Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Once she had the piece lined up properly, she hovered it in place again, her fingerprints only littering the ends of the strip. Letting out a long, slow breath, she lowered the tape onto the partial print, and gently smoothed it onto the spot with a gentle rub of a pointer finger. Would too much pressure smear the print?

  Pulling on another pair of gloves, she grabbed hold of the cartridge between two fingers, and with her other hand, gently pulled the tape away from the cylinder. Holding the tape up to the light, it looked like her little experiment had worked. She held it up to her phone’s camera, turning it this way and that, hoping the image wasn’t too blurry. Carefully, she transferred the tape onto one of the microscope slides, then placed another slide on top of it. She labeled the end of the slide with the date and time, and showed that to her fictional audience as well.

  She pulled off her gloves, tossed them on the table, and then crossed her arms. The only police connection she had was Detective Howard, and he was currently busy. She didn’t have time today to drive the slide over to Santa Fe anyway, assuming he would even accept it from her.

  “Here’s a random fingerprint from a person who might have killed three or more women eighteen years ago in a city you don’t work in. You’re welcome. Bye!” probably wouldn’t go over well.

  It would go even less well if she dropped it off at the Taos police station. She hit the stop button on the video.

  After getting the slide into a plastic zippered bag, Riley placed it in her nightstand drawer. It occurred to her then that the killer she was after could be dead himself. That bastard better not show up.

  Thankfully, she would be at Michael’s over the weekend. She just hoped that she didn’t come back to her apartment Sunday night to a grumpy ghost situation.

  She wrote her name, as well as the request of “prints and negatives” on the cartridge, put it in a zippered bag, and then headed back to the post office. Once the cartridge was inside its padded, neatly labeled shipping bag, she walked it over to the drop box. She just stood there a moment with her hand on the handle, staring down at the missive and the address of the film development studio in California.

  Pulling the handle down to reveal a shelf, she reluctantly slipped the package onto it, as if it were the woman in the yellow dress herself Riley were sending away. She released the handle and the shelf disappeared back inside the box, taking the cartridge with it.

  All she could do now was wait.

  July-September, 2021

  I awoke in a hospital bed. A monitor beside the bed displayed my vitals—a series of colors, numbers, and pulsing lines. My head ached, my mouth was parched, my mind fuzzy. How the hell had I ended up here?

  As I tried to push myself up, I groaned. My limbs—all of me, really—felt like lead.

  A door to my left swung open and a woman in a white coat walked in.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, walking to my bedside, a wide smile on her face. “You woke up.”

  “What …” I coughed, clearing my throat. “What happened?”

  “You were found in an alley. It appears you were badly beaten.” She shone a pen light in my eyes and checked the vitals on the monitor and on my chart. “You have been in a medically induced coma for almost four months.”

  Nothing made any sense.

  “You’re a very lucky man,” she said. “Do you remember your name?”

  I blinked, searching my memory. There was a black hole in my head. A few of the lines on the monitor by the bed jumped. The doctor placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s quite all right. Try not to tax yourself,” she said. “Because you suffered blows to the head—and there had been quite a bit of swelling—you’ll likely experience some memory problems for a while. Brain injuries aren’t all the same, so I cannot tell you for certain what your journey to recovery will be like. For some, memories return in days, and for others it could take decades. My guess is retrograde amnesia.”

  I tried to repeat the phrase, but I got lost halfway through the words.

  “It’s not uncommon to suffer from confusion, to forget what you were doing, and to have problems focusing.” The doctor folded her hands in front of her lap. “Essentially, you’ll have a hard time remembering the event itself, at least for a while, and find it difficult to recall past memories. The lost time might encompass only the traumatic event itself, it could be a handful of years, or it could be a much longer chunk of time.”

  At the moment, I found it hard to remember anything at all.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” I croaked out.

  Over the course of a week in the hospital, I remembered bits and pieces of my life. I remembered my name and address, but I couldn’t recall a conversation I’d had an hour ago. Dr. Singh had to tell me about “retrograde amnesia” many more times over the week before it started to stick in my scrambled brain. A few other things she’d told me over the course of the week started to stick, too.

  It had been early April when I’d been brought into the hospital, barely holding onto life, and now it was the middle of July. The hospital I was in was a teaching hospital, which had been responsible for saving my life as much as those teenagers dicking around in the alley who had found my body. The hospital had seen my battered body as a learning experience for medical students, and many discussions had been had beside my body over the last few months.

  “Amnesia isn’t like it is in the movies or on soap operas. Total memory loss is exceedingly rare,” Dr. Singh said one morning during the start of week two. We slowly walked together down the hallway. Most of my wounds had healed up quite nicely after four months, but my muscles had gone soft. I tired easily. “Often what’s affected the most are facts—names, dates, events—but you’ll retain skills. You remembered how to walk, for example.”

  “Are there any medications for this? Surely there’s something given to Alzheimer’s or dementia patients.” I could remember words like “Alzheimer’s,” yet couldn’t remember what truly mattered. The event that put me here was still a mystery.

