Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  But I was already reaching into my pocket for my case of business cards. “I agree that this was all a sign from the universe, yet possibly not the way you think.” She turned to me, a dark brow cocked. I held out the crisp white card between two fingers. “I work for newspapers and magazines, but I also photograph events like graduations and weddings, as well as headshots for actresses and models. A friend of mine works for a local magazine. Since he’s always on the lookout for more models, I often send many of my clients his way, and vice versa. We have a great working relationship and we’re thinking about going into business together. It’s an exciting time; I really feel we’re on the brink of something amazing.”

  She delicately took the card from me.

  “If you’d be interested in making another—dare I say, a better—modeling connection, please consider me. I would also be happy to offer you a discount on headshots. It’s rare that I come across someone with beauty as natural as yours. It would be a treat to photograph you. Just give my site a look over and contact me if you’re interested.”

  “Wow, this sounds great,” she said, sounding as dumbstruck as I’d felt earlier. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” I said, walking backward toward the bench and my discarded book. “Oh, and if we do end up working together, might I suggest you wear yellow?”

  CHAPTER 13

  On Saturday morning, Riley sat cross-legged on Michael’s couch with her computer on her lap, and Baxter curled up and purring by her side. Michael was busy making breakfast with one of his new “only $39.99 a month!” pans. Riley and Michael had early lunch plans with her parents tomorrow, and she planned to ask “Reggie Reg” to refrain from suggesting any more cooking accessories for a while. The spare bedroom in Michael’s duplex had boxes for a new juicer, an air fryer, and two crockpots—all unopened—that hadn’t been there two weeks before.

  The photos of the mystery woman lay in their envelope on his coffee table. Last night, after discussing the consult at Julie’s house, Riley and Michael had laid out the pictures in neat rows before going over the same theories Riley had discussed with Jade and Jonah. The Brynn dream hadn’t reoccurred, which, strangely, had disappointed Riley.

  Jonah’s suggestion that Riley possibly hadn’t been looking at the dream from the right angle had struck a chord with her. So while the scents of coffee and bacon drifted through Michael’s duplex, Riley searched for every article she could find about Brynn and Shawna. She’d already done this, but she’d been treating them as separate cases, just as the police had.

  Instead, she scoured the internet for any articles written about the possible connections between the two cases. There were plenty of forums where she could find sub-threads and conspiracy theories, but she wanted something written by someone with a more official byline than “monster_m@$h_69.”

  Eventually she found the same article in the Taos Daily Journal that she’d seen during her last search. It was the only one she’d been able to track down. The year on the article was 2004, and in it, Carter Quincy speculated exactly as Detective Howard had: that the two murders were related, and that the police department hadn’t made the connection. He point-blank made the claim that the police in Taos saw a down-on-her-luck Black woman and automatically assumed her death had to be at the hands of her abusive ex, even when his alibi put him out of the area during the time of Shawna’s murder, and when the residents of the neighborhood were all adamant Rodney hadn’t done it.

  A quick search of Carter Quincy revealed that he still worked at the Taos Daily Journal. Riley didn’t know if reporters were any more predisposed to believing in the abilities of psychic mediums than cops were, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least contact Carter to see if he’d be willing to talk to her.

  She wrote him a quick email.

  Hello Mr. Quincy,

  My name is Riley Thomas and I’m from Albuquerque. I wanted to find out if you would be willing to talk to me about the Brynn Bodwell and Shawna Mack cases. I may have information on an additional victim.

  Riley stared at the unsent message for a while, then placed her computer on Baxter’s other side on the couch and got up slowly enough to not disturb the dozing cat. He yawned and stretched, paws splayed wide for a moment, then settled back into a ball. Riley padded to one of the two open doorways into the kitchen and rested her shoulder against the doorjamb.

  Michael had finished cooking the bacon and had moved onto scrambling eggs. “Hey,” he said, glancing over when he realized she stood there. “Almost done.”

