes and the storage unit went up for sale because no one in her life kept up the payments.”

  “Maybe if you give Jade the cameras, the ghost will go with them,” Rochelle said.

  Nodding, Riley vowed to do that later. “Fine. Now can we watch episode five?”

  Rochelle grinned and reached for the remote.

  Later that afternoon, Riley drove the cameras to Jade’s house. Rochelle had placed the box in the back of Riley’s car for her so she wouldn’t have to touch anything, thereby avoiding triggering any potential snapshots of the past.

  As she drove, her gaze kept flicking to her rearview mirror, convinced the lady would materialize in the back seat. Or, worse, the passenger seat, and freak Riley out so badly that she swerved into a tree. But the ride to Jade’s picturesque storybook house was uneventful.

  Jade hurried outside just as Riley was getting out of the car, casting quick looks over her shoulder as she approached, no doubt hoping Jonah wouldn’t come wandering out and spot the “vintage tech.” Perhaps he could sniff the stuff out like a bloodhound.

  They stood side by side at the now-open trunk, peering in at the box of cameras.

  “What if the ghost is a poltergeist or something and starts throwing crap around the garage?” Jade asked.

  Riley tried not to react to the word “poltergeist,” knowing Jade would ask her countless questions if she opened that can of worms. “She doesn’t strike me as a ghost with a lot of juice,” she said instead. “She doesn’t manifest for very long, and when she does, she doesn’t communicate with me.”

  Jade nodded at this as if it made perfect sense. “I think I’m obligated as the best friend to present the other possibility. Maybe the owner of the camera is the one who caused this woman harm and she’s reaching out to you for help figuring out who knocked her off.”

  Riley tossed her head back and groaned, staring at the wispy white clouds scudding across an otherwise clear blue autumn sky. It was the kind of story she loved, but only if she were reading about it, not living it. “I can’t get sucked into another murder mystery, Jade. I’m not emotionally ready.”

  “First off, you absolutely are.”

  Riley groaned again, keeping her focus upward.

  “Secondly …” Jade said, and Riley rolled her head toward her. “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But you also know it’s my dream for you to become Albuquerque’s celebrity medium.”

  Riley couldn’t think of anything she wanted less.

  Jade grabbed the box out of the trunk and hugged it to her chest. “They’re here if you change your mind.”

  As Riley backed out of the driveway a few minutes later, she tamped down her guilt about this ghost woman possibly being stuck in Jade’s three-car garage, rather than in the thrift shop. At least there, the woman had a variety of clientele to observe.

  When Riley reached the street, she glanced down the length of the driveway through her rearview mirror to wave goodbye to Jade, as she always did. Jade stood in the doorway of the garage, a hand in the air, and there beside her was a young Black woman in a yellow sundress, her lips painted a bright red.

  Pit in her stomach, Riley drove away.

  A week passed with no more visitations from the ghost woman and Jade hadn’t reported any strange sights or sounds. Riley still hadn’t called Nina. With each day that passed without a reappearance from the woman in the yellow dress, Riley felt better about not making a decision.

  It was Michael’s turn to stay with her that weekend, and he and Baxte
r were already inside her apartment when she got home from her shift just after ten Friday night. She had a takeout bag of shao mai, stuffed eggplant, and baked pork buns. It had taken everything in her power not to eat it all on the drive home.

  She took a scalding hot shower to get the scent of food out of her hair. Since Michael had already eaten, she scarfed the food straight out of the bag because she was starving and had no shame, then settled onto the couch with the guys. It was a perfectly normal evening, just like the perfectly normal evenings she’d been having for months on end now. After a week of no activity, she’d almost started to believe that things would stay that way.

  That night, her sleep was interrupted by a new dream. In this one, a young woman sat at a table with a newspaper in front of her. A large photo of a Caucasian girl smiled up at Riley. Tears splashed onto the words, the ink running in places, but Riley saw enough to learn that the woman had been twenty years old, and after being missing a week, her body had been found on the shore of the Rio Grande River in a recreation area near Taos. Her name had been Brynn Bodwell.

