Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Praise for Speak Softly, She Can Hear

  “Gripping … with a freshness that sets it apart from the thriller genre. There is a queasy darkness to the novel that the reader will savor. Once begun, it’s a hard book to let go of, and the writer’s skill prompts rereading of passages for their craft alone.”

  —Daniel Sams, New York Post

  “Speak Softly, She Can Hear is the perfect recommendation for thriller fans—so many exciting twists and turns and one of the best-written villains I’ve read in a long time. I could not put it down.”

  —Jan Warner-Poole, Storyteller Books, Battle Ground, Washington

  “This psychological thriller is an excellent debut for first-time novelist Lewis. Her settings are vibrant, from the hippie culture in San Francisco to rural small-town life in Vermont. Her descriptions, especially of angst-ridden teen years and those friendships that pull us through them, are dead on. In subtle strokes, she paints a menacing darkness around Carole, who, no matter how far she runs, can’t seem to escape the threat lurking in the shadows.”

  —Karen Carlin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Pam Lewis will keep you guessing, she’ll keep you up late at night, but most of all, she will bring you back to the friendships and betrayals of your past. Smart, clever, and emotionally involving. You’ll never feel the same way about keeping a secret.”

  —Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tenth Justice and The Zero Game

  “WOW! … I simply couldn’t stop reading Speak Softly, She Can Hear—frightening yet enthralling, it kept me awake all night. Eddie, the manipulative villain, is every parent’s nightmare. As he drew the girls deeper into his power I was both horrified and fascinated. The book is being enthusiastically passed from staff member to staff member, and I have a feeling that all 65 of us will be putting it into our favorite customers’ hands.”

  —Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage, Corte Madera, California

  “Pam Lewis’s novel vividly captures the hippie era of free love, pot and rock ’n’ roll, developing an unsettling and mesmerizing psychological thriller.”

  —Ann Hellmuth, The Orlando Sentinel

  “Speak Softly, She Can Hear makes for a chilling, hold-your-breath thriller.”

  —Maggie Wardlaw, Barnes & Noble, Santa Monica, California

  “This debut psychological thriller is full of promise for author Pam Lewis, who takes various familiar genre elements and gives them some fresh twists.”

  —Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

  “[A] chillingly elegant first novel.”

  —Joanne Sasvari, The Calgary Herald

  “Well-written and gripping … Readers will stay up late to see whether beleaguered, tortured Carole can free herself from the despicable Eddie.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I loved Speak Softly, She Can Hear. It’s a great read—kept me going from beginning to end. I’m going to add this to my must-read list.”

  —Paul Pessolano, Borders Books & Music, Snellville, Georgia

  “Inventively plotted. … Nicely written first effort.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “I started Speak Softly on Christmas and read it most of the day as I traveled by plane to visit family. Once there, I spent most of the next day finishing it. I was compelled by the story and the characters. A quick, interesting, well-crafted read.”

  —Darla Roy, Read All About It Bookstore, Boerne, Texas

  “Lewis, in her debut novel, tells an engrossing tale of an unlikely friendship, the burden of keeping secrets, and the insidiousness of lies.”

  —Booklist

  “An intriguing and well-written thriller which keeps you interested through to the very last page.”

  —Kate Jacka, Townsville Bulletin (Australia)

  “Being a huge fan of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, I am always wary when someone makes a comparison to it. This time I must say I was not disappointed. This well-crafted tale of friendships, secrets, and lies will have you compulsively turning the pages in a cautious yet irresistible race to discover the fate of the novel’s central character. In her debut novel, Ms. Lewis has turned out an excellent literary thriller. Bravo!”

  —Stephen Cropper, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Memphis, Tennessee

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Pamela Lewis

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2006

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Elliot Beard

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lewis, Pam, 1943–

  Speak softly, she can hear / Pam Lewis.

  p. cm.

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction.

  2. Female friendship—Fiction.

  3. Children of the rich—Fiction. 4. Private schools—Fiction.

  5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Betrayal—Fiction. 7. Secrecy—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3612.E974S64 2005

  813’.6—dc22 2004056563

  ISBN-13 978-0-7432-5539-4

  ISBN-10 0-7432-5539-9

  ISBN-13 978-0-7432-5540-0 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10 0-7432-5540-2 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-4010-6

  For my sons

  The ghost’s white fingers on thy shoulders laid …

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Part One

  Chapter One

  MARCH 28, 1965

  It was pitch-black. Black above and below. The only way to know up from down was by the pinprick stars. Ahead the sounds of Eddie Lindbaeck’s boots fell heavily in the snow, his full weight coming down and then pushing off. Carole’s footsteps were quieter because she’d worn her new Capezio flats to make her feet look pretty and to impress him. Capezio flats, black stretch pants with the loop under the arches to keep them from riding up, Naomi’s gold mohair sweater, and her aunt Emily’s brown parka with the cream vee. She couldn’t help the jacket. It was all she could scrounge up in the warmth department. But now her feet were numb. She had to come down hard on her heels to get any traction at all, and it made her feel foolish.