  “Unfortunately not,” Dr. Singh said. “Memory issues such as yours often resolve themselves on their own with time. There are a few things you can try. Foods such as whole grain cereals, nuts, beans, lentils, and lean pork could help. The brain is muscle, just like the ones in your legs that you must strengthen again. Activities such as crossword puzzles are a way to build that muscle back up.”

  Crossword puzzles and lentils? What was I, eighty?

  “Memories sometimes come back all at once,” she added, as if she too could feel my dark mood hovering above us like a cloud. “Sometimes bits of things can be triggered. Smells, music, and photographs are often quite helpful.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Photographs. There was an itch at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t scratch it. What was it about photographs that called to me?

  Two weeks after I first awoke in the hospital, some of my physical strength returning, Dr. Singh discharged me. This wasn’t because I was suddenly cured of my amnesia, but because I had overstayed my welcome. Now that I was no longer a medical marvel, I was seen as a drain on the hospital’s coffers. The chunk of time missing spanned at least half a decade as far as my taxed mind had been able to discern. Dr. Singh believed I could benefit greatly from psychotherapy, but when it became clear that I was sure I didn’t have medical insurance, my potential contributions to science no longer seemed to matter. Dr. Singh had the decency to be worried about me.

  “Is there anyone you can call to pick you up?” she asked as I stood in the hospital lobby, back in my old clothes—which they’d laundered for me, at least—and she in her pristine white coat. A little line of worry pulled her dark brows together.

  I didn’t need a fully intact memory to know the answer to that. “No. I’ll be fine. I remember where I live. The walk will do me some good. I’ll call a cab if need be.”

  The worry line grew deeper. “Take
care of yourself, hmm? Avoid stressful situations as much as you can. Be mindful of your diet, try to exercise—both your body and your mind. If your memory loss gets worse, or if you develop bad headaches, come back and see me.”

  Autopilot, instinct, the earth’s magnetism—something led me back to The Water’s Edge apartment complex. I wandered down the streets of uptown Albuquerque in the oppressive summer heat for what felt like hours before I arrived at the familiar complex, as if it had been luring me there like the northern star guiding home a lost sailor. The place was small—maybe ten units total—and was somehow both well-maintained and shabby.

  I didn’t have keys, so I stumbled into the tiny office of the complex. My skin felt slick and hot. The guy behind the counter quickly lowered his feet off his desk and stood abruptly, his mouth hanging open. My fuzzy memory told me this was the landlord, but I didn’t have a clue what his name was. I clenched my jaw in frustration. He was a lanky guy with long hair pulled back in a low, greasy ponytail and he wore a dingy white shirt and dark green khakis. His brown beard was lightly sprinkled with gray and was patchy in places.

  “Jesus, Anderson,” he said, rounding the desk. “You look fucking terrible.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “I … uhh … haven’t seen you around much lately.”

  The silence that followed was long and strained, partly because my legs hurt so damn much, I thought my knees would give out. My head throbbed. Sweat soaked the back of my shirt.

  “Look, Anderson, it’s none of my business what you get into, but do you need a ride to the hospital or something?”

  A laugh unexpectedly bubbled out of me, which quickly devolved into a coughing fit. I braced myself on the back of a chair with one hand, the other pressed to the stitch in my side. “Fuck. I just came from the hospital. I’ve been in a coma for almost four months because someone kicked the shit out of me.”

  “Jesus H,” the guy said, arms crossed. “Ain’t that some shit. The fuck you do to get beat that bad? Not gonna lie, you’re a weird dude, but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be weird enough for someone to do this to you. Was it a robbery or something?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, wincing. “Do I … do I even still have a place to live anymore after being gone for this long?”

  The landlord stared at me, his wide gaze roaming my face. “Man, they really did a number on you. Yeah, you got a place to live. You pay for this place in cash every six months.”

  “How long have I lived here?”

  After some thought, he said, “Going on five years now.”

  Which confirmed that my black hole was at least half a decade wide.

  “You’re the best tenant I’ve got. You pay up front, don’t ask for anything, never complain. I honestly didn’t even notice you were gone. You’re still paid up for the next two months. I hope you don’t have a cat or something you needed someone to check on, ’cause that thing is dead for sure. No one has been around looking for you or anything. I thought it was business as usual.”

  I didn’t know how I felt about any of this. “Could I get a set of keys? I lost everything.”

  “Yeah, of course.” He walked across the room to what looked like a supply closet. He disappeared inside.

  While I waited for him, I continued to breathe deep. I longed for the comfort of a bed I currently didn’t remember.

  Once the landlord had returned with a set of keys for apartment 8, I took them, thanked him, and made the trek across the small complex and up an excruciating flight of stairs. My legs knew the way even if my head didn’t. The smell of the apartment, as musty and stuffy as it was, was so familiar, my head spun. I stumbled into my bedroom, peeled off my pants and shirt, collapsed face first on my unmade bed, and slept.

  I slept on and off for a few days after I got home. Once I started to feel human again, I took stock of my apartment. It was a tiny one-bedroom, and my living room-slash-dining-room-slash-kitchen was littered with photography equipment. Photographs in sleek black frames covered one wall. As I stared at them, I knew instantly which ones had been mine and which had been my father’s. He’d been a photographer too.

