Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Riley crossed her arms and glared at the shop’s front door.

  “You are mad,” he said, shutting off the car and turning to face her.

  “Of course I’m mad,” she said. “You’ve basically kidnapped me. I am under extreme duress.”

  “Well, we’ve reached the melodramatic portion of our show …”

  Riley angled her glare at him now, instead of at the front door.

  Michael winced and held his hands up in innocence. “Are you actually mad about the kidnapping, or are you mad at yourself that you want to go in there?”

  It took her a moment, her glare refocused on the consignment shop. “To be honest, I’m mostly mad at you now for knowing it’s the second one.”

  “Do you want me to come in with you or …”

  “Ugh,” she said, unfastening her seat belt and opening her door. “Come on. There’s a bunch of vintage games and stuff in here I’m sure your old ass will love. I think I saw a couple Game Boys last time.”

  He gasped dramatically and scrambled out of the car. “Why wouldn’t you lead with that?”

  When Riley reached the door she paused, hoping the door would be locked and they could leave and never come back. But the door pushed open with ease, and the faint scent of lavender whooshed out to greet her.

  The same older woman from before was behind the counter, her attention on a magazine laid open on the glass top. Her head snapped up when they walked in, a bright smile on her face that faltered just slightly when her magnified eyes behind her thick glasses landed on Riley.

  Michael had only been slightly exaggerating his excitement over the Game Boys. “Oh, man. You weren’t kidding. Do you need the moral support—”

  “Go crazy.”

  Michael offered the woman behind the counter a polite “Good afternoon, ma’am,” before heading down the middle aisle, gaping at the games. He held up a Game Boy and mouthed, “There’s a box, too!”

  What the eff was it with guys and “the original box”?

  Shaking her head, she shot him a thumbs-up, then steeled herself as she walked to the counter.

  “Hello again,” the woman said as Riley approached. Her name tag said Carol. “You were here the other day to purchase the cameras, weren’t you?”

  Riley wondered if Carol had so few customers that she easily remembered them. But then she recalled the woman’s odd behavior and she wondered again if the cameras weren’t actually in working order. “Yep, that’s me.”

  “What … uhh … can I help you with today?” Carol asked, hands folded on the magazine. A quick glance revealed that it was a tabloid. She unfolded her hands, laying them flat on the glass surface of the counter. After a moment, she scratched the side of her nose.

  Riley cocked her head. “I was wondering if you knew anything about the person who owned the storage unit where the cameras came from.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Carol said. “The units usually go up for auction due to the owner not paying their fees. The details of why the customer stopped paying—assuming the storage unit facility even knows—aren’t disclosed to the buyers. I didn’t attend the auction. It’s not really my bag. But my friend has a good eye for these kinds of things, so I trust her judgement. Plus, I believe this one was way out in Clovis.”

  Clovis was on the eastern edge of New Mexico, near the border with Texas. Brynn Bodwell, according to the article Riley had seen a snippet of last night, had lived in and been found in Taos, which was in the north end of the state. Information was supposed to help her sort out her jumbled thoughts, not confuse her further. Was there no connection between Brynn and the woman in the yellow dress? Maybe her psychic wires had gotten crossed.

  “Is there something wrong with the cameras?” Carol asked, derailing Riley’s train of thought. “All sales are final,” she said, tapping the small, handwritten “Absolutely No Refunds!” sign taped to the corner of the glass countertop.

  “I’m not looking to return them,” Riley said. “The cameras just have a … quirk, and I have very specific questions about that quirk.” Chewing her bottom lip, she shot a glance over her shoulder. Michael was halfway down the shop now, still perusing the shelves. Her gaze jumped past him and landed on the glass case of dental equipment that the ghost woman had been standing in front of the last time Riley had been here. Turning back to Carol, Riley asked, “Has the owner of a storage unit ever come in trying to track down their items?”

  The crease between Carol’s brows smoothed out. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you? The woman in the yellow dress, I mean.”

