Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Jade shivered. “Did it just get colder?”

  “Yeah. I think she’s trying to pull energy into herself.” Riley grabbed the camera out of the box, then glanced up at the sad woman in the yellow dress. “Are you on this roll of film?”

  The temperature in the garage still steadily dropped, and the woman’s face was even more pinched now.

  Yes, someone said directly into her ear, causing goosebumps to skitter down Riley’s arms.

  The woman vanished, taking the cold air with her.

  Jade shuddered. “Is she gone?”

  “Yeah,” said Riley, looking down at the camera. “I don’t think this belonged to her. She clearly has a connection to it, but it’s a weak connection. I might be able to communicate with her better if I have something of hers.”

  Jutting her chin at the camera, Jade said, “Like a picture?”

  A little flutter of hope took flight in Riley’s chest. “Yeah, like a picture.”

  They were silent for a few beats.

  “Since Michael isn’t here, I guess I’ll be devil’s advocate,” Jade said. “What I said earlier … that what’s on that film could be the smoking gun in a murder case … it’s kind of eating away at my brain now. Do you think you should take the camera to the police?”

  Riley had started shaking her head before the question fully left Jade’s mouth. “The problem is, there’s currently nothing about this camera that connects it to Brynn or Shawna. What would I say? ‘Here’s a camera that was owned by an unknown person who may have murdered three people’? If they ask what evidence I have and I say I had a sort-of dream about Brynn, what are they supposed to do with that?”

  Jade chewed on the inside of her cheek.

  “And who do I turn it over to? The Taos police department, since that’s the town where Brynn and Shawna were found? Or to the Clovis police, since that’s where the unit was? What if the woman appearing to me now wasn’t killed in Taos or Clovis … what if she wasn’t from New Mexico at all?”

  “True,” Jade said slowly, brows furrowed. “Maybe you can find the officer or officers who worked on the Brynn or Shawna cases and give the camera to them, like you did with Renee? That worked with Detective Howard.”

  “Yes, but I also had indirectly witnessed Renee’s murder by then,” Riley said. “He was skeptical from jump, but when I told him what details I had been shown from the crime scene, that’s what helped sway him. I knew things someone my age with no connection to the crime should have known. And even then, I got a lot of ‘We’re working on it’ when I called to check up on his progress. He had been swayed, but not so swayed that he made researching the case his top priority or anything.” She lightly shook her head. “All I have is a dream about a friend of Brynn’s crying over the article about Brynn’s death. I don’t know the friend’s name. I don’t know anything about the crime scene. I know even less about Shawna and the woman in the yellow dress.”

  Jade sighed, her shoulders slumping a little. “And I guess just because Howard was open to the idea of psychic mediums, it doesn’t mean the next cop will be.”

  “Right,” Riley said. “And even if the next cop is open to it, he or she can’t know who is legitimately a psychic and who is making things up, or is mentally unstable, or whatever else. Who knows how many psychics have called them about this case already, giving them countless leads that don’t pan out? If I go in with nothing to back up my psychic claims, they’ll be twice as likely to discount me immediately.

  “Plus, if Detective Howard is right, and the Taos police department messed up in connecting these cases, they might not want to investigate what’s on the film. At best, they say they’ll look into it and the camera gets stuck in an evidence box to collect dust for years, and at worst, the camera and/or the film goes missing. It wouldn’t be the first time evidence disappeared to control the outcome of a case, or to protect the culprit or the department. Not to mention there might be nothing on this film other than flowers and landscapes.”

  Jade sighed. “Okay. So, same plan: we get these pictures developed on our own. We’ll keep the cameras here until then since I’m assuming you don’t want them in your apartment overnight.”

