Shutter(17)

“Who are you talking to, Rita?” Principal Bennett chimed in.

“Judith,” I said.

“Is she your imaginary friend, Rita?” Principal Bennett looked at Grandma, who wasn’t smiling. She knew. Grandma stared at me with that look of fear I couldn’t stand.

“She’s not imaginary,” I said. I watched Judith move slowly to Mr. Bennett’s door. Grandma and Mr. Bennett watched in silence as it crept open on its own. I closed my eyes and pushed Judith’s energy from me like blowing out a candle. Judith slammed the door shut. Grandma and Principal Bennett jumped in their seats and turned to look at me.

“She’s gone,” I said.

When Grandma and I got home, I opened my camera box in the front yard and watched the photograph I took of Judith and the class turn black, the edges coiling away from the tape.





CHAPTER ELEVEN

Canon EOS 5D Mark III (Low Light)

IT STILL FELT like Erma was in the room as I pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went down to my car. I sat there shivering until the heater rattled and creaked its way to life, then I headed out into the morning, toward I-25.

It was almost midday when I arrived back at the overpass where Erma was thrown over. There had to be a good reason why Erma had latched herself to me.

I knew now what I didn’t know as a kid: my grandpa had been right. Some ghosts never even realize that I have this thing. The ones who know I can see and hear them are rarely strong enough to push themselves in. If they do, I dispatch them quickly. But some manage to break through. Those are the ones that want something to happen. They need something from you.

It is a feeling you get, like a ball in your stomach or that heartbeat that comes when you look over the edge of a cliff. Sometimes they fill you with prickly heat or smother you with cold until your muscles cramp. When I was younger and unable to control the channels that the voices navigated, their presence would give me nosebleeds and the most tremendous pressure in my head. They preyed on my youth and my naiveté because they knew I hadn’t learned to set boundaries.

The one thing I couldn’t do was ignore them. That was impossible. It was best to keep yourself healthy and strong because the voices knew to take advantage when you were sick or weak. Even small bouts of insomnia or the flu could trigger the switch. The dead would be waiting in line, glaring up at the neon sign outside my psyche.

The power never worked liked you wanted it to. Earlier on in my time at the department, I had tried to find out leads on cold cases to see if the ghosts of the unsolved murders in the city had to get something off their chests. Back in 2003, the remains of eleven women were found west of town, up on the mesa that overlooked the city. I visited the site several times, just waiting for the ghost of one of the women who was buried in the mass grave to come and talk to me. I visited for years. Not one came.

The killer was dubbed the “West Mesa Collector” but was never captured by the police. There were two suspects in the case: one, the major suspect—living only two or three miles from where the women were found—was killed by the boyfriend of the girl he had just raped, murdered, and rolled into a piece of carpet. The other was a serial rapist police knew to be stalking prostitutes along Central Avenue. He received a life sentence for other crimes, but he was never pinned to this one.

What this work proved to me was that people were evil. The things I saw day after day were unthinkable, and the people who did these things sometimes still walked the streets. It was hard when you knew the truth but had no way to share it, no way to lead the police officers straight to a killer’s door. If I told the department what I could do, they would surely fire me, maybe lock me up in the nearest mental hospital. My years on the job would be written off, as I would be. Any would-be psychics, or “psychic detectives,” are quickly dismissed by the departments, accused of retrofitting facts and calling them visions.

My “visions” couldn’t be defined as “post-cognition”—like the psychics you see on television, who can “feel” the past. I didn’t feel their past. I felt their presence. I just relied on them to tell me what I needed to know. I had no control over who knocked on the door.

Erma was powerful. She gave me back the headaches of my youth and the bright lights buried in my memories. She was able to pry into my weaknesses unlike any other being I had encountered. My mind was buzzing and looking to be anywhere else but the final moments of Erma Singleton. But there I was, standing on the overpass where she took her last breaths, watching the approaching cars rise between the lanes. Erma’s fear and dread became my own. I began to feel the pressure building in my head.

The busy sounds of the overpass were swallowed by a child’s cries. In my mind, I could see Erma Singleton picking the little girl up and twirling her around. From the other room, a voice:

“You’re going to be late.”

“I know, Mom,” Erma answered. She carried the girl into the other room, and I followed them. Erma kissed her mother on the cheek. “Thanks,” she said. She pulled her leather purse to her shoulder. “I’ll be right back, baby.” Erma blew a kiss to the little girl and pulled the door shut—a slam that startled me into reality.

I had never done that before, let something draw me that close. I felt Erma as if I had been dropped into her own spirit. Even there on the overpass, I could smell her daughter’s skin and the toast burning in the kitchen.