The Secrets She Carried

by Davis, Barbara

  Finally, Jay pushed back his plate and laid his napkin aside. “In case I haven’t said it, I’m impressed, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. You’ve got a real head for this stuff.”

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid I was rather shameless with Mr. Whitney.”

  “Used your feminine wiles to get your way, did you?”

  Leslie lifted her nose with a sniff. “Certainly not.”

  “Then what?”

  “I used cunning and guile.”

  Jay grinned, teeth flashing white in the soft candlelight. “Why does it sound so dangerous when you say it?”

  “Not dangerous, effective. I threw my old title around, empathized with him about the trials and tribulations of underappreciated editors. He lapped it up like cream. Plus, the stuff I gave him was really good, if I do say so myself. It’s hard to believe my time at Edge prepared me to market a winery.”

  “It did, though,” he said, his tone suddenly thoughtful. “While my career did nothing to prepare me for this…or for anything, really.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Leslie reached for the bottle of Chardonnay, divvying the last of it between their glasses. “As a writer you created stories out of thin air, and that’s exactly what you’ve done with Peak. You created a story out of thin air.”

  Jay met her eyes over the candle, his face all angles in the wavering light. “What a nice thing to say.”

  Leslie squirmed, keenly aware of the warmth fluttering in her belly. “Yeah, well, I have my moments. And while we’re on the subject of your writing—”

  Pushing back from the table, Jay stood, effectively cutting her off. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  Leslie blinked up at him. What had just happened? Before she could respond, he was at the counter with the dinner plates, his spine as stiff as a two-by-four while he waited for the sink to fill.

  Gathering up the silverware, she followed him to the sink. “Jay, I wasn’t…I didn’t mean to push. I just wondered if you’d ever thought of writing about Peak. Maybe not a novel, but something about its history, about the people who built it and lived here.”

  “About Adele and Henry, you mean?”

  “Well, it’s intriguing, don’t you think? Forbidden love, a mysterious grave.”

  Jay turned off the tap and turned to face her. “Stories have to have endings, Leslie, and this one doesn’t. Adele died—we don’t know how. The child vanished—we don’t know where. There’s nothing to write.”

  Leslie reached into her pocket and withdrew the folded Gazette article. “I went to the archives at the paper today. I was hoping to find something about Adele’s death. This was all I found.”

  Jay dried his hands on his pants before taking the article. He scanned it a moment, then glanced up. “This is about a shed fire.”

  “When I first ran across it, I thought it might have been the accident Maggie told you about, but it says no one was hurt. Did Maggie ever mention it?”

  “Leslie, things like this go on all the time on a farm.”

  “It says they suspected vandalism. It mentions names.”

  “What difference does any of this make now? Adele is dead. You’ve seen her grave. Can’t we just leave it there?”

  “Why?”

  The one-word question seemed to catch Jay off guard. Tossing the article aside, he turned back to the sink and fished a plate from the water. “Because I think you’re letting this get under your skin.”

  “I’m just curious about what happened.”

  A pulse flickered along his jaw. “That’s how it starts. Believe me when I tell you, you can get sucked into these things, and before you know it they’re eating you up.”

  Leslie stifled a sigh. He was being dramatic, but he was a little bit right. She knew it too. Clearing the grave, schlepping the Rebecca downtown, combing through years of newspaper archives, all pointed to a growing fixation. She also knew she couldn’t afford distractions when so much was on the line for Peak’s success.

  “You’re right,” she said, taking the dripping plate from his hand and picking up a towel. “It’s not like we’ll ever know. Forget I brought it up, okay?”

  Jay seemed visibly relieved as he handed off another plate, then picked up the silverware Leslie had carried from the table. “What should we talk about instead?”

  Instead of answering, Leslie began to giggle, the sight of him at the sink with a fistful of knives and forks prodding memories of their early days.

  Jay peered at her over his shoulder. “What’s so funny?”

