Little Secrets

by Megan Hart

It wasn’t like Kendra was the queen of keeping an eye on her children, Ginny thought uncharitably at the sight of Kendra’s panicked expression. Still, having once misplaced Luke in a department store when she was supposed to be taking him to pick out a birthday present for Peg, Ginny knew the rush of panic. She put a hand on Kendra’s arm.

  “We’ll find them. They have to be in the house somewhere. Right?”

  Kendra nodded, looking doubtful. She pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and pressed a few numbers. “Clark. Are the kids there with you? No, not Carter, I know he’s there. No, well…they didn’t go with you? No,” she snapped. “They’re not missing. They’re just…they’re here somewhere. I just wanted to make sure they hadn’t gone with you before I started hollering for them. Yes, we’ll be home soon. Just put him in the crib, for God’s sakes! Give him a bottle, whatever!”

  She disconnected and gave Ginny an embarrassed shrug. “You’d think he’d never put the kid to bed before.”

  “We’ll find them,” Ginny repeated so she didn’t have to comment on Kendra’s marital discord. God knows, Ginny shouldn’t judge. “Let’s look upstairs.”

  Sean had come back inside the house, his nose and cheeks flushed pink with cold. He smelled of smoke. Ginny pulled her husband aside to explain the situation. He didn’t get it, she saw that clearly enough.

  “I’m going to take Kendra upstairs and check around. Keep an eye out down here.”

  “Carson!” Kendra cried, because at that moment her son ambled out of the dining room with a cookie in each hand and chocolate around his mouth. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Where’s your sister?”

  “Don’t know.” Carson lifted a cookie to his mouth but didn’t bite it. He looked suddenly alarmingly green. “Don’t feel good.”

  Oh hell no, Ginny thought. “Bathroom’s down the hall.”

  God help Kendra if her son puked all over Ginny’s brand-new area rug, she thought, but Kendra at least had this part of parenting down. She hustled Carson down the hall so fast he dropped both cookies before he could toss them. The bathroom door slammed behind them.

  Ginny looked at Sean. “I’ll go look upstairs.”

  He lifted his eyes to the ceiling at the sound of pattering footsteps. “Someone’s up there.”

  Running. Back and forth along the hall and in the baby’s room. Also the library. Ginny and Sean tracked the noises with their eyes for a minute before she gestured at the fallen cookies. “Can you get that? I’ll be back.”

  He looked first surprised, then annoyed, but said nothing as he bent to clean up the crumbled mess. Ginny left him to it, not interested in an argument, though his response had rubbed along her skin like a shark’s scales being stroked the wrong direction. She climbed the stairs with one hand on the railing to help heave her bulk along, and by the time she reached the top she had to stop and catch her breath.

  She flicked the switch on the wall, but the ceiling fixture stayed dark. Colored light from the outside Christmas bulbs came in through the window facing the street, but it was filtered even further by the stained glass. Some other light drifted into the hall from the bathroom night-light, but that was it.

  Shadows moved, whispering and giggling. The patter of feet slapped the floor beyond the railing across from her and slipped around the corner into the nursery. The door shut with a click, cutting off the childish laughter.

  “Kelly?” Ginny put her left hand on the railing, but didn’t move toward the nursery.

  She could go to the left, past the bathroom and her bedroom, to get there, or she could go to the right and pass the library. The door was closed there too. If Kelly came out of the nursery, she could jog either left or right and avoid Ginny altogether, depending which way she ran. Ginny didn’t feel like chasing her, especially not in the dark. As she hesitated, her decision was made for her.

  The door to the library opened, and Kelly tumbled into the hallway on a couple stumbling steps before she stopped with her back to Ginny.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Ginny put out a hand to snag the girl’s dress. “I’m right here.”

  Kelly whirled with a shriek that startled Ginny into echoing it. Her scream scared Kelly into another wail, and the girl ran back into the library. Ginny managed to gather her wits, though, and pursued her. The light in this room worked, though both of them put their hands up against the sudden brightness when she turned it on.

