She hoped she’d found him first.
Riley hadn’t yet found a way to prove her abilities to Rodney. She’d been able to prove herself to Lola Bodwell, but she’d had help from her daughter. Before going to bed, Riley thought of what Nina had told her while they were at the campground. “Focus your energy on these flowers, why you’re here, and call out to Shawna.”
Riley didn’t know if it would work the same way here in her apartment, in a location not connected to Shawna, but she thought of how Iris had gotten in contact with Riley through her dreams. Riley pictured the switchboard in the Great Beyond again, willing that light above her name to flip to green. Perhaps Shawna could see it and would pay her a visit.
She sat on her bed and stared at the picture of Shawna and her son, scouring every detail of the picture, silently asking Shawna to give her something—anything—that would be proof she could use to get Rodney to speak to her. She mentally called out to Shawna and kept the woman in her mind as she placed the photo on her nightstand, turned out the light, and settled in to sleep.
Riley dreamt not of Shawna, though, but an older Black woman standing on the back porch of a house. It was dusk, and a pair of moths busily buzzed around and periodically slammed into a glass-enclosed porch light on the wall. She was a heavyset woman in her sixties or seventies, and had a head of short curly gray hair. She wore a house dress covered in brown and white songbirds.
“Rodney!” she called out. “I’m not going to call you again. Get your butt inside and eat!”
Though her tone had been stern, her wrinkled face brightened when she saw a young Black boy run toward her. The knees of his pants were caked in mud. “Sorry, Grandmama!” he called, deftly squeezing past her and darting into the house.
“Boy! You better not be tracking mud into my house,” she said, following after him into the small, homey kitchen. The walls were a butter yellow, and the faded tile floor had flecks of yellow mixed with the cream and brown tones.
“Sorry, Grandmama,” the boy called out from somewhere beyond the kitchen. He emerged a moment later, standing in the open doorway of the kitchen with a mason jar held between two dark hands. He thrust the jar up like an offering. A worried-looking frog sat at the bottom.
“Oh!” his grandma yelped, hand to chest. “Don’t you have enough of those things already?”
“Can I keep him? Please? That’ll make four. Fred, Barney, Bamm-Bamm, and now the Great Gazoo.”
“You and that show.” She eyed the jar warily, but then offered a small nod. “That’s the last one, boy. Now go wash your hands. Food’s getting cold.”
Rodney ran toward her and managed to hug her tight around her wide middle without dropping his new pet. He peered up at her and the affection in her face as she smiled down at him made even Riley’s heart constrict.
His grandma cupped him behind the head and placed a kiss on top of his head. “Go on,” she said softly.
Rodney ran off, presumably to the bathroom.
Then the woman turned to Riley, offering a knowing little wink. “Stubborn as hell, that boy.”
Riley woke with a gasp.
What the hell was that?
She knew a little about lucid dreaming—was his grandmother someone who could control her dreams? How had she ended up in Riley’s dream when she’d been thinking about Shawna?
She waited until ten that morning—after she’d showered and dressed for work—to call Rodney back. It initially rang so many times, she was sure it would go to voicemail.
“Yeah?” he answered.
A flash of the woman’s image on the porch flitted through Riley’s mind again—the moths buzzing by the light, her halo of curly gray hair, the songbirds on her dress. The dress, for some reason, felt important. Words she hadn’t known she was going to say came tumbling out. “You spent a lot of time with your Grandmama Robin when you were younger. You collected frogs you named after Flintstones characters. I’m guessing you were eight or nine when you got the Great Gazoo.”
Rodney was silent so long on the other end that she pulled her phone away from her face to check to make sure he hadn’t ended the call. He hadn’t.
“That proof enough?” she asked.
“She come to you in a dream?” he finally asked, his voice raspy.
“Yes.”
Another long pause. “Grandmama had it, too. The sight, I mean. At least she claimed she did. That, or she had literal eyes in the back of her head. That lady put the fear of God in a person like no one I’ve ever met.”
