I Have a Secret (A Sloane Monroe Novel, Book Three)

by Cheryl Bradshaw

  “I know, I still can’t believe one of my old friends was murdered.”

  She shook her head and smacked me on the shoulder. “That’s not what I meant. You tried to seduce a kid half your age. I didn’t know you had it in you!”

  I smiled. “There’s plenty you still don’t know about me.”

  She jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. “Seems that way.”

  My phone rang.

  “Who is it?” Maddie said.

  I glanced down at the screen. “Trista.” I pushed the button and a frantic Trista was already shouting before I could get any words out. “Trista, slow down,” I said. “I can’t understand you.”

  Her words ran together like a run-on sentence. The only thing I could make out was something about Rusty Jenkins being attacked outside Flex It, the town gym.

  “How badly was he hurt?”

  When she replied the phone slipped from my hand and plummeted to the carpet. I bent down and picked it up in time to hear her say, “Sloane, are you still there?”

  The only thing I could mutter was, “I’ll be there in the morning. Everything’s going to be okay…I’m coming.”

  Maddie’s face filled with concern. “I know that look.”

  “Another one of my classmates was just found outside the local gym.”

  “Found what? Passed out because his workout was too intense?”

  I shook my head. “Stabbed. He’s dead.”

  The last time I stepped foot in my hometown of Tehachapi, California had been for my aunt’s funeral several years earlier. At that time, it surprised me how much the town had changed in the years since my move to Park City, Utah. To return and see all the differences was like running into an old boyfriend who’d been voted Best Hair in school, beating out all the guys and the girls, and then finding time had left him not just with a bald spot, but bald all together. This type of thing might have been acceptable had the old boyfriend entered the UFC or was blessed with a name like Bruce Willis, but if he was skinny and had a square-shaped head, well, it just wasn’t the same thing. And that’s what Tehachapi had become to me—different, almost to the point of indistinguishable. Whether it was different bad or different good had yet to be determined.

  I entered town on Highway 58 and was amazed to find my aunt’s old billboard still hoisted up twenty-something feet in the air on the right-hand side of the road. The town had commissioned the painting when I was in high school. She’d divided it into four sections, one for every season of the year. Each section reflected something different: The mountains, a sprawling orchard with rows and rows of fruit trees, the windmills, and of course, the snow. Back then the sign had read:

  WELCOME TO TEHACHAPI

  LAND OF FOUR SEASONS

  What the sign said back then was true, and the locals joked that not only was the town capable of four seasons, but all four could be experienced in the same day. Twenty years of weather like that tarnished the sign which no one had bothered to maintain. It bent inward, the wood had split and chipped away sections of paint, and the sun had produced a magic fading act. Now all that remained was:

  TO TEHACHAPI

  LAND OF FOUR

  Time for a new sign.

  I veered off the exit onto Tehachapi Boulevard and drove several blocks until I reached Peach Street.

  Trista was outside on the porch when I drove up sporting a ball cap and dark sunglasses and leaning on her mailbox for support. “I’m glad you came,” she said when I exited the car. “I didn’t think you’d get here so fast.”

  Thanks to Giovanni’s private plane, nothing was out of my reach. “I just wish it wouldn’t have taken something like this to get me here.”

  She motioned for me to follow her with her hand. “The kids are still at school. Come inside and we can talk.”

  I followed her through the door and removed my shoes. She turned and said, “Do you need anything? Water? Soda? I think I have some Diet Pepsi in the fridge.”

  Before I could respond I felt something hard brush beneath one of my feet. I flew forward and grabbed the corner of the wall to brace myself so I wouldn’t go down.

  Trista scrunched up her nose like she’d just found something old in the fridge. “You don’t have any kids, do you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The way you tiptoed your way around the room when you walked in here like you thought a grenade would go off.”

  I looked at the reddened area beneath my foot and tried to push through the pain like it was nothing. “How many do you have?”

  “Kids?”

  I nodded.

  “Three.”

  She pointed to a collage of photos on the wall. There were two boys who appeared to be twins and one girl who was much older. “My two boys, Joshua and Jack, are six, and my daughter, Alexa, just turned twenty. She’s at Stanford. Top of her class. She wants to be a doctor. In a lot of ways she’s living the life I never had.”

  “Do you see her much?”

  She shook her head. “It’s been about a month now, but she’ll be home this weekend. You’ll have to come for dinner so you can meet her.”

  The age difference between the girl and the two boys shocked me, but I tried to keep a straight face. I looked at the photo of the girl again. Blond hair and blues eyes which were odd considering both Trista and Doug had brown hair and brown eyes, the same hair and eye color as their two sons.

  Trista forced a smile. “Why don’t we sit at the table?”

  I pulled out a chair and started to lower myself into it until Trista said, “Hold on! Don’t sit there.”

