Collector's Edition
a tale from the underside by Sean MacKendrick
Who doesn’t like to collect things? We start as kids: baseball cards, beanie babies, stamps, rocks—am I showing my age? What do kids collect nowadays?
How about secrets? Well, that’s exactly what the heroine of our story does. Find out more after the picture.
And if the post is truncated in your email, you can always view it in the app!
Collector’s Edition
by Sean MacKendrick
I’ve been keeping secrets for nearly four decades now. Wait, no. Everyone keeps secrets throughout their entire life, that’s not the important part. What I started doing forty years ago was collecting them from other people.
It started in kindergarten. That was a tough time for me. I was always the quiet shy one, slow to make friends, and homesick for that entire year, a daddy’s girl without her daddy. As the only girl in a house with three older brothers, I was accustomed to more attention focused my way than an average teacher could provide.
Mom was there too, at least physically. She and Dad hadn’t been in love since some time before I came along, so say my brothers. My accidental arrival in the middle of their low point probably explains why my father latched on to me so tightly. All I knew at the time was that I could do and say whatever I wanted, and that loving glint in Dad’s eyes wouldn’t dim for even a second.
Mrs. Barber was a nice enough teacher. She just couldn’t compete with all the unfailing adoration I got at home. So when she had a family emergency and class cut short on a late spring day, I felt like my heart would burst with joy. I sprinted from the bus stop to the door and stopped at the last minute so that I could sneak in. Daddy would be so surprised when he saw me early.
I crept inside and tiptoed down the hall toward the living room where I could hear Mom and Dad talking. I like to think I had both hands over my mouth to keep in the giggles as I inched closer.
Whatever they were discussing, they did it in that quiet, scary tone that I had heard them use before, where they’re both angry but not willing to show each other how much they’re hurting. Maybe I understood that all at the time, maybe I filled it in later. What I did know for sure was that I no longer wanted to jump around the corner and plant myself in a triumphant pose, ready to be picked up and loved.
Mom mumbled something while Dad kept asking, “Who?” over and over, until Mom finally relented and named someone. A neighbor. After a long uncomfortable pause, Dad asked another question, and I heard crying from both of them. I knew that I shouldn’t be hearing this and walked back out as quietly as I had entered. Then opened and slammed the door, and stomped in, throwing my bag on the floor and announcing my presence.
After taking a lot longer than necessary to remove my shoes, Dad picked me up, and while I won’t say I forgot all about whatever I heard, it no longer lived at the forefront in my mind.
That night at dinner, Dad said he liked the chicken. Maybe it was a good chicken, maybe it wasn’t. Mom was never a great cook, but she had her moments of culinary competency. Still, I don’t think I had ever heard my dad compliment her cooking before then. Mom smiled and said thank you. Through those simple little gestures, we could all tell something had changed.
And change it had. Slowly, maybe, and not without its hiccups, my parents’ relationship began to improve. They even fell back in love. All because my mom had revealed some secret to my dad, and even though it was horrible, sharing that secret had freed them of something.
#
The next school year, Isaac joined my class when his parents moved into town mid-year. He was a smart, friendly, immediately popular kid I would not have imagined becoming my friend. At recess, a few months after he joined our school, I watched Isaac not interacting much with the rest of the kids, just sort of standing near the tetherball poles watching others play. I was accustomed to playing alone, he wasn’t. It stood out when he did it.
I approached him and asked if he wanted to play the next game, and he just looked at me, lost in his own thoughts. He gave me a blank stare, and once I realized it wasn’t me perplexing him, I asked him what was wrong. He shook his head and looked away. Remembering my parents, I told him that when people tell secrets to each other, it makes them happier.
So he did. Simple as that. God, if only we could still be as trusting as we were as children. He told me that his mom was sick. No further details, just that simple sort of way kids have about telling things. And wouldn’t you know it? That’s when our friendship started, because he was free from all that strain.
The secret was now a shared one, between the two of us. Not with our teacher, or classmates, or anyone else. I was the one that took on that burden, by lifting it off Isaac. Or at least, helping him to carry it. That’s enough, most of the time.
