Fiction
Forbidden Love Part 6
A Sunny ALexander-Johnson and Henry James Series By P.G. & Sharon Barnett
My name is Sunny Alexander-Johnson, and I’m Henry James, and we’re writers for Dark Sides of the Truth Magazine.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
What’s interesting is no matter how long you stare at something extraordinarily foreign to you, if you have no idea what it is, continuing to stare at it isn’t going to bring about an answer.
Before leaving Charlie and the police department, we’d taken photos of the cryptic cipher, and this Thursday morning, the call back from Donnie Martin and Rebecca Wu lifted our spirits a bit and then crushed us flat.
They’d been able to quickly identify the five people in the photo, two we already knew. Standing beside Gloria was Charles Devonshire and beside him, Clay Richardson. Charles had died in a car accident shortly after the photo was taken, and Clay, an Army brat, had moved with his family to Germany.
To Clay’s right stood Ginny Buchanan, born and raised in Round Rock, Texas, a thriving community just north of Austin. She was a happy looking young girl with ginger hair and from the looks of things in the photo definitely into some type of athletics. All five of them possessed bronzed tans from weeks spent outside in the sun, and they all seemed genuinely pleased to pose for the photo.
And we were happy as well. Happy that Donnie and Becca had made such short work of the identification. Unfortunately, neither of them could make a dent in the cipher.
Which left us right where we started.
Nowhere.
One thing we’d noticed in both the journal the police found twenty years ago and the one we’d recently discovered in Gloria’s clothes hamper was Gloria’s tendency to mention her friends using the initials of their first and last names when she wrote of them.
Perhaps she guessed it provided her friends with a modicum of anonymity. Maybe it was just laziness. At this point, we had to assume both.
“This is strange, Henry.”
“What’s that?”
“According to my notes, Gloria mentions J.B., C.D., and C.R. a lot, but do you remember seeing her mentioning G.B.?”
“Ginny Buchanan? No. Maybe we need to call Charlie and have him take another run at it. We could have missed it.”
“I’m pretty sure we didn’t.”
“Make the call, princess.”
“Fine, whatever.”
After a quick call to Charlie Alvarez, we resumed staring at the picture of the cipher on our phones.
“This is driving me freaking insane, Henry. What the hell is this?”
“Hey, don’t yell at me, I didn’t write it.”
“Dang Henry, me and Tim can hear you two arguing all the way across the bullpen. You want to keep it down?”
“Easy for you and Rice to say, Roberto. You ain’t got something staring you in the face with no way to figure out what it is.”
Roberto shook his head, then got up and strolled across the bullpen, stopping at our desks.
“What it is that’s got you two so riled up?”
“Look at this boyo and tell us it won’t stump your ass as much as it has ours.”
Roberto studied the photo for close to five seconds, then handed the phone back. We guessed he would be as confused as we were, but then the expression on his face told us a completely different story.
“Anybody got a mirror?”
“What?”
“You know, like a compact mirror or something like that?”
“Damn De La Cruz, did I say you had something stuck in your teeth?”
“Henry, you can be so freaking hard-headed sometimes. Sunny? Do you have one?”
“Yes, hang on a second. Oh, and be glad you only had to work with the old fart a couple of times.”
“I feel for you, my sister.”
“You know what? You can both…”
“Bite your ass, yeah we know Henry.”
“Here, Roberto.”
“Henry, show me that photo again.”
Roberto took the phone and held it in his right hand, then angled the reflective part of the mirror in front of the image. After adjusting the angle a few more times, he began to read.
“Conocerla esta noche. Ella dijo queue preferiria…”
“Whoa, stop right there, Roberto. That’s Spanish, right?”
“Sure is.”
“How in the hell are you getting Spanish from all that gibberish?”
“Henry, it’s not gibberish. It’s called mirror writing.”
“What?”
“Mirror writing, Sunny. You guys remember my sister Rosalita?”
“Yes, so?”
“When Rosalita was young, she would accidentally write backward like this. From what I’ve learned, this usually happens to be a trait of more than a few left-handed people. Rosalita is left-handed. What’s interesting, and from what everyone in the family has come to understand, is that doing it unintentionally usually happens at a young age. Being able to do it at will, whenever the mood strikes you, is rare. It’s weird as hell, but Rosalita can still summon up the capability anytime she wants to, and we’ve all learned when she does to have a mirror handy.”
“Holy shit. So what did Gloria write?”
Roberto squinted at the tiny compact mirror once again.
“Conocerla esta…”
“In English, dude.”
“Oh, right, sorry. Okay, let’s see. Meeting her tonight. She said she would rather die than lose me, but I can’t live like this anymore. This…this forbidden love of ours and her constant attempts to control me ends tonight. Thirty minutes from the movies to Garrett, one more time of making love, and then I’ll…I’ll tell her it’s over. I should be home before midnight.”
“Damn, Henry. Not only did she write it backward, but she wrote it in Spanish and backward. She wanted to make sure nobody knew what she planned on doing.”
“And nobody did.”
“Henry that entry was the last thing Gloria Salitos wrote in that journal. The night she disappeared.”
“Right, princess, now we need to find out where she was going.”
“I’d start with Garrett.”
“Garrett as in Garrett, Texas? That’s impossible, Roberto. Garrett is a little berg just south of Dallas. It at least a three-hour drive.”
“Roberto? Thanks, dude, we owe you one. Henry, we need to go see the spy twins.”
“What for?”
“We’ve got two more keys to this puzzle now. Thirty minutes and Garrett. We need Donnie and Becca to pull their maps and show us the terrain from a satellite view. We’re looking for anything by the name of Garret, which is thirty minutes from ground zero.”
“The movie theater.”
“Exactly. Don’t forget, we have to call Manny before we show up or he’ll leave us standing outside on the sidewalk for hours.”
“You just get us there princess. I’ll take care of Manny.”
Read On — Forbidden Love Part 7
Let’s keep in touch: P.G. & Sharon Barnett ([email protected]) © P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.
