The Secrets Sisters Keep

by Abby Drake

  She’d thought he was pretty hot, too. It had helped that he drove a motorcycle and smoked cigarettes and had manliness, as Cosmopolitan called it.

  Carleen sighed. She touched the lines under her eyes, tried to smoothe them with her fingertips. She didn’t have to wonder where the time had gone. Every year had been a blessing, another year distanced from the past. This past. This place and the people in it.

  She supposed she couldn’t stay in the bedroom all weekend. Sooner or later, she’d at least have to use the bathroom, which would mean leaving the room and going down the hall. Maybe she could hold it for just a little while.

  She pulled her hair into a ponytail and wondered how long she could wait.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “She’s here,” Amanda said to Jonathan. “My sister, Carleen.”

  He let out a low whistle.

  “It was all her fault. The fire. My parents dying. Babe’s abortion. All of it. And now she’s come back.” She’d thrown in Babe’s abortion because she didn’t think she’d ever told him about that. It had been so embarrassing, so distasteful. Now, however, it might help deflect any fantasies Jonathan might conjure about his glamorous, movie star sister-in-law. Amanda, after all, could no longer trust him.

  “What’s she like now?” he asked.

  “Babe?”

  “No, Carleen.”

  “She looks like our daughter.”

  They drove from the driveway to the narrow, unpaved road that circled Lake Kasteel and provided residential access, rutty though it was.

  “The boys are with Wes McCall,” Amanda said, not that Jonathan had asked. “Babe’s husband.”

  “Oh, right,” Jonathan said. “The actor.”

  She checked her lipstick in the mirror on the visor.

  “Well,” Jonathan continued, “Chandler must be excited to meet McCall. He’s always been one of his heroes, hasn’t he?”

  “Chandler outgrew him years ago. Now it’s Chase who likes those kinds of movies.” Her words were purposely sour, both for her husband, who didn’t know his own sons better, and for Babe’s husband, for whom she did not hold a grudge; she simply was annoyed that he was there interfering.

  She was about to muster the nerve to ask what kind of business had kept Jonathan in Manhattan last night when he took a sharp right and they landed in a driveway.

  “Donnelly,” Jonathan said, reading the mailbox perched on a post. “Sound familiar?”

  She shook her head: Amanda had never befriended the neighbors the way a couple of her sisters had, especially Babe, who’d had that boyfriend, Ray, for a while, the father of the aforementioned aborted baby. Ellie once told her that he still lived there, that he was the head of the lake association or something upstanding like that.

  Jonathan pulled up to an old brown Jeep that was parked, unregistered, next to a rickety garage. The garage was attached to a large stone house whose lawn needed mowing and whose gardens needed tending.

  “Summer people,” Amanda said. “Not here yet.”

  Her husband stopped the car and jumped out. He started to walk around the garage when Amanda opened her door and shouted, “Hey, what are you doing? You really can’t take someone’s boat if they’re not home.”

  He looked at her oddly. “Your uncle is missing. He might have drowned.”

  “That’s no excuse to turn into a thief.”

  He laughed. “Then call the police and have them arrest me. Oh, wait, I bet no one has called the police on account of no one wants to stir up any trouble. Or alert the media that the Dalton girls have returned to their uncle Edward’s.”

  She got out onto the pockmarked driveway. “That’s not very nice.”

  He laughed and waved her away. “Stay there or come with me. It’s up to you.”

  For a moment she stood her ground, her life-with-Jonathan flashing before her, her future a blurred vision of thrift shops and food stamps. Her only choice, as she saw it, was to take control and confront him, to be the aggressor rather than the victim.

  “Wait up,” Amanda shouted at last. “We might as well be arrested together.”

  They must have opened their bedroom doors at the exact same time, because Babe had been listening for sounds of life. She hadn’t heard any. Not one little peep.

  Which was why she shouted, “Jesus,” when she nearly collided with Carleen.

  “Babe,” Carleen said. “I’m sorry.”

  Babe figured she meant she was sorry that she’d almost bumped into her, not sorry about all the other stuff. She clutched her towel and looked away. “I’m going to use the bathroom. You need to use the one in Ellie’s room.”

  Carleen juggled shampoo and powder and reached out and touched Babe on the arm. Touched her on the arm. “Babe,” she said. “Can’t we at least be polite? For Edward’s sake?”

  Now that Babe saw Carleen up close, it was nice to know the years showed on her, that she wasn’t nearly as pretty as she’d once been, that she had bags under her eyes and crow’s-feet at the corners, and her skin looked pretty dry. “I don’t have anything to say to you,” Babe replied.

  “That’s too bad,” Carleen said, “because I have a lot to say to you.” She started down the hall toward Ellie’s room; at least it didn’t seem she would argue about that.

  “You have a lot to say? Like what?”

  Carleen stopped. Carleen turned around.

  “Like how are you?”

  “Well, you’re looking at me. You can see I’m fine.” Better than you, she wanted to add.

  “You didn’t used to have a chip on your shoulder.”

  “Didn’t I? Maybe I got it from you.”

  They stood there in the hall, each clinging to a towel. It might have been better if they’d both been holding pistols.

