Domestic Secrets

by Rosalind Noonan

  He nodded slowly, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “That’s possible.”

  Rachel drew in a shaky breath. “He was murdered. I’m sure of it.” In the eight months of his incarceration, Rachel had sent him at least one letter every week. Sometimes it was just a short, cheerful note. Other times she waxed introspective, writing to him about life choices and redemption and hope. In all that time, she had received three notes back from him, all of them asking her to have Ariel get in touch with him. “Jared wanted to live,” she said. “He told the whole world about it when he did that prime-time interview with Sawyer Swift. He wanted to live happily ever after with Ariel.”

  “Maybe he lost hope. Prison can break a man’s spirit.”

  She shook her head. “He could be stubborn as the day is long, and he was determined to win Ariel back. You saw the interview. That was the only thing I heard from him, all about Ariel. He was counting the days and months and years till his sentence was ended. He was planning to walk out through those prison gates and reunite with Ariel.”

  “Rach.” Mike covered her hand with his. “It’s going to be really hard to prove that it was a homicide.”

  “I know.” She closed her hand around his. “That’s not a battle I want to fight. It won’t help Jared now. I just pray that he didn’t suffer. And I wish that I’d been able to get on better terms with him.”

  “You tried.”

  She did. But Jared had dodged her, and now it was too late.

  April

  Sometimes Ariel thought it was all a trick of the mind; she wondered if she believed Jared had been one of the best because she couldn’t have him anymore. But when she parsed out their moments together and really tried to analyze it, she realized that it was the tenderness and anger, all mixed in an intense force, that had made their lovemaking so exciting, so edgy and breathtaking.

  They had been a volatile match, a fire that had burned bright but flamed out too fast. It was easy to wax lyrical about their love. So much easier to romanticize a person who had succumbed to death.

  But Jared had also brought her trouble, dragging her into that scandal back in Oregon. He was stubborn and persistent, hounding her from prison with countless letters that begged her to visit him or write. He had carried a torch for her, which was sweet in a way. It was nice to be wanted.

  He had made his wants and desires very clear when she had visited him in prison. Oh, yes, Rachel had blackmailed her into that fiasco. She’d been forced to enter that disgusting, smelly place because Jared refused to cooperate in his defense unless he had a visit with his beloved.

  Fortunately, Ariel’s disguise of dark sunglasses, hat, scarf, and trench coat had kept her visit out of the media. But the prison had been deplorable and the meeting with Jared just broke her heart.

  “I’m sorry about Remy,” he had told her, his beautiful eyes round as quarters. “Really sorry. But I did it for you, Ariel. She knew about us, and she was mad. She turned on me, called me a psycho. I think she was going to tell people, and there was no way she’d go to prom with me and . . . and I’d promised you.” He had pressed his palm to the glass, his eyes lulling her into those long-ago hours of seduction and pleasure. “I couldn’t break my promise. I couldn’t do that to you. So I tried to coax her. I thought it would really scare her. And . . . the rest of it happened so fast. She wouldn’t stay against the wall. Trying to get away, she pressed herself into the knife. It happened so fast. One second I was holding her there, the next, the blade had gone in really deep. Just like that, it was over.”

  Just like that.

  She had loved him more than ever that day when he told the story. There was something pure and beautiful about a love that knew no boundaries: his love for her.

  But reality, cold and dank as the concrete prison walls, set in before she made it out through the final gate. No matter how you cut it, he had killed her daughter. Accident or not. She had a career and a future to pursue, and he was stuck behind those walls. Nothing was going to come of that beautiful passion.

  But Jared did not give up so easily. A few months later he did the prime-time interview with Sawyer Swift, and the whole scandal seemed to crack open again like a rotten, sticky egg. Parents at Maisy’s school began to eyeball Ariel as if she were a dark seductress, ready to snatch up their little ones and drag them off to hell.

  Stosh insisted that the controversy had upped her ante in Hollywood, but so far she had not seen her new notorious status pay off with a single job. She kept getting callbacks, but she suspected that the producers were looky-loos. The final straw came after a frustrating audition when she locked herself in a bathroom stall and sat with her head on her knees. While she was composing herself in the busy restroom, two women came in and gossiped about her. They picked at her, calling her a pervert and an abuser and a sex addict. “I thought that Andre liked her,” one woman said. “He likes to look at her, the old perv,” the second woman replied. “But he’ll never give her a part. No one in this town is going to hire a woman with a convicted killer breathing down her neck.”

  Jared’s image throbbed in Ariel’s head as she drove home that day. Those big brown eyes. That teddy bear smile, so huggable. He had won people over in that interview, attracting attention. Now those hypocrites were turning a critical eye on her.

  This was so unfair.

  She had wanted him to be gone; she had needed him to be gone so that people would begin to put all that nastiness behind her, where it belonged.

  But when she learned of his death, it was devastating. The news was underinflated and short-lived, bumped from the headlines by a senator who had been caught stealing water for his pecan ranch in California.

  “The infamous prom day killer has died,” said the television reporter. That night Ariel cried in the tub, but she never said anything to Stosh, and she hoped the report was right when they mentioned that Jared had committed suicide. She liked thinking that he was that noble.

