Secrets

by Jude Deveraux

  “The one with the rum in it?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  Jeff laughed. “This is a different kind of love.” He was quiet for a moment. “Did you know that Lillian really liked you?”

  “Did she?” Cassie asked. “I was insanely jealous of her.”

  “She knew. I told her how you’d been following me all week and—”

  “Please don’t remind me that you knew that.” Cassie’s voice showed her embarrassment.

  “It was my business to know who was where and doing what.”

  “You sound like you worked for the CIA even then.”

  “Not on that job, but Dad got me into a training program when I was a teenager.”

  “And your father couldn’t be there that weekend because he’d been shot,” Cassie said softly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was the third time he’d been shot. You can’t imagine what it’s like growing up and seeing your dad get shot on a regular basis.”

  “James Bond’s son,” Cassie said. “Yet you went into the same business.”

  Jeff shrugged. “I wanted to protect him.”

  “And you have,” she said, smiling. “You gave him Elsbeth and a home and love. And he’s still alive, so you did what you wanted to.”

  “I never looked at it like that, but maybe you’re right.” He moved to walk beside her, taking her arm in his. “You’re good for me, Cassie. You’re good for all of us. I didn’t realize how important you were until after you were gone.” For a moment he closed his eyes. “Dad and Elsbeth have bawled me out every day since you left.”

  “Good!” Cassie said. “You deserved it. I thought I’d die when you told us you’d ‘met someone.’ It was horrible.”

  “Skylar,” Jeff said. “Who knew she’d take everything so seriously? Sometimes I think she really wanted me to marry her. And she drove Roger nearly crazy too.”

  “Roger? Oh, yeah, he and Skylar were friends.”

  “He had to work with her dad, yes.”

  Cassie stopped walking. “Are you telling me that Roger is also a CIA agent?” When Jeff said nothing, she nodded. “Of course you can’t tell me that.”

  “Cassie, I’ve told you much, much more than you should know, but I need to stop you from trying to figure out so much.” He smiled. “I can hardly wait to tell Leo that you saw through his cover. And that you figured out about Roger.” His eyes were begging her to understand.

  “I don’t think Dana knows what Roger does,” she said quietly.

  “No, Dana knows nothing.”

  “But she feels it,” Cassie said. “When I first met her, I couldn’t stand her. She seemed brittle and angry. And now I know she’s angry. She may not know what secrets her husband has, but she knows he has them.” She looked at Jeff. “And you! You, your dad, and even Elsbeth are covered in secrets.”

  “You make it sound like smallpox.”

  “I think it might be worse.”

  He squeezed her arm. “Okay, so no more secrets. From now on, I’ll tell you everything that I can.”

  For a few minutes they walked together in silence. “So what do you teach?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She looked at him.

  “No, really, I can’t tell you. In fact, the United States government doesn’t have a CIA school near Williamsburg, Virginia.”

  Cassie couldn’t help laughing. Everyone in Williamsburg knew of the nearby training school. “Okay, so you’re back to being a structural engineer.”

  “Guess so,” he said, laughing with her.

  “All right, enough of your problems, let me tell you the mess I’m in with my mother,” she said, then told him about her impromptu mention of opening a small nursery, then told him how her mother wanted to take it over. Since she hadn’t had a lot of time to really think about the idea of opening a business, she was tentative about it, but not so Jeff. Immediately, he loved the idea.

  “Dad is bored to death,” Jeff said. “Until you came into our lives, I think he was thinking about going on another mission into danger. You settled him. But since you’ve been gone, everything has fallen apart. Starting a business might resettle him. And it would certainly get him off my back. He’s always telling me what a loser he thinks I am when it comes to women.”

  “Really?” Cassie asked, laughing. “Tell me every word he’s said.”

  “That I’m stupid and a fool and not worthy of you.”

  “I like it. Tell me more.”

  “Not until you say you’ll marry me,” Jeff said.

  Cassie stopped laughing and stood still as she looked at him.

  “Okay, this is as good a place as any,” he said, looking around them. They were in a beautiful area, with the shallow river meandering in its bed, tall willows hovering over them, and giant rocks beside the water.

  Jeff reached into his trouser’s pocket and pulled out a little blue velvet box and opened it to reveal a diamond solitaire. “I bought this right after you left and I’ve carried it with me every day since. Just having it gave me hope.” While Cassie was staring at the ring, he went onto one knee. “Will you marry me, Cassie?”

  She stood there, blinking at him, unable to react.

  “Will you?” Jeff urged.

  She smiled at him. “Yes,” was all she could say.

  He took her left hand and slid the ring onto it, then he stood up and kissed her. “I’m sorry I put you through so much pain,” he said softly, his hand caressing her cheek as he smoothed her hair back. “If I treated you as though you were a child, I’m sorry for it. I had to think of you as a kid and therefore untouchable or I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off of you.”

  “I didn’t want you to keep your hands off of me.”

  “I was afraid—I’m still afraid—because of what happened to Lillian. But these last months have shown me that I need you. My whole family needs you. And loves you. I love you, Cassie. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  “And what about secrets?” she asked, her arms around him.

