She was running dangerously low on snacks of every variety, so she pushed her cart down to aisle nine to restock her supply of Cheese Wheelz and pretzels. She’d learned that this particular store had a window of 2 to 2:30 pm where it was largely empty. She’d gotten good about getting in and out of here on her days off in record time, missing the crowds entirely.
When she rounded the side of aisle nine, a man in a black button-up and pants was already there doing an inventory of the shelves. Riley rounded his pallet of crackers and offered him a small smile when he looked up from his clipboard. He glared at her as if she’d insulted his mother. She snagged a family-size bag of pretzels on her way out of the aisle, not wanting to ask him to move from his position in front of the Cheese Wheelz. Perhaps he liked this unique window of dead time in the store, too, and he was upset with her for ruining it. She’d circle back and grab them once she finished her list.
An unbroken, circular thoroughfare ran the outside edge of the store, where most of the cold storage sections were located along the back wall. Here, she picked up eggs, milk, and orange juice. She stopped in the meat section, debating between ground chicken or turkey, when she got the feeling that someone was watching her. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted the grocery store worker standing in the middle of the thoroughfare a couple of aisles away. “Aggressive” was the word that popped into her head at seeing his posture—a wide stance, hands balled into fists by his sides, shoulders tense. For about five seconds, they just stared at each other. Then he disappeared back into aisle nine.
“Creep,” she muttered, selected the ground chicken, and pushed her cart on.
Turning right into aisle three, she stood before the rows and rows of toothbrushes, trying to decide if she actually needed a new one. Michael had said last week that her toothbrush looked “like a porcupine having a bad hair day.” She tried to argue that she didn’t want to get a new one when she’d just broken hers in. But perhaps toothbrushes weren’t the same as uncomfortable dress shoes.
She felt it again then—the sensation of someone watching her. When she turned this time, the man was a foot behind her. She sucked in a breath and took an involuntary step back. The vein in his temple pulsed, his jaw tight and dark brows smashed together.
Pushing her cart a few feet away, she did her best to ignore him, but this seemed to piss him off even more. Her own emotion mounted, mirroring his note for note. Her chest tightened and her face heated. It started in the pit of her stomach and rose, like the mercury traveling up an old thermometer in a cartoon before the heat got so red-hot, the top exploded.
“Can I help you?” she snapped, whirling toward him when all he’d done for the last minute was stare at the side of her head.
He didn’t reply, just kept glaring at her as if she were the cause of all the world’s problems.
“Leave me alone or I’m going to get security,” she said, forcibly grabbing the handle of her cart and beelining for the other end of the aisle. She startled slightly when she noticed the middle-aged woman standing several feet away. The woman looked from Riley to something over her shoulder and back again.
When Riley reached her, she was about to say, “Watch out for that guy. He’s being a total creepshow,” but the woman interrupted her with, “Are you okay? Was someone bothering you?”
Riley looked over her shoulder, only to find the guy gone. She sagged in relief; maybe he’d finally given up stalking her around the store.
Turning back to the woman, Riley sucked in a breath. The creepshow was behind her now.
The woman spun around, trying to find the source of Riley’s alarm, but it was instantly clear the woman couldn’t see him. She practically stared right through the guy. When she turned back to Riley, her expression had changed—she still looked concerned, but now, instead of being concerned for Riley, she looked concerned about her. Now it was Riley slapped with the unhinged label.
Riley couldn’t blame her; she was practically hyperventilating at the reality that a pissed-off ghost had been stalking her, not a person. It wasn’t the ghost himself that made Riley freak out, it was the energy coming off him. It was too strong, too out of place in this bright and public space. It made PTSD-level flashbacks of Orin Jacobs’s ghost come roaring back.
Was he pissed off at her, or in general? He seemed to get angrier the more she ignored him, but his off-the-charts fury was short-circuiting her brain. Usually she was all flight when she was presented with a scary situation, but currently she was stuck in freeze. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t slow her heart down.