  “That would be a solid hell no.” Then she winced slightly and eyed the spot over Jade’s shoulder where the woman had stood not that long ago. “No offense.” Riley gently placed the camera back in the box, wondering not only what secrets were hidden behind the closed film door, but who had taken the pictures in the first place.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jade assured Riley that both she and Jonah would be out of the house by eight the next morning, so Riley headed there at quarter after. It would have been more logical for Riley to have taken the camera or film cartridge with her last night. She knew that. It wasn’t as if not having the camera in her possession hindered the woman in the yellow dress’s ability to pop in unannounced. But the woman had managed to communicate with Riley for the first time. It had only been a single word—Yes—but it was more than she’d been able to do so far. Either Riley’s proximity to the camera had given the woman an extra ghostly jolt, or the spirit was getting stronger. Nina told Riley that she could get better at dealing with ghosts if she practiced. Did the same go the other way, with ghosts learning to communicate with the living the more they tried? Sleep was already hard to come by. If the camera had been in her apartment, she wouldn’t have slept at all—it felt like having guests over and being compelled to keep them entertained.

  Riley called Michael on the way.

  “You there yet?” he asked, the sounds of the road audible in the background, meaning he was in his car, too, on his way to work.

  “Just left,” she said, then stifled a yawn. She and Jade had been up late into the night, texting each other links for places scattered all over the country that offered film development services.

  Michael had been caught up on her latest theory: that the woman in the yellow dress, Brynn, and Shawna were all victims of the same killer—and that there could be more.

  Then she yawned so deeply again, her eyes watered. This was not a safe condition for driving.

  “How late did you two stay up anyway?” Michael asked.

  It was her sleep deprivation that made her say, “Not that long. I just haven’t slept.”

  “Riley,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Kinda comes with the territory. Once I start letting the spirits in, they can get persistent. Which is why I usually haul ass in the opposite direction.”

  “Now I feel bad for encouraging any of this. Maybe it’s too soon for you to be looking into another serial killer,” he said. “Wow, that’s really a sentence I just said to my girlfriend.”

  Riley smiled ruefully. “Eh. It’s too late. I’m curious as hell about what happened to her.”

  Sighing, he said, “Me too. I’m just worried about you. At least you’ll be here tonight. I’ll make sure you sleep. It’s just too bad the days of one-hour photo places are long gone. We could have looked at these pictures together tonight.”

  “Yeah, agree. The place we’re going to send the film to said it’ll take at least a week to get them back. But they’ll send a CD of the pictures, prints, and return the negatives. I don’t know if we’ll even need the negatives, but it sounds like most drug stores don’t return them anymore.”

  “Now we just have to cross our fingers that what’s on this film isn’t some Freddy Krueger-level shit that makes the film tech get the vapors and pass out,” Michael said. “Or send the FBI to your house to ask what in the hell you’ve been up to.”

  Ugh. “Do you think there are support groups for psychic mediums? This is stressful.”

  “I’ll do some research,” he said. “I just got to the office so I have to head in. Call my desk phone if you need me.”

  She almost—almost—said, “Okay, love you!” as a sign-off, but chickened out and said, “All righty!” instead, like the weirdo she was.

 
Pulling into Jade’s driveway, she hit the button on the garage clicker Jade had given her last night. She climbed out and then crept into the garage, as if she were sneaking into the woman-in-the-yellow-dress’s house. The woman didn’t materialize. Jade had hidden the cameras behind an old red toolbox last night. Riley beelined for it. She slid the box toward her on the wooden shelf, grabbed the camera in question, and then pushed the remaining two back into their hiding place.

  Mission complete, Riley got back in the car, placed the camera on her passenger seat, and hit the button for Jade’s garage door.

  She eyed the camera. “Please don’t appear in my car while I’m driving.”

  She got no response, which suited her just fine.

  Before she headed out, something suddenly occurred to her. If this camera truly had been owned by the person who had killed the woman in the yellow dress, was it possible that his fingerprints were still on the film cartridge? Finding fingerprints on the camera was already a moot point. Between the camera being sold at auction, its arrival at Reinholt Consignment, and eventually being purchased by Jade, countless people had touched the body of the camera. But maybe the film itself, since it was still inside, hadn’t been handled much aside from the person who had put the film in the camera to begin with.

