by Jen Jensen
“Are you saying Mitch Reynolds was corrupt?”
He pointed to the file. “I’m saying that there is plenty of shit in there to suggest he had his own set of rules and he played by them. He was an old western chief and likely saw Stephanie as a whore, nothing more. If you’re asking me if it’s possible he covered up her death, for his son or someone else, the answer is yes.”
“I was going to go talk to him and his son’s wife, Barbara.”
“He won’t give you anything, even with dementia. But you can try.”
“Thanks,” Jamis said, readying to leave.
“Hold on,” Sampson said. “If you get enough to take this to the police, you come right back here with it too. I’ll write about it, print it, and make sure something happens.”
“Is that all altruistic? Because you want justice?”
“No, it’s not. I want the story. If justice comes with it, amazing for everyone.” He turned back to his computer and Jamis let herself out.
* * *
Jamis was on the sidewalk in front of Stephanie’s house. She felt nervous and uncertain. She knocked to be certain Vince and Darcy weren’t home. When no one answered, she tried the handle. The door was unlocked, and it opened. She stepped into the house and closed the door behind her.
“Hello,” she yelled, but no one responded. The house was empty except for furniture. The Shires moved quickly. Jamis sat in a chair in the master bedroom and looked out the window. She imagined Stephanie sitting there or lying in the bed near enough to see out of it. Jamis thought about Stephanie’s life, considered the depth of sexual abuse, and how much courage it took to decide to leave town. She wondered about Mitch Reynolds Jr. and resolved to talk to Mitch Reynolds Sr. and his wife. At some point, she would need to take her findings to the police, but that wouldn’t be today.
“Stephanie. I’m here. I get it now. I understand. I want to find who did this to you. If you can help me, you should.”
The house was silent. Somewhere, a board creaked and a faucet dripped. Jamis rested her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. She’d not dreamed for a few days and longed for the field and woman. How was that possible or rational? She opened her eyes, expecting to see Stephanie in front of her, but no one materialized. The house rested. Then there was a knock on the front door, and Jamis raced down the stairs.
It was Sapphire. She held a computer tablet in one hand and a box in the other. “I’m probably going to regret this. Didn’t I say that already?”
* * *
Sapphire scattered the contents of the box she carried around the room. “I assume your cameras have night vision?” She didn’t look up from what she assembled.
“Yes.” Jamis was in the chair, facing the corner of the room. If anything moved, she wanted to see it.
“Well, I was thinking it might make sense to see if a modified sensor could pick up anything. I downloaded some software earlier that the military uses to read heat and such. Then I found some other cool radar stuff too. I don’t know what it will do, but I thought it might be interesting for us to try. So we will try to read heat and bounce some sonar around. Yeah?” Sapphire set a black box on the table, shifting from her tablet to the laptop.
“When you say things like ‘software the military uses,’ does that mean you stole it?”
“Well, technically, I suppose at some point, someone stole it. But I picked up the code in open-source sharing platforms on the dark web.” Sapphire bent to take a smaller box from the larger box, setting it in her lap. “Really, money is stupid. The accumulation of wealth hoarding technology is the crime. Ever heard the term rent-seeking?” Sapphire looked up and met Jamis’s eyes.
“No,” Jamis said, shifting into a comfortable position in the chair, enthralled.
“Thank Gordon Tullock and Anne Krueger. It’s when someone who isn’t really adding any great value to humanity hoards wealth only by virtue of their ownership. If I buy land, then I take other people’s money and add to my wealth just by owning it, I’m not actually contributing anything new to society. I’m not bettering humanity. I’m creating income inequality. Capitalism isn’t really merit based. If it were, you’d know the name of the person who invented the World Wide Web. That’s how the one percent in America got rich. Not because they really do anything. Because they know how to earn rent and patent.”