  “Enough,” Ginny snapped, her patience worn thin by the unpleasantly behaved neighbor children. “Kelly, stop it.”

  Kelly’s screams trailed into a whimper. Her terror faded visibly, though at the sight of Ginny’s face, her eyes widened and she looked like she might start to sob instead of scream. “You scareded me!”

  “You scared me too. You shouldn’t be running around up here in the dark, especially alone.”

  “I’m not alone. I’m playing with the little girl.”

  “Which little girl? From the party? What did she look like?”

  Kelly looked evasive. “Umm…she has dark hair.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know her name, I think it’s Carrie.”

  Ginny froze. Her gaze narrowed as her heart set up a quickened, nervous thumping in her wrists and the base of her throat. “It’s not nice to tell stories that aren’t true, Kelly.”

  “I’m not telling stories.” Kelly looked chastened, but unrepentant. She scuffed at the floor with one of her patent-leather shoes. “Carson quit with us because he wanted some more cookies, but she kept playing.”

  “Kelly,” Ginny said warningly. “Don’t make me tell your mom that you were lying to me.”

  “But I’m not! I was playing with the little girl, I was. You can ask her yourself!”

  Ginny looked around the room, half expecting to see a floating ghostly form. “Where is she?”

  Kelly looked shifty-eyed again and shuffled her feet. “She probably ran away.”

  “Where would she go?”

  “I don’t know.” Kelly shrugged.

  “She was in here with you? Playing hide and seek?”

  Kelly nodded, looking a little relieved that Ginny’s tone had gone a little softer. “Yeah, she was hiding in the cubby, and I found her, but she ran through.”

  “In the…” Stunned, Ginny looked toward the small door set into the wall. There was another identical door in the nursery, but she hadn’t known the storage space connected the rooms.

  It made sense, of course, but another surge of irritation rose. The one peek she’d taken had shown her a slanted, narrow space with nails sticking through the roof and a gap in the floorboards under the eaves, stuffed with insulation. Not the place to be running and playing.

  “Where is she now, Kelly?”

  “I don’t know, I told you, she ran through…”

  The girl kept talking for a minute or so, but Ginny was looking past her to the easel and paints she’d set up weeks ago and had been ignoring ever since. The painting on the easel had only been a few strokes, just a couple blobs of color and some light pencil sketching. She hadn’t touched it since then, or even looked at it. But one thing Ginny knew for sure—she most definitely had not been finger-painting.

  Anger, real anger now, instead of just annoyance, bubbled out of her. Stalking past the sniffling child, Ginny looked at the painting. Jaw set, she glared at Kelly.

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t…I mean, me and Carson…and the little girl…”

  “Why would you touch this? What made you think this would be okay, to go into someone else’s house and touch their stuff?” Ginny snapped a hand toward the mess on her canvas.

  Someone had streaked it with color in broad, thick lines. There was a pattern to it, but no shape, no form. It wasn’t a painting that meant
to look like anything specific, not a dog or horse or person. Not even a rainbow. If anything, it resembled some of the most offbeat pieces of modern art she’d ever studied, and Ginny loathed modern art.

  “Answer me!” She took a step toward Kelly, who must’ve rightly assumed it was threatening though Ginny hadn’t so much as raised a hand.

  “I t-t-told you, it wasn’t me or Carson. It was the little girl, she painted it!”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  Kelly tucked them at once behind her.

  Ginny’s mouth twisted, but she kept herself from shouting. She took another step toward Kelly. “Kelly, I don’t want to have to tell your mommy you’ve been naughty.”

  Reluctantly, Kelly held out a hand.

  Ginny snagged her wrist to study the girl’s palm for telltale signs of paint. That was how Kendra found them.

  “Kelly? What’s going on?”

  “Mommy!” Kelly screamed and ran into her mother’s arms, burying her face against Kendra’s stomach. Her shoulders shook with sobs.