The shelf next to her suddenly rattled so hard, it sounded like an earthquake. Toothpaste boxes, whitening strips, and bottles of mouthwash abruptly fell off the shelves, hitting the linoleum with a deafening crash. The bank of lights above her flickered. Riley screamed. The woman screamed. The guy disappeared.
Fuck. This.
Riley abandoned her full cart and booked it to the parking lot. The heat of the summer afternoon pressed down on her shoulders and heated her already hot face.
She gave herself a pep talk as she practically sprinted to her car. You’re fine. Breathe. It’s not Orin.
She reached her car, her oasis, and was seconds from unlocking the door when she felt him there. Right behind her. She pulled her shoulders up, anticipating a husky whisper in her ear, a sharp poke of her shoulder, a hand wrapped around her forearm to spin her around. His fury overrode her own panic and almost sent her to her knees. The same sensation from her first time in the cellar of the Jordanville Ranch was back—the feeling of a boulder sitting squarely in the middle of her chest, air shoved out of her lungs in one fell swoop like quickly depressing bellows.
She managed to turn around, her back to her car door. He stood a foot from her, that vein in his temple throbbing, his hand balled by his sides. She fought the urge to cower before him.
What the hell had gotten her out of this feeling last time, when she had been sure she would die on the spot from the tidal wave of pissed-off emotions that weren’t hers, but felt capable of drowning her just the same?
Nina.
Nina Galvan had calmed her down. She’d been part of the ghost hunting investigation team at the Jordanville Ranch. She had taken hold of Riley’s hands and had told her to breathe, to remain calm, and not to let Orin’s angry spirit force her out of the cellar.
Riley let out a slow breath and tried to assess the situation she was in, clinging to the handle of her car door, back pressed to the glass, while a furious ghost stared her down. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to speak to her. And since he couldn’t, his frustration had turned to anger. All she knew was that she wanted him to leave her alone.
She imagined channeling her own haywire emotions into a singular location in the middle of her chest, then shouted, “I can’t help you! Go away!”
A woman in a parking spot a few cars down cursed and dropped one of the bags she was loading into her trunk. Something crashed and splattered. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she snapped.
Riley still clung to the door, but the ghost was gone. Chest heaving, she scanned the area, then spun, expecting to see that the ghost had just teleported to another part of the parking lot to torture her from a new vantage point.
“Hey!”
Riley’s focus swung toward the front of the store.
A security guard came jogging out to see what was going on, likely under the assumption that someone was being accosted in the parking lot. The woman from the toothpaste aisle was by his side. She pointed at Riley.
Riley wrenched open her door, flung herself inside the car, and peeled out of the lot.
Once she was a few blocks away, she pulled over. She cranked up her air conditioning. She was heated externally by the unrelenting summer air, and heated internally by utter embarrassment and fear. Head resting against the steering wheel, she closed her eyes and attempted deep breathing exercises. Even with her eyes closed, she could still see the man’s face, his an
ger etched into his features as if that were his default expression. Perhaps he’d been a curmudgeon as a living thirty-something and now he was a curmudgeonly thirty-something ghost.
Unable to talk herself off the proverbial ledge, she fished her phone out of her purse. With a shaking hand, she scrolled through her contacts, then hit the call button.
“Well, this is a surprise,” Nina said after two rings.
“I’m freaking out.” Riley held up her free hand, watching it shake. “I was in the grocery store and—”
“An unexpected haunting?” Nina asked.
“Yeah.”
“Come on over.”
The drive to Nina’s house took fifteen minutes, giving the adrenaline time to wear off and the panic to subside—which might have been part of the reason for Nina’s suggestion to come over. Her car was an icebox now too, her profuse sweating back under control. She turned down the air conditioner, feeling a little foolish now. It wasn’t as if she and Nina had become pals after the Jordanville Ranch experience.
