Riley frowned. She hoped that if she figured out who killed Shawna, it would help ease Malcolm’s mind about his father—at least about this.
“Sorry,” he said, sniffing hard. “I don’t get to talk about this kind of stuff that often. But uhh … to answer your question, I can’t think of anything that stands out.”
“Did your grandma have any other dreams about Shawna?”
Rodney tipped his head back a little and stared up at the sky as he thought. “She told me that she kept seeing a white guy with very light hair cut in military style. But the asshole cop who was so sure he had me all figured out looked like that. Maybe that cop was in her head a lot because of how hell-bent he was on tearing apart the whole family. I can’t ask Grandmama, though … she passed while I was in prison.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Riley would have liked to meet her, though in a way, she might have already met her. In the story Riley’s mother had told her about Gigi—the young girl who was almost kidnapped—the man she’d described had a buzz cut hairstyle too. It could be a coincidence, but Riley had a feeling it wasn’t. Still, it wasn’t much for her to go on.
“Not sure if any of this has been helpful. Turned more into a therapy session for me. You remind me a lot of Grandmama. Maybe that’s why.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind listening,” she said. “Oh, I have something for you.” She rummaged in her bag and took out the picture of Shawna and Malcolm. “This was on Emery’s roll of film.”
Rodney choked back a sob as he took it from her. With shaking fingers, he touched Shawna’s image, then Malcolm’s, both of them captured in a moment of pure joy by a man hiding in the shadows, intending to rip that happiness out from under them like a rug.
“The reason why the picture exists is awful,” Riley said, peering over at the photograph in Rodney’s lightly quaking hands, “but it’s still lovely somehow.”
A tear slid down Rodney’s face, off the end of his nose, and onto a pant leg. He didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe if the cops had seen this, they would have seen how much Shawna loved that boy. They might have tried harder to find out what really happened to her. She never would have left that boy for anything.”
“You can keep that,” she said. “I should probably get going. Thanks for talking to me.”
He sniffed and wiped a sleeve across his eyes. “If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”
They stood. Riley resisted the urge to hug the sad, broken man in front of her, not wanting to overstep. Her clairsentience told her Rodney was resistant, but she couldn’t pinpoint why. She thought of Norma’s assessment of him: “Kind of get the feeling that he wants to be alone, so he is.”
Her gut told her to hold out her arms. Rodney stepped into them and hugged her, letting out a little choked sob as he did. It took him a minute to compose himself, then let her go, sniffing hard and wiping at his eyes.
She wiped at her eyes too, hoping he had someone in his life that would hug him again later.
Looking down at the picture he still held, he said, “I hope you’re able to find the bastard who did this.”
“Me too. Stay in touch, okay?”
“I will.”
She headed across the park to join Michael at the gazebo, where he’d managed to get into a deep conversation with the fisherman about Bitcoin, of all things. She’d stood nearby and listened to them chatter about cryptocurrency for a while before either of them noticed her. First the beard, then the deep dive into cooking and all its facets, and now Bitcoin? She wondered what was next.
“Nice talking to you, man! I’ll check out that site,” Michael said, then walked across the gazebo. “How’d it go?” he asked her.
“Good,” she said, laughing. “I see you made a friend.”
“He’s such an interesting guy,” he said.
“Is he from here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“No idea.”
It never ceased to amaze her how men never covered practical information in conversations. “I didn’t know you were interested in Bitcoin,” she said, switching tack.
Michael cocked his head at her curiously. “I’m not.”
Men were very strange creatures.
As they headed back for the car, Riley looked over her shoulder to wave goodbye to Rodney, but he was back on the bench, all his attention focused on the picture she’d given him. She lowered her hand and continued on, leaving the man alone with his own ghosts.
October, 2021
On Sunday, the day The Client emailed me for the first time in ten years, I drove out to my old storage unit in Clovis. A phone call wouldn’t be enough. When I walked into the office, I forced tears into my eyes, telling the man behind the counter that I’d been the victim of a brutal attack and that the delinquency of my account had been no fault of my own.
“The cameras were my father’s,” I said tearfully. “He was a war veteran—a true hero. He died only last month, while I was laid up in a hospital bed completely unaware that he’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Those cameras are all that I have left of him.”
The man behind the counter seemed unmoved. After keying a few things into his computer, he said, “I’m very sorry to hear about your father, but that unit was auctioned off over the summer. I can’t disclose who bought the unit, but if I remember correctly, that was the one some lady with a thrift shop in Albuquerque bought. We all thought it was weird she shelled out so much cash for a table but …” He shrugged.
What was I supposed to do with “some lady with a thrift shop in Albuquerque”?
“Look, I’d help you if I could, bud, our facility doesn’t even run the auction.” He trundled open an unseen drawer and produced a business card that he then slid across the counter to me. “They’re who we usually use. They’d have more information about the sale than we do.”
I snatched the card off the counter and stalked for the door without another word. Thanks for nothing, bud.
“Dick,” the guy muttered.
I resisted the urge to root around in the supply bag in my trunk to find something sharp to slash his tires with. Useless prick.