  “I’ll keep as few of them as possible,” he said, making her laugh, then he moved away from her, took her hand, and they began walking again. They were tightly holding hands, Cassie feeling the ring on her finger. She hadn’t assimilated it all yet. She’d had six months of missing what she’d come to think of as her family, and now they were going to be given back to her. Soon, she’d have Elsbeth back. If Dana hasn’t stolen her, she thought.

  There was so much in Cassie’s mind that she wanted to quieten it, wanted to think of something else. “Tell me about Althea,” Cassie said. “I want to know what she did.”

  Jeff squeezed her hand. “You want to know your enemy,” he said, smiling.

  Cassie smiled back. “She is going to be my neighbor.”

  “You should ask Dad about her, as he knows much more than I do, but I can give you a brief Althea history. Let’s see, I think she started in the 1930s. She tried to help calm Spain down, but it didn’t work. World War Two still broke out.

  “In the early 1940s, she was in Germany with Hitler and Unity Mitford, and reporting back to us. Later, she was able to get information to the French Resistance. She told the U.S. government what she heard about the concentration camps, but no one believed her.

  “In the late 1940s, she was a friend to Eva Perón, Churchill, and Gandhi, and, oh, yes, in 1946, she wore the first bikini at a private party of socialites and some top government people.”

  Cassie laughed. “I can imagine that well. I think I’ll look in her attic to see if I can find a photo of her in that suit.”

  “You have realized, haven’t you, that she wants you to write her autobiography.”

  “You mean her biography?”

  “I didn’t make a grammatical error. You know Althea, she’ll take full credit for it. No cowriter will be given credit for her book.”

  “She had this in mind from the first?”

  “I think so,” Jeff
said. “Part of the reason she’s had to be protected was because she said she was going to write her memoirs. She could indict some people who are still alive.”

  “I guess she found out I was an avid fan of hers from Roger’s gossip.”

  “And she tested you by opening up her attic and finding out that you’re a diligent worker whose only crime has been to try on some of her old costumes.”

  “Those were nice pictures Brent took, weren’t they?”

  “I hated them,” Jeff said, and Cassie laughed.

  “Unless you plan to go into business with your mother,” Jeff said, looking at Cassie out of the corner of his eye.

  “I’ve decided to tell her no.”

  “You aren’t saying you’re going to stand up to your mother, are you?” Jeff was teasing her.

  “I think I am. There’s something about seeing a murder victim, and seeing how quickly life can be over, that my fear of my mother has left me. If I open a nursery, it will be the way I want it to be, and where I want it to be.”

  “I was thinking about—” Jeff laughed at her look. “Okay, no advice from me.”

  “Unless I ask for it,” Cassie said.

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay, so where were we on Althea? If I’m to write her, uh, autobiography then I should know if it’ll be worth my time.”

  “In the 1950s she was involved in Truman’s peace treaty with Japan, then she went to Russia to study.”

  “Study what?”

  “She said it was Russian history, but our records say she mostly drank vodka and listened, then reported everything back to the U.S.”

  “Am I going to be given access to your records?”

  Jeff gave her a look.

  “Okay, but maybe I could be given a bit of information.”

  “Maybe a bit,” Jeff said, smiling.

  “Did no one in Russia suspect what she was up to?”

  “If they did, she talked them out of it. And it was about this time that she gave some money to a man whose hamburgers she liked.”

  “What?”

  “She invested in what became McDonald’s.”

  “Oh.”

  Jeff smiled. “In the 1960s she was—”

  “Let me guess. Friends with the Kennedys.”

  “Good friends, and heaven only knows what she did for JFK.”

  “And the 1970s?”

  “That’s still classified. I can’t tell you the specifics, but I can assure you that she was busy.”

  “With things other than making three movies a year?”

  “I think that you’ll find that most of those movies are set in foreign countries.” Jeff raised her hand and kissed it. “You think this would be interesting enough for you to write about?”

  “Has anyone thought about the fact that I have no idea how to write a book?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Dad’s done some writing. You assemble what Althea tells you, go through that stuff in her attic, and Dad will help you put it all together. It’ll keep him occupied.”

  “And me. So you can do whatever it is that you do all day and not have to worry that I’m going to run off with the next-door neighbor’s gorgeous gardener.”

  “More or less,” Jeff said, grinning, then he pointed toward a pretty little house nearly hidden under three huge willow trees. “There it is.” The house was set far enough from the river to not worry about floods, but close enough to enjoy the sound and the view.

  “Come on,” Jeff said. “She’s expecting us.”

  22

  CASSIE’S FIRST THOUGHTwhen she saw the old woman was, What a marvelous thing plastic surgery is. The woman was younger than Althea but looked fifty years older. She was heavy, walked with a limp, and her face showed her years spent in the Texas sun. Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun, and her clothes were worn and faded.

  The house was small, but very clean and welcoming. Cassie recognized the scent of old-fashioned spice cake in the air. The furniture was old and frayed, but comfortable-looking. Set around the house were what had to be hundreds of photographs in interesting frames. She could imagine that for every holiday “Granny” was given picture frames, and from the looks of them, her relatives competed to see who could come up with the most unusual frames.