Sapphire returned her attention to the device in her lap. “Tim Burners-Lee. He didn’t patent the World Wide Web. He wanted it available to everyone. If he had, it would just have come off patent. Can you imagine what we would have lost the past twenty years developing the World Wide Web? Meanwhile, pharmaceutical CEOs make millions every year defending patents to medications created with public funds to protect corporate profits. Rent seekers.” She plugged in another cord. “I take liberally from rent seekers.” She smiled, a glimmer of mischief in her eyes. “Wanna see?”
Jamis was impressed and jumped up. “I tapped into your cameras here.” She pointed at her tablet and held up a device. “The sensor reads heat and the sonar bounces off stuff. I figure we might get lucky and it’ll bounce off something paranormal and we will read it here. I don’t know.” She held up her hands. “I’ve modified this program to read what it’s scanning and return it in images you’ll understand.”
“Do you think it will work? Nothing I’ve used before shows anything,” Jamis said.
“How should I know? You’re the ghost hunter.” She walked around the room with the sensor. “Watch on the tablet there. See if anything weird jumps out.”
Jamis watched the screen with anticipation, which gave way to disappointment. Sapphire’s efforts returned nothing in any room. But then something blinked on the screen and Jamis felt a surge of excitement. “What’s that?”
She pointed at the screen, then saw Sapphire point the sensor at her. “Oh, that’s me.” They laughed together.
“Well, it works, at least,” she said, setting it on the coffee table.
“Let’s keep it on, just in case something happens.” Sapphire nodded. “I was thinking about Stephanie today. I talked to Gordon.” Sapphire listened to the details of their conversation. Then Jamis summarized what they knew. “She’s pregnant. She asks Mitch to leave town with her. He probably says shit like ‘How do you know it’s my baby?’ She’s upset. Angry. Hurt. Decides to break the cycle. Leave town. Give her baby a better life. But she needs money. She decides to blackmail some other men.”
“Would she do that?” Sapphire looked genuinely distressed. Jamis knew it was one thing to read about things in the news but to step into the story like they were was emotionally draining. Holding the space for compassion was the ultimate test of empathy, especially when self-preservation urged her to turn away. She understood how Sapphire felt and watched her breathe through the density of emotion.
“Of course, she’d do that. Wouldn’t she? These men treated her as little more than an object. Why should she value them any more than they valued her?” Her phone chirped. Jamis picked it up and typed back. “Johnna got dropped off at home. She and Virginia send their regrets.”
“Johnna had enough peopling for the day,” Sapphire said. “It doesn’t take a lot of peopling to be enough.” Would Jamis’s extroversion drain Johnna over time? She never got tired of talking. It might be problematic. “But she seems happy enough to spend time with you.”
Heat flushed her cheeks. Was she that obvious? “Let’s talk about ghosts, okay?”
“Sure, yeah, or Johnna, you know, whenever you want,” Sapphire said, teasing.
Jamis ignored her. “So, yeah, I think Stephanie would. Why wouldn’t she? We create from the place we feel the most comfortable. For Stephanie, in this incarnation, she only knew men as objects or as objectifying. I think she would have gone to them for money.” Jamis shifted the subject, uncomfortable.
“If that’s the case, Jamis, it’s not open-and-shut that Mitch killed her. Any number of men could have killed her.” A strong wind
howled outside. The trees in the front yard shook with the gust. In the declining light of day, the bare branches cast eerie shadows. “Is there another storm coming?” Jamis looked out the front window. “Big clouds are rolling in. Do you need to get home?”
“I’m fine. I’m in for the long haul,” Sapphire said.
“I thought it was kind of nice today,” Jamis said. “The sun was out. It wasn’t horribly cold.”
“Spring is fickle here. We’re rolling into it now, but winter doesn’t go down without a fight.” Sapphire turned on her laptop and began to type. “You should stick around. Even after this is done.”
Jamis turned away from the window. “Why?”
“Seems like you could belong here.”
Jamis looked down at her phone in her hands. She wanted distraction. She had one thousand notifications on Facebook and too many to filter on Instagram.
“I’ve considered hacking your social media,” Sapphire said.
“Why?”
