Secrets

by Jude Deveraux

  That thought made her wake up! She checked on the man on the couch, and he seemed to look sleepy. He’d made a trip to the bathroom, but other than that, he hadn’t moved, so maybe he’d fall asleep and Cassie…She didn’t know if she’d push out the taped window she’d used to get in, or run for the front door.

  Her leg was going to sleep, so she quietly changed her position and pushed the sleeve of a flannel shirt out of her face. When she moved her foot, the heel of her shoe scraped across a board that protruded from the floor of the wardrobe. Smiling, Cassie remembered the time she and Brent had been excited about seeing the armoire used in Althea’s movie about the detective. The Twenty-sixth of December , she thought. The all-important journal had been hidden under the boards.

  More to keep herself awake than because she thought something would be there, Cassie squashed herself into a corner and pulled at the loose board. She got a splinter in her fingertip when she tried to lift it, but she kept pulling.

  When it came up, she smiled in accomplishment, then started to put it back, but on impulse, she cautiously put her hand into the dark hole. She was ready to snatch it back out if she felt anything slimy or moving.

  But the hole was just a big empty space and seemed to have nothing in it. She was about to give up when her hand touched something. It felt like stiff paper. It wasn’t easy to maneuver herself so she could get hold of it, but she did. She pulled it out and knew what it was as soon as she had her hand fully around it. It was a computer CD in a white paper sleeve. It was her guess that someone had once used the hole as a hiding place, but when they’d cleaned it out, this disk had stuck and been left behind. Smiling, and feeling a sense of achievement, she tucked the disk into her bra. Reaching her trouser pocket would entail standing up, and she couldn’t risk the noise.

  Cassie sat back against the wall of the wardrobe and didn’t know whether to be happy or terrified. Of course the disk could just contain some ordinary files, but if so, why hide? She leaned forward to peer in the mirror to see the man. He looked wide awake, fascinated by whatever show was on TV.

  Cassie was so absorbed in looking at the man that when she saw the hand at the window, she almost screamed. It took her several seconds to calm down. She knew the hand well. It was Jeff’s.

  He had cut away the tape the man had put over the window and was trying to get her attention. But how did he know she was in the closet? she wondered, but then she knew. He’d seen the ladder that was still outside, and which he was standing on, then he’d looked inside the cabin and seen that, other than the bathroom, the only place she could hide was inside the wardrobe.

  She desperately wanted to signal to him, but she couldn’t open the door even an inch or the man would see the movement. But if she didn’t signal Jeff she was afraid he’d leave and she’d be caught. And sent to jail. Or worse!

  When the man got up to go to the kitchen to get yet another beer, Cassie nearly burst into tears of happiness. She opened the door a few inches and put her face to it so Jeff could see her, then she closed the door again. She did not want to think about the expression Jeff had been wearing.

  It was less than a minute before she heard a car alarm go off, and then the man jumped up and ran out the door. Cassie was out of the wardrobe and at the window in a split second. Jeff had the window open, and he wasn’t gentle when he pulled her through it. He grabbed the waistline of her trousers and hauled her out, catching her in his arms as he stood her on the ground. The man’s car alarm was still going off so loudly that she knew that if she said anything, she’d have to shout, so she stood in silence as Jeff angrily tore off strips of tape from the roll he held and covered up the hole in the window. If the man looked at it he’d see that this tape had been put on from the outside, but Cassie guessed that as long as wind and mosquitoes didn’t come into the room, the man wouldn’t look behind the curtain.

  When he finished, Jeff picked up the ladder in one hand and grabbed Cassie’s arm in the other, then they took off running toward their cabin.

  13

  “ DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEAwhat you put me through?” Jeff said. He was so angry that veins were standing out on his temples. They were back in their cabin. Cassie was sitting on the couch, Jeff was looming over her, pacing, and telling her in loud detail what he thought of her escapade. “Cassie, I have always thought of you as a sane and sensible person. If I didn’t think you were, I wouldn’t have let you take care of my child.”