  Riley woke with a start. At first, she thought it had been because of the dream, but then she heard an odd sound. When she’d originally drifted off to sleep, Baxter had been stretched out between her and Michael, his head on Riley’s arm. Now the orange cat faced the other direction, his ears pinned against his head, and a low, steady growl rumbled out of his throat.

  Swallowing, Riley looked to the foot of her bed. There stood the woman in the yellow dress. Her sudden presence was what Riley found terrifying, more so than the apparition herself. The woman’s energy was calm, though still heartbreakingly sad. Riley’s chest and throat tightened, like she was on the verge of sobbing. Pete’s ghost had spoken to Riley. This woman was unnervingly quiet.

  Like Orin and the grocery store poltergeist, this woman was projecting emotions to get her own feelings across. Miserable was definitely the word for this. Abject misery. Yet, Riley didn’t think the woman was necessarily projecting this emotion on purpose—it was more that this misery oozed out of her like a cloying fog.

  Riley couldn’t shake the sense that this woman was waiting for her to do something. She was expectant, yet not demanding.

  “You need my help, don’t you?” Riley whispered, her voice shaky. Baxter had yet to stop growling low in his throat. Michael was still fast asleep.

  The quiet, sad woman nodded her head up and down, up and down, then vanished.

  CHAPTER 4

  Riley paced in front of her kitchen’s open doorway as Michael tried his hand at the waffle maker Riley’s mother had given her two Christmases ago. It wasn’t going well, but Riley was too worked up to worry about the state of her messy counters. Baxter groomed one of his front paws while perched on the back of Riley’s couch, his orange tail swishing periodically.

  “The cameras haven’t been here for a week,” Riley said before turning around to head back the other way down her hallway.

  “You’ve said that at least six times,” Michael said. “Dammit! Is the batter supposed to be this … watery? These things look like floppy disks, not waffles.”

  Riley stopped abruptly in the kitchen doorway. “Floppy disks? You’re thirty, not ninety!”

  Michael ignored that, too focused on prying the sickly-looking waffle out of the maker. It also appeared that he’d forgotten to grease the thing—again—so most of it was holding fast to the machine. “Would you be mad if I just threw the whole thing in the trash? I can buy you a new one.”

  “What if we buy already-made waffles. You know, cooked by professionals?”

  He whirled and pointed a fork in her direction. A blob of half-cooked batter landed on the floor between them. “How dare you.”

  Rolling her eyes, she resumed her pacing. “There aren’t a lot of ghost rules, but I was banking on the fact that an object significant to the person had to be around in order for the ghost to manifest.”

  “Need I remind you that the toothpaste poltergeist broke all the rules?”

  No, Michael did not.

  “Who the heck is Brynn?” she asked. “That would make two dead women. Two, Michael. That’s one short of a serial killer. Serial killers are fascinating in large part because they’re rare.”

  “To be devil’s advocate once again,” Michael said. “Psychic mediums are pretty rare, too.”

  Since he couldn’t see her, as she was halfway into the living room again, she took the opportunity to silently mock him with all the maturity of a teenager. She was mostly upset with him for being right and levelheaded all the time.

  She stalked into the kitchen, wiped off a sliver of counter space, and hopped onto it. After a minute of trying to scrape the waffle maker clean, Michael cursed, unplugged the machine, and moved to stand in front of her. He wedged himself between her knees and placed his hands on her hips.

  “Have you worn yourself out yet? What’s bothering you most?” he asked.

  Nina had asked her something similar after the incident at the store.

  She lightly draped her dark arms around his fair-skinned neck, playing idly with the tag at the collar of his shirt. She studied his face for a moment, liking the beard he’d started shaving less and less. It wasn’t growing nearly as fast as the hair on his head, which was inching dangerously close to being a too-long brown mop. As much as she found him wildly attractive, she might have to have a serious conversation with him if he was planning to go the man-bun route.