He talked about his grandma in the past tense, she noted. She recalled the way the woman had looked at her in her dream. She’d seen Riley. Did a psychic medium’s powers extend beyond death?
“I … apologize for how I spoke to you before,” Rodney said now. “Even if you were lying to me, I shouldn’t have talked to you that way. You caught me on a bad day.”
“And I’m sorry I contacted you out of the blue like that about such a sensitive subject,” she said. “So … uhh … I wanted to ask you a few things if you have the time. I’m a consultant of sorts on Shawna’s cold case. Some information has come to light recently and I’m helping sift through it.”
He was silent for a beat. “Did you have anything to do with that article that came out about her recently?”
“I played a part in that, yes. Would you be willing to meet with me in person? I usually work late afternoons into the evening, so anything before noon usually works better for me. I’m in Albuquerque, so it would take me about three hours to get into Taos.”
After another long pause, he said, “I can talk to you, sure. And I can meet you halfway. Santa Fe all right? I’ve got a bad case of claustrophobia since being let out, so a park or something would better for me, but I can meet you somewhere more public, too. I work nights, so before noon works fine for me. Or anytime on the weekend. I don’t do much else.”
“Cool. I’ll pick a place and email you.”
After ending the call, she sent Michael a text.
Riley: Remember that time we met a murderer in Santa Fe?
Michael replied half an hour later.
Michael: I’m scared to reply to this …
Riley: How would you feel about meeting an ex-con in a park?
He started and stopped typing a few dozen times.
Michael: Dating you is an adventure, you know that?
Riley: Is that a yes or …?
Michael: You know it’s a yes. Do you have the deets yet? Can you email the deets to me?
Riley: Stop saying deets.
Michael: You love me.
She grinned.
Riley: Yeah, yeah.
Riley scoured the internet for popular parks in Santa Fe. Finding one just off the highway, she sent the deets to both Michael and Rodney, including a meeting time for Saturday at 11 am.
CHAPTER 23
Baldwin Park was huge and swarmed with people. It had several parking lots, and Michael had chosen the one on the east side. It was walking distance from a huge play area that was filled with children and watchful parents alike. Kids climbed jungle gyms, swung on swings, and shakily crossed suspension bridges.
Michael grabbed her hand and they walked across the grass toward the duck pond, where she said she’d meet Rodney. Off to the left, beyond the play area, a large group of men were engaged in a raucous game of soccer. A line of kids rode down a nearby walking path on their bikes, a little boy pedaling as hard as he could to keep up, shouting at someone who was probably his big brother to slow down.
The pond was more like a small lake, and had a short pier at the end of which was a wooden gazebo. A man stood there, fishing pole in hand. Benches ringed the path that snaked around the pond. Only one of the benches to the right of the pond was occupied, possibly because the ones on the left were surrounded by an army of geese busily mowing down the already well-tended grass.
“I think that’s him,” Riley said, jutting a chin to the lone man sitting at the bench.
<
br /> “I’ll go hang out by the gazebo,” Michael said. “If the ex-con gets shifty, just give me a shout.”
Riley laughed, kissed him, then let his hand go, heading for Rodney. From her research, she knew he was in his mid to late forties, but if she had passed him on the street without knowing anything about him, she would have guessed he was closer to his sixties. Prison wasn’t kind to most.
When she was only a few feet away, he glanced over. He offered her a small smile and stood up, hand out. “Riley?”
“Yep,” she said, shaking his hand.
It wasn’t until this moment that she really wondered about the danger of meeting someone who had spent fifteen years in prison. It wasn’t as if she thought he’d suddenly shiv her, but it struck her then that he had lived a life so wildly different from hers.
“I don’t bite,” he said, letting her hand go and chucking softly.
Her face heated. “Sorry.”
