The Secrets She Carried (26 page)

Beside him, Belle fidgeted, nudging a chilly nose into the crook of
his arm in case he’d forgotten she was there and available for petting. Jay gave her an obligatory pat as he kicked off the covers and reached for the sweatshirt and jeans draped over the footboard.

In the kitchen, he stared into the fridge, debating whether a sandwich might provide a plausible distraction, but soon decided it would not. Being in the kitchen, the scene of the crime, as it were, only served to remind him of Leslie. Only now, it wasn’t the kissing he was thinking of. He was thinking about the article she had handed him. A shed fire, it said. No injuries. But what if it wasn’t true? What if someone
had
been hurt, and instead of being reported to the authorities, the truth had been covered up?

What if someone had died?

Jay closed his eyes, suddenly back in Maggie’s room, her voice gauzy with pain and with something else he’d never let himself put a name to—guilt. Snatches of conversation were floating back, things he’d the spent the last year pretending he hadn’t heard. He
had
heard them, though—talk of an accident, of a bolted door with no escape. Even then the hair on the back of his neck had prickled. Now there was proof of a fire, resurrecting the suspicions that had been niggling at him for months. What if the accident that killed Adele Laveau hadn’t been an accident at all?

Please, God, let him be wrong.

In the living room, he moved to the desk, easing open the middle drawer to stare at the neat white stack of pages. After six years of not writing a word, of shuddering at the very thought, the muse had suddenly returned with a vengeance, prickling like a phantom limb, and God help him, he had yielded.

It had begun in earnest the day Leslie brought him to the ridge, the day he’d first set eyes on Adele Laveau’s grave; a few late-night notes added to those he had scribbled into a notebook after Maggie’s death, just to empty his head, he told himself, even when those notes began to spin themselves into fully fleshed-out pages. He’d never
meant for it to go anywhere. It was just a way to clear his thoughts, to work it all out on paper, and once and for all lay his suspicions to rest.

Only it hadn’t worked. No matter how many times he tried to shut Adele out, she came, nudging him awake, whispering in his ear, urging him to fill page after page. It wasn’t new. Back when he was writing it had always been like this, characters so real they refused to let him sleep, fighting, loving, laughing, dying, all in full color and full sound—a lot like schizophrenia, except you got paid for being delusional.

But this was different. Adele’s story wasn’t a work of fiction. It was real life, so shrouded in mystery and rife with sadness that even he couldn’t have invented it, a surefire best-seller if he was interested, which he absolutely was not. The bones in the Gavin closet were none of his business. And even if he decided to make them his business, what was the point of rattling them now? Of exposing truths no one wanted to know, least of all him? Maggie had taken her secret to the grave, and for that he was grateful. Whatever her sins, they were buried now and best left that way.

There was only one problem. While doing everything in his power to discourage Leslie from snooping around in Adele’s death, he had been quietly and methodically committing her story to paper, a fact Leslie was likely neither to appreciate nor to understand, given her zeal for absolute honesty and his tendency to skirt the truth when the truth might prove inconvenient. It wouldn’t matter that his intent had been to insulate her from some rather nasty possibilities or that he never intended to publish a single word of what he’d written. She wouldn’t see it that way. He had deliberately misled her—again. Period. And the longer he waited to come clean, the worse it was going to turn out.

Shred it. Purge your hard drive. Pretend you never wrote it.

But he couldn’t. As he lifted the stack of pages from the drawer, he
reveled in their weight, the heft of hard-fought words, perhaps—no, almost certainly—the best and truest he’d ever written. Even if he never added another word or page, which he almost certainly would not, how could he just pretend the ones now in his hand had never poured out of him?

And yet he knew as long as the story sat in his desk, he would continue to struggle with his conscience and his choices: tell Leslie about the half-written story and the real reason he couldn’t bring himself to finish it, or keep it to himself and tell her nothing at all. He didn’t care much for either option, but even in the interest of truth, it made no sense to share his suspicions about Adele’s fate when it was highly unlikely that either of them would ever really know what happened.

He stared at the stack of pages in his hand, hesitating a moment more before slipping them back into the drawer. How the hell had he gotten here? Two months ago his life had been settled, his course neatly and cleanly charted. Or so he thought. Then Leslie had shown up, and now nothing felt safe. Not his tightly woven plans or his carefully crafted walls, and sure as hell not his heart.

Adele

F
or the second time in my life I wake not knowing where I am.

I open my eyes and stretch, confused when my gaze lights on familiar sheets, my travel trunk from Parson’s, my robe draped neatly over the footboard. But this is not my room, not my bed. I make myself sit up and look about, blinking in confusion at the gritty walls and dusty floorboards. And then I remember where I am—and why.

I am in a narrow loft on the upper floor of the cottage, large enough only for a bed and small chest of drawers. There is a single grimy window looking out over the lake. I cross the room and drag open the sash, then perch on the peeling sill, gulping deep lungs full of muggy morning air, shaken by this new turn my life has taken. It is not shame I feel, though I feel that too, beneath all the rest, and suspect that I will feel it more keenly in the future. But just now, staring out over Peak’s vast green hills and shining lake, I grapple with my new place in the world and with the realization that I am suddenly quite rudderless.

