The Deepest Secret (20 page)

“Owen’s here. He wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him I’ll be right there.” The world is fuzzy, black around the edges. She’s only slept a few hours, a flimsy sleep, plagued with broken images. She kept jerking awake to the realization that she was forgetting something important, something that required her to sit up and take stock of her surroundings, and it made her tick down the usual list: Tyler, Melissa, David. Each time her mind had stalled with terrible certainty on
Amy
. Amy, who’s alone out there somewhere. Amy, who would have returned home if she could.

Owen’s in the living room, looking out the window. The drapes
are pulled open, and moonshine gleams on the wood, the glass. “Owen?”

He turns. He’s haggard, his face sunk in deep folds. He’s short and powerfully built, but he’s collapsed in on himself. He seems smaller somehow, and the magnetism that radiates from him is gone. He’s just a man, not the guy with the booming voice and quick temper. “Sorry to wake you.”

“What is it? Have they found her?”

He shakes his head, and she feels the corrosive rush of relief. Every hour that passes pulls the events of that night farther away. With every minute that goes by, people’s memories are blurring and evidence is wearing away. But she’s not free yet.

“I need to talk to you,” he says.

Tyler’s hovering in the dining room. He’s been gaming, his controller lying on the coffee table, the TV screen frozen on the scene of a soldier running across a burned-out courtyard. “Go to bed, Ty,” she tells him gently. “Classes start in a few hours.” It used to be when he couldn’t sleep, he’d wake her and she’d keep him company. To Owen, she says, “Let’s go into the kitchen. I’ll put on some coffee.”

Coffee would be good. It would clear the fog in her head.

They sit across from each other at the kitchen table. The blinds are open in here, the way they keep them at night. Through the window, she can see the trees in the backyard, the corner of the new neighbors’ house. A light burns in an upstairs window. She guesses someone’s up with the baby.

“Tell me,” he says. “You’re Charlotte’s best friend. Tell me she isn’t mixed up in this.”

“No! Of course she’s not.”

“I want to believe her, but she’s lied to me before.”

“I know.”

“It was going on right under my nose, and I never had a clue.”

Charlotte had kept it from Eve, too. But Eve had noticed how
Charlotte and Robbie had angled themselves away from each other at that Christmas party, and she’d known instantly. Until then, Robbie had been just another one of Charlotte’s clients, a name Charlotte had mentioned from time to time. Eve had urged Charlotte to talk to Owen. God help her, she’d told Charlotte to confess. Eve had believed there was room in their marriage for honesty, and she’d been wrong. David had been annoyed. He’d warned her to stay out of it. And now … he’s retreated.

It’s like we’re not even married, he’d said, and her heart had plummeted down a thousand flights. Maybe no one’s safe. Maybe there’s no such thing as a true love that lasts a lifetime.

Eve finds her voice, reaches for his hand. “She would never hurt Amy. You know that.”

“They’d been fighting so much lately. Every day I got inundated with texts and phone calls from Amy, wanting to come live with me.”

But Owen wouldn’t take her in. “Nikki and Charlotte argued, too. Remember?”

“Little stuff, not like this. This was on a whole new level. Charlotte even locked her out of the house one night. Amy called, crying. She was only outside for a few minutes, but still. You don’t do that to a kid.”

Eve hadn’t known about that.

“It’s Robbie,” Owen says. “How could she fall for a jerk like that? What does she see in him?”

“Maybe she sees the person she wants to be.”

“I don’t know her. I have no idea who she is anymore.”

She’s still holding his hand. They’ve never touched before other than the brief hugs at the occasional dinner. “She’s still the same Charlotte.” It’s Eve who’s changed. Or maybe this is who she is, who she’s been all along.

“You make sure she tells the truth today,” Owen says. “You hold her to it.”

———

Tyler sits, spooning cereal into his mouth. Melissa sits across from him, holding a glass of juice and texting, her thumbs moving rapidly over the face of her phone. They don’t look at each other. They’re not talking at all. It’s as if they’re strangers. This shared grief, never brought out into the open but always lying just beneath the surface.