The last time Riley had been to Nina’s was months ago, back when she and Riley’s best friend Jade had attended one of Nina’s monthly séances. Riley suppressed a shiver at the memory of the creepy smile that had come over Nina’s face at the end of her spirit-induced automatic writing session, when Orin Jacobs’s spirit had used Nina as a vessel to relay messages.
When she pulled up outside the white house with its pair of black Adirondack chairs on the porch, Riley recalled sitting here with Jade as they watched Megan and Charlotte, affectionately dubbed the Goth Twins, walk up the steps.
Riley climbed out of the car and cautiously made her way to the door. It opened before Riley had a chance to knock. The woman, in her mid-forties, was short, pale, and had a dyed-black pixie cut.
“Hey, Riley,” Nina said, gesturing her inside. The small gold hoop in her right nostril glittered. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”
Slipping off her purse, Riley placed it on the coffee table in front of the white-and-blue checkered couch and gingerly took a seat. A row of owls on top of a low bookshelf across from the couch stared at her with unblinking eyes. Some of the birds were made of clay or porcelain, while others were made of fabric or pine cones. Eyes had been crafted out of buttons, beads, or painted on by a careful hand.
Riley had never been much of a collector of things, other than a handful of glass figurines. Her mother had gone through a brief sea otter phase a few years back, and now her house was full of them, her friends and family picking up sea otter-themed anything as a go-to gift. When her mother received a sea otter Christmas ornament made out of burlap, feathers, and nightmares from a coworker last year, she confessed to Riley that she was so sick of sea otters but she didn’t have the heart to tell anyone. The garage was filled with boxes of the ones too hideous to display in the house. Riley wondered if the same was the case with Nina and owls.
“There was a TV show I watched in secret when I was a kid,” Nina said as if she’d heard Riley’s musings. Nina approached the owl collection. There had to be at least twenty of them. “I was only about seven when I saw the show for the first time. In it, there was an undercurrent of the supernatural, which appealed to me since I hadn’t quite figured out what was going on with me yet. All I knew was that I had an ability that none of my friends did.”
Riley knew that feeling well.
“The supernatural creature terrorizing the small town had the ability to shift into an owl and could also use owls to spy on people. From the age of about seven to ten, I was deeply fascinated by owls. Young kids get fixated on stuff all the time, especially animals, so my parents didn’t think much of it at first. But one night, my mom found me in the backyard hooting up at the trees. It was two in the morning.”
Though Riley had no idea where Nina was going with this, she smiled softly at the image of a little girl in pajamas standing barefoot in wet grass in the middle of the night.
“That’s when Mom got freaked out. She tried asking very reasonable questions … you know, trying to be supportive. She asked if I was obsessed with owls because I wanted to be a veterinarian, or if I had heard one outside my window that night and had come out to investigate. I said, ‘No, Mom, I’m trying to learn how to talk Owl so I won’t be scared when I take my owl form.’”
“Yikes,” Riley said.
Nina laughed softly. “My mom said she would like to learn how to become an owl too, and that she’d love to know what it felt like to fly. I told her only I could become an owl because, ‘Only supernatural creatures like me can shape-shift. I have until puberty to figure this out.’”
“Oh wow,” Riley said. “What did she say to that?”
“She told me to come inside, made us some hot chocolate, and asked me to tell her what was going on with me,” Nina said. “For me, my abilities started with my grandma’s passing. She died from a quick-spreading liver cancer when I was eight. Even though I hadn’t been old enough to really understand death, I knew Grandma was gone and wasn’t coming back. Yet, Grandma did come back, but only for me.
“It turned out that quite a few family members had taken to using Grandma as a confessional while she was on her deathbed. She got very sick, very fast, and lost her ability to speak, so they told her their secrets, knowing she’d take them to the grave.
“About a week after she died, I had gone with my parents to Grandma’s to help clean the place out. Two sets of aunts and uncles and their kids were there too. While we were all in the living room packing and cleaning, I saw one aunt and uncle have a quiet moment together. They joked about something, he kissed her, and even at that young age, I had been struck by how much love was in my aunt’s face when she looked at him.”