  Riley’s brows shot toward her hairline. She stared at Carol dumbly for what felt like an hour before she finally asked, “You’ve seen her?”

  Eyeing Michael for a moment, Carol lowered her voice. “I had a feeling you saw her when you were here. I saw her that day, too. Since those cameras left the store, I haven’t seen her. When you deal with this many old items, it’s sort of inevitable you’ll pick up a few ghosts along the way,” she said. “Most of my friends in the business have said they’ve dealt with a haunting at least once. One friend gives every new item she gets a good sage before she brings it into her store. She had a nasty malevolent spirit once. Gives ‘bull in a china shop’ a whole new meaning. That ghost was hopping mad.”

  Riley stared at her. “How’d she get rid of it?”

  “Oh, it was a big to-do,” Carol said. “She hired a demonologist and everything.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Nope! Ticked the thing off even more. She culled half her inventory and moved,” Carol said. “I heard the old location is still haunted. Every business that sets up shop there ends up shutting down in a year or less.”

  Riley winced. For the sake of both Riley’s sanity and Jade’s three-car garage, Riley was glad her ghost wasn’t “hopping mad.” Just a very sad woman who wanted Riley’s help. “You didn’t feel the need to disclose the fact that they were haunted?”

  Carol flushed. “I’m sorry. As harmless as that poor girl is, I have to say I was a bit relieved that she left with the cameras. She’s just so … miserable. The mood of the whole shop changed when she appeared. And I did try to be honest with customers before, but it scared them off. You’re the first customer who saw the woman in the yellow dress, far as I can tell, so I guess I thought she’d be in better hands with you.”

  Riley wanted to be angry with her but couldn’t muster up the emotion. After all, Riley herself had foisted the cameras off on Jade after a few visitations from the sad spirit. “Do you see ghosts often?”

  “Oh, goodness no,” Carol said. “I only ever see them here and it’s very rare.” After a thoughtful moment she added, “But I get the feeling you see them all the time. What are you special ones called again … the indigo children? Are you one of those?”

  Riley hadn’t known her maternal grandmother for very long; she had passed away when Riley was eight. But Grandma Nat had “the gift of sight” too, able to see and communicate with ghosts the way Riley could. She’d talked to Riley about the indigo children a few times; Grandma Nat had been a bit of a new agey hippie. The indigo children were said to be on a different plane of existence, here to shake up the status quo. Riley didn’t think that description fit her, but Grandma Nat liked to tell Riley and her mother how special they were. Riley’s mom had only inherited the psychic part of psychic medium.

  “Something like that,” Riley said.

  Carol nodded. “You might have more luck talking to my friend who went to the auction. Would you like her contact info?”

  “Sure,” Riley said. “Thanks.”

  Carol rummaged around on the shelf below the cash register, then produced a small pad of paper and a pen.

  Just because Riley got the woman’s phone number, it didn’t mean she had to do anything with it, she assured herself. She could palm the piece of paper Carol was writing on now, then discreetly drop the wadded ball in the trash outside the groomer’s without Michael seeing her do i
t, and that would be that.

  Until the sad woman in the yellow dress materialized at the foot of Riley’s bed, that is. Or another dream about Brynn pulled her from sleep.

  Carol tore the note off the pad and handed it to Riley. “That’s her cell, the number to her shop, and the address. Her name’s Martha but she goes by Marty. I’ll let her know to expect a call or visit.”

  Riley offered a tight-lipped smile to the note, then to Carol. “Thanks.”

  Michael came up behind her then. “Do you have any games for the Game Boy?”

  “Everything I’ve got is on the shelf,” Carol said. “But I’ve seen quite a few pop up on eBay.”

  “Ugh, don’t give him any ideas,” Riley said.

  After Michael paid for the ancient console, they thanked Carol and headed for the door.

  “If you ever find out what makes the poor girl so sad, do let me know, will you?” Carol called after them.