  She wanted to remind him of the idiot nannies he’d hired before her, but she thought better of it and kept her mouth closed. Even from her limited experience she knew that angry men recovered more quickly when they were allowed to blow off steam.

  She and Jeff were alone, and she wondered where Brent and Skylar were, and if he’d sent them away.

  “I guessed where you were,” he said. “I remembered that you suggested that I break into that man’s cabin, so it came to my mind that that’s what you’d done. But I thought no, that couldn’t be possible. Not sweet little Cassie. Not the cookie-baking Cassie who everyone depends on. Not the Cassie who takes care of everyone, who is reliable and trustworthy. Not that Cassie breaking and entering into some man’s house, hiding in a wardrobe and spying on him.”

  Cassie put her arms over her chest and she couldn’t help it, as her bottom lip stuck out. He certainly made her sound boring. Cookie-baking? Trustworthy? Reliable? Is that how he saw her? No wonder he was taken in by someone like Skylar. No wonder he’d never made a pass at Cassie.

  “Would you mind telling me what you were doing in there? What did you think you would find? A bundle of jewels from a robbery that happened over twenty years ago?”

  “Leo,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Leo,” she said louder. “I thought Leo was staying there and I thought I could find out something about him. I told you he wasn’t who he seemed to be.”

  Jeff’s face drained of color. “You thought Leo Norton was a person who was…What was it you said? Bad? You thought he was a bad person, yet you went snooping around where you thought he was and searching through his belongings?”

  Jeff seemed to be so overcome with the enormity of it all that he sat down on a chair as though he weighed hundreds of pounds.

  “I told you that Leo said he was leaving at fiveP.M ., so I thought I was safe in searching his cabin,” Cassie said.

  “For your information—which I would have told you if you’d asked—Leo wasn’t staying in any of the cabins. I don’t know where he was staying. He just came in for the day.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought that since you’d told me about the cabin and Leo was here that that’s where he was staying.”

  “And where he was hiding the jewels, I guess.” Jeff wiped his hand across his face. “Cassie, you don’t seem to realize how dangerous what you did was. If I hadn’t found you, what would have happened?”

  “That man was on his seventh or eighth beer, and eventually, he would have fallen asleep and I would have climbed back out the window.” She knew that Jeff was running down. It was funny, she thought, how one person could bawl you out and you’d be terrified, but another person could do it and you’d just have to wait for him to finish. With Jeff, she didn’t have the least bit of fear. But then, Cassie knew she had an advantage over other people: she’d been terrorized by the best. All her life, her mother had told her that whatever she’d done was wrong. In the rare times that Margaret Madden visited her daughter in the country house, there was nothing that escaped the woman’s attention and nothing that she didn’t find fault with.

  And every word out of her mother’s mouth had terrified Cassie. Right now, Cassie realized that the difference between her mother and Jeff was that he wasn’t going to hurt her. Jeff cared. He was a man who loved people very, very hard. He wasn’t a man who punished and ridiculed, as Margaret Madden did.

  Cassie hung her head and let Jeff say what he wanted to, but she wasn’t upset that he was yelling at her. She coul
d tell that most of his anger was relief that she was all right. He’d told her in detail how he’d been upset when she’d “disappeared.” “I knew that you’d done something you shouldn’t have. A voice in my head told me that you were where you shouldn’t be,” he’d said.

  Now, he finally seemed to have run down a bit. “Would you like to see what I found?” she asked softly.

  “Found? What do you mean, ‘found’?”

  “In the cabin. I found something in the cabin.”

  He gave her a hard look. “Cassie, that cabin is occupied by a man neither you nor I know, and he has a right to hide anything he wants in there. It’s none of your business or mine. I think we should return whatever it is that you found.”

  “But what if it’s from the robbery?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. “Okay, I’ll bite. What did you find?”

  “A disk.” As she removed the disk from inside her bra, she couldn’t help herself, but she made her movements rather slow and she hoped sexy as she unbuttoned her shirt—one button lower than necessary—and withdrew the disk. When she looked up at Jeff she was happy to see that his face was a shade paler than it had been.

