Secrets Rising

by Sally Berneathy

  It was all the encouragement she needed. "Well, Kay Langley and Murray Johnson were awful thick, holding hands and kissing in public. And Bob Horton and the Wilson girl. Let me see...what was her name?"

  Jake dutifully took notes as Lorraine ran through a list that surely included the entire town and a longer time period than 1979.

  Finally she concluded. "My memory's not what it used to be. That's all I can come up with right now."

  "You've been very helpful. If no one on this list checks out, we'll get back to you and see if you've remembered more."

  Lorraine nodded. "I'm sure I will."

  Jake stood, and Rebecca followed his lead. She couldn't wait to get out of the stifling, chemical-scented house.

  "Thank you very much for all your help, Mrs. Griffin. And allow me to express my condolences on the death of your daughter. I know it was a long time ago, but wounds like that don't heal."

  Lorraine Griffin rose, too. "No, they don't. A mother shouldn't outlive her child."

  "How did she die?"

  Lorraine's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "It was an accident." She waited as if she expected him to contradict her.

  "I assumed it must be. She was so young. A car wreck?"

  Lorraine's mouth twisted. "No. She was having a hard time sleeping, and that fool doctor, Sam Wilcox, gave her a prescription for drugs. I didn't know about it or I'd have taken it away from her and flushed it down the toilet stool."

  She drew herself up and Rebecca felt a moment of sympathy for her. Even this insensitive woman had loved her daughter. Perhaps the loss had hardened her. Perhaps she hadn't always been like this.

  "She didn't know how strong those drugs were. She took too many. The doctor said sometimes people woke up in the middle of the night and didn't remember how many they'd already taken and took some more. Janelle must have done that. She went to bed one night and didn't get up the next morning."

  She looked at Rebecca, bestowing her full attention for the first time. "Any mother that would give up her child isn't worth looking for. I don't believe you're sick except at heart and finding somebody who'd do that kind of thing isn't going to help you."

  "I'll keep that in mind." Even the woman's good advice had a cruel edge to it.

  Jake thanked Lorraine Griffin again, and they left.

  At the end of the sidewalk, Jake stopped and turned to her. "You want to go pick up some chicken or something and go to the park to eat it? I don't know about you, but after that house, I'm not anxious to be inside anywhere for a while."

  "Sure. Sounds good to me." He'd mentioned the park as casually as if yesterday had never happened, as if they'd never made love in the park.

  Or even had sex.

  ***

  The day was still comfortable when they reached the park a little after noon, though Jake suspected it would soon be hot and muggy with the humidity from the rain the day before.

  He set the sack of fried chicken on the picnic table closest to the shed where he and Rebecca had made love yesterday. Not because he wanted to be as close as possible to the reminder of their encounter but because he needed to desensitize himself to the memory. He needed to associate it with mundane things such as eating fried chicken, talking about the case, watching squirrels play in the trees...anything but that mind-bending episode that replayed itself in vivid detail every time he was near Rebecca or even thought about her.

  Pretty much continuously.

  She sat across from him now in a white sundress that gave the fair skin of her neck and shoulders a creamy glow by contrast. Her slim fingers moved gracefully as she peeled the paper off a straw and stuck it through the plastic lid of her soft drink.

  Damn! He'd be hard pressed to find something more mundane than that action yet she seemed to be moving to music...erotic music. Even over the strong smell of fried chicken, he caught her scent...summer flowers...along with the essence of the rain-washed grass and trees, all imbedded in his brain as a part of making love with Rebecca.

  He jabbed a straw into his own drink, ripped open the sack of food, pulled a drumstick out of one of the boxes and bit into it.

  Rebecca took out a wing and separated the sections then stared down at it. "That was a waste of time, wasn't it? Talking to Lorraine Griffin. We didn't learn anything new."

  Jake shrugged. "We learned that if Janelle Griffin got pregnant, she wouldn't dare keep the baby."

  She looked up at him skeptically. "You think that, even after what Lorraine said about women who give up their babies?"

  "Maybe that's why she said it. To mislead us."

  "I hope not. If that woman is my grandmother, then she's right. I don't want to find her."

  "Yeah, that's certainly something to think about."

  They ate for a few minutes in silence except for the lyrical chirping of birds and the occasional raucous call of a blue jay. Jake noticed Rebecca was doing more picking at her food than eating it. She munched on a fry, holding it between thumb and index finger while slowly sucking it between her lips and into her mouth. Her gaze was unfocused and he knew she was probably thinking about Lorraine Griffin, but her actions with the fry struck him as intensely sexual. Of course, most things she did struck him as intensely sensual.

  They were going to have to find a different motel in a different town tonight, and he was either going to have to see that they got rooms on opposite sides of the place...or one room with a big bed. Avoid it entirely or dive in completely.

  "My adoptive grandparents were wonderful people," she said, and Jake made an effort to wrench his thoughts away from his lust. "They're all dead now, but I adored them when I was a little girl. My dad's parents were the more stereotypical, I guess. They lived north of Plano, in McKinney, and when I'd go to see them, Grams would do the cookie thing and Gramps would take me fishing. Mom's parents were more like her, always busy, involved with the community, doing volunteer work. They'd take me to Six Flags Amusement Park and the zoo but also to visit people in hospitals and nursing homes."

