Marty waved her off.
Frowning, Riley worked through the possibility of sending Marty a check in a week or so.
Marty craned her neck to force Riley to focus on her instead of mental math. “Now you listen here,” she said, turning to face Riley head-on now, partially blocking her view of the destruction. She put her hands on her slender hips. “Carol said that the young woman showed up the day I brought her the cameras. She saw that woman nearly every day, and every time she said the same thing: ‘I wish I knew what made her so sad.’ She felt guilty when she sold the cameras to your friend and the ghost went with them. Carol couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman needed help, that she was lost, you know?”
Riley nodded.
“When she called me to tell me you might come by, she was so relieved. She said she thought a lot about the chain of events … how you wouldn’t have come into her store looking for those cameras if I hadn’t gone out to Clovis to that auction. If Kenneth hadn’t outbid me a year ago, I wouldn’t have been so determined to get that unit in the first place. Carol and I are both big believers in things happening for a reason. So if that dumb ol’ coat rack getting smashed to bits means that young lady will eventually be put to rest, that’s A-OK with me.”
Riley wanted to hug her. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” Marty said, then took out her phone, tapped a few things and then handed it over. “Put your contact info in there for me. You have my number, right?” Riley nodded as she keyed in her name and number. “Keep me updated on this as payment, and I’ll be in touch if I happen to think of anything else. Or if that new workbench of my husband’s has a secret compartment in it stuffed with incriminating evidence.”
Riley managed a laugh, handing the phone back. “Sounds good.”
As she left the shop, limping slightly as she did, she thought about how the ghosts who had started demanding her attention lately had all met some horrible end at the hands of terrible people. It was easy to grow even more cynical than she already was in light of that. But she had to remind herself that while she’d searched for Pete’s and Renee’s killers, she’d met people like Michael, Mindy, and Detective Howard. And now the woman in the yellow dress was leading her down a path that had intersected with Carter Quincy, Carol, and Marty. The good people far outweighed the bad.
She winced as she climbed back into her car, her lower back aching so much already that she knew a scalding bath was in her near future, but despite all that, a small smile still managed to break free.
CHAPTER 16
Riley might have been getting better at trusting her instincts and dealing with ghosts when they materialized, but it still didn’t mean that she wanted to run the risk of another altercation with the Poltergeist of Aisle 3. Which was why she had driven half an hour out of her way—again—to go grocery shopping. She’d only been here for a whopping five minutes and was already regretting her decision; she picked a hoity-toity Whole Foods knock-off on accident. As she dubiously eyed the wide variety of kombucha, her phone chimed with a text message. It was from Carter Quincy.
A photo of your mystery woman is going to run in tomorrow’s paper. Send me your email address and I’ll send you a link to the article.
“Oh shit,” she whispered at her phone’s screen.
The woman next to her turned up her nose and pushed her cart a bit farther down the aisle.
Riley ignored her and sent Carter her address.
Her phone immediately rang.
“Hi, Carter,” she said, a little breathless.
“Is this a good time? It’s the middle of the day so I assumed you were working …”
“I have the day off.”
“Oh.” The awkward silence that slammed down on them told her he still hadn’t fully embraced the whole psychic medium thing. “So … uh … the article is more focused on Shawna Mack than anything else. It would have been her 45th birthday tomorrow.”
“Oh wow …”
“Your mystery woman will be added to the end of the article. A ‘this woman may be connected to the case; do you know who she is?’ kind of deal,” he said. “Not mentioning you or your … gift.”
“What did you tell your editor to get him to agree to include the picture?” Riley asked.
“I told him I have a very reliable source whom I couldn’t reveal yet,” Carter said. “He trusts me, so he’s running with it. Let’s hope for both our sakes, and the sake of the mystery woman, that this pans out.”
Riley didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll be in touch.”
After putting away her groceries—minus kombucha—Riley called Jade. The sound of wind answered the call before she did.
“Crap,” she said in greeting. “Hang on.”
The wind quieted.
“Sorry, I’m on my way home. You still coming over tonight?” Jade asked.
“Yep. Need me to bring anything?”
“I don’t think so. The card stock showed up yesterday. It all looks amazing.”
Tonight’s maid of honor task was wedding invitations. Jade wanted to handcraft all one hundred and fifty, of course. They had raided quite a few scrapbooking sections of craft stores over the last few months, leaving Jade with piles of wedding themed stickers, decals, and other paper decorations. She’d also apparently taken a few online calligraphy classes. Riley had no idea when she found the time to do it all.
Jade had thankfully allowed Riley to put in an order for card stock and hadn’t tried to make her own stationery, at least. The stock had been printed with the location, date, and time, and Jade would handwrite people’s names on the cards and envelopes.
“Also … Jonah said he’s got something to show us,” Jade said. “I think he got a hit on the face recognition thing. I didn’t get too many details. He called just before I had to go into a meeting and now he’s in a meeting.”
“You people and your fancy meetings.”
Jade laughed. “See you tonight.”
