The Secrets She Kept

by Brenda Novak

  This silence lasted even longer than the first one. Hoping that she was doing the right thing, Rocki squared her shoulders. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. I’m just... I’m not clear on where you’re going with this. After Dad died, Mom was with a lot of men.”

  She was ignoring or discounting the fact that Rocki had said Josephine had first met Hugh more than forty years ago. “This was before that, Maisey. Gretchen claimed that this man, who owned a pharmaceutical company down under, was—” she drew another deep breath before blurting out what she’d been holding back “—Keith’s father.”

  “No!” Maisey cried. “Keith is...Keith’s as much of a Lazarow as we are. He looks exactly like us.”

  “Because he resembles Mom. He’s part Coldiron. But there are differences, too. His height, his lean build. Our dad was five foot eleven and stocky.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not our full-blooded brother. Gretchen would say anything to tear Mom down. We’ve talked about this before. She tried to make you feel lucky she was the one raising you, even though she couldn’t give you all the things you would’ve had as a Lazarow.”

  “Maisey—”

  “No, you can’t believe her. She kidnapped you because she felt Mom was an unfit mother, to get you out of a bad situation—and she probably had to keep reminding herself how pure her motives were. Otherwise, how would she ever excuse the fact that she’d stolen another woman’s child?”

  Rocki loved Gretchen as the mother she’d known for most of her life. She’d been well cared for. And yet that woman was her kidnapper, someone who’d taken her away from her real family. When she thought of Gretchen, there was tenderness and gratitude and resentment and outrage all wrapped up together. Even worse, Rocki couldn’t speak to Gretchen about the past, couldn’t get any sense of resolution, since Gretchen had passed away before Rocki learned that her birth family hadn’t died in a car accident. All she had left were memories of Gretchen and conjecture about what those memories might mean. It was Landon who’d made her feel loved and whole all these years, in spite of her past. And now he wasn’t acting anything like the man she knew...

  But she wouldn’t think about that. She had to focus on making sure no one suspected him of murder. They could deal with their other problems later.

  “That’s all true,” Rocki admitted. “But when Josephine first mentioned to me that her new ‘boyfriend’ was from Australia, a chill went down my spine. That moment was like déjà vu, as if I could hear Gretchen talking to me in that car after that darn movie, telling me how terrible my real mother had been. How she’d beaten Keith. How she’d cared only for herself and her beauty. How she was a harsh and unforgiving employer. And how she’d been unfaithful for almost the whole length of her marriage.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “I can see why. Most people don’t maintain such a long-lasting relationship with someone they’ve had an affair with. But what are the chances Josephine would get involved with two different men, both of whom she met in first class, both of whom were from Australia, both of whom were extremely wealthy and owned pharmaceutical companies? She wasn’t the only one who was married back then, and that could explain why she didn’t break up her own marriage to be with him.”

  Nothing. No response.

  “This could be important, Maisey. Gretchen even told me that she had overheard Josephine on the phone talking to her lover, who had to be Hugh, saying he was the one true love of her life.”

  “Shit,” Maisey said, her voice small.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Do you think there’s any proof?”

  “Beyond the fact that Josephine thought he was the father of her second child? No. Why would she get a paternity test? That would only prove her infidelity. It’s not as if she was going after Hugh for child support.”

  “So maybe it’s not true.”

  “That’s a possibility. But the timing, or the way Keith looked, or something convinced Josephine that he was Hugh’s.”

  “What are we going to do? We can’t tell Keith. That could destroy all the progress he’s made. You didn’t know him when he was going through those dark years, but they were awful. I thought he might never overcome the past.”

  Rocki hated putting Keith at risk. She understood how this might hurt him. But what she knew established how much Lana Pointer would hate Josephine if she ever learned about her. “He’s shared enough with me about those years that I understand what’s at stake.” Which was what made this so hard...

  “Did he tell you he once tried to commit suicide?”

  “We haven’t discussed that specifically, but I know he got pretty desperate.”

  “It was terrifying,” Maisey said.

  Rocki couldn’t think about that. She loved Keith. “But he’s well beyond that kind of thing now, isn’t he? He’s so functional these days.”

  “It all depends on his sobriety. If he relapses, who can say how far he’ll fall? That spiral only moves in one direction—and that’s down.”

  “So we won’t tell him,” she said. “Hopefully, we won’t have to.”

  “Hopefully?” Maisey echoed.

  Rocki grimaced at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t showered yet, had gone most of the day without even combing her hair. She’d been too distraught—and she hadn’t wanted to see her red, puffy eyes staring back at her as they were now. “I’ll have to speak up if the police start investigating Landon. As much as I care about Keith, this gives Hugh’s wife a strong motive, and that could save my husband.”

  Maisey sighed audibly. “I understand.”

  “You’d do the same for Rafe.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

  * * *

  After Keith left Nancy’s, he drove over to Maisey’s to talk to her in person and weigh some of his concerns. But she wasn’t home. When he texted her to see where she was, she told him she was helping Rafe’s mother clean her house, since her arthritis was so bad, and would be home soon.