  With her straw, she stirred the crushed ice left from her drink. "And all that time, everybody knew about me, that I wasn't really a part of the family."

  "Doesn't sound like it made any difference that you weren't born into it."

  "How can I ever know how they'd have treated me if I'd been their real daughter and granddaughter?"

  Jake gave an unamused bark of laughter. "Let's hope it wouldn't have been the way somebody—maybe your real parents—are treating you now...a threatening phone call, a snake in the bathtub. I think I'd prefer the homemade cookies, trips to Six Flags and even visits to nursing homes."

  She leaned forward, her arms on the rough wood of the tabletop, her hands clasped tightly together. "How did your grandparents treat you?"

  This time his burst of laughter was from genuine amusement. "Which ones? The real ones or one of the sets of steps?"

  She didn't laugh. "All of them," she replied.

  Jake shifted on the bench that had suddenly become hard and uncomfortable. He forced himself to smile. "It's tough to keep them separated, remember which was which. My family tree, especially with the grafted on sections and the sawed off branches, is too complicated."

  "Like the way my family tree is turning out." She waited, watching him intently, her chameleon eyes a mixture of the sharp green hues of the leaves overhead and the blue of the sky.

  He'd always felt there was little point in recalling the past. It was over and dead and had no bearing on the present. But now it did. Rebecca needed a comparison, and he had all varieties of relationships to give her. He sighed and folded his arms.

  "Okay, let me think. Grandparents. One set—I'm pretty sure this was my mom's parents—used to send me really inappropriate gifts. Like one year when I was five or six, I asked for a guitar and they sent an electric one with so many attachments, I didn't have a clue what to do with it. Or when I wanted a set of weights, something small that I could take along when I moved from one place to another,
they had a full size home gym delivered."

  "They had money," Rebecca guessed.

  "Several of the branches had money. Some handled it better than others. I remember one set of grandparents that didn't bring me a lot of gifts but the ones they did bring were neat. Like a baseball and bat. They lived in the country, and I thought it was great fun to go out and pick tomatoes that we'd eat for dinner. They even let me have a go at milking a cow. I got one little stream of milk, and you'd have thought it was pure gold the way I carried on. The way they carried on, for that matter. But they belonged to my dad's second wife, and when he married his third or maybe it was his fourth...anyway, she went ballistic when she found out her husband's son was hanging out with the ex-wife's parents. So we got a divorce and they got custody of the cow." He chuckled at his own humor.

  She frowned, a vertical crease marring the smooth skin between her eyebrows. "Why did you laugh? That's not funny."

  "You don't see the humor in that? I guess you had to be there."

  She still didn't laugh or even smile. In fact, her eyes had gone a soft blue as if with compassion...something he neither needed nor wanted.

  He leaned forward, covering one of her hands with both of his, turning the compassion back to her where it belonged. "You know how when you exercise really hard, to the point of exhaustion, of physical pain even, you gradually build up muscles. Pretty soon you're much stronger, and the same exercise that used to wear you out and make you ache all over is a breeze. Well, that's the way it is with life. You had a good life. You didn't have to exercise your emotional muscles. Until now. One day you'll wake up and realize that you're stronger, and even somebody like Lorraine Griffin won't be able to cause you so much as a moment's discomfort."

  Her gaze flickered over his face then down to their hands. Gently she pulled her hand from beneath his and laid it on top. "I'm not sure I believe that or even want to believe it."

  Her hand was soft, the fingers long and slim, the skin silky. Like all of her. "When the time comes," he said quietly, "you will. When you wake up with those muscles fully developed, you'll know it, and you'll be glad."

  She took her hand away and lifted her soft drink, taking the straw between her lips and sipping the melting ice, then setting it down. "Why did you become a private detective?"

  "I didn't like being a cop."

  "Oh. Well, why did you become a cop?"

  He closed his box of chicken bones and set it on the torn bag. "Control, I guess. It didn't seem like I had much when I was a kid, being shuttled from one place to another at somebody else's whim with a new set of rules every time. When you become a cop, you have one set of rules that you and everybody else have to live by. If they don't, then you can force them to."

  "So what didn't you like about it?"

  "It didn't work. Nobody wanted to play by the rules. The victims, the perps, they all have problems, and they expect you to solve them. You haul in a kid for doing drugs, and his mother hits the ceiling, the same mother who called you last week to report a prostitute working her neighborhood. Somebody gets killed and you bring in the killer. So the victim's family wants his head while his family screams that he's innocent and they want him released. Nobody's happy. Now I find information for people. They may not like the information I get for them, but I've done what I said I would. The rules are clear-cut. Nobody has any right to be upset. It's just a job, no emotional confusion, nobody expecting things I can't give."

  She nodded slowly, the dappled sunlight and shadows gliding over her hair and her face. "I see. But you've warned me from the beginning that I might not like what you find for me. Is that part of your job? The warning?"

  "Sometimes."

  She studied him in silence for several moments.