Riley arrived a little after five. Jonah wouldn’t be home for at least another hour, so they got to work while they waited, covering Jade’s giant dining room table in supplies. It didn’t take long for Riley’s fingers to ache from affixing tiny puffy champagne stickers and gluing black bow ties to the corners of the printed cards. When she finished attaching the decorations, she added the cards to the growing pile for Jade to add her handwritten flourishes.
By six o’clock, they were two-thirds through a second bottle of wine—most of it consumed by Jade—and were so deep in conversation, neither one had noticed Jonah had entered the room until he cleared his throat. Jade jumped so abruptly that a splatter of red wine landed on the corner of one of the cards.
Riley gasped as if Jonah had just walked into the royal palace and slapped the queen across the face.
“Jonah Henderson, I will strangle you!” Jade said, hopping to her feet, but swayed a little, and Jonah had to grab her by the elbow to keep her from pitching over the side of her chair.
Jonah merely smiled at his wife-to-be. “Making any headway on this very large undertaking, my love?” he asked in a dramatic tone that elicited a giggle out of Riley.
Jade pointed a finger at her. “Don’t encourage him. I’m not above firing you.”
Riley grinned. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
Jade, clearly having forgotten that she was upset with him only a moment ago, threw her arms around Jonah’s neck and kissed him. “Are you here to help us, almost-husband?”
“Absolutely not,” he said, hands on her hips. When she just stood there gazing at him with a goofy smile on her face, he asked, “Do you remember what I told you earlier?”
It took Jade a second and then she dramatically let him go. “You have done some nerdy tech sleuthing!”
“Indeed I have,” he said chuckling, then picked up his laptop lying on the table. Riley wondered when he’d set it there.
Jade cleared a small section of table for him, and then
she and Riley huddled on either side while he pulled up his findings.
“Okay, so this program we’re using pulls all images from the internet it can find. It deems a photo a match with the face you’re searching for based on a certain set of criteria,” Jonah said. “It’s still very buggy. Issues come up constantly because at the end of the day, a computer isn’t as good at recognizing faces as a human is, so there’s a lot of sifting through findings. It’s still way more efficient than a human would be if they were scouring the internet on their own for something like this. Plus, it’s just looking for images—I had to search the images’ metadata to track down where the pictures had come from.”
Jade was waving a hand in a circular “less talk, more pictures” motion.
Jonah either didn’t see it, or he chose to ignore it. He clicked a link in an email he’d sent himself. “So I flagged two things that I think fit our mystery woman. One is a Myspace profile.”
“Oh geez!” Jade said. “Isn’t that super old? When was Myspace around? 1990s or something?”
“It launched in 2003,” Jonah said.
A quick scan of the page with its dark blue background revealed that it had belonged to an Emery Dawson. The profile picture sent a chill racing down Riley’s spine. It was absolutely the woman in the yellow dress.
Now she had a name.
“She’s beautiful,” Jade said softly. “But … I thought Myspace went the way of the dodo. How are you able to still see her profile?”
“It never really went away. Nothing on the internet ever truly dies. Someone is keeping the platform live, therefore you can still find profiles if you know where to look.”
There wasn’t much on the profile, just her name and a few pictures. The sections where she could have put descriptions or posts were all empty. Either there hadn’t ever been much on the profile to begin with, or the page had largely been scrubbed since Emery’s disappearance.
“The next one is an article,” Jonah said. “You’ll see why you’ve been having a hard time figuring out who she is. I haven’t read the full article yet. I just bookmarked it.”
The article was from the Socorro Gazette, based out of Texas, in 2005. The picture accompanying the article was the same one from Emery’s Myspace profile. Jade and Riley hunched forward even more to read the article, Jonah’s head between theirs. Hopefully the poor guy didn’t pass out from the wine fumes wafting off them both.
Young Woman Goes Missing
Emery Dawson, 22, was last seen a week ago. Dawson moved to Socorro only six months ago for a job opportunity in nearby El Paso. She lived with a roommate, Abbigail McKinley, who worked the graveyard shift at a hospital, so the two rarely saw each other. McKinley said, “Emery was a really nice girl. I talked to her briefly a few days ago when she was leaving for work and I was coming home. We were like two ships passing in the night most of the time, so I don’t know much about her even though we lived together. If she ever had friends or guys over, I didn’t know about it.”
Dawson’s parents live in Odessa and hadn’t heard from their daughter for a few days, but that wasn’t unusual, according to her father.
“Emery was always a quiet girl. Introverted, I guess you’d call it,” he said. “She liked her books and video games. It’s always bothered me that her laptop went missing. There could be clues there. She spent a lot of time online, like kids do these days. We didn’t bug her too much about what she was doing on there, but we didn’t think we needed to. She’s a good girl. Now I wish we’d paid more attention. She thrived online since she was so shy till she got to know someone. Who knows who she befriended on the internet?”