  She had the sinking feeling he’d forgotten she was even here. If anything, he was getting farther ahead. When he’d picked her up at the Double Hearth, he’d been aloof, not at all like he was on the train. A car passed them, whipping their shadows together. Afterward, it was even blacker than before.

  “Is it much farther?” she called to him.

  The sound of his boots stopped somewhere up ahead. “Is she tired?”

  “No,” she said. “She isn’t. She’s just cold.” She wouldn’t want him to send her back to the Double Hearth and ask for Naomi tonight instead. She’d won going first, and she was going through with this no matter what.

  “It’s not far,” he said. “It’s something out of Cannery Row. You girls didn’t exactly go all out, did you?”

  “You’re the one who made the reservations.”

  Another car beamed from behind them, and she saw the sign up ahead. SNOWTOWN MOTEL. She knew exactly how far it was now because it was where the taxi had dropped him off after the train today. After the turn, the drivew
ay snaked through a forest and then ended up at a clearing and the bunch of cabins, a big ring of them, with an office off to the left. Maybe it was crummy, but she wasn’t going to take the blame for it. He was the one who’d supposedly been here before.

  “You didn’t give me much to work with.” When she caught up, he put an arm around her shoulders and breathed into her ear. “No matter,” he said.

  The sound of his words triggered a spreading warmth, followed by a tight cluster of sensation, as though a string were being tugged deliciously somewhere deep within her. Naomi said the whole world is divided between those who have done it and those who haven’t. Men can tell.

  “I couldn’t believe what you did this morning,” she said.

  Carole and her mother had arrived at Grand Central early and had had to wait near the information booth, where the floor was disgusting. Carole had Aunt Emily’s skis and was wearing Aunt Emily’s urine-colored stretch pants. In her suitcase she had Aunt Emily’s long underwear and a hat she wasn’t going to be caught dead in. She’d never carried skis before, and she kept hitting people with them by accident. When she set them down, they slithered every which way. Her mother kept trying to kick all the equipment into a tidy pile.

  Carole had felt a little bad that her mother had gone to all the trouble of getting the skis from Emily when Carole didn’t care about skiing. They’d had to get the car out of the garage and drive up to Tarrytown. Emily had taken the bindings to be oiled or something, and had the sides sharpened, and it was a very big production. She’d shown Carole and her mother those old pictures from a hundred years ago when she had been, in her words, a big girl too. Before she’d dieted herself into oblivion. Back then you had to walk up and ski down. Emily had said that a hundred times. Now they had chair lifts. Emily thought walking up made her superior. Emily was always saying things like that.

  So Carole and her mother had been standing there waiting when they heard a voice bellowing out across the whole station. “You guys!” There Naomi was with Eddie right next to her on that giant marble landing that looked out over all of Grand Central. Carole had frozen on the spot. What did Naomi think she was doing? She had on all black and one of those serape things her father and Elayne were always bringing her back from South America. A sort of shawl in bright red. The odd couple, Carole thought. Eddie had looked preppie in his gray Shetland sweater and tweed jacket. He had blandly handsome features, a Scandinavian face—wide, high cheekbones, narrow dark blue eyes, and a full mouth. His lank hair was the color of sand. Naomi’s eyes were thick with kohl, something she’d just started doing. Carole counted. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand. She knew exactly what was coming. On four one-thousand her mother leaned over. “Isn’t it a shame what Naomi does to herself. She could be such a pretty girl.”

  Naomi and Eddie came barging through the crowd toward Carole and her mother, Naomi in the lead, Eddie following, carrying both their suitcases. Naomi pretended not to know his name. She called him “this nice man” and said he’d been kind enough to share his taxi, that if he hadn’t, she’d have missed the train for sure. Eddie had grinned shyly as though embarrassed at all the fuss, as if, aw shucks, all he’d really done was what any decent person would do. Carole had held her breath in desperate, paralyzing fear that any minute now her mother would catch on and Carole would be in the biggest trouble of her young life.

  But her mother hadn’t had a clue. She’d believed what Naomi had said and shaken Eddie’s hand, her manner the same as when she met Carole’s father’s business associates—overly chatty and nervous. What a nice thing it was of you to do … People in this city don’t usually … Now where I’m from … On and on, blushing and squirming in her coat like a complete idiot. She was forty, for God’s sake, and Eddie was twenty-six. It killed Carole the way her mother could get, especially when she was the one going to bed with him later. It was so pathetic. She hadn’t dared to look at Naomi, who she knew would be smirking dangerously.

  “The nerve of you,” she had said to Naomi when they finally ditched her mother and got on the train. “The absolute balls!”

  They managed to get two pairs of seats facing each other and throw their stuff all over the other two. Then they’d had to fight people off who wanted to sit with them, saying the seats were taken. Naomi was best at that, coolly and calmly putting her hand on the vacant seat and saying, “I’m afraid these are already spoken for,” ignoring people’s dirty looks once the train got going and the seats stayed empty. If it had been up to Carole, she would have given them away. She was weak when it came to things like that.