  Kendra gave Ginny a narrow-eyed, frowning glare. Peg had once revealed to her younger sister that no matter how terrible her children had behaved, if another adult was the one disciplining them, something protective and feral reared its head. Ginny saw it in Kendra’s gaze now, the sharp glance at Ginny’s hands and then how she took up her daughter’s to go over the wrist. Checking for bruises, maybe.

  Ginny didn’t care. She’d seen the evidence on Kendra’s hands. She kept her voice sickly sweet, though. Concerned, not accusatory. She felt more than able and happily willing to take on Mama Bear, but the tiny, still-rational part of her held her tongue.

  “She got into my paints. Be careful she doesn’t get it on your pretty blouse.”

  Kendra yanked Kelly’s grasping hands away from her at that news, peering harder at her daughter’s palms. She sagged, then looked at Ginny, embarrassed. “Oh God. Kelly. What on earth?”

  “You should take her home,” Ginny said firmly enough that Kendra blinked. “Now.”

  “Right. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Ginny.” Kendra paused. “I cleaned your bathroom for you, though. Carson’s okay now, but…yeah, I took care of it.”

  As though Ginny should be, what, grateful? She smiled thinly but kept her voice as sweet as sugar cookies. “Thanks for coming to the party.”

  Kendra nudged Kelly forward; the girl went as reluctantly as she’d offered Ginny her hand. “Say thank you to Mrs. Bohn.”

  Kelly hesitated.

  Ginny smiled at her. She couldn’t really get down on her knees to be eye to eye, but she bent forward so the girl had no choice but to stare her in the face.

  “Merry Christmas, Kelly.”

  “Thankyouforhavingus.” Kelly’d rushed the words and ducked back behind her mother, who gave Ginny another apologetic look.

  “Merry Christmas. Thanks for the party, it was really lovely. Umm…yeah.” Kendra fumbled when Ginny didn’t return the smile. “We’ll just…okay. Good night.”

  In the doorway, Kelly looked over her shoulder at Ginny. “Merry Christmas, Carrie!”

  Kendra shushed her, shoving her along, but Ginny turned to look behind her. The cubby door was cracked open, just a little, and she couldn’t remember if it had been that way before or if that squeak of Kelly’s patent-leather shoes had masked the creak of it opening.

  Ginny stared at it for a long time as the sounds of merriment drifted up from downstairs. It wouldn’t take much for her to cross the room and open that door. At the very least, she should shut it tightly to prevent drafts.

  She opened the door the whole way, her fingers reaching for the pull chain on the light she remembered was inside. It, like the light in the hall, didn’t come on. Ginny muttered a curse for ancient light bulbs. She looked along the low space, into the darkness, forcing herself not to be uneasy. There was nothing in there but dust and the nose-tickling smell of pink insulation, and maybe a mouse or two that had been smart enough to avoid the bait left by Danny, the exterminator.

  Except there was something back there, in the deep and shifting shadows. Something small and crouched. And something on the floor too—spots of green, the same color that had been on Kelly’s palms and splashed across Ginny’s canvas. She looked hard into the darkness and willed her eyes to find a face, hands, toes, but the figure remained solid and lifeless, without a glimmer of eyes or teeth. It remained a nothing.

  She leaned in just a little to take another look at the floor, the small curved imprint of a bare foot. Unmistakable as anything else, just this one, the others more spattered and uneven. She was reaching to touch the paint and check to see if it was wet, when someone called her name. Startled, she jumped and smacked her head on the inside of the doorframe. With a muffled curse, she backed out of the cubby.

  “Your friends are getting ready to leave. I thought you’d want to say goodbye.” Sean leaned in the library doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh. That little heathen from next door was messing with my stuff. She was inside here, running from room to room.”

  “In the crawl space?” Sean came up behind her to look over her shoulder. “In the dark?”

  “Apparently.”

  He snorted soft laughter. “Brave kid.”

  “Stupid kid. She could’ve fallen through, broken a leg. Or worse. Not to mention that she got into my paints and…” Ginny broke off with a sigh and a shake of her head. “Never mind. Just remind me, next year, when I say I want to have a party…that I don’t.”