  Riley offered her an awkward wave goodbye in response, then followed Michael outside.

  That night, Riley couldn’t sleep. She lay awake, staring at her ceiling, listening to Baxter squeaking periodically in his sleep, and Michael lightly snoring in his. She knew she had likely already stepped over the “I’m not getting involved” line.

  Her mind buzzed with questions.

  She gave it another few minutes, screaming Sleep, dammit! at herself, which she quickly learned wasn’t conducive to maintaining a calm and relaxed mind. Eventually she muttered a mental fuck it, and crept out of bed. She grabbed her pajama pants off the floor and her cell phone off the bedside table, then tiptoed into the living room without waking anyone up.

  Once she’d pulled on her pants, sat cross-legged on the couch, and settled under the blanket Michael had left pooled on one of the cushions, she opened a browser on her phone. She squinted as the bright white of the search page nearly blinded her in the dark. After adjusting her screen settings to low brightness, she typed in “Brynn Bodwell.”

  A photo popped up immediately of a beautiful blonde woman with blue eyes and an infectious smile. After some searching, Riley found the same article that the woman in her dream had been crying over. It had been in a 2003 article from the Taos Sun Times.

  Young Woman Found Slain

  According to a press release from the Taos Police Department, the body of Brynn Bodwell, 20, was found at the base of a boat ramp in the Orilla Verde Recreation Area early this morning, near the Taos Junction Bridge. Her nude body had been washed prior to being dumped at the site. Bodwell had been reported missing by her family a week ago. They had known immediately that something was wrong when she hadn’t been in communication with any of her friends or relatives for several hours.

  Bodwell’s boyfriend, Liam Sotheby, 22, had a date scheduled with Bodwell that evening to celebrate their two-year anniversary. “She said she had a surprise for me and was going to show me after she went to the gym,” Sotheby said. ‘I hate that I’ll never know what the surprise was.”

  Bodwell left her parents’ house around 7:45 pm that evening with her gym bag and a change of clothes. “She liked going to the local gym up the road in the evening because there were fewer people there,” her mother said. “She said if she got there close to 8, the after-work crowd would be gone and she could be on the treadmill as long as she wanted. We’d signed up for a 10K this summer.”

  The security footage from the parking lot of the gym provided little insight into what happened to the 20-year-old the night of her disappearance. The angle of the camera only shows part of the parking lot. It captured enough to show that Bodwell arrived at the gym a little before 8, as planned, but she didn’t immediately get out of her car. Within a few minutes, a second car arrived and pulled in behind her, perpendicular with her trunk. The angle of the camera provided only a partial view of this second darker car—possibly blue or black.

  Bodwell got out of her vehicle without her bag and rounded the car that had pulled in behind her. Shortly after that, the car drove away with Bodwell presumably inside. The security camera didn’t pick up the license plate. All of Bodwell’s belongings except for her phone were left in the vehicle. Robbery has been ruled out as a motive.

  A week later, Bodwell’s nude body was discovered in the recreation center. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

  The Taos Police Department encourages anyone with any information about what might have happened to Brynn Bodwell to contact them or Crime Stoppers. A $100,000 reward is being offered to anyone who can provide information that leads to an arrest.

  Despite living in New Mexico all her life, Riley had only been to Taos a handful of times, most of which had been when she’d been a kid taking in-state road trips with her parents.

  A bit more searching revealed that Brynn’s case had made national news. Riley had been eight or nine when it had happened; she had no memory of it. She wondered if her parents did. The story had been covered by Unsolved Mysteries, Disappeared, 20/20, and Dateline.

  Riley climbed off the couch long enough to pluck her earbuds out of her purse on the table by her front door. A quick search for videos about Brynn Bodwell turned up a clip of her Unsolved Mysteries episode. In it, they discussed the list of suspects. They ran the gamut—her boyfriend, an employee at the gym, someone from the veterinary program she had been in. It appeared as if she’d known the person who had pulled up behind her, as no struggle had been evident in the grainy black-and-white footage from the security camera. But, Riley supposed, if the person in the car had a gun, perhaps Brynn merely hadn’t struggled because of self-preservation.