  Somewhere in Connecticut, Eddie made his way up the aisle and flopped down in the seat next to Carole. He leaned against her, and she let him, feeling his warmth. But that was nothing. The next thing she knew, Naomi, who was sitting opposite, slipped her stockinged foot between Eddie’s big boots, inched it up the front of the seat between his knees, and rested it right between his thighs, wriggling her toes and laughing. Where had she learned to do that? He made a kissing motion at Naomi and then at Carole, and Carole dared to make the same noise back. After that, anything went. Whatever they felt like doing, they did. Whatever they felt like saying, they said. What a feeling it was. Think it, do it. For mile after mile of swaying tracks and stops and people getting on and off, staring at them, some of them making remarks. The girls switched places, took off their shoes and socks, touched his feet, each other’s feet and ankles, until, some time in the afternoon, they all fell into a semi-sleep, tangled and barefooted.

  “So I’ll see one of you later,” he said as the train was pulling into the Waterbury station.

  “Me.” Carole was drunk with him. Eddie had bedroom eyes, half shut all the time, with fat lids. And thick lips. His whole face reminded Carole of sleep, like you’d have to stick a pin in him to get his attention. So sexy, she thought.

  “We had a race, and she won,” Naomi said.

  “You did?” Eddie said, waking up, a little confused. “A footrace?”

  “Sort of,” Carole said. Eddie’s expression bothered her, and she didn’t feel like giving him the details. It had been her idea and now it seemed sort of dumb and she was embarrassed. She and Naomi had chosen a course. Carole would start at 100th and Madison, while Naomi started at 20th and Madison. Whoever got to 60th and Madison first, the exact midpoint, won the right to go first with Eddie. Carole had won by six minutes.

  “You must have cheated, eh?” Eddie pressed two fingers into Carole’s belly and jiggled them. She knew what he was thinking. That she was too fat to outrun Naomi. But she’d only had to outwit Naomi. She’d zigzagged through the city, plunged into traffic midblock, and raced through red lights. She counted on Naomi’s getting distracted by stores and people, and she had.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, lucky me,” Eddie said.

  In the headlights of an oncoming car she saw him ahead now, getting ready to cross the road to the motel. He waited for the car to pass and then ran for it. She wished he’d wait for her, but maybe it was because he was an actor that he was this way. Maybe he was going over lines in his head or thinking about how to do a scene. She’d read in Confidential Magazine that Danny Kaye did that all the time. People would see him on airplanes and ask for his autograph, and he wouldn’t even hear them because he was so preoccupied with a script.

  He waited for her to cross the road. She couldn’t see him very well and had to grope for him in the dark. Her hands hit the soft layers of his jacket. “Hold still,” he said. His gloved hands came to rest on her arm, and she smiled secretly. He tucked her hand under his elbow and pressed it hard against his side. “Come on,” he said. “It’s fucking cold out here.” The word thrilled her. She’d never heard it spoken like that, so casually, as if he said it all the time. He set off fast, but she couldn’t keep up and soon her hand slipped from under his arm. He took a few steps without her and then stopped. Utter silence. She could be anywhere with anybody—it was
that dark. She was too scared to take any more steps by herself.

  “Eddie?” She groped the dark again. “Come on. This isn’t funny.”

  He grabbed her from behind and she screamed. He clamped a leather glove that smelled like gasoline over her mouth. “Sshh,” he said and kissed her, the warmth of his lips and tongue a sudden shock, more terrifying still. “Come on. Not much more.” By now she could see a little bit of light through the trees ahead. She had her hand tucked in again between his elbow and his side and she was a little bit behind him. She liked it this way, the feeling of being taken somewhere. Against her will, but not really.

  He led the way to the second cabin from the left. The ones to either side were dark, and the office was dark except for a neon sign with pieces of the letters missing. The cabin was dark wood, or painted brown, she couldn’t tell. It had white shutters tilting off. She knew what he meant about it being crummy. “Ours is only a dorm,” she said about the Double Hearth, where she and Naomi were staying. “At least you have some privacy.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for the key, opened the door, and switched on the light. “See what I mean?” It smelled of bats and mice inside, like a summerhouse that had been closed up. There were two twin beds with beige-and-brown-striped bedspreads, an armchair, and a bureau. His suitcase lay open on the floor. It was one of those fiberglass ones that you could drop from an airplane and it wouldn’t break. His shaving stuff was spread out on a fake mantel. There was an electric heater. He switched on the heater, and they both watched the coils start to glow red. He went to one of the beds, jiggled the mattress, and grinned. He sat on the bed, took off his parka and sweater, and threw them into a corner. He started undoing the top button of his shirt and then stopped. “Don’t just stand there,” he said.

  Her parka crackled with static electricity when she took it off. The yellow mohair sweater came way down over her hips, but even so she tugged it down and sat on the bed across from him, holding the parka in her lap. She had never thought about this part, the part right before. She had no idea how they were ever going to get from here into one of the beds. How she’d even get out of her clothes. How Eddie would. She studied the lamp on the table between the beds. It had a cowboy roping a steer on the shade. He probably wished Naomi was here instead of her.