  She fished her cell phone out of her purse sitting on the passenger seat floorboard, did a quick search, and then called Reinholt Consignment.

  “Thank you for calling Reinholt Consignment,” a woman said. “This is Carol. How may I help you?”

  “Hi, Carol,” Riley said. “This is Riley Thomas. The … uhh … indigo child.”

  “Oh, yes! Hi, dear. Have you solved the mystery of why our friend is so sad?”

  “I’m working on it,” Riley said. “I had a question, though. Did you notice that one of the cameras had film in it?”

  Carol was quiet for a moment. “Yes. The whole lot of cameras felt so haunted, I was worried that if I altered them in any way, it could cause problems. My friend, the one who dealt with the poltergeist? That’s what happened to her. She bought a locked jewelry box from an estate sale. The woman running the sale was the previous owner’s granddaughter. She had no idea where the key was. Well, that ghost was already ticked off about being taken from his home after the sale, and then my friend jimmied that lock open and broke the mechanism while trying to open the box. Hoo-boy! That’s when the grumpy ghost went poltergeist on her. When I told her I’d picked up a ghost in addition to the cameras, and that there was film in one of them, she told me to sell it all as is, and not to fuss with anything.”

  Which explained Carol’s squirrelly behavior.

  “So no one has opened that camera?” Riley asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Carol said. “I got them appraised to make sure they were in working order, but I told the man to leave the film cartridge alone.”

  “Got it. Thanks. If I figure out who she was, I’ll let you know.”

  “All right, hon,” she said. “Good luck.”

  Riley dropped her phone back into her purse and headed for the post office, unsure of what to do with this information. Even if Carol and the appraiser hadn’t touched the cartridge, someone else might have. When she reached her destination, she pulled into a parking space and killed the engine, but didn’t immediately get out. If the killer’s prints were on the cartridge, they would get rubbed away by the techs at the company in California when they opened the package. Not to mention that part of the instructions for shipping the film was to label the cartridge with a Sharpie—that alone could ruin any potential prints.

  She grabbed her cell again, this time calling Detective Howard.

  It rang four times before he picked up, with chatter muted and persistent in the background. “Hi, Riley. Is this urgent?”

  “I just had a quick question. It’s about the Brynn and Shawna cases. I may have found something.”

  She bit down on her lip during the silence, wondering if he was going to humor her. He issued a little sigh. “Mark, I’ll be right back. I want pictures of every inch of this place, okay?” The sound of chatter dwindled in the background, and she heard the sound of a door open and close. “Okay, Riley, what did you find?”

  Was he at a crime scene? She had to tell her true-crime-loving self to chill the eff out and not ask a million questions. But it also reminded her that detectives like Howard were constantly busy with current cases; making time for cold ones wasn’t always possible, especially if the department was small, like the one in Taos.

  Not wanting to keep him for too long, she told him the latest—about the camera, the woman communicating that she was on this roll of film, and Riley’s concern that prints might be on the cartridge.

  “Interesting …” Detective Howard said. “I cannot advise you on what to do here, mostly because I don’t want this to bite me in the ass later. There are resources online that will help you lift prints if you’re so inclined to try, but it’s also not something I would necessarily recommend, because if you don’t know what you’re doing, you risk damaging the cartridge. All I can say is that if you do this, document everything. I can’t say that even if you find a print that it would stand up as viable evidence in court, but if there’s documentation, it might help lend it some credibility.”

  “Howard!” someone called out in the background. “I think we got another one.”

  “Shit,” Howard muttered. “Sorry. I gotta go, Riley. Let me know if you find anything out.”

  He hung up before she could say goodbye.