“Your trolls. I’ve seen some of those comments. I could chase them down. Ruin their lives. They’re mean to you.”
“You might be diabolical, and I’m glad you’re on my side,” Jamis said. Sapphire continued to tap on her laptop. “Did it ever occur to you that all of this is just an unfolding matrix of manifestation and synchronicity? It’s almost like this is a computer operating system, constantly upgrading. Right now, we’re like WordPerfect 95.”
“I liked WordPerfect. I feel like everything else overcomplicated the simple beauty of the word processor,” Sapphire said with a grin. “Oh, hey, I forgot to tell you I tried to clear up that image from the other night.” Jamis must have looked uncertain because she clarified. “Our incident, when you thought you saw something in front of the door.”
“Right. Yeah. Did it show anything?”
“No. Just a blur of yellow. Faint yellow. Then it was gone.”
“In my dream, the woman is in a yellow dress.”
Jamis had more to say, but a strong gust of wind hit the house, and something crashed above them. Wood squealed as it split apart. The dining room window cracked. Jamis jumped to her feet and Sapphire followed. They ran to the bottom of the stairs, even as thunderous noise echoed above. The wind in the house howled, and they turned to look at each other.
“Well, holy hell,” Jamis said, taking the stairs two at a time.
Sapphire followed behind, sleeves pushed up, a fierce look on her face. At the top of the stairs, Jamis said, “You look so cool right now.” Sapphire laughed and shoved her forward. Jamis stopped at the end of the landing.
A tree had broken through the side of the house at the end of the hallway. Branches smoked and sparked.
“Lightning,” Sapphire said.
“Looks like it,” Jamis said. Sapphire crept closer, her back against the wall. “It looks like it came down right into the hallway. Took out the doorway to that bedroom.” Sapphire reached across the hall and flipped on the light switch. It flickered and then blinked out. Jamis reached into the bedroom next to her and turned on the light. Some of it drifted into the hallway. Jamis turned on her cell phone flashlight for more illumination. “It got some of that wall too. What is that?”
Sapphire stepped, the floor cracked, a board splintered under her weight, and she plunged. Jamis dropped her cell phone, leaped, and grabbed Sapphire under the shoulders, yanking her upward. Sapphire pushed to get up, and boards splintered under her.
Jamis grabbed her by the hips. “Hold still.” Sapphire complied. “Let’s scoot back slowly.” Jamis moved backward across the floor with Sapphire, pulling them back to the end of the hallway. Sapphire pushed off her and then turned to pull her up. “I dropped my phone.”
Sapphire crept forward. “I see it. It’s right up there. I think I can get to it. I see where the boards are splintered now.”
“Let me,” Jamis said, getting to her feet. “Don’t get hurt.” She nudged Sapphire from her path and edged up the hallway, against the left wall. About two feet from her phone, Jamis stopped. “Sapphire, can you see up there?”
Sapphire inched forward and leaned around Jamis without moving her feet from where they were planted on solid flooring. “What is that?” There was a hole in the wall. “Was there a door there?” Sapphire stepped across Jamis, who held on to her waist to help her keep balance. “There are stairs.” Sapphire stepped onto the floor near the window at the end of the hall.
“The tree hit the wall and made a hole, where there are stairs. You’re kidding?” Jamis picked up her phone and shined the light in the hole. “It’s an attic. It looks like it was closed up.” She turned to Sapphire. “This can’t be a coincidence.” That’s why the space hadn’t felt right to her. She sensed it was off balance somehow.
“I don’t think so,” Sapphire said. “I mean, what’s the probability?”
“I’m going to go up there. You don’t come. It might not be safe.”
“What are you? A gallant lesbian knight? Shut the fuck up. I’m going.” Sapphire nudged her forward. “Go. Go up the stairs.”
Chapter Fifteen
Jamis stepped through the small hole carefully and peered over her shoulder as she did. The tree struck the house at the perfect angle to expose the attic stairs. The emerging night blanketed the backyard in darkness, but a single streetlight cast enough glow to see where the lightning struck the tree. The house groaned under the weight of it and then quieted as the wind calmed. “Watch the glass,” Jamis said. “There are some big pieces.”