#
He never did tell me, back then, what specifically was wrong with his mom. Just that she wasn’t well. Obviously there was more than just a vague nameless ailment happening, but Isaac never told me. I came to realize that he didn’t know, himself. His parents weren’t giving him the whole story. More secrets. I was coming to realize how the world was crammed full of them.
It was that secret that drove me to sneak into the school nurse’s office. For some reason I thought she might have medical records of Mrs. Isaac’s Mom, and I wanted to help him understand better.
Much of my success in procuring the other kids’ medical records was pure luck, I realize now. I was pretty sure at the time that my faked upset stomach was a stroke of genius. When the nurse brought me into her office, I flopped into a chair and sighed in my best dramatic tone to indicate, yes, this was exactly what would cure my ills. She asked a few questions, and eventually let me rest as I assured her in a brave voice that I would be OK if she would just let me relax for a moment. As soon as she stepped out, I went right for the file cabinet. The fact that it was unlocked, and that any records sat in the lower drawers where I could reach, that was luck. The files being labeled in a simple enough way that even a child could read them, that was the luckiest part.
Some scraped limbs, headaches, fevers, and scared little kids making themselves sick with worry made up most of the files’ descriptive labels. Or of those I could make out, anyway. I think there was a case of chicken pox, maybe a dislocated shoulder from the playground. That may be me filling in details of my memory that didn’t originally exist. As an introverted eight-year old from a literate family, I read quite well, and this was a veritable treasure chest. I lay back down and closed my eyes, trying to think of what I would do with this information. There was no help for Isaac, but in the process of trying I had taken on this responsibility of so many other people’s medical secrets, I thought I might explode.
It was no longer necessary to fake that stomachache by the time the nurse came back to check on me.
#
As soon as I got home, I wrote down what I could remember. Names and infirmities. There was too much to carry around inside my head. It was such a relief, as though the strain and pressure flowed directly out of my brain through the pencil, staining the paper with dark secrets.
I wish I could remember the name of the girl I saw some days later, the one who was now written on a piece of hidden paper next to the words, “very sad.” She had been to the school nurse three times already that year, her third year, crying her eyes out, struggling with school so much more than I ever did. Yet here she was playing tag with a group of boys, shrieking with laughter, letting the cutest boys catch her.
Nothing about her game of tag even hinted at sadness. I watched her the next day at recess, and the next, and the next. I had cured her by taking on her secret. She didn’t need to tell it to me. She didn’t even have to know who I was.
#
I never quite lost that sense of being able to extract secrets from those who suffered them. Look, I’m very aware that I did some of this for my own benefit. You think it wasn’t a thrill to learn about the affairs in my quiet little subdivision? To discover who was drinking too much and who had to pay a dozen parking tickets a year? Of course it was. But that wasn’t why I did it. If you had only seen that look of gratitude on my mother’s face as her husband expressed a simple appreciation for the dinner she prepared, after years of only tolerating each other’s existence, you’d understand.
In college, I bounced from subject to subject before settling on electrical engineering. I later went back and obtained a second degree in computer science. The World Wide Web was just becoming fashionable, and as more and more information was digitized, people like me were all but invited to take whatever they could. And every year, more information was posted online. Every year it got easier.
Outside college, I was studying and gathering other skills. A locksmith certification here, a psychiatric course in body language there. I ended up with a private investigator’s license, the only logical way to make a living given circumstance. Officially, I work primarily with process servers to find people that don’t always want to be found. My little studio flat is filled with notebooks of secrets from random strangers, co-workers, and the increasingly rare lover from back when I thought I needed companionship. It’s hard to feel trust for someone when you knew their entire credit history, arrest records, whatever they thought was hidden. Not one of my exes ever discovered my GPS trackers, and if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to trace them back to me. Not for certain, anyway. I was able to build those myself with parts delivered to different post office boxes under fake names.
No one with such an intimate knowledge of secrets like myself was going to be sloppy about her own. My loneliness was just an inevitable consequence. I welcomed it. I still do.