  Resources online to help her lift prints, huh? She pulled up a search engine on her phone and Googled “DIY fingerprint powder.” Though she shouldn’t have been surprised, finding what she needed took a matter of seconds. Once she had her list—latex gloves, graphite powder, clear plastic tape, microscope slides, and a delicate makeup brush—she backed out of the lot.

  She got everything she needed in two trips; one to a hardware store, and the other to a craft supply one. She’d known that the craft shop by her apartment sold microscope slides, thanks to all her maid of honor shopping for Jade.

  She supposed being maid of honor for her best friend wasn’t all bad.

  Within an hour, she had returned to her apartment with her supplies. It was just after ten now; she still had a couple hours before her shift. She placed her purchases and the camera on her coffee table, then grabbed a small bowl out of the kitchen.

  “May I also request that you don’t pop up in the apartment right now?” Riley said as she returned to the living room, addressing the camera as she situated herself in front of the table, her back resting against the couch. “Detective Howard already has me freaked out that I’m going to destroy this thing, and if you materialize in the middle of this, graphite powder is going to go everywhere—and my vacuum is broken.”

  She didn’t actually own a vacuum, but she didn’t need the woman in the yellow dress to know that. She watched a quick video on how to get the film out of the camera. Then she stared down at her supplies in dismay.

  Document everything, he’d said.

  Grabbing her phone, she pulled up the video function and flipped the camera view to selfie mode. She hit record, then addressed the camera. She stated her name, the date, where she had gotten the camera, and when. “I’m going to open the film door, take out the cartridge, and attempt to lift a print. I will document the process.”

  Wincing slightly and shrugging, she propped the phone against a small stack of books. She fiddled with the angle until she had a good view of the table and her supplies. Once she had a small amount of the graphite powder poured out into the dish, she strapped on her gloves. The button on the side of the film door didn’t give right away and she had to jiggle it to get the latch to pop free. She cautiously lifted the door, peeking inside, relieved to see that the film was fully inside the green-and-black cartridge. She did her best to give a verbal play-by-play to her phone’s camera.

  Once the cartridge was free, she he
ld it up between her purple-latex-covered forefinger and thumb, unsure if latent fingerprints were usually visible to the naked eye. Shrugging, she gently sat the cartridge upright. It was cylindrical, with a short, upraised tube at the top, like a small straw.

  Pulling the makeup brush from its packaging, she swept it across the back of her gloved hand a few times—more of a nervous tic than anything—and then pulled the small dish of graphite powder toward her. She had visions of being struck by a surprise sneeze attack and sending powder across the table.

  With the cartridge once again held between forefinger and thumb, she picked up a small amount of powder on the brush and then very gently swept it along the cylindrical cartridge. She tried to channel all the forensic scientists she’d seen doing this on TV, yet was fairly certain real forensic scientists would be horrified she was trying this at all.

  “Note to self,” she muttered, “befriend a forensic scientist.” Then she blushed furiously when she realized that would be on the video now, should anyone ever watch it.

  Back and forth, back and forth she went with her brush, hoping some sign of a fingerprint would reveal itself. She had just turned the cartridge for the third time, preparing to brush the last section, when what looked like half a print emerged, outlined in black powder. Riley almost dropped the cartridge in her excitement. Willing her hands to remain steady, she brushed on a bit more of the powder. Definitely a partial print. She wanted to pump a fist in the air, but her hands were full. She gently blew on the cartridge and sent a fine spray of graphite powder onto her coffee table.

  She carefully set the cartridge down and removed her gloves, knowing that handling tape with them on would be a chore in itself. Getting a piece of tape onto the cartridge without screwing this all up was going to be a miracle, but she would try it anyway. Pulling free a stretch of clear plastic packing tape, she hovered the piece over the cartridge to get an approximation of size, then trimmed the tape so it was the same width as the cartridge. In doing all this, she noted that the tape was now covered in her own prints. So she tore off another piece and started again, trying to be more mindful.