  A soggy, partially-wet substance was stuck to the slats of the chair and appeared to be the remnants of some type of fruity oatmeal left over from that morning. Trista snatched a rag from the counter and wiped it down. When she finished, she threw the rag into the sink and grasped the sides of the kitchen counter with both hands. She closed her eyes and stood there, breathing deeply to calm herself.

  I sat in the chair and tried to think of what I could say to make it all better, even though I knew nothing I said could change anything. “You have beautiful children. I’ve always wanted kids.”

  She opened her eyes and spun around. “Why don’t you have any?” And then her hand flew over her mouth. “I’m sorry, how rude. I didn’t mean to be so intrusive.”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not something I talk about much, but I wasn’t ever able to get pregnant.”

  She sat in the chair beside me. “It took almost fifteen years to conceive my twins.”

  “You mean after you had your daughter?”

  She stiffened. “Umm, yeah. After Alexa was born, getting pregnant wasn’t easy like I thought it would be.”

  I’d done the math in my head and figured out that their daughter had to of been born right after they graduated high school—an obvious reason to get married. I wondered if that led to their sudden change in plans, but I sensed there was a lot more to it.

  Trista studied my face for a moment like she knew I was milling the possibilities over in my mind. “It’s a long story. Let’s save it for another time, okay?”

  I nodded. “You know what I don’t understand? Why didn’t Doug go into the family business? His parents are the richest people in town.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t get along very well. They nose into our lives enough as it is, trying to throw their money at us and influence every decision we make, but Doug made sure we always had a degree of separation. If not for that, we never would have survived here.”

  It made sense.

  “Tell me more about what happened last night with Rusty.”

  She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “All I know is he’d gone to the gym like he does almost every night. When he was finished working out, he went out to the parking lot and someone had moved his bike.”

  “His bike?”

  “Harley-Davidson.”

  “How do you know someone moved it?”r />
  “My neighbor’s husband was there and said they’d finished their workout at the same time and walked out together. That’s when Rusty noticed his bike wasn’t where he parked it. My neighbor was in a hurry to get home, so he left. About twenty minutes later Rusty was found in a grassy area next to the side of the building, dead.”

  “And his bike?”

  She shrugged. “Sorry, that’s all I know.”

  I reached into my bag, pulled out a bottled water, unscrewed the lid and took a sip. Trista’s eyes shifted to a calendar hanging on the wall next to her. She gazed at it like she wished she would have taken it down before I got there. The top portion had a picture of a waterfall. It was made on flimsy paper and reminded me of the kind of token gift passed out at banks each year. On it were a series of various appointments for the month. Under today’s date there were three words written so small I could hardly make them out. I leaned over and pretended to stare at a floral arrangement on a pedestal next to the calendar and then snuck a peek at the writing in the square box. It said: AA 7 p.m.

  Interesting.

  “You said Rusty was stabbed—once or repeatedly?” I said.

  “Once in the chest from what I heard.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, then Trista said, “What are you thinking?”

  In my experience, when a person died as a result of being stabbed, the motive was always personal. The knife created a type of one on one with the victim, and often, that type of attack carried a lot of pent up rage with it. But, I wasn’t ready to speculate with Trista.

  “Whoever attacked him had to be precise for him to die from a single wound. Doug and Rusty were pretty chummy in high school, right?”

  She nodded. “They played football together, and for a while Rusty dated my best friend. But after we graduated we didn’t hang out much.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Life. Doug became a family man, and Rusty opened a tattoo shop. He tried to come around, asked Doug to come to a few poker nights with some of the other guys, but Doug was weird about it.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “All I know is, he didn’t want anything to do with those guys.”

  Two deaths within days of each other, both men stabbed. Doug and Rusty may not have been close anymore, but there was definitely a connection—there had to be.

  The parking lot at Flex It was empty except for a few vehicles and one squad car minus the presence of any officers. I exited my rental car and was yanked backward by someone who shielded both my eyes with his hands like I was the counter in a game of hide and seek.

  “Well, well…Sloane Monroe. You’ve managed to stay away so long I assumed I’d never see you again,” a male voice said. The voice was rough but had an unmistakable high-pitched squeak that rounded out the end of his sentences.

  “You should remove your hands so I can see who I’m talking to,” I said.

  “Awww, come on. You don’t recognize my voice?”

  “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  He laughed. “It’s not like there are millions of people in this town.”

  Beads of sweat beneath his fingers seeped an oily moisture that melded with my skin and spread, and I had the sudden urge to scrub every layer until the layer of grime he transferred peeled off. He was too close, and I didn’t know how long I could withstand his advances.

  “Seriously, Jesse. You can let go now.”

  Most girls at some point in their high school years always had what I liked to call ‘restraining order guy’—the one who never went away no matter what you did or how hard you tried. Jesse was the equivalent of that to me. He was the kind of person who seemed harmless but followed me around like a hitchhiker in need of shelter in the middle of a snowstorm.

  Jesse peeled his hands off me and spun me around, but before I could get a good look at him, all I could see were his moistened lips attempting to acquire a landing position on mine. As his tongue protruded out of his mouth in an attempt to pass first base, I whipped back and swung my hand in his direction.