“You look nice,” Eve tells Melissa. She didn’t even know her daughter owned a pair of jeans that weren’t ripped or a shirt with actual sleeves instead of straps or that hung off the shoulder. Maybe this is a sign her daughter’s growing up.

Tyler pushes back his chair and carries his bowl to the sink. He’d been full of the usual questions.
What if the teacher asks a question I don’t know the answer to? What if I look like a dork on camera?
This is why she needed to be home.
You couldn’t possibly look like a dork
, she’d told him.
And no one knows the answers on the first day of school
.

“I’ll be up in a sec,” she tells him.

The school bus is due any minute. Eve peels back an inch of drapery fabric, pushes aside the blinds. They’re under siege, imprisoned within their own house. But for this brief slice of time, the street is blessedly empty of strange cars. It’s a gift, this peace. Jason Freed had stopped them in the driveway, a cameraman right behind him, aiming his camera into their car. Eve huddled against the door and averted her face, but the man had stood only a few feet away. He could have captured her image. Somewhere it could be playing, and someone could be watching. Maybe someone who’d been on the road that stormy night.

“Mom?” Melissa says, impatient.

“All right, you can take the bus. But if the reporters are back this afternoon, I’ll come get you.”

They go into the garage and close the kitchen door behind them, even though Tyler’s in his room.

The garage is cool and dark. Melissa punches the button on the
wall. The garage door slowly rolls up, creaking along its tracks. For years, Melissa’s left this house—to catch the school bus, climb into a friend’s car. Eve feels the weight of all those departures, all those minutes and hours her daughter has been gone from her.
Don’t go
, she longs to beg.
Stay with me
.

Pale yellow sun washes across the pavement. Melissa ducks beneath the garage door and straightens her shoulders. She is preparing herself, and Eve loves this small, simple act of courage.

“Have a good day,” Eve calls.
Be safe
.

Melissa trudges up the street to the ravine road. She won’t tell Eve who sits next to her at lunch. She won’t explain why she won’t wear braids anymore or whether she’s finished her summer reading book. This is normal, right? Melissa’s just trying to sort herself out, establish herself apart from her parents. But Tyler had said,
She lies right to your face
. David had said,
Something’s wrong with our daughter
. It’s Eve who hasn’t seen it.

It would be easy to go into Melissa’s room and search for clues. Eve’s mother would have done it. She believed that a teenager should have no expectation of privacy. Her mother had been disappointed when Eve didn’t tell her about David until they were engaged. Eve had been determined to be a different kind of mother. She had told David this when they were expecting Melissa. He had smiled and shaken his head.
We’ll still make mistakes
, he’d told her.
They’ll just be different ones
.

How is a parent supposed to balance the needs of a healthy child against a fragile one? It can’t ever be equal—not the time, nor the resources, nor the hours lying awake in the dark consumed by tangled thoughts—but the love can be exactly the same. The love has always been split precisely down the middle, an effortless divide. Melissa knows this. She must know this.

There are other kids waiting at the corner. They turn as Melissa approaches, and she steps among them.

———

The police station echoes with brightness, doors leading off everywhere, people coming and going. Phones ring. Conversations are cut off in midstream as doors open and close. This could be any office building, anywhere, except for the uniformed officers with their heavy gun belts. They wear their guns so easily. At any moment, they could pull them out and point them at her.
We know what you did
.

She’s pinned to her chair. Why had she agreed to this? Charlotte doesn’t need her. She’s got Gloria and Felicia, Nikki and Scott. But Charlotte had asked, and David had made Eve feel ashamed for hesitating. But she feels her heart banging against her ribs. Charlotte could say something that might unravel everything. She might say something that would make the police stop and take another, harder look at Eve.

“What’s taking so long?” Scott says.

“It’s only been an hour,” Gloria says. “These things take time.”

No one asks her how she knows this. It’s a platitude, and they all recognize it.

“This is so stupid,” Nikki says. She’s small and sturdy. She’s done gymnastics for years; she wears her makeup like armor. Even the black lines around her eyes are firm and straight. “Why are they wasting their time? Why aren’t they looking for Amy?”

“They are,” Gloria says. “Everyone’s looking for her.”

