No Perfect Secret

by Weger, Jackie

  “Clara-Alice! Of course we are.” How much to tell, Anna wondered, then decided—all of it. “We’ve been trying for years. We’ve both been to doctors and we’re both fine. There’s no physical reason for me not getting pregnant.”

  “Maybe you and Kevin need a vacation—like a second honeymoon. You’ve never let me pay for anything all these years, so—well... If you and Kevin would agree, I’d like to treat you to a second honeymoon.”

  Anna looked at the empty teacup before Clara-Alice, then up to her mother-in-law’s face. There was no malice, no deception, no sly smirk. She could barely keep her jaw from hanging open.

  “That’s a really nice thought. Let’s talk to Kevin about it when he gets home.”

  “I’ll convince him. You know he always minds me. I got pregnant with him on my honeymoon, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” Anna said.

  “You’ve never seen his baby books, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Maybe we could get those out of storage. I don’t remember where we put everything after—after it happened.”

  Anna smiled at Clara-Alice. A genuine smile, not one she had to paste on to hide dismay or irritation. “Kevin put all of your things in the basement. We can look for them this weekend.”

  “Oh. Let’s put a bug bomb down there first. I hate spiders.”

  “Ew, me, too,” said Anna.

  Later, as she lay in bed, each time she closed her eyes, thinking of Kevin, another face rose up to plague Anna. An angular face in which dark gray eyes tracked her every move, mocking her, piercing her brain, so that all her secrets were laid bare for inspection.

  She turned on the lamp, propping herself up on a pair of pillows, forced Caburn’s image from her mind and devised ways to reclaim the rapture in her marriage. Kevin was coming home. Frank Caburn had said so. For some unfathomable reason she believed him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Every tree limb, bush, wire and car was coated with a thick layer of ice. The sun was barely up, casting no warmth, but the faint rays activated gleaming prisms of green and blue and purple, a still-life kaleidoscope. Anna offered a mental blessing for those New York feminists who years ago had balked at skirts and began wearing pantsuits in the work place. She was clad in her favorite—lined tweed slacks with a jacket fitted at the waist, beneath which she wore a green cashmere sweater. She had a matching knit cap on her head, pulled low and wore a pair of black leather ankle boots with sensible heels.

  She had awakened energized, made swift work of breakfast—coffee and buttered toast, a three minute shower, and dressed in five minutes flat. She had made up her mind that whatever the issues with Kevin—they would work them out. Moreover, to her utter astonishment, Clara-Alice had perked the coffee, tuned the kitchen radio to an Appalachian station putting out slow talk and merry-mood fiddle music. Clara-Alice seemed perky.

  The Saab’s remote had unlocked the car doors but the damned things were frozen shut, the windshields coated in ice, and the scraper was on the passenger seat.

  “Hey! Anna. Girl, you should’ve put one of those NASA space age blankets over your car last night. Didn’t you listen to the weather report?”

  Lila Hammond came barreling across the yard, wearing rubber camouflage boots, her dead husband’s greatcoat over her flannel nightgown, and a fedora plopped on her grey-white hair. Lila looked like a thousand-year-old mummy, claimed to be a hundred-fifty, but was really almost ninety. She had the energy of a teenager. Lila had been in the WACs until 1978, served as a nurse in Philippines during the Japanese invasion, and eventually married Lt. Col. Charles Hammond, a survivor of the Bataan March. “Any man who got through that was tough enough for me,” she claimed. “Of course, I had to fatten him up before I got him into bed. When I fell for him, he was only about two inches wide, but after he filled out some—yum, yum—he was man to the bone!”

  Anna adored the old woman and often guiltily wished Lila was her mother-in-law. However, Lila had become friends with Clara-Alice and for that, Anna was everlastingly grateful.

  “Is Clara up?” Lila asked.

  “Yes, and there’s coffee made.”

  “Oh, good. We were going to the movies this afternoon, but that’s out. I’d brave these icy streets if I owned an Abrams tank—but all I’ve got is that godawful Gremlin—which should’ve been buried with the Colonel.” She came around the Saab, took hold of the door handle and gave it a jerk. The door opened. “There you go.”