  “I’m worried I’m losing control of this,” she said. “Going to the ranch messed everything up.”

  “Hey …” he said, mock-offended, gently squeezing her hips.

  “Okay, not everything,” she said. “But I thought I’d figured out how to avoid all this—ghosts in stores and bars and my apartment. The rules being broken means maybe there weren’t actually any rules to begin with and I’m even more out of my depth than I thought.”

  “All of that is valid,” he said. “Like Nina said, there’s a steep learning curve.”

  She sighed, still playing with the tag of his shirt.

  His phone on the counter next to her buzzed and she looked down to see a text had popped up on his screen from a “Reggie Reg.” The message read, My pot got here today! You get yours yet?

  Riley unhanded him so she could pick up his phone. She stared at the screen, incredulous. Then she angled a pointed glare at him. “Did you buy that really expensive diamond-encrusted pot off that infomercial? I thought you agreed it was too expensive.”

  Michael made a half-hearted grab for his phone, but Riley held it up and behind her, just out of his reach. Lowering his arm, he winced slightly when he said, “I might have bought the whole six pot-and-pan set.”

  “Michael Roberts!” she admonished.

  “It’s only eight easy payments of $39.99!” he said. “Your dad swears by them!”

  “My dad also owns more cooking appliances than any human needs. Their garage is full of even more boxes of cooking crap than my mom’s sea otter collection,” Riley said, bringing the phone toward her so she could look at the screen again. “Second, did you honestly program my father into your phone as Reggie Reg?”

  He easily reclaimed his cell, stuffing it into his back pocket. “What’s wrong with Reggie Reg? He likes it. Are you shocked to learn you’re dating such a cool cat?”

  “Oh my god,” she said, laughing.

  Grinning, he pulled her a little closer to him. “You can’t get out of this conversation. What else is bothering you about the woman in the yellow dress?”

  It took a long few seconds, but she finally asked, “What if she and Brynn aren’t the only ones?”

  “They might not be,” he said. “But I think it’s safe to say there are countless victims out there. More than all the police and psychic mediums combined could ever find.”

  It wasn’t comforting, but she knew what he meant: she couldn’t worry about every “what if” under the sun if she wanted to maintain any semblance of sa
nity.

  “I’m also scared of running into another Hank. And that if I ignore the woman in the yellow dress, then I’m allowing the person who hurt her to hurt someone else.”

  “Sounds like you’re getting close to making a decision,” he said.

  She wrinkled her nose, not looking at him.

  “You always seem to forget that you stopped Hank,” he said, lightly squeezing her hips again, forcing her to look him in the eye. “He may never have done anything else that was as awful as what he did to Renee, but I saw the way that guy looked at you. He was a predator. He’s locked up and that’s a good thing.”

  Riley nodded absently at that. “I guess it just feels like a lot of responsibility.”

  “You don’t have to look into any of it,” he said. “It isn’t your responsibility. But I still think things happen for a reason. Maybe you’re obsessed with true crime as a way to deal with your ability. Or maybe you have this ability because you were already destined to be interested in it. This all suits you, even if it scares you.”

  It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before.

  Michael grabbed her more tightly by the hips so he could slide her toward him until their chests were flush. He nipped at her ear. “I have an idea of what we can do to keep you distracted while you think about it.”

  Her eyes had slipped closed. “Oh yeah?”

  “Mm-hmm,” he murmured, his breath hot on her neck. “I can slide you off this counter …”

  “Uh huh …” she said, breathless.

  “Then take you somewhere with professional waffle chefs.”

  She groaned. “That’s the hottest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Riley was in a waffle-induced food coma—that was why it took her longer than usual to realize Michael wasn’t driving them back to her apartment. “Where are we going?”

  “You can’t be mad,” he said, not looking at her.

  A minute later, she figured it out. Ten minutes after that, Michael pulled into a spot outside Reinholt Consignment. A woman and her delicate dark brown poodle mix came sauntering out of the groomer’s next door. The dog had small pink bows affixed to the top of either ear.