The Secrets She Carried

by Davis, Barbara

  “I thought we could get breakfast somewhere,” Leslie suggested tentatively. “Maybe take a walk down by the harbor?”

  “Actually, I was thinking drive-through. I’d like to get on the road. I’m expecting a call this afternoon, some business I need to handle.”

  A tight knot formed beneath her rib cage as she watched Jay disappear into the bathroom. He was so eager to get her back to Peak that he couldn’t even look her in the eye. Under the moon’s soft spell, she hadn’t let herself think of consequences. But now, in the cool glare of morning, consequences were all she could think about. Last night had been a mistake, one that would sit between them like some grisly crime scene, to be roped off and carefully stepped around.

  Jay finally emerged, clean-shaven and neatly combed. After a quick check of the nightstand, he zipped the satchel closed and slung it onto his shoulder.

  “Ready to go?”

  Leslie sat fixed to the arm of the chair. “I want— You can tell me the truth, Jay. Do you regret what we did last night?”

  “Regret it?” For a moment he seemed astonished. “Did it seem like I was being taken against my will?”

  Now it was Leslie’s turn to avoid eye contact. “Not exactly, no. But it was my idea. And now you seem like maybe you wished we hadn’t—”

  He crossed the room, silencing her with a long, thorough kiss. “I don’t regret anything that happened last night,” he said, still holding her chin. “I just didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings between us.”

  Leslie stood and sidled around him, pretending to search for her purse. “You mean you wanted to make sure I didn’t get the wrong idea and start making rice bags.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I wasn’t sure last night was ever going to happen, but I know it was getting harder and harder to pretend I didn’t want it to. And maybe I was trying to slow things down, but that’s because there were things I needed to say…first…before.”

  “I’m a big girl, Jay, and I live in the real world. We both need to figure out where we go from here, and if we go together or separately. I get all that. Just please, please, don’t say you regret last night.”

  Jay smiled, a quick, tight smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I won’t if you won’t.”

  The morning was spectacular, crisp and clear, with a chilly wind cutting in off the harbor. Leslie offered to drive, but Jay tossed the duffel in the back and slid into the driver’s seat. After a few halting attempts at small talk, she gave up. He was clearly not in the mood for conversation, his attention fixed straight ahead with a kind of grim preoccupation she decided she would rather not question. For someone with no regrets, he certainly was having a hard time meeting her eyes.

  When the Mustang finally crunched up the long gravel drive, Leslie shouldered her purse, ready to bolt the instant the car was in park. They both needed time alone, to digest what had happened and decide what, if anything, they wanted from each other.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she told him over the roof of the car. “I guess I’ll see you later?” It came out as a question, though she hadn’t meant it to.

  Jay looked at his watch. “I’ve got that call, but maybe later—”

  “Oh, sure, maybe later—”

  “Good, then. I guess I’ll—”

  “Yeah—me too.”

  In the kitchen, Leslie brewed a cup of tea, then let it go cold while she switched on her laptop and stared at the list of files. She had hoped to lose herself in work, but the muse just wasn’t there. Instead, her mind kept wandering back to last night, to how right it felt to finally surrender to the feelings she’d been fighting for weeks. Had it been that way for Jay too?

  It had certainly seemed so last night. But that was nearly twenty-four hours ago, when the wine from dinner had still been coursing through their veins, the moonlight still spilling through the shutters, playing pale and cool over tangled sheets and damply twined limbs. In the light of day he might feel very different, a prospect that didn’t seem unlikely when she recalled that it was she who had pressed matters, while Jay had seemed uneasy from the moment their meeting with Emilie Fornier ended.

  Weary of pondering the subject and needing something to divert her attention, Leslie considered popping by to visit Angie. But that would almost certainly involve a discussion about why the Mustang hadn’t reappeared until this afternoon, and she wasn’t at all ready to have that conversation. Instead, she phoned Mr. Randolph to fill him in on what they had learned from Emilie Fornier. It was only as she was ending the call that she remembered the Rebecca was still in Jay’s trunk.

  As she brushed out her hair, she tried to convince herself that retrieving the painting was a perfectly legitimate errand, not just a lame ploy to see Jay, but at the last minute she ended up changing her sweater and dabbing a bit of gloss onto her lips. No reason to show up looking like a frump.

  The cottage door stood ajar. Leslie knocked tentatively, calling out as she stepped inside. The desk was littered with papers, but there was no sign of Jay or of Belle either. Maybe they were out for a walk. Suddenly, she wished she hadn’t come. He was going to see right through this. He’d think she was desperate, or worse, some kind of stalker.

  She was relieved when she finally caught the sound of running water from upstairs. It felt like a reprieve. She’d leave a note asking him to bring it by, then beat a hasty retreat. All she needed was a pen and something to write on. When the shower went quiet she grabbed the first scrap of paper she saw. It appeared to be a list of some sort:

  Conference call—Simon & Schuster 9:30 a.m.

  —Flesh out synopsis

  —Negotiate advance ASAP

  —Draft deadline

  —Contact attorney re: royalty rights

  He was writing again? Unconsciously, Leslie’s eyes slid to the desktop. It was wrong, she knew, and certainly none of her business, and yet she found herself picking up a stack of neatly printed pages, scanning lines that wove the story of a married man and a forbidden love, the story of a woman named Adele.