#
It was the free computer terminals in the Chicago Public Library that ultimately caused my trouble. I installed small recording devices in several of them. Once a week or so I swapped them out and downloaded the info, watched the playback as I scribbled notes in my notebooks.
I never entered the secrets into another computer. That would have been foolish. It would have further risked exposing them to anyone with my skills. It was never about exposing these secrets. I was only out to lessen their burdens. Everything went into those stacks of notebooks.
So many people used the library for what they wrongly assumed was safe, private use. Why send your secret lover an email from home where your wife could see it, when you can pop into the library and do it from a hidden account there?
Few of these people were stupid, they were mostly just desperate. That was John’s situation, I have to believe. Here was a guy with a good job doing risk analysis for a major bank, making quite a bit of money, who just happened to have some kind of excessive spending habit. I recognized his name after seeing it come up more than a few times in an email sent from a library terminal, stating simply that he was wiring the money for item #15 or something equally non-descriptive. I hacked into three different email accounts all under his name, checked his bank accounts, and put together a picture of a man who spent more money on a secret obsession than his family would ever know.
He was interesting, but I had dozens of interesting cases going at any one time. He was one of a thousand such cases that filled pages of scrawled secrets, nothing all that special. But he spotted me when no one else did. It’s possible that he saw me one of the times I was waiting outside his office to follow him. More likely, he just happened to be the first one to see me swap out one of my library bugs one Saturday.
#
John followed me to Starbucks one morning. I wish I could say I saw him approaching, or realized I was being followed, but when he held the door open for me to leave, I didn’t even give him a second glance.
“Busy morning?” he said.
I chuckled politely, assuming it was a corny and half-hearted flirtation by a random stranger. As I passed him and dug for my keys, he said, “I saw you.” It wasn’t in a flirtatious tone at all. It sounded scared and angry. I turned and dropped my keys as I searched his face. A face I now recognized.
There was no use pretending. I gave it a shot anyway.
“Saw me what?” I said, taking a while to pick up my keys, so that I wouldn’t have to look at him again.
He waited, silently. When I did look up, he was holding a small black plug out in one shaking hand. It was one of the recording devices I had swapped in at the library that morning. Less than an hour before, in fact. He wouldn’t have had time to check it yet.
I reached for it, numb, not even knowing why I was doing it. Incredibly, he let me take it. I said, “Thank you,” and walked away. He didn’t say anything, and made no move to follow me. He just watched me walk away.
To my car. With my clearly visible license plates.
#
It wasn’t even a surprise when he called me at my office a week later. I knew how easy it was to track someone by a license plate number. God only knows how many times I’ve done it myself.
He didn’t bother trying to block his number, which I knew by heart at that point. My week had been a frantic one, full of research and insomnia. By that point I knew all I possibly could about this man I’m calling John. I knew he had been divorced once already, not long after he started spending a significant amount of money on his habit. I knew a Swiss bank account existed with his name on it, with no funds or activity since it opened two months prior.
I knew he owned a half-dozen bank deposit boxes. I knew he visited at least one of them, on average, once every two weeks. I still had no idea what he was depositing in them, or who was sending the items.
I knew the number calling me was from a second cell phone that he hid from his wife and family. I picked up the phone and waited for him to talk.
“Jane D.?” he said.
I just waited.
“What do you want from me?” He asked me that, not the other way around.
I said, “Why would I want anything from you?”
He sighed, nearly a sob. “Please don’t play games. Just tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever you ask of me.”
His purchases. Whatever they were, he thought I knew about them, and was trying to use that against him.
“No, John,” I said. “I don’t want anything. I’m trying to help you.”
“Help me?” His voice sounded strangled.
I was holding the most recent notebook of secrets, half full, in my lap. It felt reassuring. I closed my eyes and leaned back, trying to relax. “I help a lot of people,” I said. “They just don’t know it.”
John took a while to respond. “How much do you want for your help?” he said, finally.
“No, that’s not it at all,” I said. “This isn’t blackmail. I’m not spying on you. I mean, I am, but—it’s not like you think. I spy on everyone. To help ease their pain.”
“What do you know about my pain?” he said.