  A woodpecker beat his rat-a-tat-tat rhythm in a nearby tree, the sound hollow and lonely.

  "I'm going back to Dallas tonight," she said abruptly. "Right after we have dinner with Doris."

  He blinked twice, scratched an eyebrow that didn't itch and gave himself a few seconds to assimilate her announcement. "You mean for the weekend."

  "No, for good. I'm going to get out of your way and let you do the job I hired you to do." She gave a half-hearted, crooked grin. "To quote somebody we all know."

  "When did you make that decision?"

  "Last night. I decided, as long as we have to move out of the motel, I might as well go back to my condo. You seem to have things under control down here. And talking to Lorraine Griffin confirmed that I don't need to be here. If that woman should turn out to be my grandmother, I'm not sure I want to be around when we make that discovery."

  "Well." He picked up a limp fry that had escaped his cleaning efforts and laid it on the torn paper bag. What was the matter with him? This was what he wanted, wasn't it? For her to go away, remove temptation, protect herself from the harsh realities they were bound to uncover...from the harsh reality of getting involved with him.

  "Good," he said. "That's a wise choice. I'll call you every night. To keep you updated on the progress."

  You'll call her every night to hear her voice.

  He wanted to groan aloud at the startling revelation from some gremlin inside his head. He'd been so damned careful to protect Rebecca that he'd forgotten to watch out for himself. He'd let her get under his skin, let himself become accustomed to being around her. She'd become a habit of sorts. A damned attractive habit, one that sent his libido into overdrive.

  But habits could be broken.

  Thank goodness she was leaving. A couple of days and he wouldn't even remember what she looked like. It always happened that way. All those muscles acquired through the years automatically came into play.

  He stood, gathering up their trash. "You ready to go?" He wasn't at all sure where they were going. He'd planned to spend the afternoon locating another motel. He supposed he could do that, but Rebecca would be left alone to fend for herself until time for dinner with Doris.

  Not that taking care of her was his responsibility.

  "If this is going to be our last day together—" He stopped in midsentence. Somehow that hadn't come out the way he'd intended. "If this is going to be the last day you're down here, I'd like to try to talk to Charles again with you along and see how he reacts to your presence. Yank his chain a little. Check out a hunch I've got."

  Disgust and fear shadowed her delicate features. He realized her fear came from the possibility that they might discover Charles was her father rather than from physical fear. Accordingly, he recognized and admired the courage it took for her to lift her chin and agree.

  "All right," she said. "I'll admit I'd as soon visit the city sewer as see him, but if it's what we need to do, let's go."

  "There's no point in taking both cars, and this is probably as good a place as any to leave one of them." A totally logical thing to do so why did he feel guilty and a little excited to be riding in the same car as her?

  "Let's take mine," she suggested, "since yours has that broken headlight. You're probably driving on borrowed time as it is. If you run into Farley Gates again, I have no doubt he'll be thrilled to give you another ticket, maybe take you to jail."

  "Good idea." Reminding himself that he wasn't some drooling teenager with lustful thoughts of what could happen in a car after dark, he turned and strode toward the automobiles parked a short distance away. "I need to get that headlight fixed, but since I've put it off this long, I might as well wait until I get back to Dallas and get a friend of mine to help me." He should have done it the day after it happened. Surely they had an auto parts store in Edgewater. Even without the proper tools, he could have probably done the job in a couple of hours. But he'd been busy.

  And he hadn't wanted to leave Rebecca alone after that threatening phone call.

  Or was it just that he hadn't wanted to leave Rebecca?

  He reached his car and realized he'd carried their trash with him. Damn! He never got distracted like this. When Rebecca was long gone and out of hi
s hair, he'd be able to focus better.

  She was already getting into her car. "Be right back," he told her.

  He loped over to the refuse container near the table where they'd eaten and shoved the sack and paper cups inside.

  Rebecca started her car and backed out of the parking space, and for a moment he thought she was leaving him. The brief spurt of disappointment that knifed though him was, he assured himself, merely the overreaction of his hormones. Anyway, she wasn't leaving, just moving the car into position.

  He jogged back to where she waited, opened the door and slid in then looked out to the dark spot in the area where she'd been parked. "Do you have an oil leak?"

  "Not that I know of. This car's only two years old, and I have it checked regularly."

  "Probably condensation from your air conditioner." He fastened his seat belt and turned to her. "Are you ready to beard the mayor in his den?"

  She didn't look any more ready for that experience than he was ready for her to leave, but they'd both do whatever was necessary.

  Chapter 17

  Rebecca leafed through the six-month old issue of Newsweek for the third time. Even if the reading material in the reception area of Charles Morton's office had been timely and interesting, she'd have found it difficult to concentrate, especially after they'd been waiting for almost an hour.

  Jake, sitting in the molded plastic chair next to her, seemed fascinated with the old magazines, going through each one page by page. He'd warned her before they came in that they might be turned away without seeing Morton or might have to wait a long time before being admitted. The waiting didn't seem to bother him at all.

  She supposed that was normal, though. This was only a job to him. It was her life, her future.

  And the longer she waited, the more inclined she was to take Jake's advice and walk away, take him off the case, tell him to forget this whole nightmare.