  “I was thinking about the first time you cooked for me.”

  “Ah yes…breakfast.”

  “And I repaid you by hurling my plate into the sink and drenching you.” The corners of her mouth lifted wryly. “So much for charm.”

  Jay turned off the tap and faced her, his hands heavy and damp on her shoulders. “I happen to think you have a great deal of charm, Big City, in spite of your cunning.”

  It took all she had to stand still and meet his gaze. “And my guile?”

  “Especially your guile.”

  His voice was like raw silk, raspy and deep, setting off little tongues of warmth just south of her navel. There was nowhere to run, no door to scurry through, and this time Leslie didn’t want one. He was going to kiss her and she was going to let him—the kiss had been too long in coming. She swallowed a moan as his mouth closed over hers, deep and greedy, tasting faintly of wine. His hands were on her neck, her face, tangled in her hair, and for one mad moment she never wanted to open her eyes again, never wanted this warm, wet yielding to end.

  It was Jay who pulled away first. “Should I say I’m sorry?”

  Breathless and disoriented, Leslie touched her fingers to her lips. “I think I’ve wanted you to do that for a long time.”

  “You could have fooled me. That day in the barn, when I touched you—you ran away like I was some kind of masher.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not good at this.”

  “On the contrary. I’d say you’re very good at it.”

  “Not this. The you-and-me thing. I don’t…let people in.”

  Jay reached for her then and drew her close. “Neither do I. So we’ll take it slow. It doesn’t have to be scary.”

  “It already is,” Leslie breathed against the collar of his shirt.

  “Yes,” he murmured, his lips wing soft as they brushed hers. “I suppose it is.”

  Chapter 23

  Jay

  Jay peered at the bedside clock and swore softly; twenty after three and he was still awake, wrestling with the memory of Leslie’s mouth against his, the undeniable passion that had erupted as he had pulled her tight against him. Was he crazy to think this could work? Crazy to risk a working relationship that was only just beginning to mesh for a chance at something he wasn’t sure he was even ready for? The look on her face after the initial kiss—confusion and abject terror—seemed to suggest he was. And yet, she had kissed him back, and not just once.

  He still wasn’t sure which of them had had the presence of mind to cool things down before they passed the point of no return. He wanted to believe it was him, that in the end his chivalrous instincts had kicked in, but as he lay in the dark, still feeling the warmth of her mouth against his, he had serious doubts.

  She had kissed him softly as she left, her face unreadable as she thanked him for dinner and slipped out the back door. Now, as he flipped his pillow over in search of a cool patch of pillowcase, he wondered if she was lying awake too, replaying the evening and feeling regret.

  Beside him, Belle fidgeted, nudging a chilly nose into the crook of his arm in case he’d forgotten she was there and available for petting. Jay gave her an obligatory pat as he kicked off the covers and reached for the sweatshirt and jeans draped over the footboard.

  In the kitchen, he stared into the fridge, debating whether a sandwich might provide a plausible distraction, but soon decided it would not. Being in the kitchen, the scene of the crime,
as it were, only served to remind him of Leslie. Only now, it wasn’t the kissing he was thinking of. He was thinking about the article she had handed him. A shed fire, it said. No injuries. But what if it wasn’t true? What if someone had been hurt, and instead of being reported to the authorities, the truth had been covered up?

  What if someone had died?

  Jay closed his eyes, suddenly back in Maggie’s room, her voice gauzy with pain and with something else he’d never let himself put a name to—guilt. Snatches of conversation were floating back, things he’d the spent the last year pretending he hadn’t heard. He had heard them, though—talk of an accident, of a bolted door with no escape. Even then the hair on the back of his neck had prickled. Now there was proof of a fire, resurrecting the suspicions that had been niggling at him for months. What if the accident that killed Adele Laveau hadn’t been an accident at all?

  Please, God, let him be wrong.