He shrugged, sitting back down. “It’s a look I get a lot once people find out I did time.” There was no bitterness in his tone, but she had to imagine he was exhausted.
They sat there a minute in semi-awkward silence, listening to the lively energy of the park and watching as a pair of little girls threw pieces of bread to a group of ducks in the pond—despite the large sign nearby telling people not to feed the birds.
For reasons she couldn’t explain, out of nowhere, she blurted, “I know you didn’t kill Shawna.”
When she turned to look at him, his eyes were a little glassy, though they were focused on the girls feeding the ducks.
“That means a lot coming from a psychic,” he said, smiling to himself. “Even though I got put away for drug offenses, it felt like I got put away for murder. I’m not trying to make any excuses for myself.” He looked at her then. “I fucked up. I own that. But I also did my time. And even if people look at me and just see a felon, I’m not a murderer. I got close—once—in prison when I first went in. It’s dog eat dog. I needed to protect myself. But even in there, I wasn’t about that. I sure as shit wouldn’t have killed the mother of my kid.”
Riley nodded. “Why did it feel like you got put away for murder?”
Rodney sighed, turning a bit so his side was resting against the back of the bench. His hands rested in his lap, his shoulders slumped. “Shawna and I were … not good for each other. Toxic. When things were going good, they were real good. But when they were bad, they were fucking terrible, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“We couldn’t seem to stay away from each other, though,” he said. “Passionate in all the wrong ways. We were young and broke. Home life for us both wasn’t the greatest. I drank a lot … was high as shit, too. We were always stressed about money, would get in a fight, I’d put my hands on her, she’d scream and holler, and a neighbor would usually call the cops. Cops got to know me real good back then. My daddy probably rolled over in his grave every time it happened. He taught me never to hit a woman. But Shawna could get me so damn mad.” He frowned. “I’m not like that anymore. The fight’s gone out of me. I promise I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you how it was.”
Riley gestured for him to continue.
“Every time shit popped off, I’d leave. I couldn’t trust myself around her for long. But my point is, I always stopped. When it got too bad, I’d bounce,” he said. “As much as I fucked up, I’d never, never go so far as to kill her. I didn’t have it in me then and I don’t now. We’d fight, break up, and then one of us would come crawling back. Over and over and over. Then the next thing we know, Shawna is twenty-two and pregnant. I was barely a man myself and I was going to be a dad. And I wanted to be a dad for him. He made me want to get my shit together—like he was my chance to fix all my fuckups.”
“Malcolm, right?” Riley asked, even though she already knew the answer.
“Yeah,” he said, a little involuntary smile tugging at his mouth. “Shawna started working three jobs just to keep a roof over our heads. My grandmama, the one I mentioned earlier, she helped take care of Malcolm for us since we were always working. I tried to get a respectable job, but it was hard to get hired for much even before I’d done time. I worked at McDonald’s for a while, but you can’t raise a family on that. Selling weed paid the bills a lot better. One thing led to another and I made a connection with a guy selling coke. That paid really good. It was dangerous, though. I was stressed the fuck out all the time, always looking over my shoulder. Always worried about turf war bullshit with guys out in Albuquerque and that somehow my kid would get caught up in it.”
He stared out at the water again. Riley got the feeling he was working some things out. She didn’t want to interrupt him.
“When Shawna went missing, I wasn’t even in town. I came back because my grandmama called me one day asking me where Shawna was because she wasn’t answering her phone. I blew through a stop sign while I was hauling ass back home, not sure what was going on. I got pulled over and then brought in for questioning, in large part because my grandmama kept calling the police. She kept asking them to search for Shawna because she wouldn’t ever abandon Malcolm. They told her they’d file the report but that she probably just ran away, or that she was lying low to avoid me—since that happened once before—and that she’d show up eventually.”
“And then they found her body,” Riley said.