  His laugh sounded a little more like his usual, this time. “Right. You say that now, but…”

  “Next year we’ll have a little one of our own. I probably won’t even have time to plan a party.”

  He gave her a curious look and put a hand on her belly, rubbing. A tiny foot, a little hand, pressed against his touch. He put his other hand next to it, his strong fingers curling against her flesh. “You’ll want to see everyone.”

  Ginny put her hands over his. “Honestly? The only people I need to see will be the ones I already see all the time. I don’t need to host a big shindig and invite all kinds of people over and feed them and stuff.”

  Sean said nothing for a moment or two. Then he leaned to kiss her. “Your friends,” he reminded. “They said they were leaving. I thought you’d want to say goodbye.”

  Ginny knew then whom he meant, and why exactly he’d gone to such lengths to invite them. It was a relief, in a way, not to wonder anymore if he knew. She said nothing at first, letting the sounds from downstairs drift up to them…but not come between them.

  Finally, she pushed away just enough to look at him. “They can find their own way out.”

  After a moment he nodded. Then he hugged her again, his hands moving in small circles over her back as her belly made a bridge between them.

  It wasn’t until later in bed, when she’d woken once again in the night with wide eyes and the idea that someone had spoken her name, that Ginny recognized what had been so odd about the paint in the crawl space. It had looked like the print of a bare foot, a child’s foot. But not Kelly’s she remembered, because Kelly had been wearing patent-leather shoes.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  More snow. Inches of it on top of the mountains they already had. Sean had made it to work, even though the radio stations were all warning motorists to stay off the road. His class would be cancelled, or so she thought, but he’d told her he had to make it in or forfeit some of the paid time off he wanted to take after the baby came. She had to weigh the anxiety of imagining him swerving into a ditch against knowing how much help it would be having him home, and in the end Ginny’d had no choice anyway. If her husband said he was going to work, he was going to work. It was stupid to make them all come in when they could just close the offices. It served no purpose to have people risk their lives to com
e in and pound away on keyboards, entering data.

  “Not all of us have the benefit of working for ourselves,” he’d reminded her this morning, early, when she’d rolled over in bed with a groan at the sound of his alarm.

  He hadn’t pointed out that Ginny wasn’t working and hadn’t been for months. She said nothing about it either, just got up and made him breakfast while he showered and the lights flickered, and she hoped the power wouldn’t go out again.

  It did, of course, blipping on and off a few times before finally cutting out altogether. Ginny sighed, frustrated and thinking of the three loads of laundry she had yet to do, the full dishwasher. Her rumbling stomach and the soup she’d intended to heat up for her lunch.

  Her cell phone rang, Peg on the other end inviting her over for lunch and to watch movies. Peg’s house had power. Peg had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and wasn’t afraid of driving in the snow, because, as Peg said, she’d survived teaching six teenagers how to drive.

  “I’ll come pick you up. We’ll hang out. I’ll bring you home when Sean gets home, or he can stop here on his way home from work. I’ll make goulash. It’ll be good.” Peg paused. “I never see you anymore.”

  That wasn’t true—Peg had stopped by on her way to what she called the “fancy” grocery store on Ginny’s side of town just two weeks ago.

  “You’re just not used to having all your kids out of the house, that’s all. Makes you feel like you’re missing stuff you aren’t.”

  “Not true,” Peg said. “What, I can’t miss my baby sister? And besides, you know…I worry about you, a little bit. In that big house alone.”

  Ginny was silent for a second or two. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “But I do.”

  Above her, the lights flickered, but immediately dimmed and went dark. Ginny sighed. “Yes. Please come get me. I can’t stand it here without power; it’s so gray today I can’t even get any decent light to read.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  It took forty minutes, actually, the roads worse than Peg would admit at first. Her SUV handled everything okay, but it was eerie riding the snow-covered streets, the wind so bad the traffic lights swung. Not many other people were on the road.