  “Good God, Lila, what do you eat?”

  “Fried worms, mostly,” she said with a straight face and an air of insouciance.

  Anna laughed. “I love you, Lila, I really do. Tell me, where’d you get the hat?”

  “Found it on my porch this morning. Thought there might be a good-looking leprechaun beneath it—but no such luck.”

  “I might know who it belongs to.”

  “Uh, uh. Finders keepers. This is a Borsalino—an Ernie Pyle exclusive. Look him up in that wonderful library of yours.” She ran her tiny pink tongue around her thin, desiccated lips. “On the other hand, if whoever owns this hat comes calling for it—I might give it up. I’d like to get a look at him.”

  “I’ll mention it,” Anna said.

  “Do! See ya.” Lila moved briskly up Anna’s walk, throwing an exit line over her shoulder. “Time to beard the lioness, see what she has to moan and groan about this morning.”

  “You might be in for a surprise.” Anna started the engine, turned on the heater and scraped windows while the car warmed up.

  ~~~~

  Francis ‘Frank’ Caburn was having a terrible morning. He had suffered nightmares that kept jerking him awake. At first he had dreamed of a woman in a white caftan with a dangerously provocative décolletage, her eyes focused with an intense desire upon him. Her lips were swollen with desire, and he got so close to her he could actually feel her skin; it was creamy—soft, softer than silk. Their lips were so close he could feel her breath. Then she was turning him around to face the Mayan King. The King, wholly naked except for a feather cape, shoved him onto a sacred stool, handed him an obsidian dagger, and a bowl dripping with blood.

  The image had been so real and scary he’d awakened with a yelp. When he’d finally gotten back to sleep, Anna Nesmith materialized in her kitchen. She was preparing him dinner. He was breathless with admiration at her gracefulness as she moved between stove and counter. Once, she even brushed the top of his shoulder as she poured wine into a blue crystal goblet. She told him she was aching for his touch. She smiled when she served him—he looked down at the bowl to discover cooked human brains in a skull.

  He couldn’t countenance it, but he woke up hungry. When he got to the Golden Arches, he discovered he’d forgotten his wallet. He counted out the change in his pocket—he was short a nickel for a sausage biscuit and coffee. The guy in line behind him put a nickel on the counter. When Caburn turned to thank him, he almost jumped out of his skin. The teenager had tats all over his hands, up his arms and on his neck. His eyebrows and ears were pierced and linked with tiny chains. There was a piece of metal in his nose, and when he said, ‘you’re welcome’, his tongue flicked out displaying more metal. Geez. Ancient rituals? American teenagers were keeping body mutilation alive and well.

  On the drive to the office, he missed his turn and found himself on the wrong end of C Street; low-income housing, broken chain-link fences, glass layering the streets like confetti after a New Orleans Mardi Gras, and dozens of homeless pouring onto the sidewalks from shelters or vacant, boarded up buildings. When he finally maneuvered around Capitol Hill and into the State Department employee parking facilities, he was almost reluctant to take the elevator down to the warren of tiny, windowless cells that made up personnel investigations, fearing the elevator might zip past the basement and stop at one of the Nine Gates to Hell.

  He tossed his ID and keys into the tray and passed through the security check without a beep—since he didn’t have so m
uch as a dime in his pocket.

  Almost every government building in Washington, D. C. had wide-open and elegant passages aboveground, often tiled in marble with exquisite mosaics, carved statues and impressive artworks. Below ground at the State Department was a warren of narrow claustrophobic corridors lined with discarded furniture, file cabinets, trunks, army footlockers, rolled carpets, outdated podiums, and broken lamps. When he’d been an unpaid intern, Caburn had discovered a leather-topped desk that was rumored to have once been used by Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson. He’d tried to move the monolith into his own cubical, but discovered he couldn’t get it through the door.

  The corridor Caburn now negotiated also smelled like cat. How the creature had found its way into the building was a mystery. But it had to have found a way in before there was security at every entrance and exit.