Charlotte’s behind a door fifteen feet away. She’d had to go alone. She couldn’t take anyone in with her, not even a lawyer. All she had was herself and her version of events.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Nikki asks.

“What do you think?” Scott says.

“This is all my fault,” Nikki says. “If I’d been home, I could have caught Amy sneaking out. I would have stopped her.”

“News flash,” Scott says. “The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“I never said it did,” Nikki says, tearful.

“Scott, please,” Felicia says.

Nikki slumps onto the bench beside Eve, and Eve puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders and draws her close. This is the way it’s always been: Charlotte’s children going in and out of her house, her children going in and out of Charlotte’s. She thinks about Tyler, locked alone in his room. So many things could go wrong. During tornado season, when the sky looks the least bit threatening, she never leaves the house.

The door down the corridor opens, and Charlotte emerges. She looks grim but composed. “Least that’s over.” She ignores the man coming out behind her, with a big black case and a sheaf of papers. Eve doesn’t like the watchful look on his face.

“How did it go?” Felicia asks.

“It went,” Charlotte says. Her face is shockingly pale. “Come on. I have to get out of here.”

Outside, the sun makes Eve squint. Charlotte and her children walk ahead, Felicia with her arm around her sister. Gloria puts her hand on Eve’s arm, draws her to walk more slowly beside her. She’s in her seventies. She’s had a hip replaced. Eve slows down. Charlotte moves farther and farther ahead.

“The police are convinced that Charlotte’s covering something up,” Gloria says suddenly.

Eve looks at her. Gloria’s face is set in weary lines. Her hair is white, softly curled. “It’s all those terrible cases you hear about that’s making them think that way.”

“Yes, and just like all those terrible cases you hear about, Charlotte’s the one without an alibi.”

“She called the police as soon as she realized Amy was missing.”

“No, she didn’t. You know as well as I do that she looked around the neighborhood for her first.”

“But Amy was always running away.”

“It still looks bad.”

Surely it was pure disbelief that kept Charlotte from immediately picking up the phone. Any mother would have done the same thing, checked all the usual places first before succumbing to the horror that her child was gone.

“Children don’t change much,” Gloria says. “I could always tell when Charlotte was hiding something.”

“You can’t mean …” Eve says, horrified.

“I don’t know what it is. I just know there’s something she’s not telling us.”

Everyone else is waiting for them by the car. Eve unlocks the doors and they climb in. She drives them home.

The rainbow sticker’s been scraped away. The beach towel’s gone. Felicia maybe, or Gloria, has done her best. But the CD still protrudes from the player.

Gloria keeps up a determined monologue about all the things they need to do that afternoon: print up more flyers and pass them out, search the online list of predators once again, call the national foundations for missing children. Charlotte sits in the passenger seat, her face turned to watch the buildings roll past, and makes no reply.

The highway’s clear, the usual jockeying among drivers for position at the merges. They pass the grocery store and Gloria asks Charlotte if she needs anything, and Charlotte just shakes her head.

Eve struggles to focus on the road. The lanes merge into one another. She has to blink hard to straighten them out again.

There’s a teenager out walking a black-and-white dog. A man bikes past, and a mail truck is stopped at a mailbox, the postal carrier reaching into the wooden box. The school playground is noisy with children; the shouts and whoops reach the car as they bump over the speed humps. Felicia rolls up the window to let the car fill with silence again. Eve holds onto the steering wheel, lets it guide her into their cul-de-sac. The reporters are back. Their cars fill this street. Car doors fling open, and the reporters step out, their faces turned
toward them. They recognize Charlotte’s car. Eve feels a surge of pity and shame, the two waves cresting and dragging her under.

“It’s her!”

“Look this way, Charlotte!”

“Can you give us a statement?”

“Faster,” Scott urges, low in Eve’s ear.

She’s drifted to a stop, men and women all around the car, banging on the windows, waving their hands, their mouths moving like hungry fish. “Mrs. Nolan! Charlotte!” Their voices come through the glass. Charlotte stares ahead, her profile carved and still. But her hands clench and unclench the purse straps in her lap.