Rodney lowered his head, staring down at his hands in his lap. “When they had me in for questioning, they’d say stuff like, ‘We know Shawna was seeing someone else’ and that I was jealous about it, and ‘How’d you feel when you found out Malcolm wasn’t really yours?’ and a bunch of other bullshit. None of it was true, but they kept making shit up, giving me likely scenarios that would have made me mad enough to kill her. They’d seen enough ‘guys like me’ that they assumed they had me pegged. So they kept pissing in the dark hoping they’d hit something.” He shook his head. “One guy, I’ll never forget it, said, ‘You know what I think happened? I think you two were out there at that campground for a romantic evening, you have sex under the stars, but then she starts running her mouth like always—you said that’s what happens, right? She starts running her mouth and you gotta knock her around to make her stop? She does that again while you’re out there, ruins the moment, and then you shut her up for good.’”
“Shit,” Riley muttered.
“Yeah,” he said, working his jaw. “Every time my grandmama called the police, she told them they should check that camping area. The cops thought it was because we went out there as a family a lot, so maybe Shawna was hiding out in a familiar place. Thing is, Grandmama was saying that because she had the sight—she saw it in her dreams that Shawna would be out there—so when they did find her out there days later, they were sure it was because I’d confessed to her. They thought that was her way of calling in a tip without ratting me out. They said they knew she was protecting both Shawna and me, since I was her grandson.”
Something Detective Howard and Carter had said came back to her. “Your grandma was the supposed secret informant …”
Rodney pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s why I thought you were fucking with me when you first contacted me. I thought you’d somehow found out about her connection to it, and that’s what you really wanted to talk to me about.”
Nodding, Riley asked, “Did she tell the cops about her psychic dreams?”
Rodney sighed. “Eventually, yeah. Especially when it looked like they were going to try to pin the murder on me. But that’s why the cops never said who the informant was. They didn’t want to admit that their main source was a crazy old Black lady ranting about her dead granddaughter-in-law coming to her in a dream. They had no way to prove I’d done it, but they convinced themselves my grandmama’s tip was the smoking gun. Lucky for them, I was deep into drug running, or they wouldn’t have anything to arrest me for.”
“That’s awful,” she said.
He managed a shrug. “Is that how Shawna comes to y
ou? In dreams?”
“I actually saw her. Her ghost, I mean, at the campsite.”
Rodney’s bottom lip trembled slightly. “Did she speak to you?”
“No,” she said. “She just showed me an image—a clue about who took her.”
“You really think the same guy who killed her also killed that white lady?”
“Brynn.”
“Yeah, Brynn. And the other lady in the picture, too?”
“Her name was Emery,” Riley said. “But yes. I think he killed all three, and there might even be more.”
Rodney’s eyes went glassy again. Riley agreed with his self-assessment; the fight had gone out of him. He looked more numb than angry.
“If they hadn’t been so sure I’d done it, maybe those other girls wouldn’t be dead, too.”
“Maybe,” Riley said softly. “Do you remember anything odd about the month or weeks before Shawna disappeared? I know you said you weren’t in town when she first went missing, but do you remember anything out of the ordinary before that?”
“To be honest, a lot of that time is a black hole in my head. Too much alcohol and drugs. I’ve come to terms with a lot over the years. Prison gives you a lot of time to think and work through shit. I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, or even a good system, because it’s not—it’s fucking brutal. I’ve tried to better myself, though. What happened to Shawna, though, and the tense relationship I have with Malcolm now?” He shook his head. “Those will haunt me for the rest of my life. If I’d been in town that day, maybe she’d still be here. My whole life would be different. Shawna might still be alive. I might hear from my kid other than on holidays and birthdays.
“I can’t even be mad at him. Even if I was arrested for something else, even if I swear to him on a stack of Bibles, and on my grandmama’s grave that I didn’t kill his mom, Malcolm is always going to wonder if I did. He’s always going to blame me for his mama not being on this earth anymore.”
Shuttered Secrets Page 29