  Helen, the general factotum of the office was a cat person, so she set out dry cat food, a litter box, and refused to allow the maniacal animal to be trapped. For fun she insisted the creature was the reincarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “the finest, best-looking, and most astute president this country has ever seen.”

  Caburn felt Helen’s eyes on him as he shrugged out of his overcoat, his suit coat and loosened his tie. She had once worked in the old FBI building, but had been overheard to make a remark about the ‘prissy’ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, gotten herself fired and somehow managed to weasel herself a job in the State Department.

  “Where’s your hat?” she asked.

  “I sent it out to be blocked.”

  “Right. Suddenly you don’t care if your bald spot shows?”

  “I do not have a bald spot.” He hung up his coat. “Could we make an appointment to have a halfway courteous conversation?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Do you mind telling me how you pay your mortgage?”

  “I don’t have a mortgage, Frank. My brownstone’s been paid off for more than fifteen years. I rent the basement apartment to a sissy Congressional aide and the second floor apartment to a pair of call girls. Well, they might be cross-dressers, but they haven’t been late with their rent in more than eight years.”

  “Prostitution is illegal.”

  “Really? Did you see that painted on the Russell Building?” she said, mentioning one of the three Senate office buildings.

  Sighing, Caburn took two steps to the break room, a converted closet that held a coffee pot, a microwave, and a miniscule fridge. He started a pot of coffee, put his cup on the burner, and waited impatiently for the cup to fill. He took cream from the fridge, checked its sell-by date, then took a sniff. Sour. He muttered an expletive.

  “Constipated again, Frank?” Helen called.

  On his way to see his boss, he stopped at the corner of Helen’s desk. “I just want you to know, I’m about to order your Christmas present.”

  “Is this another of your stupid knock-knock jokes?”

  “I’m serious, Helen. I just need to know your favorite color.”

  “Okay. I’ll fall for it. Turquoise.”

  “I think that’ll work.”

  “Well, what’s the punch line?”

  “A silk-lined casket. For an extra ten bucks, they’ll throw in a stake.”

  “Good one.” She actually smiled at him. “But don’t waste your money. I know the secret to eternal life.” She turned on the ancient computer on her desk and waited for it to boot up.

  A moment later Caburn sat in the cracked leather chair in front of Albert Phipps’ desk. Albert was filling his pipe with an acrid, foul smelling tobacco. He lit the thing with an old-fashioned kitchen match that sent sparks to flare and die on the papers across his desk. “One of these days I’m going to find you in here fried to a crisp, Albert.” It did no good to mention the no smoking rules. Phipps made his own rules.

  “I’ve been here too long to get off on being politically correct, Frank. So, what’s your take on the Nesmith women?”

  “I want off this case, Albert. It’s giving me nightmares.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “I’m getting there. Do you know what kuru is?

  “Sounds like some kind of sushi.”

  “Do you know how many countries there are in the world?”

  “Are you practicing to go on Wheel of Fortune or one of those game shows? My grandson loves Are You Smarter Than a Fourth Grader? I watched it with him once. Lemme tell you. I didn’t know a single answer. I came away from that thinking, praise Jesus I already have a job—if they asked questions like that on those dinky intelligence tests, I’d be bagging groceries at Wal-Mart.”

  “Have you ever heard of Mayan Kings and their occult practices?”

  “Oh, dear Lord. Don’t tell me Nesmith was into that stuff, too.”

  “No, no. It was just something that came up in an aside.” Caburn shifted in the leather chair, trying to avoid the loose spring. “Any idea when we’re getting him back?”

  “Oh, damn. I forgot to tell you. There’s a snag—besides Nesmith having to pass through the Direction generale des douanes et droits indirects—that’s the civilian customs service, then the Gendarmerie National, then some medical stuff, to make certain he’s not a carrier of some exotic disease, or maybe got shot up with some rare poison. As if—” Phipps snorted. “Anyway, the French have already started their Christmas holidays. Nesmith is gonna be on ice until after the New Year.”

  Caburn’s heart sank. “But—but, I told Anna Nesmith we’d have him back in a few days—a week at the most.”

  “Well, I’m sorry—I forgot. You’re just going to have to finesse it. Hang with her, keep her occupied and everything low key. Feed her bits and pieces—”