  He rubbed his cheek and frowned. “What the—why’d you do that? I was just trying to say hello.”

  Hello? Is he serious?

  “We’re not eighteen anymore, Jesse. You don’t try to suck the life out of a person you haven’t seen in twenty years.”

  He took a step back and muttered something under his breath that sounded like ‘you haven’t changed much.’

  “What was that?” I said.

  “Nothin’. It wasn’t anything.”

  “What kind of cop behaves like that anyway?” I said.

  He smiled and in a flash was back to himself again. “The romantic kind.”

  In the looks department, Jesse was the perfect example of what time could do for a person. The once skeletal, acne-faced boy had turned into a man with flawless skin and a slim body worthy of the cover of GQ magazine. If only his personality had changed along with the rest of him.

  “Why weren’t you on the reunion cruise last week?” I said.

  “I was.”

  I shook my head. “I never saw you.”

  “I was busy.”

  “There were plenty of class soirees to attend during the week; I didn’t see you at any of them,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, the poker tables were calling my name.”

  “Every day? You couldn’t come out of hiding to say hello?”

  “I saw you. Several times, in fact. But you were always too caught up with the dude you were with to notice there was life going on around you.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Why are you here, Sloane?”

  I shrugged. “I had some free time, and after the cruise I thought—why not come for a visit?”

  He shook his head. “Your eye twitched.”

  “What?”

  He took his finger and pointed it at my left eye. “In school your eye always twitched when you were feedin’ me a line of bullshit.”

  That isn’t true, is it?

  He leaned against the door of my car, folded his arms and slanted his head to the side. “Try again.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to play games, and it was obvious he was keeping me from nosing around at the crime scene. “Can you move? I need to go.”

  His backside remained glued to the door. “Why? You just got here. Were you plannin’ on gettin’ a workout in, or did you have an uh, more sinister idea in mind?”

  “Get out of my way, Jesse. I mean it.”

  He didn’t budge.

  “Trista told me you were here.”

  I stepped back. “So you know?”

  “You’re helping her find the person who supposedly murdered Doug? Yep.”

  I’d forgotten how hard it was for people in small towns to keep their mouths shut.

  “And what, you showed up to tell me to mind my own business and offer me a personal escort off the property?”

  He laughed. “Naw. I’m here to ask you to dinner.”

  “What?”

  He leaned forward, shoved his fingers through the belt loops on both sides of my jeans, and yanked my body toward him until our waists were pressed against each other. “Have dinner with me, Sloane.”

  I wrapped my hands around his wrists and pulled back, but it was to no avail. “Let go.”

  “You’re not the only one who wants to know what happened to Doug. He was my friend too.”

  “You, Doug, Rusty, and Nate. The four of you were like your own little version of the Rat Pack in school and now two of the four are dead. Coincidence?”

  “Look, you have questions, I might have answers. Did ya ever think of that?”

  I doubted it. “I’m busy tonight,” I said.

  “How ‘bout tomorrow night?”

  His tight grip on me combined with the rancid odor of his over chewed piece of citrus gum gave me the urge to teach him a lesson he’d never forget, but I resisted. I needed answers, and it was worth a couple hours to find out what he
knew—if anything. “Dinner. And it’s not a date.”

  “I know, you’ve got a boyfriend…for now.”

  At seven pm I walked into the Tehachapi Cultural Center and sat in the middle of a semi-circular row of chairs. Men and women flanked both sides of me. Some smiled and gave a curious nod; others avoided direct eye contact altogether and gazed at the floorboards, their shoes, and any object that allowed them to pass the time in silence without any verbal exchanges. If there was a mood to the room, it was a somber one.

  After a few minutes, a man emerged from the corner of the room where he’d been in deep conversation with a long blond-haired woman. He stood at a wooden podium that looked like it belonged in front of a casket at a funeral home. “You’ve all probably heard by now a member of our group was killed on the class reunion cruise several days ago,” he said. “I’d planned to read from the Big Book tonight and follow our regular course like usual, but many of you were good friends with Doug, and out of respect for his passing, I thought you might like to share a few of your thoughts and memories first.

  A man a couple chairs to my left raised his hand. The speaker at the podium tilted his head toward him to indicate his request was granted. The man relayed a story about how Doug had given him a loan at the bank after every other bank in town turned him down. Similar comments floated around the room until almost every person had their say.

  While I sat and listened my eyes veered back to the blond woman who sat silent, disengaged from the conversation going on around her. The woman’s thumb and pointer fingers were pressed beneath her eyelids like she was trying to form some kind of invisible shield, but it didn’t hide the fact she was crying. Tears dripped over her light pink fingernails and ran down the backside of her hand until it was almost completely soaked.

  A minute later, the blond woman stood up, turned to the man at the podium and whispered, “Excuse me, I need to go,” and then she bolted for the door. I followed.

  When she reached the parking lot, I broke my silence. “Are you all right?”