  “I found a reporter who thinks Brynn and Shawna were killed by the same person,” Riley said without preamble.

  Michael cast her a side-eyed look. “Did you email him already?”

  “Started to. Do you think I should drop the ghost-seeing thing before or after I meet him? Assuming he even replies.”

  “After,” Michael said. “Feel the guy out first. Never know what a journalist is going to do with information like that.”

  Riley cocked her head. “Do you not trust the media, Mr. Roberts?”

  He smiled, but his attention was focused on the eggs. “I don’t think all media sources are created equal. If you meet him and he’s cool, then go for it. You’re a good judge of character.”

  She stepped into the kitchen long enough to kiss him on his scruffy cheek, then returned to her computer. After rereading the short email, she added her contact information and hit send.

  Late Sunday morning, Riley and Michael went to her parents’ house for brunch. They had met Michael for the first time a few months ago, just after Riley and Michael had returned from their trip to Arizona to return the Scooby Doo shirt to Pete’s mother. Michael had charmed the pants off her parents in a matter of minutes, as Riley suspected he would. Her father, the Thomas Family Self-Proclaimed Top Chef, had been cooking that night and he and Michael had gotten into a deep discussion about food. Michael was a horrendous cook, but he was experimenting more and more lately, determined to advance beyond the basics. By the time they left, Michael had a long list of suggested appliances typed up in his phone, as well as her father’s number, apparently.

  While the men had been in the kitchen, Riley and her mom had sat at the dining room table, drinking wine and playing cards. It was then that Riley had gotten into the details of what had been going on months before—the ghost of Pete Vonick taking up residence in her apartment; Orin Jacobs and the remains of five additional victims Riley, Mindy, and Michael had found in the dark room; and her run-ins with Francis Hank Carras. Her mother had drunk twice as much as Riley that night.

  Currently, Riley helped Michael out of his coat in the foyer of her parents’ house so he could still hold onto his prized potato casserole dish.

  “Ah, you brought it!” Riley’s father said.

  “It was a very challenging recipe, Reggie Reg,” Michael said.

  Riley and her mother groaned in unison.

  Her father launched into an animated tale about his latest nemesis: a homemade cheese sauce recipe. Michael slipped out of his jacket without breaking conversation with her father, and then the two men, in mid-ramble, wandered through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  “Better Michael than me,” her mother said. “That man won’t shut up about his damn cheese sauce. He burned the flour the first time and I swear he took it as a personal offense.”

  Shaking her head to herself, Riley busied herself in the foyer with hanging up both her coat and Michael’s while her mother followed the chattering men toward the kitchen.

  A wooden block with hooks for jackets and keys hung on the wall just inside the door, the wood painted with expressive faces of sea otters. Each hook was fashioned to look like an otter’s curved tail.

  Riley had every intention of keeping her latest ghost-hunting mystery to herself this afternoon, recalling how ashen her mother had gotten the last time Riley had told her about her time spent with serial killer ghosts and living predators. When she walked into the din
ing room, she came up short.

  Her mother stood in the middle of the room facing Riley, her arms crossed and brow cocked. It was a Jade look. Riley mirrored the expression, defiant.

  “Are you all right?” her mother asked.

  “Yeah, fine. Need any help with lunch?”

  Her mother took a step to the side, not allowing Riley past her. “Sit down.” It wasn’t an aggressive command, but one that brooked no argument.

  “Mom …”

  The cocked brow somehow went up farther.

  Grumbling, Riley pulled out a chair and flopped into it. Mothers already had a sixth sense when it came to their children. But having a mother with a literal sixth sense could be a pain in the ass.

  “Spill,” her mom said, taking a seat as well.

  A pair of sea otter salt-and-pepper shakers stared at her from the middle of the table.

  Riley started talking. When she got to the Shawna Mack part of the story, her mom’s eyes widened.

  “Oh, I remember that. We were actually just talking about this at book club last week,” she said, sitting up a little straighter. “Do you remember Norma Kling? She used to work at the elementary school?”

