No Safe Secret

by Fern Michaels

  Molly liked poking around in the kitchen, but today it hadn’t relaxed her as it normally did. She knew the recipe by heart, but her thoughts were anything but soothing. If anything, she felt even more stressed than she had earlier. She was tense as she waited for Holden and Graham to come storming downstairs. Unsure what her reaction to Holden would be, she filled the sink with hot water and a squirt of dish detergent. She tossed her mixer parts and bowl in the sink to soak. She could not face Holden, not yet. Her hands were sweaty, and again, her mouth was dry as a bone. Nerves, she thought. She checked her watch, then grabbed her purse, and was about to head upstairs when the telephone rang.

  “Crap,” she said out loud, but then remembered it could be Kristen. Maybe her flight had been delayed or canceled.

  “Hello,” she said a bit breathlessly, expecting to hear Kristen’s voice. When she heard nothing, she spoke again. “Hello, Kristen, is this you?”

  Still nothing. She was about to hang up the phone when she heard an odd, high-pitched squeal, kind of like the sound her old car radio made back when she drove that red Mustang.

  “Whoever this is, we have a bad connection. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I know who you are. And I know what you did.”

  What?

  The room began to spin. She blinked, then whispered, “Who is this?”

  There was laughter, then the squealing sound again. “I said, I know who you are, and I know what you did.”

  “This isn’t funny,” she said softly. Taking a deep breath, she raised her voice. “Okay, then tell me, who am I, what have I done?”

  More laughter. The voice was definitely male. “You’re Maddy Carmichael, Marcus’s twin sister. And you know exactly what you did.”

  Then the line went dead.

  Oh My God!

  Her breath came in rapid gasps, the room tilted, and her throat felt like it was closing. She struggled for air. Her heart felt like a thousand hummingbird wings were beating against her chest. She threw the phone across the room, and it smashed against a wall. She managed to drag herself over to the sink. She turned it on, and with trembling hands, she splashed cold water on her face. Over and over until she was calm enough to think.

  Someone knew her name. Her birth name.

  Full circle. She was coming full circle.

  Chapter Twelve

  Molly was virtually paralyzed. A sheer black fear swept through her, and she began to shake as images of the past came back to her. After twenty-one years, why now? On the day Kristen left. Was there a connection? Had someone from her past been watching her all this time without her knowledge? Taking several deep breaths, she tried to calm herself, but found that the deep breathing only caused her to be light-headed. She closed her eyes and counted. Sometimes this helped to relieve her anxiety.

  It wasn’t working.

  Her body felt limp, as though she were made of liquid and would dissolve at any moment. She managed to slump into the chair she’d just vacated.

  What to do? She’d never planned for this. After so many years, she thought her secret was safe; but then, she acknowledged, there were no safe secrets. Maybe one could keep them at bay for a while, but somehow, some way, secrets always returned to haunt, taunt, or torment, whichever was the case. Each of those words accurately described what she was feeling at that exact moment.

  Inhaling, trying to calm herself, she focused on what to do. She tried to retrace her steps, where she’d been, and with whom she’d had contact. Surely, she couldn’t remember back over twenty years, so starting at the beginning was impossible. No, this unknown man who had just called her would have made himself known if he had had knowledge of her past. Possibly, he would have tried to blackmail her. Tanner was a very wealthy man, and this fact alone would be tempting if someone from her past knew who she was.

  Possibly, she was being watched this very moment. She jumped out of her chair so fast that the room began to spin. Clutching the back of the chair, she closed her eyes and waited for the vertigo to pass.

  But who? She’d never met anyone in Goldenhills who had any connection to Blossom City. At least none that she’d known of. Another deep breath. She sat in the chair, trying to clear her head. She needed to think.

  She and Tanner didn’t have much of a social life outside of the dinner parties they held. Given Tanner’s difficult personality, their personal friendships were practically nonexistent, to say the least. Indeed, socially speaking, Tanner was pretty much a pariah, someone to be avoided at almost any cost. They had acquaintances, but as far as she knew, no one she’d known from her past. While Tanner was big on showing off his home and his wealth to others in the medical profession, she couldn’t name anyone who could be considered his close friend. And, sadly, other than Gloria, she didn’t have any real friends, either. She’d remained in touch with Teresa and Lou throughout the years, but being in actual contact was rare—a Christmas card, the occasional phone call. She remembered when she’d told Lou and Teresa she was going to take the job Tanner, then Dr. McCann, offered. They’d both begged her to stay on at the diner, but she’d been adamant. The salary he’d offered had been too hard to resist.

  If only she’d listened to them. Again, she thought of her daughter. All the pain and heartache had been worth it. Or at least that’s what she’d always convinced herself of after a particularly nasty fight with Tanner. But they were all nasty, and more often than not, when they were alone, the arguments turned physical.

