“Is your name Amy Velasco?” came Olivia’s voice, the sliding red line of the time marker moving to the right over the blue lines indicating the peaks and valleys of Olivia’s voice.
Several seconds passed by as Olivia allowed her potential ghost to reply.
“Daughter.”
“Whoa,” Riley said.
“Right? It’s a slog, but when you find EVPs like this, it’s like discovering gold.”
The next two were harder to parse out, the replies a bit garbled and staticky. To Riley, the reply to Nina’s “Why are you still here?” sounded like “painted” while it sounded like “placement” to Nina.
When Riley asked, “What happened to you?” the ghostly reply sounded like “down the hall” to her, but sounded like “I had it all” to Nina.
“This last one is the clearest,” Nina said, navigating to the last audio clip.
Riley’s own voice rang out as she asked, “Are you here intentionally?” to which the immediate reply was “Help Amy.”
The warmth from Riley’s mug wasn’t enough to stave off the chills that forced goosebumps to spring up on her arms. “Are you planning to contact her daughter?” she finally asked, unable to keep her curiosity in check any longer.
“It seems we might have to. I believe Iris won’t move on until Amy is informed about what happened to her mother. Your research showed the conventional wisdom is that she died by suicide. She wants her daughter to know she didn’t leave her on purpose.”
“Do you have to make cold calls about messages from the other side often?” Riley asked.
“It’s rare. I’m going to ask Julie how she feels about getting in contact with her realtor. If she explains the situation to them, we might be able to get in contact with Amy that way. If the message comes from a source of authority to start off with, sometimes the message is better received.”
Riley nodded. “And there’s a video clip, too?”
Nina directed her cursor back to the file section and pulled up the short twenty-second clip. “It happens quickly, so I can play it a couple times if you miss it.”
The shot was from the kitchen, where the camera had been set up in the corner by the patio doors and aimed toward the dining room table, kitchen sink, and the window facing the front of the house. Riley worried at her bottom lip as she watched, gaze darting wildly around the image. Something dark and possibly shiny whooshed past the window beyond the kitchen sink. Riley jumped.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“I’ll play it again. Tell me when to hit pause.”
When the video restarted, Riley focused on the window alone, waiting. “There.”
With the image frozen, Riley leaned forward even more, head cocked. “That looks like a ladder, doesn’t it? Like it tipped sideways? If she fell in the front yard, she could have easily hit her head on the cement walkway or any of those bricks that line that little front garden.”
“Right. It could explain the cracked front tooth too,” Nina said.
Riley nodded, recalling Iris’s little whimper at seeing the state of her own face. A cracked front tooth must have hurt like hell, yet she was so disoriented, she hadn’t noticed until later.
“For the consult, only jump in to offer information if you’re comfortable doing so,” Nina said. “We’ll be explaining to Julie what the nature of the haunting is, show her the evidence, and then let her decide how she wants to proceed. I’m hoping she’ll happily contact the realtor on our behalf if it means getting the ghost out of her house. Usually if you give the client a little bit of agency, they’ll step up to help.”
After they finished their coffee, Riley followed Nina to Julie’s house. Her daughters were outside on the lawn when Riley and Nina arrived. They were sprawled out on their stomachs on the lawn on top of a towel, each busily working crayons across their coloring books. The older girl was filling in the tiny details of a mermaid’s scaly tail, while the younger one was coloring the sky a blood red with furious strokes of her crayon. They hardly looked up when Nina and Riley walked past them.
Nina made her way up the steps, where Julie already had the door open, but Riley stopped a few feet from the porch. Eyeing the bricks that lined the small garden of bushy flowers, Riley tried to imagine Iris falling here and chipping a tooth on one of the sharp edges. She rubbed her tongue back and forth against her own front teeth as she walked across the grass and squatted before the garden. She had just reached out a hand to touch the brick when a little voice sounded beside her.
“You’re here ’cause of the ghost lady, right?”