  When Bruno came knocking on her door again with his reality show pitch, she was in a vulnerable state. He told her that her experience, gruesome though it was, would land her a starring role on his TV crime show.

  “A starring role?” Ariel liked the sound of that.

  “You would be the host, and we would love to have you in some of the reenactments.” Bruno accentuated each word with his flying hands. “It’s called Damsels in Distress, a show about preyed-upon women.”

  That seemed a little weird, considering that people thought of her as a predator now. But then her daughter had been a victim of a violent crime. She could lead that charge.

  Ariel signed on for sixteen episodes. Hell, she had kids to support for a few more years. And there was an adorable production assistant working in Bruno’s office. He was dark and exotic looking, and more than once, she had caught him watching her, his gaze lingering. He wanted her; she could tell. Well, maybe he would get lucky.

  Epilogue

  Although a year had passed since it all happened, Rachel still had trouble going near the high school. Whenever she had to drive down that street, something about the truth of that fatal moment took her breath away. Each time, she held the wheel steady as she honored Remy with a silent prayer for everlasting peace or maybe a new life through reincarnation. E = mc squared, and all that. Einstein claimed that molecules do not disappear. Matter was not destroyed but transformed . . . a solid to a gas, a gas to a liquid. In Rachel’s dreams, Remy’s spirit had lifted away before there was any pain and had dropped into the body of a newborn at Good Samaritan Hospital. Or maybe she was floating in the atmosphere, waiting for the right fit.

  Rachel had stopped torturing herself over the frantic thoughts of the pain and horror Remy must have known, as well as the desperation and brutal fury of her Jared. For Rachel, the high school would always be Remy’s place of passing, her portal to the afterlife. A very public cemetery.

  In the weeks after the killing, some parents had lobbied for some kind of reconstruction at the
school to demolish the stairwell where the crime had occurred. After meetings and debates, the school board decided that it was not an act of domestic terrorism but “a domestic quarrel.” They painted the stairwell and erected a plaque in the theater to commemorate Remy Alexander’s contribution to the drama program. Rachel was glad the plaque hung in the theater. Remy had always liked the bustle of activity there, the emotional highs and lows, the laughter and applause. And plenty of music.

  Of course, no one had asked Rachel’s opinion. She had followed those developments in the Timbergrove Times, but had not discussed them with anyone but KJ. It didn’t make for upbeat dinner conversation with her new husband, and the ladies at the shop avoided the topic altogether. KJ listened with interest when she talked about the ripples in the community, but his head was elsewhere these days, deep in his studies. With the time commitment of football out of his life, he had switched his major to biology and was applying for postgraduate programs to become a physician’s assistant. Oregon Health & Science University had one of the top ten programs in the country, and with top grades in tough courses like Chemistry and Physiology, KJ’s counselors thought he had a good shot.

  Rachel didn’t talk about Jared much, either. Not that Mike couldn’t deal with it, but the time and place of Jared’s death left Rachel with a disconnected sense that he was still on this earth. Still waiting, still planning to pass through those prison gates one day and find his true love. So Rachel did not discuss her dead son, but she thought of him often. Her teddy-bear boy, awkward and curious and quiet.

  And Jared’s restless spirit? Her son was still avoiding her. Sometimes she imagined that he’d flown south like a western tanager, coursing through the sky over Southern California in search of Ariel.

  Ariel’s house had a different vibe from the high school, and Rachel drove by the place nearly every day on her way to the shop. Another family lived there now, an optometrist, she heard through the grapevine, with his elegant, dark-haired wife, whom Rachel had seen in passing. They had two boys, maybe five and eight, who played in the driveway, aiming a ball at a hoop or kicking goals toward a net or rolling around on the lawn.

  One summer day they had a lemonade stand set up—two chairs, a TV tray, and an ice chest—with a sign that boasted ONLY FIFTY CENTS A CUP! Rachel stopped. She couldn’t resist.

  “It’s weally good,” the younger one told her, while his older brother dipped a paper cup in a bag of ice in the cooler. The pitcher trembled as he lifted it, and a bit of liquid sloshed over the side. Seeing the crease in his brow, the familiar worry and self-doubt, Rachel quickly looked away and handed the younger boy a dollar bill.

  “Uh-oh. Clive, she needs change.”

  “Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Clive said in a parental voice.

  “Keep the change.” Rachel smiled as she accepted the cup. “I’m just happy for a cool glass of lemonade on such a hot day.”

  “Yay.” The little boy waved the dollar bill through the air, a scraggly butterfly. His smile, his whimsy, his moon-shaped face reminded Rachel of the early days with her boys, before the torment of adolescence and a cruel world had torn away at their innocence.

  She pressed the cup to her lips and drank the lemonade, sweet and sour to match the memories.

  “You forgot to say thank you,” Clive scolded his younger brother, and the boys chimed a thank-you together.

  “You’re welcome. Do you like living here?”

  The little one shrugged, and Clive drew closer to his younger brother.

  “Where did you live before?”