  Leaving his car in the drive, he went down to the beach and walked along the water’s edge. His family didn’t need any more problems. He and his siblings had survived their grandfather’s death, their father’s death, “Annabelle’s” supposed death and their subsequent reunion, Maisey’s baby’s death and divorce from her first husband and his own addiction. Would they really have to cope with learning of an illicit affair between their mother and Landon, in addition to Josephine’s death?

  The questions Keith needed to ask could drive a wedge between Rocki and her husband. And what if, in the end, the police couldn’t prove Landon guilty or innocent?

  That would mean they’d have to live with some level of doubt and suspicion.

  Either way, Rocki’s family would probably be torn apart. Even if she managed to bear up under an intense police investigation, maybe a prosecution, she’d likely become estranged from him and Maisey. Five years of a relationship might not be enough to survive that kind of upheaval and the destruction of her marriage. Unless Chief Underwood could quickly eliminate Landon as a suspect, there’d almost have to be a split somewhere. Keith had seen several true crime shows where part of the family—a son or daughter or parent—remained firmly loyal to the defendant despite overwhelming evidence that suggested the defendant had murdered another loved one. On one episode of Dateline, everyone except the suspect’s children believed he’d murdered their mother.

  If Landon became a suspect, would Rocki stand behind him? Even if she didn’t, there’d be far-reaching consequences. The more Keith thought about what those consequences might be, the more convinced he became that there was nothing he could do to change the future. He hated that Rocki and her children might be hurt. He hated that Maisey might be hurt, too. But they had to have answers, had to at least seek justice. Otherwise, it was po
ssible that Landon would get away with murder, and Keith, for one, wasn’t about to allow that.

  The wind ruffled his hair and his clothes as he headed back to Maisey’s house. The darkening sky told him they were about to get more rain. It’d been so wet since he’d arrived on Fairham. He missed sunny Los Angeles, but only because of the weather, he realized. This was home. This was where he belonged.

  Surprised to feel that connection, when he’d always been so restless, so unhappy and dissatisfied here, he stopped and looked around as if he was seeing Smuggler’s Cove for the first time. Despite everything that was happening right now, he was more settled, more grounded than he’d ever been.

  Who would’ve guessed? he thought and, tilting back his head, he closed his eyes and filled his lungs with the same salty air he’d breathed as a child.

  * * *

  When she returned, Maisey found Keith waiting on the steps of her bungalow and felt a heightened sense of foreboding. In spite of her concern, she waved cheerfully as she cut the engine. Then she hopped out, putting a spring in her step, all in an effort to act as if she hadn’t just learned that they might not have the same father.

  “Where’re Rafe and the kids?” her brother asked, getting to his feet.

  Maisey kept her chin up and a smile on her face. “At his mother’s.”

  “Still?”

  “They’re getting a pizza for dinner.”

  He gave her a funny look. “You could’ve stayed with your family and stopped by Coldiron House to see me on your way home. Why didn’t you say you had plans?”

  “Because you wanted to talk to me.” So she’d dropped everything and arranged for Rafe to stay with the kids. After what she’d learned from Rocki, she hadn’t been able to pay attention to what was going on at her mother-in-law’s, anyway. She’d been too worried about her brother and what might happen if he were to find out, or even suspect, that Hugh Pointer from Australia was his father and not Malcolm, the calm, steady man who’d raised them.

  At first, Maisey had tried to deny that Keith could belong to someone else. She didn’t want to believe it, but there were a few things that suggested what Rocki had told her could be true. Keith was far more high-strung than they were. Malcolm had had a difficult time relating to him, which might’ve been caused by some intuition about his wife’s behavior, if not outright knowledge that Keith wasn’t his. Their mother had always loved Keith best, despite their frequent clash of personalities. And last, but not least, what about all those trips her mother used to take? Was she traveling with Hugh? Meeting him at exotic places? Malcolm had rarely gone with her. He preferred to stay on the island with them and work on his vacation rentals and other developments, most of which were in Charleston and had long since been sold...

  Keith blew on his hands. “I do need to talk to you, but I didn’t mean to ruin your family outing.”

  “I was afraid it might be something I wouldn’t want Laney to hear.”

  Her brother acknowledged this by grimly pursing his lips. “That’s probably true.”

  She braced for more bad news. Surely, Rocki hadn’t hung up with her and then immediately called Keith. This couldn’t be about what Rocki had just told her, could it? “What’s going on?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what Landon was like around Mom.”

  She swallowed a sigh as she unlocked the house to show him in. “Not Landon again. You’re barking up the wrong tree, Keith. I’ve decided there’s no way he could be responsible for Mom’s death. You know him as well as I do. He isn’t capable of murder.”

  “How can we be sure of that? I like him, don’t get me wrong. But murderers don’t walk around with Post-it notes on their foreheads. A lot of killers have wives and children.”