  It was a moment before he spoke. “If you think that’s from the jewel robbery, it couldn’t be. You’re not old enough to know that twenty years ago they didn’t have disks like that.”

  “I’m old enough to know that information can be transferred,” she said, smiling. “Did you bring your computer? We could look at this.”

  “I don’t think we should,” Jeff said. “It’s private property and—”

  “Fine,” Cassie said as she started to put the disk back into her bra. “I’ll look at it when we get home. By the way, when are we leaving?”

  “Not soon enough,” Jeff said, then got up. “Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t break into anyone’s house, and don’t go sneaking around and listening in on anyone’s conversations.”

  “When did I do that?”

  “I don’t know, but I think you may have done many things that you shouldn’t have.” He paused at the door. “Cassie, I’m beginning to wonder if you’re the girl I thought I knew.”

  After he left the cabin, Cassie broke into a smile. She was sure he’d meant his statement as a put-down, but she couldn’t take it as such. She liked that she was changing his mind about her.

  Minutes later, he returned with his laptop and power cord in his hand. She couldn’t help teasing him. “I don’t think you should look at this disk,” she said seriously as he put the computer on the table and turned it on. “What if it has something illegal on it? You’d be an accessory then. No, it’s better that I take full responsibility onto myself and leave you out of it.” With that, she started to shove the disk back into her bra.

  But Jeff caught her hand. “Would you please stop doing that?” he said in a way that made Cassie laugh.

  He put the disk into the drive and opened the file.

  It was disappointing, just a list of places in and around Washington, DC, and dates from the 1980s. A dress shop, and a date in 1981, then a house and a date in 1982. There were six house addresses in ’83, and a jewelry store in 1984.

  “It looks like someone’s address book,” Cassie said. She’d hoped she’d found something interesting, but it obviously wasn’t.

  “Why do you think I wouldn’t go into that house?” Jeff asked. “How could there be anything in there after twenty-plus years? What did you think you’d find? Did you—”

  He broke off because as he scrolled down the screen, one address caught their attention at the same time. It was the last entry on the page, and it was the name of a small bank that had been robbed in 1994 and had been in the news for many days. Cassie was a teenager then, but she still remembered the story. The robbers hadn’t taken any money, but they’d killed two tellers and the bank president before they’d run out the back and jumped into a car with the license plate covered. They’d never been caught.

  Cassie and Jeff looked at each other, their eyes wide. “Let me do it,” Cassie said. “I can type faster than you.” Jeff moved to the chair beside her to let her take over the computer. She reduced the word-processing screen to half size, then connected to the wireless Internet that the computer kept saying had been found. Minutes later she’d typed in the name of the dress shop. Robbed in 1981. She found newspaper articles about four of the houses listed, all robbed in the year that was on the disk. The jewelry store had been robbed of nearly a million dollars in 1984.

  “Well,” Jeff said, looking at her.

  “Yes, well,” Cassie said, smiling. “So what do we do now?”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we,’” he said, smiling back at her. “I feel like I’m making progress.” He nodded toward the computer. “Mind if I take over now?” Five minutes later he had e-mailed the contents of the disk to someone.

  “Who did you send that to?”

  “Dad, of course,” Jeff said, then looked as though he wished he hadn’t said that.

  Cassie jumped on his words. “We find a list of robberies and you send the information to your father? The one whose heart is so bad that he can’t even walk up a flight of stairs? Why didn’t you send it to the police?”

  “Why would they believe me?” Jeff asked. “Are you hungry? I’m starving. Why don’t we go to that little café by the grocery and get something to eat? If you can refrain from breaking anybody’s windows, that is.”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  Jeff pushed the button on the side of the computer, took the disk out, and put it in its sleeve. “You want to put it back in the safe?” he asked, looking pointedly at the front of her still-open shirt.

  “You’re not going to distract me. Why did you send this information to your father?”