Riley was still deeply puzzled by this conversation, which was made even more puzzling by the fact that Nina said all this with her attention still focused on the owls.
“Confused by what I saw,” Nina continued, “I said, ‘I don’t understand why you’d want to divorce Aunt Jill when she loves you so much, Uncle Rob.”
Riley winced. “Uh oh.”
Nina turned to her then. “All conversation in the room stopped like someone had hit the mute button. Aunt Jill laughed and asked why I would say such a thing. But in the next moment, everyone, even Aunt Jill, saw how pale Uncle Rob had gotten. Aunt Jill said, ‘What is she talking about, Rob?’ Rob just stared at her for a long time, swallowed hard, and said he hadn’t wanted to tell her like this, and that he’d planned to wait until after the dust had settled, and things like cleaning out Grandma’s house had been taken care of. Aunt Jill burst into tears and ran out of the room. Their two kids were my age and they started crying too, not understanding why the adults were so angry all of a sudden.
“Uncle Rob got right in my face and told me it was wrong of me to spy on private conversations. His face was bright red and I remember a few drops of spit hit me in the face. He thought I’d overheard him telling Grandma about the planned divorce. Uncle Rob wanted Jill’s mom to know that he still loved Jill, but that they weren’t a good fit anymore. He was apologizing to Grandma for planning to break her daughter’s heart.”
“Geez,” Riley said. “How did everyone else react?”
“My dad shoved him away from me,” Nina said, still standing beside her owl collection, her hands in her pockets. “Mom and Uncle Rob started screaming at each other about respect. I was sobbing. It was a mess. One little sentence and I’d ruined my entire family. My cousins—Jill and Rob’s kids—were so mad at me for so long. They blamed me for the divorce. Kids can be mean as hell, and since I already felt awful about what happened, I shouldered that blame for years. I suppose some part of me still does.”
“Sounds like this was your grandma’s fault,” Riley asked.
Nina chuckled. “She’d loved drama when she was alive, and that hadn’t changed in death. Yet, it was I who had said those things. I was the one who threw the bomb. I was convinced there was something wrong
with me. Or something wrong with Grandma. When she told me my seventeen-year-old cousin was pregnant, I kept it to myself. I didn’t tell anyone I knew Aunt Sarah had given up her firstborn for adoption.”
“Probably a good call,” Riley said.
“When that show about the owls came along, something in it resonated with my little eight-year-old brain,” Nina said. “I figured that once I mastered becoming an owl, I could fly away and stop causing so many problems for my family.”
Riley frowned at that, wishing she could go back in time and give weird little Nina a hug.
“When my mom sat me down with the hot chocolate that night and made me tell her what was going on, she’s the one who added ‘psychic medium’ to my vocabulary. She told me I wasn’t a demonic creature, and that Grandma wasn’t either. My parents bought me books about psychics, mediums, and the afterlife. We watched every show on the topic we could find. I eventually found a network of other psychics and like-minded people who helped me make sense of my ability.”
Riley chewed on her bottom lip, unsure of what to say. She’d been the one to call Nina but now she wasn’t sure what she was doing here. Nina had done all the talking. Gesturing to the rows of owls on top of the bookshelf, Riley said, “Are these all owls you got when you were a kid?”
Nina laughed. “My mom gets me an owl every year for my birthday as an inside joke—a reminder of the time I’d convinced myself I was a demonic shape-shifter who could speak to animals.” She finally walked over to Riley and sat beside her on the couch. “I’m telling you all this because whether your ability kicks in when you’re eight or eighty, there’s going to be a learning curve. Your path to living comfortably with it isn’t going to be a straight line. It’s going to be twisty, messy, and probably weird as hell.
“You can choose to manage it enough so that you can effectively turn it off, or you can swing in the other direction and do anything from paranormal investigations to group readings in packed conference halls.”
Shuttered Secrets Page 2