  “Why are you here?” Babe asked.

  “Because I was invited.”

  “Edward’s mistake.”

  “Maybe,” Carleen said. “But I have as much of a right to be here as you do, Babe.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Yes. I guess it is.”

  “Why are you alone? Don’t you have a family?”

  “A husband, yes.”

  “And children?”

  She hesitated. “Yes. Two.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “It is. They are.”

  “Boys or girls, or one of each?”

  “Girls. Two girls.”

  “Are they like you?”

  “No,” Carleen said. “They’re nice, like Ellie is. The way you used to be.” With that she turned again and walked toward Ellie’s room, leaving Babe standing in the hall in a small cloud of talcum powder dust.

  Few people might understand that, despite her fame and fortune, Babe would have traded everything if she could only have had a child. Ray Williams’s child. If she only could have turned back time and instead of saying yes to Carleen, Babe had said, “No. I will not kill my baby, I don’t care what Mother and Father think or say or do.”

  She’d asked the doctor—the abortionist, a female physician whose name she could not remember but whose stern face she would never forget—if the fetus had been a boy or a girl. The doctor would not say; she’d said it had been too early to tell.

  Not that it mattered by then. And Babe was sick. She’d lost a lot of blood when her cervix had been damaged because she was so young, too young.

  “Not uncommon,” the doctor had sighed.

  Only Babe’s therapist knew that seventeen motion pictures (five of which were TV originals), three husbands, those damned awards and countless accolades later, Naomi “Babe” Dalton had still not moved on, not in her heart, where it counted.

  She turned the shower to steam, as hot as possible. She thought about her parents, burning in the fire, “smoke inhalation,” the fire chief had called it, adding that the heat had been unusually intense because it had been a dry summer and firewood was stacked against the side of the house where the fireplace had been
and one thing ignited the other and whoosh, everything went up in flames. The house. Mother and Daddy. Not Carleen, because she escaped.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Carleen had whispered soberly at the trial. She’d worn a tailored Liz Claiborne suit and had pulled her wild red hair into a ponytail and tied it with a pink ribbon. She had on very little makeup and sedate Capezios. She did not look like Carleen but like a Miss Porter’s imitation. Amanda said her attorney must have told her to dress like that to garner pity from the jury.

  But who would take pity on the rest of them?

  “I didn’t know the flue was closed,” Carleen continued from the stand. “The house filled up with smoke; I got scared and I ran.”

  “You didn’t think to alert your parents?” the district attorney probed.

  “I didn’t know they were home. They go away in summers. We stay with Uncle Edward . . .”

  “So you should have been at your uncle Edward’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is Edward Dalton?” The D.A. swung and faced the audience, pointing at Uncle Edward.

  “Yes.”

  “So you were supposed to be at Edward’s, but you snuck home to Poughkeepsie . . .”

  “I . . . I went to find my birth certificate.”

  “Your birth certificate? For what purpose?”

  “To prove I’m eighteen. So my boyfriend and I could go to North Carolina to get married.”

  The courtroom got quiet. Until then, no one—not Ellie, Amanda, Babe, or, apparently, Edward—had known that Carleen and Earl intended to run off and get married.

  “That’s all,” she whispered. “I just wanted my birth certificate.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No.”

  “But you went looking in the attic?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you find there?”

  “Old things. School papers, mostly.” She toyed with the ribbon wrapped around her ponytail.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I tried to burn them.”

  The D.A. moved a few paces to the left, then a few back to the right. “So you went home for your birth certificate. You went upstairs to the attic to look for it. But though you couldn’t find it, you found some old school papers and decided to burn them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that made sense to you?”

  Her hands moved from the pink ribbon. “I . . . I was angry,” she said. “I was angry I couldn’t find what I wanted.”

  “So you burned your school papers.”

  She shrugged. “Yes.” She admitted it had been foolish. “But I was angry with my mother. I wanted to marry Earl, and I knew she wouldn’t want me to. But I didn’t want to live with them anymore. I was just being stupid. I didn’t mean to hurt them.”

  Then she cried, which was something to see. None of them had ever seen Carleen cry; she was always the tough one who held both laughter and tears deep inside.

  Luckily for her, the jury believed her. Luckily for her, they knew who Uncle Edward was—indeed, they spent most court sessions with their eyes shooting from Carleen to him to the many supporters he’d brought along, most of whom having had their larger-than-life portraits plastered on billboards in Times Square at one time or another.

  “Not guilty of manslaughter,” the foreman read once they’d made up their minds.

  Later that day, Uncle Edward escorted Carleen to a bus. That was the last they saw of her—Good riddance, Babe and Ellie and Amanda said simultaneously under their breath as they watched the silver Greyhound start its stop-and-go trip out of town.

  Babe leaned against the tile wall of the shower now, sweating from the steam, withered from the heat, exhausted from remembering. She wondered if she should retreat to her room again or join Ellie and Amanda, who must now be hurting, too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Oliver Twist and the binoculars and Edward’s iPod were missing.