  She realized now that she had to know, had to discover who’d tracked her down and threatened to expose the past she’d successfully hidden for decades. It was time, she realized. Kristen was leaving, and her marriage was such a sham that it was too late even to think about salvaging it. While she had loved Holden and Graham as toddlers, first as their nanny and then as their stepmother, and during their early childhood years, she could honestly say, at least to herself, that she now feared them more than anything else. Whatever maternal feelings she’d had before they were teenagers had been destroyed by their disrespectful and cruel ways.

  No, it was time to engage her backup plan.

  On shaking legs, Molly went upstairs to her room. Her hand trembled as she dialed the number of a local cab company. “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes,” she said after giving them her address, then placed the phone back in its receiver.

  She took a small suitcase she’d purchased a few years ago from the top shelf in the closet. Inside were a few items she’d bought at a secondhand shop years before. With time at a minimum, she hurriedly tossed in a few basic necessities. Jeans, a couple of blouses, underclothes, and a nightshirt. In the master bath, she grabbed her toothbrush, toothpaste, and makeup kit.

  She located the picture frame that held a picture of the kids at the beach, on a rare trip to Maine. Kristen was three, she remembered. It’d been one of the most memorable of the few family vacations they’d taken. She’d been happy then. She looked at them, remembering the woman who’d offered to take their picture. It’d been the only picture taken of them as a family on that trip. Carefully, she pushed aside the metal clips that held the back of the frame in place. Next to that was a thick gray piece of cardboard. Taped to the front of this was a single key. She removed the key and dropped it in her purse.

  Without glancing behind her, she raced downstairs. She was about to step outside to walk down the long drive to wait for her ride when she remembered the banana-nut bread. She went over to the stove and turned the oven off. She was about to leave when she decided to take the bread out of the oven. She placed the baking sheet on the granite countertop. When Graham and Holden came downstairs, they’d simply think she’d stepped out for a trip to the market if they even realized that she wasn’t in the house. Checking to make sure there was nothing suspicious about the way things appeared, she remembered the phone she had tossed across the room. She quickly gathered the broken pieces and found the two batteries. She dropped them in her purse, then walked out
the side door, not bothering to lock it since she knew the boys were inside. Once they discovered her car in the garage, they might be curious, but not enough to do anything about it. Maybe they would be too stoned or hungover even to bother. She looked at her watch. She had five minutes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Ms. M, haven’t seen you lately,” said the young girl behind the juice bar.

  Molly gave up a phony smile. “Been busy, you know how that is.” She doubted it, but it seemed the right thing to say.

  “How was the class today?” the girl asked as she placed an olive-green smoothie on the counter.

  “Rough, it’s been a while,” Molly said. At least that much was true. She’d been a member of All Night Fitness for ten years. No one in her family, at least as far as she knew, was aware of this. While she didn’t attend the rumba class or any others with any degree of regularity, she did try to show up at least once a month to keep up appearances. Just in case.

  And today was the day she’d thought about all those years ago when she’d joined the gym. She took a few sips of the grass-tasting smoothie, left the girl a two-dollar tip, then headed for the showers. She had to make her visit to the gym appear normal. Though she wasn’t a regular gym rat, the manager knew her, as did a few of the instructors. She never discussed anything personal, other than telling the few members she conversed with that her job didn’t allow for a regular schedule. No one questioned her, and for that she was glad. Today was just like any other day as far as they were concerned. She’d made her appearance known in the class, just in case, though it really didn’t matter. It was just that she was hesitant to vary her gym routine.

  Inside the locker room, she quickly showered, dried her hair, and added a bit of makeup to cover the bruise forming on her cheek. Keep it normal, she kept saying to herself, though inside she felt anything but normal. A million thoughts skittered through her mind. Kristen was safe for now. She would be back before she returned from Paris. Maybe. She had no clue what the future held, but Molly was going to make things right. For Kristen’s sake. She risked the possibility of Kristen’s distrust and anger, but she felt that she no longer had a choice.

  The phone call had been the final nail in the coffin. It was time to right the wrongs of the past. The nails had to be removed before she suffocated in her own lies. And she knew it was very possible that she would lose her freedom. But she had to do this now—she didn’t have a choice any longer. It’d been taken away when she received that phone call from a man who knew that she had been Maddy Carmichael.

  Finished with her makeup, she twisted her long blond hair into a topknot, then added a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. She wore a pair of faded men’s Levi’s she’d purchased from a secondhand store years ago and a black men’s T-shirt. As soon as she was outside, she’d add the generic sunglasses she kept in the locker. She gave a final glance in the mirror before exiting the shower room. She looked like shit. She could still see the outline of the bruise forming on her cheek, but once she was out of here, it wouldn’t matter.

  She pulled her small piece of luggage behind her and went to the room where private lockers could be had for a monthly fee. She took the key out of her purse and opened her locker. She removed a large manila envelope from the top shelf. She looked inside to make sure of the contents. Satisfied, she put the envelope under one arm and dropped the key in her purse and headed for the exit. When she’d prepared for this ten years ago, when the boys were twelve and had begun, encouraged by their father, to show the disrespect that had become the norm as they entered their teenage years, she’d planned out as many details as possible, and though a lot had changed in ten years, she felt confident her plans were as concrete today as they were then. Once a month she made this same trip, checking for new surveillance cameras, anything or anyone that might possibly identify her. She walked three blocks to the bus stop. Fifteen minutes later, she was on her way to Boston.