  Her chest squeezed painfully as she flicked through the pages, feeling the reality of them, and the betrayal, sink deep. All this time, behind her back, while he’d pretended—

  “Leslie…”

  She glanced up at the sound of her name, hanging in the air along with the scents of toothpaste and shampoo. Jay stood at the foot of the stairs, bare chested, his hair dripping wet.

  “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you—”

  “All this time,” she said, her voice a choked whisper. “All this time, you were writing about it…about her?”

  “I wanted to tell you.”

  “When?” Leslie hurled back as she smacked the stack of pages back onto the desk. “When did you want to tell me? While you were pretending not to know anything about the photo Goddard gave me? Or while we were standing in front of her grave that day?”

  “I wanted to tell you last night.”

  “Last night was a bit late, don’t you think? Unless, of course, you dashed all this off after we came back from Charleston this afternoon.” She paused, fixing him with scathing eyes. “You didn’t, did you?”

  Jay sighed. “Leslie, I swear this isn’t what it looks like.”

  Leslie managed to laugh, a hollow, scraping sound in the small space. “Well, that’s certainly a relief, because what it looks like is you using my family history to resurrect your writing career, and lying to me about it the whole time.”

  “But that’s not what it is.”

  “How long have you been working on it?”

  Jay sunk his hands deep into his pockets and rocked back on his bare heels. “I started jotting down notes after Maggie died, but they kind of took on a life of their own after you brought me to the ridge that day.”

  “Notes?”

  “It’s what I do when a story gets in my head. It was just notes at first, thoughts I couldn’t seem to shake. Then, before I knew it, she was walking around
in my head. The only way I knew to make it stop was to write it all down. That’s how it works for me.”

  “I don’t care how it works! I care that you went behind my back and deliberately kept all this from me—that you lied to me.”

  “I never meant for it to turn into a book.”

  “And yet, here it is. What changed your mind?”

  “You did.”

  Leslie’s mouth dropped open. “You think I wanted you to do this?”

  “That isn’t what I said. And for the record, this has nothing to do with my career. When you showed me the stone and began asking all your questions, it started the wheels turning again. Before I knew it, I had two hundred and thirty pages.”

  “And this?” Leslie held out the scribbled note. “Did I inspire this too? Maybe you’d like to explain how negotiating an advance has nothing to do with your career.”

  Jay looked away then, his eyes drifting beyond the narrow front windows. “Something came up,” he answered flatly. “I needed to raise some money.”

  “How much will you make?”

  “I don’t know, or care really, beyond the advance. I didn’t do it for the money. A family issue came up that needed to be dealt with, and I dealt with it.”

  “A family issue?” Leslie lifted one skeptical brow.

  Jay’s eyes flicked away again, roaming the room for someplace to light. “If you don’t mind, I think it would be best if we stuck with one issue at a time. All I’ll say is I did what I thought I had to, in the only way I knew how. Maybe that isn’t the way it works in your world, but it’s the way it works in mine. I don’t expect you to understand, or to trust me, but I’m telling you the truth.”

  Leslie’s eyes rounded. “You can stand there and talk to me about truth and trust? When I just found what I did? When until this minute there hasn’t been a word about this so-called family issue? What a fool you must think me. And last night—”

  Jay reached for her, then seemed to think better of it, folding his arms over his chest instead. “Yes, well, we’ve certainly come a long way from last night. What happened to nothing changing how you feel? That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “I thought you were going to give me some crap about fear of commitment! I was willing to accept that. Hell, I was expecting it. But I never saw this coming. If I had, I would never have said what I did.”

  Jay dropped onto the corner of the desk and let his breath out slowly. “You weren’t wrong, by the way. I did want last night to happen, but not while this thing was between us. That’s why I wanted to talk first, because I was afraid of exactly this.”

  Leslie stared at him, blinking hard against the hot tears that threatened. “You were afraid? How hard would it have been to say Leslie, I’ve been lying to you since the day I met you? I’ll bet if you tried you could’ve managed to fit it in while we were polishing off dessert. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  Jay slid off the desk and took a step toward her. “I was wrong to not be up-front with you. I should have told you that day on the ridge, but it was still just notes at that point. I had no idea it would ever go where it did. Then, when it started to become more, I knew I had to come clean. But by then the problem I told you about had reared its head, and I did what I had to.”

  “And went behind my back to do it,” Leslie added stiffly.

  “Yes.”

  The simple one-word admission stung more than anything else he could have said. For an instant, Leslie opened her mouth but realized there was nothing left to say. Turning on her heel, she headed for the door, then paused on the threshold.

  “I guess I’ll see you on the bookshelves.”

  Jay was beside her before she could get outside. “And where does that leave us?”

  It took every ounce of strength in her to look him in the eye. “There isn’t any us, Jay.”

  “So that’s it. That’s the end?”

  She managed a smile then, a thin, cool curve that didn’t reach her eyes. “Yes, that’s the end. I should think you of all people would recognize one when you see it.”