Riley glanced over to find the youngest little girl squatted there, mirroring her own posture. “Yeah. Have you seen her?”
“Only one time,” the little girl said. “I heard a scream at night. It woke me up and I came outside ’cause I thought it was my mom. But it was the ghost lady. I saw her lying in the grass out right here and I thought maybe she’d falled off the roof, but then she went poof.”
“That sounds scary,” Riley said, a pang filling her chest. This little girl reminded her so much of Pete in that moment for some reason. She knew he was in a better place, wherever that was, because he was no longer trapped on that ranch, but she still sometimes wished she could see him again.
“Yeah, I ran back inside and jumped in bed and pulled the covers over my head,” she said, pulling at a long piece of grass between her bare feet. “I told my sister I sawed the ghost lady but she said I was lying.” She looked up at Riley then, her blue eyes wide. “But I really sawed her. And she really did go poof.”
“I believe you. I’ve seen ghost people since I was about your sister’s age. They go poof a lot.”
The little girl nodded sagely at that. “I want the ghost lady to go away. Mommy and Daddy don’t like her and they fight sometimes.”
“That’s why my friend Nina and I are here. We’re trying to figure out why the ghost lady is here, and if we can help her, she’ll go away.”
The little girl thought about that for a moment, then successfully pulled the piece of grass from the earth. She tossed it into the garden and got to her feet. “Cool. Bye!” She ran off to rejoin her sister.
Riley, smiling softly to herself, reached out and touched one of the bricks. No snapshots of the past were triggered by the contact. Giving the brick a parting tap, she stood and joined Nina and Julie inside, following their voices toward the dining room.
“I hope Lucy wasn’t talking your ear off,” Julie said as Riley rounded the kitchen counter and stepped into the dining area.
Riley shook her head. “She’s a cute kid.”
Nina and Julie were seated side by side in front of Nina’s computer, so Riley took a seat across from them, listening quietly while Nina gave a brief explanation of what EVPs were. She then played them in succession. Riley was amused to hear that Julie’s guesses for the middle two were different from Riley’s and Nina’s.
Julie had her fingers pressed to her mouth as she listened to the last EVP, tears in her eyes. Finally, she lowered her hands. “How does she want you to help her daughter?”
“We’re not sure yet. We believe Iris’s death was an accident,” Nina said. “Not suicide.”
Julie asked, “Do they really think she committed suicide by throwing herself off the steps?”
“We haven’t figured that part out yet either,” Nina said, “but I had a favor to ask of you. Are you still in contact with your realtor? We’d like to talk to Amy, but we hoped either you or your realtor could be a buffer for us so we don’t have to contact Iris’s grieving daughter out of the blue with news about her mother’s ghost.”
“Oh, goodness, I hadn’t even thought of how complicated this all could get for you. I can call him. I’ll let you know if he can give me any information.”
“That would be great,” Nina said.
After a few more minutes of talking, the consult was over, and while there weren’t any guarantees in place that the horrible crash of Ir
is falling down the stairs wouldn’t wake the family again, Julie stood a little straighter as she walked them toward the door. She didn’t yet have a solution for the problem plaguing her home, but she had more answers than she’d had two weeks ago.
Riley came up short in the front hallway, gazing up the stairs at where Iris stood. The spirit was more lucid now, even if she was still in her disheveled state.
Help Amy, she said.
“We will,” said Riley.
Iris nodded once, then turned back toward her old bedroom. Riley heaved out a relieved breath, then turned toward Julie, who had her head cocked in Riley’s direction.
“She’s still here, but I think the activity will decrease for a while,” Riley told her. “She was making all that racket because she needed to share a message. Now that she knows we have it, she doesn’t feel compelled to disrupt you.”
Julie gazed up the stairs now too, as if she herself could see Iris. Her wide-eyed expression swung back to Riley. “Thank you. You know, as a mom, I imagine I’d haunt this house if I was taken from my girls too soon. It makes me feel better to know that’s why she’s here—because she’s reaching out to her daughter after death. Hopefully we can track down Amy.”