Fuming, I slid into my car and slammed the door. Why had a woman made the trek out to Clovis to buy a desk from a storage unit? No one would have known the cameras were in one of the drawers until the unit had been bought and paid for and then … surprise! Here’s three mint-condition film cameras.
I bashed the heel of my palm against the steering wheel.
I tried the auction company next but got the same result: no one would disclose the buyer of my unit. Customer confidentiality or whatever the fuck. I drove home pissed off but undeterred.
On Monday, I took a deep dive into Carter Quincy, scouring the internet for everything I could find on him. By Tuesday morning, I was armed with information and a packed bag. I would hole up in Taos for a while, where this menace of a reporter hailed from. During my three-hour drive, I felt buoyant. After months of missing memories, the familiarity of my task at hand wrapped me in its sweet embrace. I even looked forward to booking a motel for a few nights.
The Client’s assignments were why I paid my rent in monthly chunks—it assured I would have a place to come home to when a job ended, but also granted me the freedom to pick up and leave without worry. I hadn’t needed to pay for rent in six-month blocks for quite some time, but it was an ingrained habit now. It had saved me from losing my apartment while I’d been in the hospital.
It hadn’t helped in the case of the storage unit, though. I clenched my jaw.
I would fix this. I had to.
Some part of me had always been holding onto the hope that The Client would come back to me and we could pick up where we’d left off.
I had been right. He needed me again. My hopes were coming to fruition.
I would fix this.
That night, I slept better than I had in months—years, maybe. It wasn’t as
if the slightly sour-smelling motel bed was particularly comfortable, but there was something familiar in being in an unfamiliar place. The constant, distant hum of traffic lulled me to sleep, like the undulating warbling of a womb.
I found Carter Quincy’s address before I found the man himself. He lived on a quiet residential street, and when I found the physical house that matched the one on Google’s Street View, I parked at the curb a few houses down and waited. He didn’t arrive at home until after 8 pm on Tuesday evening. I wondered where he’d been. Chasing down a story or busying himself with a woman who wasn’t his wife?
I poked around outside the Quincys’ a bit after midnight, once the lights inside those quiet little houses had gone dark, searching for evidence of security cameras or window stickers advertising an alarm company. I found neither. What I did find, however, was that his neighbor to the right had a dog. I heard a distant yipping just before the whomp-slap of a plastic doggie door. Once in the fence-enclosed backyard, the little yipping thing really exercised its lungs. I took that as my cue to leave.
I was back in the neighborhood bright and early the next morning. Around 7, as I waited for Carter to start his day, his next-door neighbor, a twenty-something, pear-shaped woman with long brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, came walking out of the house with the small brown-and-black Yorkie that had barked at me last night. It continued to yip at everything even while on a walk—cars, cats, birds, people, the occasional leaf rolling down the sidewalk. The woman turned left, away from Carter’s house and, twenty minutes later, rounded the block, walking past Carter’s house before disappearing inside her own.
Carter emerged shortly afterward, getting into his Prius parked on the street and driving off. He waved at the old man who lived on his other side as he went. The old guy had just stepped out in his bathrobe to fetch the paper off his porch.
I slowly pulled out onto the road to follow him.
Though Carter worked at the Taos Daily Journal, he rarely seemed to be in the office, always flitting about town like a hummingbird. Nothing in his movements about town struck me as particularly noteworthy. He wasn’t meeting with families of The Client’s victims or anything troublesome like that. Granted, only two of those families were local. Carter didn’t appear to be making any attempts to leave the state either.
For the entirety of the day, I followed him around town during the day, then watched his small house at night. I noted that his pear-shaped neighbor emerged with her dog again around 6 pm, turning left out of her house.
I got out of my car long enough to root around in my stocked supply bag in the trunk. I couldn’t remember when I’d started keeping it, but seeing it had unlocked more memories. The contents of the bag had grown into an eclectic assortment of items. Selecting what I needed, I walked at a casual pace up the other side of the block, knowing the woman would be rounding it soon enough, probably taking the same path with her yippy dog every day at 7 am and 6 pm, varying her route very little.
Sure enough, within fifteen minutes, the pair turned the corner, heading my way. I heard the yippy beast before I saw it. Awful creature.
“Oh!” I said when they were a few feet away. “Hi, little guy!”
The woman beamed, gazing down at the dog with more affection than the thing deserved.
“Can I say hi?” I ventured.
“Sure. He loves everyone, don’t you, Ollie?”
Ollie, the little shit, growled at me.
“Ollie!” the woman admonished, punctuating that with a light stomp of her tennis shoe. “That’s not nice. That’s not how we talk to our friends.”
“Does he like treats?” I asked, revealing a small bag of crunchy bone-shaped treats that I’d stuffed in my pocket.
“Oh, he loves treats. Don’t you, Ollie?”
I resisted the urge to say it looked like his owner loved treats, too.
Bending down, I tossed one of the little bones toward him. Ollie sniffed the air, then came out from his hiding place behind the woman’s legs. The tiny rat-dog crept forward in an army crawl until he reached the treat, turning his head sideways so he could grab it off the ground while still keeping an eye on me.