  Mrs. Turner went to the kitchen and poured out three glasses of heavily sugared iced tea. Jeff held out one of the chairs to the kitchen table, and she sat down.

  “Now what is it you two want to know?” she asked, looking from one to the other as Jeff and Cassie seated themselves at the table. Jeff took the marriage certificate out of his pocket and put it on the table in front of her.

  She glanced at it, then looked up about the house. Cassie knew what she wanted and soon located her glasses.

  Nodding at Cassie in thanks, Mrs. Turner put on her reading glasses and spent some minutes looking at the certificate, then she put it down and took off her glasses. “This takes me back. Where did you find this?”

  Jeff told her about the safe-deposit box that had been rented for over eighty years.

  “I guess it was that movie star Lester was so mad about, the one that paid his bills,” she said.

  “Althea Fairmont,” Cassie said.

  Mrs. Turner smiled, her face crinkling into a thousand wrinkles. “Can you believe that the fools named the town after a movie star? They were in a hangin’ mood because the town had the same name as a movie star they thought had killed a woman, so what did they do but rename it after another one? Did you ever hear of anything so stupid?”

  Cassie and Jeff laughed. “I hear you put it around that it was named after a beautiful mountain,” Jeff said.

  “That’s an advantage of living so long,” she said. “Most of them died long ago, so I started telling the babies that our town was named after something other than a woman who acted in pictures. In my day, we didn’t let women like her into the good parlor.”

  “But Lester became an actor.”

  “Not a very good one,” Mrs. Turner said. “It was more that women loved him. Today you’d say that they were hot for him. A real heartthrob.”

  “It got him in a lot of trouble,” Cassie said.

  “That it did,” Mrs. Turner said, laughing and showing that she had three teeth missing on the bottom. “But it was that young Florence that snagged him. Poor kid.”

  “Which one?” Jeff asked.

  “Why Lester, of course. I was only about eight years old, but he was real nice to me. He used to let me go fishing with him. One time he told me that I was the only female he knew who didn’t try to kiss him.”

  “But you wanted to,” Cassie said, smiling.

  “Oh, heavens, did I!” she said, laughing. “I was so in love with him that all I could think about was him.”

  “I know about being young and in love,” Cassie said, glancing at Jeff. “It hurts. Especially when the older person treats you like you’re a kid.”

  Mrs. Turner chuckled. “But I see you got your ‘older man.’” She nodded toward Cassie’s shiny new ring.

  “That I did,” Cassie said, smiling. “So all the women in town were in love with Lester Myers but Florence got him. What was she like?”

  “She was my husband’s cousin and family, but that didn’t keep me from seeing her for what she was. I know that paper says she was only fourteen, but she was a lot older than that. She started fooling around with boys when she was twelve. By the time she was fourteen, she was more experienced than a lot of married women.”

  “And what about Ruth?” Jeff asked.

  Mrs. Turner looked at him in surprise. “It seems to me that you already know all the story.”

  “Just the basics, nothing else. How were Ruth and Florence related?”

  “Half sisters. Same mother but different fathers. Ruth’s father was married to her mother, but he died when she was little. Her mother had to take in washing to support them, but she also did a little other business on the side—if you know what I mean.”

&nbs
p; “Yes,” Cassie said.

  “Nobody knew who Florence’s father was.”

  “Did Ruth want Lester too?” Jeff asked.

  “We all did,” Mrs. Turner said. “There was something about Les that attracted women. He was beautiful from the time he was born, that’s true, but there was more to it than that. When he was around, women put on their best clothes, and looked at him with big, round eyes.”

  Jeff drank some of his tea. “So the two women, Ruth and Florence, were both after him?”

  “Florence went after him so that the whole town knew about it, but Ruth was quieter. She used to bake pies for his family. But pies don’t win a young man’s heart.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Cassie said with feeling. “That’s something I know well. Six months in a gym and silk charmeuse work much better.”

  Jeff laughed and Mrs. Turner’s eyes twinkled. “I think I should be listening to a story, rather than telling one.”

  “No, please,” Jeff said, smiling. “We want to hear all of it.”

  “I think that paper of yours tells it all. It was Les’s mother who wanted him to go to Hollywood. She read movie magazines and knew all the gossip, and she said her beautiful son was wasted in this two-bit Texas town. She said that as soon as Les graduated from high school, he was going to Hollywood and become a movie star. She had a little beauty shop in the front room of her house and she saved everything she made for about four years and she planned to give it to her son. She was very proud of him. Too proud, maybe, considering what happened.”

  “That’s just it,” Jeff said, “we don’t think Hinton, uh, Lester, killed anyone.”

  “Of course he didn’t,” she said as she stood up. “Anybody that ever knew him knew he couldn’t kill anybody, certainly not a woman. You want some more tea?”

  Jeff held out his glass, but Cassie shook her head.

  “What do you think happened?” Cassie asked.

  “I think Ruth decided that Les being married to Florence was just a little hitch in her plans. She’d decided that she was going to go to Hollywood with Les, so that’s what she did.”

  “But it was Florence who married him,” Cassie said, backtracking. “Did she seduce him?”