“I hope so, too,” said Riley.
2005
My skin tingled in anticipation. It had been two years since my last companion, and the yearning had reached a fever pitch. I knew I had to bide my time—that playing it safe was better for all involved. But this was so hard. She was so close, nearly within reach. I had paid too much and waited too long to blow this opportunity now. I would be patient as I sat here watching, even as my body, as my very soul, called out to her.
I don’t think even The Collector understood the difficulty of waiting, and he understood me better than most.
When I got like this, I often returned to the message The Collector sent almost two years ago to the day. It grounded me as much as it pissed me off. I pulled it up on my phone.
I don’t care what you do with the information I give you, but Brynn was a mistake. Choose the ones who don’t have parents with fat checkbooks and you’ll succeed for a lot longer. And the longer you succeed, the longer I get paid. Win-win. Be smarter.
I paid the little weasel for his services, not his opinions. But he was right. Brynn had been a pie-in-the-sky dream. I’d watched her for weeks before I’d hired The Collector to put in the due diligence to get the information I needed. I thought, after Shawna, I could do it on my own. I’d tried to grab one once—a young girl by herself. But she’d been feisty and fought back. I’d been outmatched by a mere child.
Foolish. Mother always said hubris would be my downfall.
I wasn’t a ghost like The Collector. When I walked by, heads turned. When he walked by, people hardly blinked. It was a wonder he even had a reflection to look back at him in the mirror.
I’d seen Brynn for the first time when she was out for a run. I’d been on a walk along a nature trail, scoping out the site as a possible photoshoot location for a client who had booked me for engagement photos. I truly had been minding my own business when the blonde-haired goddess ran past me, the white wires snaking out of her earbuds swaying. She’d been accompanied by a tongue-lolling brown-and-white puppy that had snarled at me as they ran past.
The sight of Brynn had taken my breath away, and I’d forgotten why I’d been on the trail in the first place. It was if I’d been turned by the force of a magnet, and I’d spun to watch her go. She wore such tiny shorts; my gaze glued to those shapely calves. I refused to be ashamed of how attracted I was to her. If she didn’t want people to look, to covet, she would cover herself up.
But it was more than how beautiful she was. Something in me was drawn to her in a way I’ve been drawn to few others. The ones I’m drawn to are the ones I assign to The Collector, and his job had run past me in minuscule pink running shorts and matching shoes.
I needed Brynn in a way I hadn’t experienced since Shawna. I let Brynn get farther down the trail before I headed in her direction, knowing she would reach the parking lot in a few minutes. The fear that I would miss her, that she would be gone before I got back to the parking lot, sent a jolt of pain to my chest that was so acute, I almost collapsed. If Brynn was meant to be mine, the signs would show me the way. But perhaps the sign had been her arrival on that trail, running down the path. She had smiled at me when she went by, hadn’t she?
Hi, the smile said. Fancy meeting you here.
I ran.
By the time I reached the lot, my chest ached not from exertion, but in relief that my goddess was still there. She stretched by her car, earbuds still in. The puppy was too busy lapping up water from a bowl to notice me. I clocked her license plate number as I walked by, committing it to memory, knowing The Collector would need it. I didn’t know what her name was, but when I learned it a week later, I was pleased that my goddess had a name as pretty as her face.
Alas, that was all in the past now. Brynn was gone, as was Shawna. Though I cherished the time I’d spent with Brynn, she had caused so many problems for me. I had considered quitting altogether after the media storm. I watched the news with great interest, wondering if they were closing in on me. But authorities hadn’t connected Shawna and Brynn—hadn’t even come close. The idiots had been looking the wrong way. They still were.