  Though friends and family had been adamant that Brynn and Liam were devoted to each other, there still had been a search of Brynn’s computer in hopes of finding plans for a clandestine meeting with someone she had been seeing on the sly. A ping from her missing phone had led police on a wild goose chase, ending in the discovery of the phone in the brush on the side of a road across the border in Texas. It was speculated that the phone had been thrown out a window as a way to throw police off the scent.

  After years of tracking down every lead and tip, the case grew steadily colder.

  The only two breadcrumbs Riley’s psychic medium abilities had given her so far were Brynn’s name and the sightings of the woman in the yellow dress that had been triggered after acquiring the cameras. Carol had said that the auction had taken place in Clovis, though, not Taos.

  Riley typed “missing women New Mexico 2003” into her search bar. There was a Facebook page devoted solely to women and girls who had gone missing in the state, or who were believed to have last been seen here. When she narrowed it down to Black women, nearly a dozen popped up. The term “human trafficking” came up with alarming frequency.

  The longer she looked, the more disturbing the statistics became. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children—a site she’d gotten familiar with when tracking down both Pete Vonick and Francis Hank Carras—more than 600,000 people went missing every year, and two-thirds of them were people of color. Black, brown, and Indigenous women especially went missing at higher numbers than other demographics. Though Black women made up less than ten percent of the United States population, they comprised upward of twelve percent of those missing. There were often as many as 75,000 missing Black women across the country at any given time, and yet their cases were often both grossly underreported and discounted as runaways, especially with younger women.

  Riley scanned the faces of the women who were listed as missing in the state around the same time Brynn had gone missing, but the woman in the yellow dress wasn’t among them. She thought about Brynn’s phone pinging in Texas, and suddenly the map of the United States opened up in her head. With so little information about the woman in the yellow dress, it was impossible to know where she’d come from. Had she been snatched from Taos and taken across state lines? In human trafficking cases, stolen girls and women were moved constantly, both to keep them removed from anything fam
iliar, and to help keep their kidnappers from being caught. The woman in the yellow dress being a native of New Mexico was just as likely as her being snatched from elsewhere and later dying here.

  The possibilities, each one more awful than the next thanks to her wild imagination, ratcheted her anxiety. It still felt like too much responsibility.

  Heaving out a sigh, Riley pulled up Netflix on her phone and settled in to watch one of her favorite early episodes of Tiana’s Circle. There was an unexplainable comfort in watching something so familiar, in knowing what would come next. The real world was too much of an unpredictable mess.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Michael must have realized she wasn’t in bed with him, because when she woke in the morning, he was on the couch with her in an awkward semi-upright position, Baxter draped across them both.

  When she finally drifted back to sleep, it was blissfully dreamless.

  2007

  The feeling in my gut was unbearable. I’d woken up with it, as if some ten-ton animal had crawled onto my stomach in the night and the pressure had forced me awake. It wasn’t hunger or thirst, because even after breakfast and coffee, it was still there. In fact, it had shifted from gut to chest, and the sickening pressure had turned to a soul-deep yearning.

  None of my usual tricks were working.

  Desperate, I went for a run in the apartment complex gym. A line of five treadmills were lined up along a wall-length mirror. Though my back faced the door, the mirrors would let me see if anyone came in. It was one of the amenities that rarely got used here, though, so I was confident I would be able to sweat this out in peace.

  It was just my luck that when I was only two miles in, Apartment 16 pushed her way into the gym with her tight little pants, swaying ponytail, and a towel draped over her shoulder. For two years, I’d been coveting her. I’d learned her patterns over the years, allowing me to steer clear. And now, when I was practically crawling out of my skin, she was here. Why was she here?