“Oh, you’re so silly, Ollie!” the woman said, laughing. “This nice man isn’t going to hurt you.”
I tossed another couple of treats to the dog. By the fourth, I had him tentatively grabbing it out of my hand. “Thank you for indulging me,” I said as I stood. “I’m new to the area and my dog is staying with my mom until I get settled into my new place and job. I’ve been taking long walks trying to get to know the neighborhood, and I’ve been making new dog friends everywhere I go.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” she said. “Well, I hope your fur baby can join you here soon. I’m sure Ollie would love to meet him.”
Fur baby? Christ. “Yes, I hope so, too.” I tossed another treat to Ollie. “Enjoy the rest of your walk. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Ollie?” She blushed lightly as she said it, then continued on her way.
On Wednesday, I watched the woman leave her house again at 7 am. Boring. Carter, at least, was always doing something different. Around noon, instead of grabbing lunch, he went into a big box store. He purchased arm floaties, a pair of child’s swim trunks, and a cooler on wheels. After following him around the store, I got into line two people behind him.
As the chatty cashier rang up his items, she said, “Looks like someone is going swimming!”
Carter smiled good-naturedly as he took out his wallet. “We weren’t able to get out of town this summer, so we’re heading to a resort with a heated pool to help make up for it.”
“Oh, that sounds lovely. Can I come too?” The woman let out a hearty laugh at her own joke.
Carter was all smiles as he left with his purchases.
Was he planning to take my cameras with him on this resort trip? If the cameras were in Carter’s possession, he hadn’t used them outside the house since I began watching him. Did he have them in his little house, displayed on a shelf? I hoped he didn’t let his grubby-handed kid paw at the cameras the way Tracy had done. I pictured a lens smeared with grape jelly, and fought down the bile that had inched up my throat.
I followed him back to his house, where he spent most of the afternoon inside with his family. As I watched from down the street, the idea of the cameras being on display somewhere collecting dust made me see red. I needed to know if he had them. He wouldn’t take all three of them to the resort, surely. He didn’t know how to care for them the way I did. I nearly broke out in hives at the idea of one of them slipping from careless fingers before plunging into over-chlorinated water.
That evening, I “accidentally” bumped into Ollie’s owner.
“Oh, hello again!” I said, coming upon her closer to the beginning of her route this time. “Hi, Ollie.”
The little dog ran up to me and sat at my feet, tail swishing.
I bent down to give him a few more treats. If only people were as easily manipulated into compliance as dogs were.
On Thursday evening, I was around a corner in the middle of the route. As I took my time tying the shoe I’d untied myself a minute before, a fuzzy black-and-brown head appeared in my line of sight. Ollie got up on his hind legs, his front paws balanced on my knee. He stared up at me expectantly. The little beast left a pair of paw prints on my clean khakis. I swallowed down the urge to fling him across the street, and instead offered the dog a cheerful hello and a vigorous scratch under his chin.
I fed him a few more treats.
When I stood, his owner waited there, and I noted with an equal mix of amusement and horror that she’d dressed up more than usual. Her hair was in loose curls rather than stick straight. Her walking pants had been swapped for a pair of dark-wash jeans, and she wore pink-tinted gloss.
“Ollie looks for you every day now,” she said, smiling at me in a way that was almost demure. “I’m Vickie, by the way.”
A pink tinge that matched her gloss rose in her cheeks. Perhaps humans were as easy as dogs. Ollie needed treats. Vickie needed the hope of a meet cute she could write about in her diary or—God forbid, on her blog.
We chatted a bit, me making up the details of my life on the fly while she was probably unflinchingly honest. I laughed where appropriate and forced myself to seem tongue-tied at times, flustered by our supposed growing attraction.
There’s just something about him, she would probably tell her best friend on the phone later.
When we parted ways, I hadn’t asked for her number or asked her out. She was too shy to make a move, I knew. She’d probably spent all day debating on what to do with her hair. And, sadly for her, this was the last time we’d be chatting. What I needed was for her dumb dog to like me.
On Friday evening, Carter started loading suitcases into his loathsome Prius around the same time Vickie came sauntering out with Ollie. Carter and Vickie greeted each other. Ollie yipped happily at Carter, and then the pair started off on their usual route while Carter prepared to take off for the resort with his little nuclear family. Vickie’s saunter had morphed into a sad shuffle by the time she’d returned home, not once laying eyes on her new crush. Poor Vickie.
An hour after the Quincys finally departed, I was confident they wouldn’t be returning prematurely because they’d forgotten something of the kid’s. I left long enough to grab dinner at a nearby burger place, as well as a few snacks to tide me over until I made my move later in the evening.
I was back by 9 pm but waited until just after midnight, when Vickie’s lights had been out for over an hour. Vickie never went to bed later than 11:30. I wasn’t worried about Carter’s older-than-dirt neighbors on the other side. I’d said hello to the old woman once and she hadn’t reacted until I’d practically shouted in her face. The Quincys didn’t lock their side gate, which was partially hidden by a hydrangea bush in need of trimming. One tug on the gate’s pull cord and I was in. I eased the gate closed after me.
Shuttered Secrets Page 30