  “Bits and pieces? Albert, that woman is blisteringly smart. I mean if you give her the first letter of the alphabet, she could write the whole dang dictionary.”

  “I feel bad for the woman, Frank. I do. But I can’t jack up the French. They don’t like us anyway. They loaned us some money during the War of Independence, and sold us Louisiana. Two nice things in two, three hundred years. They ain’t working over their holiday, and that’s that. But look at it this way—if we got him back before Christmas it’d ruin our holiday. Not just ours—everybody’s,” he emphasized, meaning the Nesmith women.

  “Well, then, I think I’ll go home for Christmas.”

  “Don’t make jokes.”

  “Can’t the FBI handle this?”

  Phipps actually shuddered. “Absolutely not. This is an in-house personnel issue. Use your head. We’re already down to a three-person staff—four, if you count the loaner we got from upstairs: you, me, Helen. The only reason we’re still here is we’re out of sight and not even a blip on the budget. If another agency started handling this stuff, we’d be out of a job. Keep in mind before 9/11 all but the most sensitive dispatches were sent commercial air or on military flights. A staffer got assigned to pick up the bag, inventory the crates—whatever—and that was it. Bin Laden is fish food, and still the goombahs believe everything is sensitive. That’s good for us. Or, at least it is for me, otherwise, I would be out of job. As for Helen... Well, Helen’s going to sit at a desk somewhere until the Rapture or the sun burns out—whichever comes last. You could switch places with the loaner, though. He’s overseeing—”

  Caburn shook his head. “No. I don’t want to fight the traffic up to Ellicott City.” That was a gigantic excuse. He was in thrall with Anna Nesmith. He didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. It would be a miracle if she could get past that. He was Kansas born and bred and the only event that came even close to being a miracle in his life was Dorothy and Toto. Everything else in his existence was grounded and solid. He wished he had more experience with these sorts of situations. "I like straightforward criminals, Albert, thieves and traitors. I hate jerks like Nesmith who cause so much misery to innocent women and children—even if they don’t know it, yet.”

  “That’s a nice sentiment, Frank, but it doesn’t get
the job done. So—what’d you get. Give me a rundown. How does she strike you?”

  She strikes me just fine. “It’s pretty much like the file says. She goes to work every day at the Library of Congress—does research for the Senate, the Chamber of Commerce, trade delegations. Clips articles, I guess. She takes care of Nesmith’s mother, a clinging vine type. The old woman was in the Pentagon on 9/11 and severely traumatized.”

  “Oh, boy.” Phipps made a note in the file on his desk. “This is going to be nasty. What else? See any signs of big money?”

  “Not really—not big money in today’s terms. The kitchen’s been renovated—everything is state of the art. The house looks like every other house on the block, a bit better maintained, maybe. The furniture was nice, not over the top. No flat screen in the living room. A stone-faced fireplace. There was a laptop on a desk in a nook off the kitchen—”

  “Did you seize it?”

  “No. The situation is...delicate.”

  Phipps emptied his pipe, and began to stuff it with tobacco again. “Delicate. That’s a good word. Did you pick up anything. Like a clue as to why Nesmith pulled this stunt?”

  “I’m clueless, Albert. Maybe he wanted to get away from his mother. I got the sense that she’s a real irritant in the marriage. Anna Nesmith is not your stereotypical librarian. She’s classy—has all kinds of esoteric data at her fingertips.”

  “All librarians are smart, Frank.”

  “Perhaps so. But, Anna Nesmith looks like a...” He tried to recall a painter from Art History classes. “…Titian could’ve painted her.”

  Phipps jaw hung open. After a second he snapped it shut. “Watch your step, Frank. You can’t get personally involved. Don’t even consider it.”

  “Why not? I’m not married.”

  Albert considered that for a moment. “Well, I guess she could do worse. She has done worse. The thing is—you know things she doesn’t. I wouldn’t like to think you were taking advantage of that.”

  Caburn stiffened. “I wouldn’t. I won’t. She’s got ‘good’ written all over her, Albert. Plus she’s loyal to her husband. I won’t step on that. When I mentioned children, her face went all sad. I thought she was going to break down right then.”