  “I think so. She worked in the office, didn’t she?”

  “Yep,” her mom said. “Well, she’s got family in Taos. Her grandmother lived in the same neighborhood as Shawna, so the whole area was on high alert when she disappeared. It wasn’t the best neighborhood, so shady stuff went down there on occasion, but everyone knew how much Shawna loved that boy of hers. No one believed she would have abandoned him, so everyone was sure something horrible had happened to her when she went missing. When they found her body, people lost their minds. The cops were sure it was her ex; the locals all knew it wasn’t him. But that meant a killer was roaming the streets and the police weren’t looking in the right place.

  “Anyway, so Norma’s younger cousin, who was about sixteen at the time, was almost kidnapped a month after Shawna was found.”

  “Whoa, really?” Riley asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” her mom said. “She’d cut school early and was walking home using one of the longer routes through a rural area, and a blue car pulled up next to her. It didn’t have any license plates. I don’t know why that detail sticks with me. Anyway, there was a white guy behind the wheel with light blond hair in a buzz cut. Gigi said the weirdest part about his hair was that it looked white, like an old man’s hair, but the guy was in his forties at the youngest. He apparently was asking for directions because he was lost. He kept asking her to approach the car because he couldn’t hear her very well.”

  Riley winced.

  “Mm-hmm. She said the guy had an almost military look to him, like he could have been a cop. All she knew was that the guy made her hair stand on end. As a young Black girl on the back roads when she should have been in school …” Her mom shrugged. “She didn’t know what to do. One decision could piss the guy off, and another could put her in even more danger.”

  Riley nodded. “So what did she do? You said almost kidnapped?”

  “She approached the car, and when she did, the guy grabbed her by the arm through the open window. Once he had her, he started to get out. Little did that guy know, Gigi had four brothers who had taught her how to defend herself, so she slammed her elbow into the bridge of the guy’s nose. He let her go and she took off running. She ran to a friend’s house in the opposite direction of her own so the guy couldn’t follow her home. She never walked through the back roads again.”

  “Did she report it to the police?” Riley asked.

  “The family tried, but it took Gigi over two weeks to work up the nerve to do it. Gigi’s parents knew Shawna’s family, so tensions were already high in that neighborhood. Her family thought they could possibly track the guy down based on white men who had recently gone into the hospital to treat a broken nose. Her family was worried about Gigi being followed again, for one, but there was also a growing fear in the area that someone was targeting Black women. The cops were so convinced Rodney had been the one who killed Shawna, they didn’t even entertain the idea that the person who took Shawna had tried to take Gigi, too.”

  Riley frowned.

  “Plus, where Shawna lived was a predominantly Black neighborhood back then. The cops found it very hard to believe that a military-looking white man would have been able to creep around a Black neighborhood and not stand out like a sore thumb. The cops more or less suggested Gigi had made the story up to get attention.”

  “Ugh,” Riley said. “And then Brynn disappeared and I’m sure it was even harder to get them to listen to Gigi, since they thought the cases were unrelated.”

  Her mother cocked her head. “Brynn?”

  Riley launched into the rest of the story, and how Brynn, Shawna, and the woman in the yellow dress all were the victims of the same killer. Riley wondered if young Gigi had been grabbed by the same man, or if there had been another one prowling the back streets of Taos looking for young women to pluck off the street for his dark purposes.

  “I remember that, now that you mention it. I think it was happening right around the time your grandma passed … I was a bit distracted.”

  Riley reached across the table, her hands out. Her mom placed her hands in them.

  After a beat, Riley said, “I don’t know how to find out the identity of the ghost.”

  “I’ll give Norma a call,” her mom said, giving her hands a squeeze. “She still has family in that area even though her grandma is long passed by now. Maybe some people from back then are around. Any idea if Rodney is still in prison?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t come up in any of my searches,” Riley said. “I guess it’s possible that he was just quietly released and no one wrote about it. If he died in there, an obituary likely would have come up.”