  Ellie and Henry stood in the small room that once was the butler’s pantry. Edward had converted it into an office when he stopped giving parties and fired the live-in staff. He could have chosen any of the bedrooms upstairs, but this was close to the kitchen, where he could fetch tea and spirits whenever he wanted.

  “He’s on the island,” Ellie said as she ransacked a dilapidated wooden filing cabinet in search of more clues—not that she needed any, not that she wasn’t sure.

  “He can’t be. We already ruled that out.”

  “He is. Think about it. A book. His iPod. Binoculars, for God’s sake. He might be hiding out, but Edward is too nosey not to want to know what else is going on. Even if it’s just to watch other boaters. Did I say watch? Snoop is more like Edward.” She sounded frenetic, almost as if she were as loony as Edward. The truth was, she was relieved.

  “But where’s the boat?”

  “Maybe he hauled it out of the water and hid it. Covered it with branches. Or buried it. He could have pulled it far enough onto the shore so we couldn’t see it. Maybe Wes and the boys will find it.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s seventy-five, Ellie.”

  “And he’s in great shape for seventy-five.”

  Henry sighed and sank on the creaky rolling chair that Edward insisted on keeping at his desk. It was a far cry from a Hepplewhite, but it had come from Edward’s office in Times Square, and he’d insisted it was where he had always done his best thinking. “He isn’t in great shape,” Henry said.

  Ellie stopped fiddling and turned to him. “What on earth do you mean?”

  After a long, too long, drawn-out sigh, Henry said, “Edward has cancer, Ellie. The big C.”

  She blinked. She would have sat down, but Henry was parked in the only chair in the room. In addition to saying he had always done his best thinking in the old wooden chair, Uncle Edward had said he’d done his best thinking alone.

  “What are you talking about?” she finally managed to ask.

  Henry closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I promised Edward I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Turning back to the file, she tried slamming the drawer, but some papers were stuck and got jammed in the process. She ripped the drawer open, yanking too hard. The contents tipped out and dumped onto the floor.

  “Goddamnit,” she said, and Henry didn’t comment. With her gaze fixed on the mess, Ellie asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Henry said quietly. “It’s in his colon.”

  Ellie suddenly smiled, as if this were good news. “But that can’t be right. Edward isn’t sick.”

  Henry shrugged. “It works that way sometimes. We went to New York-Presbyterian, Ellie. They found it in his colonoscopy. They know what they’re doing.”

  “But when did you go?” If she challenged him on the details, he might admit he was lying. “You and Edward rarely leave the estate.”

  “Late April,” he said. “We were gone a whole day. You were with the gardeners preparing the summer beds.”

  She remembered. It had been a Tuesday, not that it mattered.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Henry stood.

  Ellie sat. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I know.”

  “When was he planning to tell me?”

  “I don’t think he wanted you to know. At all.”

  She stared at the rubble on the floor.

  “That’s when he decided to plan this party,” Henry continued. “That’s when he realized he wanted his friends and family together one last time.”

  It was believable. And yet, it was not.

  “There’s more,” Henry added. “Edward doesn’t want treatment. He says chemotherapy will ruin his good looks.” Then Henry’s narrow shoulders started to quiver and he lowered his head and cried.

  “No,” Ellie said, but Henry nodded, Yes.

  She knew she should go to him, comfort him, reassure him that somehow they’d get through this, that maybe Edward would liv
e a long life and everything would be fine. Instead all she said was, “So he is on the island.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is, or what he’s done.”

  “Yes,” Ellie said. “That’s where he is. And he wants us to leave him alone.”

  “Unless he decided to end things his own way . . . on his own terms . . . that would be so like him. . . .”

  Ellie stood up, looped her arm through Henry’s, and sighed. “I will not believe that, and neither should you. For now, we will do what Uncle Edward wants. We will host the party. And celebrate his birthday. He left on his own terms; he should come back the same way.”

  Ellie had no idea how she was staying composed. She only knew someone had to, and, as usual, it would be her. Which was why she decided right then not to tell her sisters. She owed Edward that much, after all.

  Besides, it was really annoying that Amanda was right.

  Before getting into the boat, Amanda tossed off her ballet flats. They were only Cole Haan, but it had taken forever to find the exact match for the pink capris and the knit top she wore. Unfortunately, the strappy sandals she’d chosen to complement the pale cherry halter dress for the party would do little to conceal the two nicks on her pedicure.

  God, she thought, trying to smooth the damaged edge of her right foot’s big toenail, how she hated all things relating to the outdoors. Bugs and birds. Raccoons and skunks. Rickety boats like the one her husband now steered toward the south end of Lake Kasteel.

  It was hard to believe she had once liked it here at the lake. She had actually liked swimming and canoeing—in spite of Edward’s warnings about the mythical lake monster. But around thirteen or fourteen she’d stopped wanting to get her hair wet, and it had been downhill from there. Oh, sure, she’d loved watching the theater people and the glamorous ladies. But, deep down, Amanda had been disturbed that they weren’t refined, that they weren’t more sophisticated.

  There was the scarlet-lipped woman who always toted her small dog whose curly white hair was a dead ringer for the coif of his mistress.