One coworker recalls how, the day before her disappearance, Dawson had asked her if she thought red lipstick would look good on her. “I was a little surprised she asked me that. She and I weren’t really close—she wasn’t close with anyone at the office. She was very nice and great at her job and everything, but she kept to herself, you know? She never wore makeup, didn’t do much with her hair … had a really neutral-colored wardrobe. It was like she was in a shell. She had this natural beauty to her but she seemed too shy to flaunt it. When she asked about the lipstick, I thought maybe she had a date or something. But then she didn’t come into work the next day. I regret not trying to get to know her better, not asking her more questions.”
When Dawson didn’t call in sick for work, her coworkers tried to get a hold of her. When that didn’t pan out, her manager contacted her parents.
“Nothing in the apartment looked out of the ordinary,” her mother said. “When her manager called us, we expected to find the worst. But there’s no sign of her. It’s like she disappeared into thin air.”
The only things missing from her apartment, according to her roommate, were her laptop, purse, and phone. It appears as if she’d left for a normal outing. Her car was found in a parking lot at the Rio Bosque Wetland Park in El Paso. The car was locked, the windows intact. None of the items her roommate mentioned were found in the vehicle. It’s speculated that she drove herself into the Rio Bosque Wetland Park, but never came back out. It’s possible she crossed into Mexico, as her phone pinged towers there in the few days after her disappearance. The phone hasn’t been found.
An extensive search of the area was conducted, but the park is largely flat and the bodies of water calm. There has even been speculation that someone attempting to cross the border illegally abducted her with the hope of monetary gain in the form of ransom. But no such demands have been made on her family.
Anyone with any information on Dawson’s whereabouts is encouraged to contact Crime Stoppers or the Socorro police department.
Riley stood to full height, suddenly feeling sober. She crossed her arms, glaring down at Jonah’s screen. “I guess this explains why her energy feels so weak. Even if the camera brought her to New Mexico, she’s not from here. And possibly wasn’t killed here.”
Jade rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Ugh, this is awful.”
Sighing, Riley said, “Did you find anything else?”
“Just a few other articles that had been written about her disappearance. She hasn’t been mentioned anywhere I could find since 2005,” Jonah said.
The mood in the room had changed from carefree wedding prep to something much more somber. Even though “the woman in the yellow dress” had a name now, it didn’t make Riley feel any closer to figuring out what had happened to her. Not even her parents had any real guesses. Professional search teams working in one of the last areas she’d been had turned up nothing. What did Riley expect to find?
“We can work on the invitations later,” Jade said, who had come around the other side of Jonah’s chair to stand beside her. She placed a gentle hand on Riley’s elbow.
Jade didn’t need claircognizance or strong intuition to know Riley would be consumed by this information now, lost in her own thoughts, and that she’d need to work through it in her own way.
“Sorry,” Riley said, collecting her purse and jacket.
“Don’t be sorry,” Jade said.
“If anyone should be sorry,” Jonah said, turning in his chair to face her, “it’s me. I killed the party. I should have read the article first so I could warn you.”
Offering him a small smile, Riley said, “You did great. I’m very impressed with your nerdy tech skills.” But even she could hear that her heart wasn’t in the banter. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, giving them both a hug before she let herself out.
On her drive home, she called Michael, a knot of tension unfurling in her chest when he said, “Hey! How was your day off?”
“The woman in the yellow dress has a name,” she said. “Her name was Emery Dawson.” It felt strange to say it out loud.
He was silent for a long moment, followed by the faint jangle of keys. “Are you driving?”
“Yeah. Headed home from Jade’s.”
“Crack open a bottle of wine and start a bath.” A door creaked shut. “I’ll b
e there in an hour or so with a pizza. You can tell me about Emery.”
October, 2021
My financial situation was not improving. I’d snagged a couple of surveillance jobs over the past week. Standard “I need proof my girlfriend is cheating on me” stuff. Five hundred dollars here, three hundred dollars there. Between that and what little I already had in my account, I was able to pay October’s rent, but what the hell was I going to do next month?
My snatch-and-grab had been a bust. I would have to try for another one. My contact hadn’t given me a due date, just that he wanted proof of capture once I had her. Something he’d said last month had been eating away at my mind, though. An earworm chewing another hole in that black curtain blocking my view of the last five years—if not more.
“The Client monopolized you for years. If you’re as good as you were back then, we can make a fuckload of money together.”
The Client.
Ever since, I’d been trying to find evidence of who this had been. I couldn’t explain it, but I was sure his identity was the key to unlocking my own. Who had I been five years ago?
I couldn’t find him on the main forum I frequented. Anon9876 had also mentioned a private chat. I had no clue what or where that was either. I tore my apartment asunder looking for anything I had missed. Curiously, I found a footlocker under my bed. What the hell was in it, I didn’t know. Perhaps the key to the lock had been on the same ring of keys that my apartment keys had been on when I was attacked. If my current search turned up nothing, I’d track down a pair of bolt cutters.
In the back of my closet, I found a suitcase. There were several other bags stuffed inside it—a couple of empty duffel bags and a smaller gym bag. In the very bottom of the suitcase was an attached zippered garment bag, and inside that lay a small black notebook. It fit easily in the palm of one hand, and the cover was made of a sturdy material. Familiarity hit me in the chest and I ran idle fingers over the cover a moment before opening it.
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