Sapphire stepped into the hole behind Jamis. “Should we go back down for the night vision goggles?”
Jamis held her phone up higher, trying to see more of the space. “Probably, but I don’t want to,” Jamis said. She stepped on the first stair. “I feel like I should just go up here.” She held the light down on the stairs and moved forward. She smacked her head.
“God damn.” The ceiling arched at the peak of the stairs and was about three inches shorter than her.
“Should’ve let me go first,” Sapphire said.
Jamis rubbed her head and cast the light around. Boxes lined the walls to her left. There were three trunks in the middle of the room, and a wardrobe next to a metal cabinet in the far right corner. “I think it’s safe. Come up here and look at this.”
Sapphire walked ahead of Jamis and pulled a cord hanging in the middle of the room and light filled the space. There was a desk by a boarded up window.
Sapphire pulled open the doors on the metal cabinet. There were Christmas decorations, Halloween jack-o’-lantern candy dishes, and a pile of magazines on the bottom shelf. Sapphire lifted one delicately. “Old Ensign magazines.”
“What?” Jamis opened the wardrobe.
“It’s a Mormon magazine. The church publishes it. These are from 1991.” Sapphire held it up to Jamis. “These belonged to Stephanie.”
“What if all of this belonged to Stephanie?” The light flickered. Jamis twisted the bulb tighter and it steadied. A heavy canvas covered the desk. Jamis pulled it off. She coughed, inhaling the dust.
There was a clown’s head on the corner of the desk, next to a carousel. Jamis picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It was made of heavy plaster, with a signature on the bottom. S. Gardner 1983. She held it up in front of her. The paint was immaculate and vibrant. The detailed coloring around the mouth and eyes was gorgeous.
“Stephanie made it.” Sapphire turned from where she crouched in front of the cabinet. Jamis held the clown for Sapphire to see. “She signed it.”
Sapphire took the clown from her and delicately turned it over in her hands, studying it. Jamis picked up the carousel, but the pieces shifted. She caught a horse on a pole right before it fell, setting it gently back on the desk. She removed each carousel animal. The horse, unicorn, and elephant were cracked with missing flecks of paint. She took the top off the carousel, which was painted red and white, like a traditional circus tent, and set it next to the animals. She picked up the base,
which was attached to the pole in the middle of the carousel and turned it over. It was made of heavy wood. The pole was iron. It shocked her with its weight. “E. Gardner 1979,” she read, and turned it to Sapphire to see. “Why is this stuff up here? Why didn’t it get hauled away when she died?”
Sapphire had put the clown head down and was in front of the wardrobe. She pried the doors open and took a step back. “I have no idea. Why would anyone save her stuff up here and then seal it up?” She touched the clothes. “These are women’s clothes from the eighties, I think.” There was a small shelf with a black case above the rod. She opened it. There was a small black book inside.
“Jamis, look.” There were vivid patterns drawn across every inch of the page with a blue ballpoint pen. “She was an artist,” Sapphire said and turned the book to Jamis.
Jamis thumbed through the pages delicately, as if she were unearthing an archaeological treasure. She handed it back to Sapphire. “Is there a code in there?”
“That’s what I was just thinking, but I think it’s just doodles. Do you think it’s okay if I take this?”
“Well, technically, the Shires are still tenants, but the house is furnished. I was going to rent it, but I don’t think they’ll let me rent it now. I suppose all of this would technically belong to the property owners, but since they’re rent seekers…” Jamis trailed off and grinned at Sapphire. “Let’s sort through the rest of this stuff and see what else is here.”
Jamis bent to unlock the trunk. She pulled blankets from it. They were polyester blends, rose and dull beige, popular in the seventies and eighties. She tossed two on the floor. A breeze filtered up the stairs from the hole in the wall. She tossed another blanket over the stairs, blocking the flow of air. She sat on the blankets and opened the first box.