  In his twenties, before he’d gotten married, he’d been a fisherman in Alaska. Half the photos on my wall were gorgeous shots of towering snow-capped mountains, massive chunks of ice floating in a vast expanse of sea, sweeping landscapes of green grass dotted with bright wildflowers of pink and purple. My father had been his best self when on a fishing boat, in the wild with a lungful of fresh, frigid air and with his trusty camera by his side.

  He met my mother, they had me, and life had been good for a while. But then he’d gotten severely injured during a freak storm and had to give up his prized life. They moved away to the mainland, taking the doctor’s orders that a warmer climate might do him some good. He wasn’t the same after his accident, my mother said. Bitterness and resentment turned him into a raging alcoholic. In his rare sober moments, he taught me about photography. They were the best—only—good memories I had of him.

  I reached up now and gently brushed my fingertips along the glass of a framed photograph of a moose, its wide fanned-out antlers backlit by the setting sun.

  My photographs were never good enough for him, though. I dropped my hand as the memories of his insults slapped me across the face. He said I lacked discipline to go from a good photographer to a great one like him. I was worthless. A waste of space. I needed to make money to support the family and being a professional photographer clearly wasn’t in the cards for me. I didn’t have his talent. His drive.

  He didn’t know that I practiced all the time. I read everything I could about photography, determined to make a career of this art form I loved so much. I was a waste of space? I was the one out in the world practicing my craft while he was in a drunken stupor on the couch, exhausted from smacking my mother around for the hundredth time.

  In high school, I flourished in my photography class. I was the photographer for the school newspaper. I had always been shy, but behind a camera, I could watch the girls on campus I was too scared to talk to without them thinking anything of it. Hardly anyone noticed me anyway. I don’t know when I started snapping pictures of more private things—of students making out under bleachers, of staff member trysts behind buildings, of classmates in their bedrooms—but the thrill of not getting caught doing it was intoxicating.

  Online, in some of the darkest corners of the internet, I found other photographers who liked what I liked—voyeur photography. After a while, I shared my work, too. They didn’t insult me the way my father did. They praised my skill. Soon, people started to contact me to make specific requests, like catching a wife in the act of cheating on her husband. Private investigators did it, so why shouldn’t I? When money had started filling my old ePassporte wallet, I knew how wrong my father had been.

  I walked away from my wall of photographs, away from the memories of my father, and toward my desk. Business cards stacked on the surface told me I’d been a photographer in the more traditional sense, too. When I started that endeavor, I had no idea. It was lost in the black hole in my memory where facts apparently had gone to die. I’d photographed things like graduations, engagements, weddings, newborn babies. I thanked my past self when I spotted a Post-it note with a couple of passwords written on it beside my laptop. I logged into my email where messages had piled up in my inbox from people irate that I’d missed appointments and hadn’t returned calls. Refunds were requested. Negative reviews were threatened.

  When my heart rate spiked and a headache started low in the base of my skull, I walked away from my computer, too.

  For several days, I split my time between getting items of importance back—a burner phone, a bank card, a driver’s license. And I took the doc’s advice—I stocked up on legumes, nuts, and lean pork. I did crossword puzzles, played music stored on my computer, and I willed the black curtain blocking me from the event of my beating and the years before it to drop an
d reveal my own past to me.

  But after almost a month of being awake, I was no closer to remembering what my life had been before the assault in the alley. On a lazy afternoon while feeling sorry for myself, I scoured social media for old high school classmates since I couldn’t remember if I had any friends currently. Matt Summers had worked for the school newspaper, too. Seeing his face reminded me of the photography forums where my online friends had resided. Those sites were ancient now, but surely I had found new ones, hadn’t I?

  It took an hour of poking around before muscle memory and three password attempts eventually guided me where I needed to go. The site’s layout was so familiar, it was as if someone had wrapped a warm blanket around my shoulders. I recognized a handful of the usernames on recent posts. I had been here during the black hole years, I was sure of it. After drafting a post about my ordeal, I hemmed and hawed, second-guessing myself—my old insecurities from high school returning. Of course it would be those memories that had been left untouched.

  I submitted the post and immediately popped out of my chair, pacing in the small space. What if no one replied? What if someone only asked, “Who the hell are you?” I would be back at square one.

  But I did get replies.

  Glad you’re alive!

  I was worried about you.

  Thank god that asshole didn’t snuff out the best in the biz!

  This place hasn’t been the same.

  I’d found my people.

  Elated, I scanned the forum for hours, scrolling back as far as I could go, finding posts as old as five years ago. Memories didn’t necessarily come flooding back, but the black curtain in my mind was full of holes now, pieces of my old life shining through. The work I’d done back in high school was work I still did now: I followed, tracked, and photographed people for a fee. And, most recently, a post from a little over four months ago had been from a guy with the handle “stratodigster” who said, I hear you’re the guy to hire if I need to find someone. I’m desperate. I need my girlfriend back.