  Jeff got up from the table. “He knows people. He’ll know what to do with the information. Have you seen Goodwin or Skylar? They were supposed to be back by now. Of course I was so busy finding you that they could have come and gone again.”

  “Did you check the bedrooms?” Cassie asked, glaring at him. “How does your father ‘know people’? He’s a retired accountant. How would he know people who have knowledge of criminals?”

  Jeff picked up the laptop, turned it off, and waited for it to shut down. “You know him, he’s charming, something that I, unfortunately, didn’t inherit. He charms his way into people’s lives, like Althea’s. Dad said that in other circumstances, he’d ask her to marry him. Wouldn’t that be something? My new mother would be the greatest living actress.”

  “She’s much older than your father.”

  “Who cares about age where love is concerned?”

  “That is a question I’d really like to have answered,” Cassie said, her eyes boring into his.

  Jeff looked at her and laughed. “This is a whole new Cassie. So, are you ready to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “To get something to eat, of course. Or would you rather cook?”

  “I’m beginning to want to tie you to a chair and make you answer questions,” she said.

  “I can take the chair and the tying part, but not the questions,” he said, smiling. “Do you want to change clothes or go as you are?”

  “She’s driving me insane,” Jeff said into his cell phone. “Dad, stop laughing. This is serious. No, I had no idea she was going to break into somebody’s house. Who would have thought Cassie would do something like that? Cassie is predictable. You could set your clock by her. She picks up Elsbeth exactly on time. She goes to the farmers’ market every Saturday morning. She makes an appointment for her next haircut when she’s still at the shop.”

  Jeff listened to his father. “Yeah, I know she’s been under duress with Skylar lately, but what can I do? I promised Sky’s father I’d look after her. I had no choice. Yes! Of course I knew the pirate thought he could buy me for his daughter.”

  He paused. “Yes, Cassie is fine. A little too fine, if you ask me. Too curious, t
oo observant, too inquisitive. I don’t know what Leo did wrong, but she didn’t believe his act. But then, you should have seen him! He put on an accent that made my ears turn red. Do we really sound like that to the English? What was it he majored in at Oxford? Some obscure English playwright, wasn’t it?

  “Oh, right. Chaucer. Only the English…

  “No, I’m not jealous. Cassie hated him. Skylar? She flirted with him, but then she knows him. She almost gave it away in front of Cassie. I’m going to kill Goodwin for bringing Cassie here in the first place.

  “Yes, I did question him. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. When? Tomorrow, late. How’s Elsbeth? Good, good. I guess she’s in bed. I miss her.”

  Jeff paused again. “Skylar? She’s fine. She’s out with Goodwin. He’s more her type than I am. I don’t know what Cassie suspects. I’m still too shocked by her comments about Leo, and about her breaking into the cabin of some guy who turns out to be a murderer. What are the chances of that, right? Who could have guessed?”

  Jeff listened to his father. “I guess I’m the one who made her do it,” he said softly. “Remember that story you told me about that man who stole the Nazi documents, then he disappeared for twenty years? Yeah, that one. I changed it around and made it into jewels and said they were stolen from Althea and that she’d been looking for them all these years.”

  Jeff rolled his eyes. “Dad! Stop shouting. It’s not good for you. How was I to know that a story about a murderer would intrigue Cassie so much that she’d break into some guy’s cabin? No, none of this is my fault.”

  He waited, listening. “Okay, you got me. Yes, maybe I made a big mistake in pointing the place out to her. But before today I would have thought that the worst she would have done is bake the owner some cookies.

  “All right, I better go. Send that info to the right people, will you? I put a device on the man’s car so he won’t be able to lose us.”

  He paused. “I already told you. Cassie is fine. She’s inside the diner waiting to have dinner with me. No, I don’t know where Goodwin and Skylar are and I don’t care. It’s good to get away from them for a while. Yes, I’m having dinner alone with Cassie. Look, I have to go. I’m afraid to leave her by herself for long. Heaven only knows what she’ll do.”