Not as much as I wanted to know, certainly. “I know you spend a lot of money, and that you have no one to share that with. Share the pain of keeping the secret, I mean. That’s what I’m helping you with.”
Nothing but breathing filled the silence.
“I collect secrets, John. I gather them to help share the weight of them, so that you and others like you aren’t broken by that weight. I help people.”
“And you aren’t interested in turning me in,” he said. “You just want me to share the stock projections with you, too, for my own sake.”
“Stock projections?” Stock projections. From a bank analyst. From a bank analyst in desperate need of additional income.
He was going to trade inside information for a big payoff, and thought I was trying to blackmail him for it. John was just full of secrets, all ready to eat away at his heart and mind.
He must have heard the confusion in my voice as I started to piece a few things together. “John,” I said into the silence. “Please, tell me your secrets. They’ll kill you if you don’t.”
Eventually I realized that the call had ended without a sound. When I called the number back, no one answered.
#
Several things happened over the next two months. Service to John’s secret cell phone was disconnected. Stock prices for the bank that employed him rose for a week before dropping by a full ten percent. A deposit for six-hundred thousand US dollars appeared in his Swiss account, of which eighty thousand was withdrawn three days later. Two more safety deposit boxes opened up in two locations, both under John’s name. At the end of those two months John called me again, from a new number.
“I was certain you were going to turn me in,” he said. It must have been a burner, some phone he bought with cash. I never saw another phone connected with his name attached in any records I could find.
“I told you,” I said, “I’m not out to hurt you, or anyone else for that matter. My job is to help.” And maybe it would help to spread the secrets around. If two people could carry a secret more easily, what about a hundred? But that was never the arrangement.
“What you told me is that you wanted to know the secret,” he said. His voice was echoing, as though he were calling from a bathroom.
And I still did want to know. “Not about the stock information,” I told him. “You shared that with me already, and I can hear how that has helped you.” I could, too. Gone was the shaking, angry tone that dominated our last truncated conversation. Now he sounded, at worst, cautious.
“No? Then what?” he asked, his voice reverberating.
“Your collection,” I said. “Tell me what you’re spending your money on.”
He was quiet for so long that I thought he had hung up again. “John?”
“I’m here,” he said, no longer echoing. “You’re interested in what I’m spending money on? You only care about the—about my collection?”
“I do.”
He laughed. “Why do you care about that so much?”
“Because,” I said. “You care.”
“Because I care,” he repeated. “You know what? I can just show you what I collect.” A door creaked in the background. “Let me know when you have something to write with. Are you free tonight?” His voice was echoing again. Not like a bathroom, I realized. More like an empty storage room.
#
When I pulled up to the address John specified, it was nearing midnight. I was a bundle of nerves by the time I got there, well outside the city, away from lights and people. The only car parked outside the old building was a rental.
My gun is a small Beretta. It fit comfortably in my overcoat pocket, where I placed it long before I arrived at the warehouse.
John waved to me as I parked, illuminated by my headlights. I turned off the motor and blinked in the darkness until I could see again. The only light remaining was from the half moon overhead.
He was staring at me with wide open eyes, bouncing from foot to foot in the cold. My hands slid into my coat, not just for the warmth. He said, “I wasn’t at all sure you were coming.”
“I said I would. I haven’t lied to you yet, John,” I said. “There are enough secrets and lies out there already. I’m not looking to add any.”
“Right. Right, I’m with you,” he said. His breath steamed out of him into the cold night air.
“So,” I said. “How do we do this?”
John licked his lips. “I can show you what this is all about.” He nodded towards the entrance of the old warehouse building, standing at the edge of the woods, in the dark.
I said, “How about you just tell me?”
“After driving all this way?” John’s breath was clouding his face. “Don’t you want to know?”
“Of course I want to know,” I said. “I want to help you. I hope you can see that.”
“Well then,” he said. He gestured to the door with his gloved left hand. His right hand remained inside his pocket. Oh, John. “After you,” he said.
“Let’s not do it this way,” I said.
John gave me his best innocent expression. A film of sweat stood out on his upper lip in the frigid air. He said, “Just take a look. You’ll see why I needed the money.”