  Chapter 36

  Leslie pushed the curtains aside and peered out the kitchen window, at barren trees and piles of damp brown leaves stirring in the chilly breeze, and felt the familiar pang of restlessness, her constant companion of late. Maybe she should have taken Angie up on her dinner invitation after all, but after three weeks of gentle interrogation about what had happened between her and Jay, she couldn’t bear the thought of yet another arm-twisting session. She wasn’t looking to assign blame or get anyone to take sides; she just didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Not to mention, there was always a chance Jay could pop in, which would be awkward, to say the least.

  They hadn’t spoken since the day at the cottage, probably because she’d taken care to avoid any chance meetings. It wasn’t hard. Jay hadn’t exactly been banging down her door, and she’d done her best to keep her head down, focusing manically on a handful of new marketing projects. Sooner or later, though, they were going to have to talk about what happened and decide how they were going to work together to open the winery.

  Leslie let the curtain fall back with a sigh and shuffled back to her papers and laptop. Another reason she had buried herself in work was to keep from wondering what Jimmy might be up to and why she hadn’t seen him since the night of the Splash. Maybe he’d gone and gotten himself nicked again. It certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. She didn’t care, as long as he stayed far away from Peak. Emotionally, her plate was full.

  Since stumbling onto Jay’s manuscript, she found that she couldn’t stop thinking of Adele and the questions surrounding her death. Maybe it was just another way to distract herself from thoughts she wasn’t ready to handle, but a part of her was starting to understand what Jay meant when he spoke of Adele walking around in his head. Yesterday, she had wasted three hours digging around online, searching for the fates of the boys the police had questioned after the shed fire.

  She had run a search for Samuel Porter of Level Grove and had finally isolated two possible matches, one long dead, buried beside his wife in Bristol, Tennessee, the other recently deceased somewhere in Maine, while Randy, and indeed most of the Porter clan, seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth not long after the fire. She hadn’t bothered with Landis. After blowing three hours on the first two and coming up empty, she didn’t see much point. Even on the off chance that he was still alive, the man would be in his eighties and not likely to be of much help.

  And yet now, as she sat staring at the random bounce of screen-saver bubbles on her laptop, she felt the pull to try once more. She was too restless to work. Maybe if she promised to limit herself to one hour. If she didn’t have any luck by then, she would shut it down and force herself back to her work. It was a long shot, she knew, but it was only an hour.

  Pulling up the people-finder site, she typed in Landis Porter’s name, and then the town of Level Grove. When a single result popped up, she was so surprised she could only stare at it.

  Landis Porter

  DOB: 1/12/1925

  121 Old Church Road

  Level Grove, N.C.

  Before she could second-guess herself, she had scribbled down the address and was out of her chair, dragging on her jacket as she hit the back door. She pretended not to notice Jay watching from the barn door as she slid into the car and backed down the drive. She wasn’t sure what she planned to say when she got there, or what information, if any, she might be able to mine from the memory of an eighty-eight-year-old man, but the churning in her belly told her she had to at least try.

  The day’s chilly mist turned to rain as Leslie headed west toward the edge of town. It was the week of Thanksgiving, and the Christmas tree lots had already put up their signs. She hadn’t celebrated the holidays since leaving Peak as a child, unless you counted the occasional turkey potpie with Jimmy. Now, as she passed by the neatly s
trung white lights, the thought of skipping them suddenly depressed the hell out of her. Angie had invited her for Thanksgiving, but Jay would almost certainly be there, which meant she wouldn’t. Maybe there would be a time when she could sit across the table from him and share a meal like nothing had happened, but that time was still a long way off.

  A battered wood sign with peeling paint alerted Leslie that she was about to enter the town of Level Grove. It was smaller than Gavin, rural and run-down, made drearier if possible by the low gray sky and steady drizzle. Following the directives of her GPS, she turned onto Old Church Road, a rutted strip of pavement clogged with overflowing trash cans, abandoned cars, and various articles of dilapidated furniture.

  She felt conspicuous as she pulled the Beemer up in front of the mailbox carefully painted with the numbers 121. The house was small, a listing clapboard structure with a sagging porch and rusty tin roof. She was glad to see the column of white smoke chuffing from the crumbling brick chimney. Someone was home.

  She moved quickly up the cracked walk, dodging a leaky gutter as she stepped up onto the porch. She still had no idea what she was going to say, or how she was going to convince whoever was inside that she wasn’t crazy. She had just raised her fist to knock when a coarse voice startled her.

  “Who you lookin’ for?”

  A man in an oversize camouflage jacket sat very still at the far end of the porch, his stringy white hair combed back from his forehead, a scruff of silver whiskers glistening along his jaw. Leslie moved down the porch, feeling the warped boards give with each step. Only when she was closer did she note the cigarette fuming in his right hand and the portable oxygen tank beside his rocker. A much-marked and well-thumbed Bible lay open in his lap.

  “Would you be Landis Porter?”

  “Might be.” Cloudy blue eyes narrowed behind thick, wire-rimmed glasses. His voice was a strange combination of ragged and breathless, a smoker’s voice. “Who wants to know?”