  In the living room, he moved to the desk, easing open the middle drawer to stare at the neat white stack of pages. After six years of not writing a word, of shuddering at the very thought, the muse had suddenly returned with a vengeance, prickling like a phantom limb, and God help him, he had yielded.

  It had begun in earnest the day Leslie brought him to the ridge, the day he’d first set eyes on Adele Laveau’s grave; a few late-night notes added to those he had scribbled into a notebook after Maggie’s death, just to empty his head, he told himself, even when those notes began to spin themselves into fully fleshed-out pages. He’d never meant for it to go anywhere. It was just a way to clear his thoughts, to work it all out on paper, and once and for all lay his suspicions to rest.

  Only it hadn’t worked. No matter how many times he tried to shut Adele out, she came, nudging him awake, whispering in his ear, urging him to fill page after page. It wasn’t new. Back when he was writing it had always been like this, characters so real they refused to let him sleep, fighting, loving, laughing, dying, all in full color and full sound—a lot like schizophrenia, except you got paid for being delusional.

  But this was different. Adele’s story wasn’t a work of fiction. It was real life, so shrouded in mystery and rife with sadness that even he couldn’t have invented it, a surefire best-seller if he was interested, which he absolutely was not. The bones in the Gavin closet were none of his business. And even if he decided to make them his business, what was the point of rattling them now? Of exposing truths no one wanted to know, least of all him? Maggie had taken her secret to the grave, and for that he was grateful. Whatever her sins, they were buried now and best left that way.

  There was only one problem. While doing everything in his power to discourage Leslie from snooping around in Adele’s death, he had been quietly and methodically committing her story to paper, a fact Leslie was likely neither to appreciate nor to understand, given her zeal for absolute honesty and his tendency to skirt the truth when the truth might prove inconvenient. It wouldn’t matter that his intent had been to insulate her from some rather nasty possibilities or that he never intended to publish a single word of what he’d written. She wouldn’t see it that way. He had deliberately misled her—again. Period. And the longer he waited to come clean, the worse it was going to turn out.

  Shred it. Purge your hard drive. Pretend you never wrote it.

  But he couldn’t. As he lifted the stack of pages from the drawer, he reveled in their weight, the heft of hard-fought words, perhaps—no, almost certainly—the best and truest he’d ever written. Even if he never added another word or page, which he almost certainly would not, how could he just pretend the ones now in his hand had never poured out of him?

  And yet he knew as long as the story sat in his desk, he would continue to struggle with his conscience and his choices: tell Leslie about the half-written story and the real reason he couldn’t bring himself to finish it, or keep it to himself and tell her nothing at all. He didn’t care much for either option, but even in the interest of truth, it made no sense to share his suspicions about Adele’s fate when it was highly unlikely that either of them would ever really know what happened.

  He stared at the stack of pages in his hand, hesitating a moment more before slipping them back into the drawer. How the hell had he gotten here? Two months ago his life had been settled, his course neatly and cleanly charted. Or so he thought. Then Leslie had shown up, and now nothing felt safe. Not his tightly woven plans or his carefully crafted walls, and sure as hell not his heart.

  Chapter 24

  Adele

  For the second time in my life I wake not knowing where I am.

  I open my eyes and stretch, confused when my gaze lights on familiar sheets, my travel trunk from Parson’s, my robe draped neatly over the footboard. But this is not my room, not my bed. I make myself sit up and look about, blinking in confusion at the gritty walls and dusty floorboards. And then I remember where I am—and why.

  I am in a narrow loft on the upper floor of the cottage, large enough only for a bed and small chest of drawers. There is a single grimy window looking out over the lake. I cross the room and drag open the sash, then perch on the peeling sill, gulping deep lungs full of muggy morning air, shaken by this new turn my life has taken. It is not shame I feel, though I feel that too, beneath all the rest, and suspect that I will feel it more keenly in the future. But just now, staring out over Peak’s vast green hills and shining lake, I grapple with my new place in the world and with the realization that I am suddenly quite rudderless.