I am neither married nor single, neither free nor attached. There is no one to whom I answer, no railing to endure, no eggshells to walk upon, no Susanne just down the hall. But it is an uneasy freedom.
I am no longer the green, wide-eyed child I was when I came to Peak. I am a woman grown, mistress of my own home, such as it is. But I have no work, no husband to do for, no child to see to, no friends to call upon—no earthly idea how to fill my time.

But as I make my way downstairs, I begin to see how I will at least fill part of it. The cottage has been vacant for years, bare except for a few sticks of shabby furniture and the dust clots and cobwebs choking the corners. I shudder when I enter the kitchen, grimy in the glare of a single bare bulb, skittering with eight-legged things. The stove is something ancient, coated with a film of grease so thick I’m certain the thing will catch fire the first time I try to light it. I shudder at the thought. I have never been easy with fire.

Still, I am undaunted. It is part of my penance, I suppose, and I will do what is necessary. I start in the kitchen, scaring up a broom, bucket, and scrub brush from the tiny closet I will eventually make into a pantry. When I’ve swept the filth out the back door, I go down on my knees and begin to scrub. My back is miserable when I finally stand up, but the scuffed oak boards are spotless—almost clean enough to satisfy Mama.

It takes a week to finish the rest, working sunup to sundown, scrubbing walls and polishing floors, cleaning years of grime from the windows, scouring soot from the rough brick hearth. When the cleaning is finished I set to work on curtains, then move on to covers for the furniture. By the time I finish, winter is nearly over. I am pleased with my little home, for a home it has become, small and spare, but enough for me.

With the cottage finished, my days are harder to fill. Henry brings surprises from time to time, practical things, mostly—magazines from the drugstore, a table radio for the parlor, novels from his study to fill the time when he cannot be with me—but the days are long and unravel too slowly.

It is planting time, and Henry is needed in the fields. When planting’s
done he’ll be needed in the barns, preparing for harvest and drying. I cannot begrudge him this. Times are hard for the people of Gavin, hard all over if the stories in the
Gazette
are true. Money is scarce, work near impossible to find—unless you have two able hands and know my Henry. In the past year he’s given work to nearly half the men in town, bringing them on in two-week shifts so that everyone earns a little something to feed their families.

I keep to the cottage now, so as not to raise eyebrows. Susanne keeps to the house, cloaked in the fog of her precious tincture. She no longer cares what Henry does, and so at the end of the day he comes to me. We are awkward with each other at first, like children playing house. Soon, though, as the weeks pass, we find a rhythm. He comes to me at the end of the day, and we share a meal in the tiny kitchen with its new checked curtains, then move to the parlor. Henry reads to me and puffs on his pipe. It feels good and right having him there beside me. But then the mantel clock strikes ten and he must kiss me good night, to return to the house and his own bed. There are times, though, when the clock strikes, that he takes my hand and leads me upstairs. He is always gone when I wake, slipping away before first light with only the dent on his pillow to show he’s been there. Those are hard mornings.

We do not speak of Susanne, or only rarely so, and for that mercy I am thankful. Henry scarcely sees her now, shut up in her room with the poor girl she has hired to take my place, ticking off the days until her quest to hold Henry’s child is finally achieved. The thought of it sickens me, and yet it will happen. I only wonder how I will live with it when it does.

I don’t like to think about what might happen when the child arrives, that Susanne and Henry and the baby will be a family—that I might suddenly become inconvenient. I have made foolish, some would even say wicked, choices in all of this. I suppose I would say it
too. But I am not a fool. I know how quickly things can change, how easily a woman in my place can be set aside. Yet in my heart, I do not believe it. And that is why, despite everything, I stay. I could have gone, left Henry behind and struck out on my own. It would have been the right thing to do, the proper thing, but by then it was too late for right, and certainly too late for proper.

H
enry’s daughter is the apple of his eye.

She enters the world just before dawn, a squalling pink bundle with all her fingers and toes and a head full of soot black curls. She is called Margaret, after Henry’s mother—Maggie for short—and from her first breath she is the sun her father revolves around, the warm, sure center of his universe. And he is hers.

From the day she begins to toddle it is clear that her heart belongs to this place, her soul so deeply rooted in the land that at times I think she has sprung from the soil itself. She is never far from Henry, spending every moment at his side, in the barns and the fields, the red-brown grit of Gavin soil worked deep under her nails, as true a son as her daddy ever wished for.

I confess I am jealous. I am a shadow now, always nearby but not quite belonging, living at the edge of their world. It is my punishment, I suppose, and my lot, to ache for things that can never be. My one—my only—satisfaction, is that there is nothing of Susanne in her, no trace of the pale, bitter woman she calls Mother.

Still, there are times, rare and precious times, when she slips away to be with me, when we play dress-up in my bedroom upstairs. We giggle together in front of the mirror as I pin up her hair, then place
a hat full of feathers on her head, cocking it just so. She begs prettily to wear the Blue Lady, the cameo her father gave me the first time he brought me to the ridge. It is the only piece of jewelry I own, my most precious possession, but she knows as well as I that I can deny her nothing. It will be hers one day anyway, a pretty keepsake from the nice lady who used to live in the cottage by the lake. As I fasten it to my old blue dress, I brush her cheek with a kiss, pretending in that moment that she is my own, which she can never be in truth but will always be in my heart.