  “True. I’ll call her this week and let you know if I get any good info.”

  Michael emerged from the kitchen holding a large salad bowl. “Your husband can’t find the tongs and would like assistance, Mrs. Thomas.”

  Riley rolled her eyes at his over-the-top formality. He did it solely because Riley’s mother thought it was funny.

  Her mom laughed. “One of these days you’ll call me Sabine.”

  “One day, yes, Mrs. Thomas,” he said, setting the bowl on the table.

  Riley’s mom gave her hands another squeeze, then excused herself to help Riley’s dad.

  Michael rounded the table and planted a kiss on Riley’s temple, then sat in the chair her mother had just left. “How’s it going in here?”

  “Oh, you know, just talking about murder, kidnapping, and ghosts with my mom,” she said.

  “You say that like it’s not normal,” he said.

  Her father poked his head out of the kitchen. “Did your mother give you your gift?”

  “What gift? What occasion?” Riley asked.

  “Oh, I can’t believe I almost forgot,” her mother said, hurrying out of the kitchen, through the foyer, and around the corner toward the guest bedroom.

  When her mother returned, she placed a small unmarked box on the table in front of Riley. It had a flap that was tucked into the box, somewhat like a cupcake box. As her mother sat across from her and Michael, her dad rested his hands on the back of her mom’s chair.

  “The occasion is that this find was too great not to share,” her dad said.

  Riley glanced over at Michael and shrugged, then pried the flap free and lifted it up. Inside the box was a nest of tissue paper, and on top of that was a cake plate.

  “Sabine! You are my hero,” Michael said.

  “My god, it’s hideous,” Riley murmured, then looked up at her parents in awe. “It’s perfect.”

  Carefully, she picked up the plate to examine it more closely. This one featured chickens. One was dressed in a wedding gown, the other in a tux. The chicken in the dress sat on a chair, one skinny leg stuck out toward her tuxedo-clad partner, who was blindfolded. In either one of the
tuxedoed chicken’s feather-hands were the sides of a garter belt. It was unclear whether the belt was being slipped on or off. The chicken in a dress had an expression that implied she was in the throes of intense pleasure.

  Flipping the plate over, Riley noted that this one was number 10 of 15 in the barnyard series.

  “I realize this is going to be a very heteronormative question, but shouldn’t the one in the tux be a rooster? Are these lesbian chickens?” Riley asked.

  “That’s your question?” Michael asked.

  Riley glanced up at her parents. “How did you find it?”

  “It was actually your father who found it on eBay,” her mom said. “There was a very spirited auction battle last week.”

  Michael said, “Well, thank you. This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten—which is saying a lot since you gave me Riley and I think she’s pretty great. But this hideous plate is next level.”

  Riley jerked a thumb at Michael as she said to her parents, “Can you believe I’m in love with this weirdo?”

  Smiling, her mother sweetly said, “To be fair, you’re weird as hell too, child.”

  Laughing, Riley’s father ducked back into the kitchen long enough to grab a platter of sliced prime rib. “Lunch is served!” As he placed it on the table, he looked at Riley and said, “His potato casserole is passable.”

  Riley and Michael shared cartoon-like open-mouthed expressions.

  “Passable!” Riley said, putting the plate back in its nest of tissue paper. “It’s a step up from abysmal.”

  “I can’t even be offended because abysmal was generous,” Michael said, taking the box and moving it further down the table so it wouldn’t be in the way while they ate.

  Riley got up to grab plates and silverware while her mom grabbed the casserole.

  “As much as we adore you, Michael,” her mother said once they were all seated again, “that last casserole was so bad we couldn’t even get the feral cats next door to eat it.”

  “And the abysmal one was like try number five,” Riley said, spearing a slice of prime rib to add to her plate. “We taste tested one of them and there was so much salt in it, we both immediately spat it out.”