  “But Landon? Really?”

  He didn’t speak again until she’d closed the door, removed her coat and gazed up at him expectantly. Then he said, “I think he and Mom were having an affair, Mais.”

  “What?” She held a hand to her chest as if he’d just slugged her. “That can’t be true!”

  “Yes, it could.”

  Her mind raced as she tried to make sense of his outlandish comment. First Rocki claims Keith isn’t Malcolm’s son, and then Keith claims Rocki’s husband was having an affair with their mother? Like Alice in Wonderland, Maisey felt as if she must’ve fallen through the rabbit’s hole. “She was sixty-three!”

  “She didn’t look a day over forty-five.”

  “So?”

  “Forty-five is actually very close to his age.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Not really. Not with a mother as beautiful as ours,” he said.

  Maisey had just opened her mouth to argue when he showed her a picture he had on his cell phone.

  “Where did you get that?” she gasped.

  “It was on Mom’s computer.”

  Fortunately, he was using his thumb to cover Landon’s genitals. A naked picture of her brother-in-law in her mother’s possession was shocking and upsetting enough.

  She shoved the phone out of her sight. “There must be some other explanation. Mom wouldn’t sleep with Landon, even if he wanted to sleep with her. What would she have to gain?”

  “Rocki’s a beautiful woman. Maybe Mom felt threatened by her own daughter. Maybe she wasn’t ready to be upstaged. Maybe she was out to prove she could still get any man she wanted.”

  Her knees were suddenly so weak Maisey had to sit down. “That makes me sick.”

  “Because it sounds plausible?”

  She imagined her curvaceous mother, dressed like someone out of a Ralph Lauren ad and smelling like the perfume section of an expensive department store. She turned male heads wherever she went... “No! Only the vainest person in the world would behave like that. Our mother was vain, no question, but I have to believe she had more integrity.” Maisey had never been able to get along with her. The past five years had been the best period in their relationship, but only because she hadn’t taken their mother as seriously as she had before. There was no need to. She’d had Rafe to lean on, to love her, to comfort her when her mother made her feel two inches tall, the way Josephine had such a habit of doing. “She was difficult on so many levels. But she wouldn’t have actively enticed Landon...would she?”

  Keith perched next to her on the couch. “Have you talked to Rocki today?”

  She averted her gaze—and lied because she didn’t feel she could cover for what she’d been told. “No. I’ve tried calling. She hasn’t gotten back to me. But that in itself doesn’t mean anything,” she added quickly.

  “She’s not herself right now.”

  “She’s under a lot of stress. They run two businesses. They’ve got three children. And they’re having trouble paying the bills.”

  “We’re all stressed, coping with Mom’s death.” He lifted his phone, referring to what he’d shown her, even though that picture was no longer on the screen. “So do we tell her about this?”

  As much as Maisey feared the fallout, she couldn’t see any way around it. Her sister had to know, couldn’t be kept in the dark. She’d want to know if it were Rafe. No one relished the thought of being duped.

  But then what Gretchen had told Rocki would also come out. All the terrible secrets of the past would be spilled on the table. “Son of a bitch.”

  “No kidding,” he said, although he had no idea just how torn she was—or why.

  He watched her for several seconds. “Well?”

  “We have to,” she said. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “And if he’s innocent? If there’s some other explanation for the photograph?”

  “Then he can give it to us. That’s why we tell her—and him. So he’ll have the chance to explain and clear his name. He deserves that.”

  Keith
pinched the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand. “Fine. We’ll tell her. But when? Now? Later? Chief Underwood’s getting Mom’s cell phone records, which should provide more definitive information. I bet she’s getting Landon’s, too.”

  “Then we’ll wait until we have those and possibly know more.” At least that would buy some time. Maybe they’d learn something that would change the situation, put fewer people at risk. Leaning forward, she rested her chin on her fists. “This really sucks, doesn’t it?” she said. “We were all doing so well, were finally sailing through smooth water.”

  He put his arm around her. “We’ll get through this.”

  Surprised that he was the calm one, that he was encouraging her, she looked into his face. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “You were expecting me to slip up while I was here?”

  She could feel his chest hum when he spoke. “I was worried. If you fell apart... I couldn’t take that, too.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I’m not going to fall apart. I hate to admit it, but getting Mom out of my life five years ago was a game changer—despite the guilt I feel now.”

  “Why do you feel guilt?” she asked. “You pulled yourself out of a bad situation and built a life. You did the right thing. And you made her proud in the end.”

  “But could I have done it a better way?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You recovered. That’s what counts. Anyway, what about her guilt? She should’ve been riddled with remorse for being such a bad mother.”

  “According to Hugh, she was remorseful.”

  She stared out over her front yard. “You’ve spoken to Hugh Pointer?”

  “Yes.”

  She clasped her hands together—tightly. “And? How’d he treat you?”

  “He was very nice.”

  “He brought up your relationship with Mom?”