  I am neither married nor single, neither free nor attached. There is no one to whom I answer, no railing to endure, no eggshells to walk upon, no Susanne just down the hall. But it is an uneasy freedom. I am no longer the green, wide-eyed child I was when I came to Peak. I am a woman grown, mistress of my own home, such as it is. But I have no work, no husband to do for, no child to see to, no friends to call upon—no earthly idea how to fill my time.

  But as I make my way downstairs, I begin to see how I will at least fill part of it. The cottage has been vacant for years, bare except for a few sticks of shabby furniture and the dust clots and cobwebs choking the corners. I shudder when I enter the kitchen, grimy in the glare of a single bare bulb, skittering with eight-legged things. The stove is something ancient, coated with a film of grease so thick I’m certain the thing will catch fire the first time I try to light it. I shudder at the thought. I have never been easy with fire.

  Still, I am undaunted. It is part of my penance, I suppose, and I will do what is necessary. I start in the kitchen, scaring up a broom, bucket, and scrub brush from the tiny closet I will eventually make into a pantry. When I’ve swept the filth out the back door, I go down on my knees and begin to scrub. My back is miserable when I finally stand up, but the scuffed oak boards are spotless—almost clean enough to satisfy Mama.

  It takes a week to finish the rest, working sunup to sundown, scrubbing walls and polishing floors, cleaning years of grime from the windows, scouring soot from the rough brick hearth. When the cleaning is finished I set to work on curtains, then move on to covers for the furniture. By the time I finish, winter is nearly over. I am pleased with my little home, for a home it has become, small and spare, but enough for me.

  With the cottage finished, my days are harder to fill. Henry brings surprises from time to time, practical things, mostly—magazines from the drugstore, a table radio for the parlor, novels from his study to fill the time when he cannot be with me—but the days are long and unravel too slowly.

  It is planting time, and Henry is needed in the fields. When planting’s done he’ll be needed in the barns, preparing for harvest and drying. I cannot begrudge him this. Times are hard for the people of Gavin, hard all over if the stories in the Gazette are true. Money is scarce, work near impossible to find—unless you have two able hands and know my Henry. In the past year he’s given work to nearly half the men in town, bringing them on in two-week shifts so that everyone earns a little something to feed their families.

>   I keep to the cottage now, so as not to raise eyebrows. Susanne keeps to the house, cloaked in the fog of her precious tincture. She no longer cares what Henry does, and so at the end of the day he comes to me. We are awkward with each other at first, like children playing house. Soon, though, as the weeks pass, we find a rhythm. He comes to me at the end of the day, and we share a meal in the tiny kitchen with its new checked curtains, then move to the parlor. Henry reads to me and puffs on his pipe. It feels good and right having him there beside me. But then the mantel clock strikes ten and he must kiss me good night, to return to the house and his own bed. There are times, though, when the clock strikes, that he takes my hand and leads me upstairs. He is always gone when I wake, slipping away before first light with only the dent on his pillow to show he’s been there. Those are hard mornings.

  We do not speak of Susanne, or only rarely so, and for that mercy I am thankful. Henry scarcely sees her now, shut up in her room with the poor girl she has hired to take my place, ticking off the days until her quest to hold Henry’s child is finally achieved. The thought of it sickens me, and yet it will happen. I only wonder how I will live with it when it does.

  I don’t like to think about what might happen when the child arrives, that Susanne and Henry and the baby will be a family—that I might suddenly become inconvenient. I have made foolish, some would even say wicked, choices in all of this. I suppose I would say it too. But I am not a fool. I know how quickly things can change, how easily a woman in my place can be set aside. Yet in my heart, I do not believe it. And that is why, despite everything, I stay. I could have gone, left Henry behind and struck out on my own. It would have been the right thing to do, the proper thing, but by then it was too late for right, and certainly too late for proper.