“OK. Lead the way,” I said. Neither of us moved.
“No, ladies first.”
“Why?”
“Just take a look,” he pleaded. Heart pounding, I took a few steps towards the building.
As soon as I stepped past him, John tried to pull his hand out of his coat pocket. His gun snagged on something, too big to come out gracefully.
I pulled my own gun. As he looked up, I swung it hard into his face. His nose exploded in a spray of blood.
John screamed, a gurgling sound, and finally managed to pull his gun free. My second swing slammed into his temple before he could aim, and John collapsed to the frozen ground. There was one last trickle of visible breath, and then nothing.
#
The warehouse was long abandoned and completely empty. Nothing collected inside but a few piles of dead bugs. Not that I had expected otherwise. This was an old storage warehouse at one time, true. But John had no connection to it. No one owned the lease any longer. Whatever his collection was, it wouldn’t be stored here.
Of course, he chose it because he had no connection to it. Just like the rental car outside, probably, and like the phone he used to call me.
But he did call me once, from a phone registered under his own name. And when the police finally did call me to ask about it, I was ready.
“Ms. D.?” said the man when I answered, nearly a month later.
“This is she.”
“Hello, ma’am. This is Detective James Johnson with the Chicago Police Department. How are you this morning?”
Fortunately, I deal with the local police on a regular basis in my capacity as an investigator. There was no need to act surprised and risk overdoing it. I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop, “I’m just fine, Detective. What can I help you with?”
He said, “I’m calling in regards to a Mr. John Smith. Do you know this name?”
“I don’t recognize the name, sorry,” I said. It came out calm and natural. I guess I was able to lie, after all.
“Well, Mr. Smith has gone missing, and our records indicate that he contacted you approximately six weeks ago on February… 24th is the date,” the detective said. “Can you tell us what that was regarding?”
I made an obvious set of typing noises on my computer. “The 24th?” I said. “Uh, yes. OK, I was contacted by a Mr. Smith in reference to a possible job regarding surveillance of his wife. Apparently he suspected her of cheating on him.” Damn it. I never give out client information that readily, normally. I wasn’t acting like myself.
The detective said, “I see. How long a conversation was this?” He would already know, of course.
“Oh, not long,” I said. “When I told him I would do the surveilling myself, he changed his mind. A lot of men do.”
“Gotcha,” the detective said. “Did he say anything else that could be helpful?”
“He really didn’t tell me much of anything,” I said.
“OK. Well, thanks for your time, ma’am. If you think of anything, could you contact me at the following number?” He gave me his contact information and hung up, and I released the notebook from my tight sweaty grip. I grabbed a fresh one and started writing furiously. My secret came flooding out of me in a painful spasm. With all those secrets I carry, I’m not sure there’s room left inside me for my own.
It doesn’t feel any better yet. Once someone reads these words, though, I know it will. I’ll feel better, I’ll feel lighter.
I’ve left enough clues, even with the faked names and omitted details. If you really wanted, you could figure out who I am, and who John was, and have me punished. You have my confession in front of you. Before you do that, consider that I have thirty boxes full of notebooks, easily three hundred in total. Three hundred notebooks full of secrets I’ve helped lift from people. That’s got to be close to half a million people over the years.
And I’ve never told anyone. I never will. That’s not why I do it. I help people. Maybe I’ve even helped you, and you never knew.
So I ask you, what will you do? Do you only care about punishment? Or will you help me carry this one terrible secret?
Meet the author:
Sean MacKendrick splits his time between Texas and Colorado. His stories, most often with a science fiction/fantasy/horror/mystery flavor, have appeared in print and online. When not writing he works as a data engineer.
His stories have appeared previously in publications such as Down in the Dirt and Nth Degree magazines.
My most recent experience with the underside was passing time in a pitch-black gym locker room with a group of strangers, after a tornado warning caught us all by surprise.
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This is a great story!
What a creative story! I like the idea of someone secretly helping others by taking their burdens. I'd like to understand what toll this takes on her though - it's kind of like the old saying in fantasy stories. All magic comes at a cost - so what price is she paying to do this?