After six months, the yearning could no longer be ignored, so I kept my eyes peeled for a new companion while out on the road. The publicity surrounding Brynn had made me nervous about straying too far from home, so when the gorgeous woman in Apartment 16 moved into the complex, I’d flown The Collector out to make an assessment. He shut me down. He shut down my next three as well. I trusted his judgement implicitly even while my frustration, my yearning, mounted. Apartment 16 wasn’t for me. Sometimes life wasn’t fair; you couldn’t always get what you wanted.
I had chosen more wisely this time, though. She was Collector approved. Another wannabe model, though her pursuits were a tad different than Brynn’s. Still, she was a beauty in her own right. I had spotted her just last month while out of town on one of my longer jobs. I was lucky both my careers allowed for so much travel, giving me the opportunity to experience all the nooks and crannies the country had to offer.
Months passed before I received the information I needed for this companion. The Collector’s extensive research allowed me to be in the right spot at the right time today.
My new beauty was in the midst of a photoshoot with a wet-behind-the-ears photographer who had no idea what he was doing. The lighting, the staging, even the colors the beauty wore were all wrong. The Collector had told me this guy was a joke, but I hadn’t thought it was this bad. The guy was sweating under his collar, likely because he knew he was out of his depth and the woman in front of him deserved better.
I watched from afar, perched on a bench pretending to read my book. To reach this spot, one had to walk up a tree-lined incline. The hiking trail either continued forward, or it veered off to the right to this flattened park area. The circular oasis boasted several park benches, well-tended grass, and a small play area for children. On the other side, surrounded on three sides by trees, was a massive gray boulder ringed in wildflowers.
The imbecile had the beauty atop the boulder like a mountain goat, encouraging her to do this with her hair, that with her arm, and to pout a little more dramatically. He was making her look like a buffoon, and the shadows cast by the wall of pine trees behind her were doing nothing for her. Not to mention she wore dark green, like the trees behind her—with skin as dark as hers, the amount of editing he would have to do to make these pictures salvageable was enough to make me pull my own hair out.
At some point, he realized he’d brought the wrong equipment bag with him. That was after he’d switched position to capture her from a better angle and had tripped over his own feet, face-planted, and been halfway swallowed up by the wildflowers surrounding the boulder.
He apologized profusely, told
her he’d be right back, and then sprinted back down the incline at the speed of a frightened jack rabbit. That was my cue, my first sign. I abandoned my book on the bench and approached her. The poor beauty looked so dejected up on that rock, but as I stood at the base of it and looked up, I couldn’t help but feel like I was a peasant at the feet of a queen.
“I’m sorry if this is an overstep,” I said, and she glanced toward me, momentarily shaken from the thoughts that plagued her. The frown lines marring her smooth skin deepened. “I couldn’t help but overhear everything. Can I guess … you’re an actress?”
The beauty smiled sadly. “A model. Well, I’m trying to be. This guy was the cheapest I could afford right now, and, well …”
“You get what you pay for?”
She groaned and pressed a hand to her face. “Did it look that bad?”
“Dreadful,” I said, but smiled as I said it, pulling a smile from her as well. My heart fluttered at the sight.
“Ugh, I’m such an idiot,” she said. “I can’t believe I agreed to this. And now he’s got basically all of next month’s rent in his pocket and I’m going to have unusable pictures because this guy tricked me into thinking his credentials were legit. I’m just trying to get started and if this is already such a mess, clearly this was a mistake. A sign from the universe that I was fooling myself.” She whimpered. “And now I’m spilling my guts to a stranger! Sorry. I need to get out of here.”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. She also lived according to signs. This was a sign in itself.
She glanced around, trying to find the best path off the boulder. She was a good five feet off the ground and wore a clingy dress and flimsy sandals—certainly not climbing attire.
“Here, let me help you,” I said.
I was a complete gentleman as I helped her, only briefly glancing down the front of her dress and catching sight of the beige-colored bra lying flush to that supple dark skin.
“Thanks.” Once back on her feet, she brushed off the back of her dress, and readjusted her top. “Have a good rest of your day.”
Shuttered Secrets Page 17