  “California.” Again, the little one answered freely while the older brother, forehead creased, took the dollar bill from his brother and opened a shoe box, their till.

  “I have a good friend in California,” Rachel said, wishing she could retract the lie the moment it slipped out.

  Just then the front door of the house—a new door of clear glass with a cedar frame—popped open, and their mom emerged. A slender woman with chestnut hair down to her waist, she was smiling despite the unmistakable vibe of maternal instinct that made Rachel feel like an intruder. And rightly so. “Hey, there. I see you stopped to support our neighborhood entrepreneurs.”

  Rachel nodded, lifting the cup in a toast. “I always shop local, and I was thirsty.”

  “She gave us a dollar,” Clive told his mother.

  “That’s very nice of her.”

  “I had to stop,” Rachel said, wanting to come clean. “I used to know the people who lived here and, well, it’s been so nice to drive by and see your family enjoying the house. I love the teal paint on the trim, and the new door is gorgeous.” The open glass panel allowed a clear view into the living room, where inviting chairs and a fireplace waited. As if visitors were welcome. As if this family did not possess terrible, twisted secrets that had to be concealed from the neighbors. “You’ve given the house great curb appeal.”

  “Thanks. We’re settling in.” Her smile was cautious. Was she afraid Rachel would talk about the tragedy in front of her kids? No chance of that.

  “Timbergrove is the perfect place to raise a family. I hope you like it.”

  “So far, so good.”

  “I know, I probably sound like someone from the chamber of commerce, singing the town’s praises. But it’s true. My name’s Rachel. Rachel McCabe.” The new name had seemed to be an awkward fit at first, a jagged departure from the name she had maintained for years to match her sons’. But her therapist had suggested the image of a hermit crab that grew out of its shell and moved on to one that was bigger and better suited to its needs.

  “Nice to meet you, Rachel.” The mom introduced herself as Ellie Henrico and explained that her sister was a longtime resident of Portland.

  As they chatted, Rachel’s gaze strayed to the boys. How quickly a lifetime cycled through: babies, toddlers, soccer games, graduation. Rachel wanted to tell Ellie Henrico to enjoy it now, to seize the moment, but that was the sort of greeting card advice that washed down the drain. Still, Rachel stared at the children, struggling to tamp down the warning.

  Hold your boys in your arms, every night, she wanted to tell her. Hold them close and let them know how much you love them.

  KJ and her therapist kept reminding her that Jared’s meltdown was not a product of bad parenting, but guilt kept knocking on her door, reminding her that the question remained. Was it mental illness? Social isolation? A twisted misconception of Ariel’s orders? A symptom of his infatuation with her?

  Realizing she would never know the answer, she was trying to let her wayward son go. Making an earnest attempt. If trying were any measure of success, she would be as rich as Donald Trump.

  Even when you know a life is over, the love remains in your heart. To the moon and back.

  Please turn the page for a Q&A with

  New York Times–bestselling author

  Rosalind Noonan.

  What prompted you to write this novel?

  The seed of the story came from a terrible event: the fatal stabbing of a Connecticut teen in the school corridor after she rejected a prom date. In so many ways that story is too appalling and horrifying to believe, and it started the thought process of how that might have happened. How could a teen be driven to such an action, and what impact would it have on the community? While I continued to research the Connecticut killing, there came a point when I needed to let the true details go and begin to create a new story with original characters and organic motivations.

  Would you say that the book is inspired by a true story?

  Not really. Although I followed the details of the true crime, I placed the story in a completely fictitious world. By the time I finished writing I had made the story very much my own. The issue of mental illness simmering in suburban homes and erupting into violence is the take-away from the original news story. Some reviewers have written that my books are “ripped from the headlines,” but generally I take a timely topic and plant it in a fictitious setting. I
have written about postpartum depression, the reunification of a family after the return of a hostage, the question of nature versus nurture, and posttraumatic stress.

  Do you begin writing each book with a theme in mind?

  Usually, the theme drives the story. In this novel I was working with the theme that we all have secrets; no family is free of strife. As I’m writing I latch on to motifs, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. In this book, one of the more obvious motifs is motherhood, as I saw Rachel, Ariel, and Cassie handling the care of children in very different ways. Although Cassie was not literally a mother, in some ways she possessed the strongest parenting instincts.

  What was the most compelling thing to you about this story?

  The ripples caused by a violent incident touch an entire community in a variety of ways. Ariel reacts with denial and numbness. Cassie strives to protect the survivors and easily forgives a killer who was like a brother to her. Rachel seeks answers and tries to protect her son’s rights. The complexity of human reaction to such a tragedy fueled the novel for me.

  How did you come up with the book’s title?

  I am fortunate to have an intuitive editor who had a fine sense for marketing books; John came up with Domestic Secrets as the title. My working title was The Short Life of Remy Alexander, which I knew wouldn’t last. As I was writing I lobbied for titles like Out of the Blue, Shattered, and Fallen Stars, but Kensington thought Domestic Secrets was the most compelling choice. Once I saw it with the cover art, I thought it was serendipity.

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  SECRETS