  She sat in the empty seat behind the driver, as this made her feel safe. She remembered how she used to ride the bus when she worked at the diner. She’d sat behind the driver then, too.

  Images of her short time at the diner flashed through her head. She’d loved the six months she worked there in spite of the reason that had sent her running from Blossom City. When she and Sarah found that dingy little basement apartment, she’d been giddy. Her first real home. She and Sarah had established a routine and became as close as they could despite the fact that neither wanted to share her past. They lived in the moment. When Molly told Sarah she was taking the job with Dr. McCann, the girl was devastated. Molly had tried to explain her financial situation, and how she, too, hoped to save up for college. Sarah hadn’t understood why she couldn’t work for the doctor and stay at the apartment, but that had been part of the job. Twin toddlers needed around-the-clock care. She’d been a bit afraid of losing Sarah’s friendship, but they’d stayed close for a while. When Sarah was able to attend Harvard full-time, then continue on to Harvard Law, she’d rarely had time for Molly, so Molly had stopped calling her. She wondered if she’d finished law school, and if she’d done all those things they had talked about when they’d been in that small room with the twin beds. Did she have a family now? A successful law practice?

  She took a deep breath. It didn’t really matter, she thought, as she grabbed her luggage and got off at her designated stop. She glanced around. The place hadn’t really changed all that much, but she knew that already. Molly made it her business to know it. It had offered her a sense of protection, a backup plan. She’d often thought of her escape, and she’d planned for Kristen to accompany her, but now she was glad she wasn’t here. It would’ve been too hard to explain to her then, though she doubted it was going to be any easier when the time came—and it would come, that was guaranteed. There was no way around this, and she would be honest. It was highly probable things would turn out for the worst. She accepted this, but she couldn’t avoid the past any longer.

  Today’s phone call had frightened her, and she was still scared because she didn’t know who he was, or how he had found her. Before the proverbial crap hit the fan, Molly had to return to Blossom City. She had to return to the life she’d left behind all those years ago, and though she never imagined she would feel this way, she almost welcomed the challenge, the change. Though she was petrified at the thought of what awaited her there, she was no longer the frightened seventeen-year-old who had run from a situation that had spiraled out of control.

  She walked the few blocks to the storage company, which was pretty much the same as it had been more than twenty years ago. The office décor had been updated a bit, a computer system added, along with a soda machine and a few plastic chairs that didn’t look as beat-up as they had the last time she’d been here.

  A glass partition separated a female clerk from the reception area. She leaned forward and spoke into a microphone. “I need to open unit 76,” she said to the back of a girl who continued to type at lightning speed with hot-pink-painted fingernails that were at least an inch long. She held up one bright-pink nail, indicating she needed a minute. Molly rolled her eyes and tapped on the glass, trying to get her attention. The girl stopped typing and whirled around to face the glass. From behind, she’d looked like a young girl, though face-to-face she had to be in her mid to late forties. Her long black ponytail and slim figure would’ve fooled anyone, Molly thought. “I need to open unit 76.”

  “You’s need it now?” the woman asked in a thick Boston accent.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Pedro’s gonna be a few minutes, so have a seat.” She nodded to the plastic chairs.

  She should’ve called ahead, but hadn’t thought about it until now. Her cell phone. Quickly, she rummaged through her purse, praying she hadn’t left the phone behind. She’d told Kristen to call her on her cell phone the minute her plane landed in Paris. She breathed a sigh of relief when she found the bright-yellow case covered with daisies hiding the iPhone’s emblem.
She checked the battery life and saw she still had a full charge. She’d left the house without remembering to bring her charger. She’d purchase one as soon as she was on the road. She scanned the phone for missed texts or calls, but there were none. Molly was about to drop her phone back in her purse when she remembered that damned Friend Finder app that Tanner had insisted she install. It was basically a GPS tracker, and anyone she’d added to her friend list could locate her immediately. She thumbed through the apps until she located it, then held her thumb on the app until a wiggly black X appeared. She tapped the X, and the app asked her if she wished to delete it. She hit YES and tossed the phone back in her purse. Thank goodness she’d thought of that. Tanner was super tech savvy, so when she didn’t come home tonight, it would be the first thing he would do to search for her. After that, well, she really wasn’t sure. She doubted he would go to the police to report her missing because of the physical attack he had made on her last night. He could not afford the police finding her in her present condition, and he damn well knew it. While there were no witnesses, other than Kristen, who was on her way out of the country, it was possible the twins might’ve heard something—but no way would they go against their father. Would he hire a private investigator? She wasn’t sure of that, either. He would probably weigh the pros and cons of the cost and chalk her up as a loss, at least until she came home. Then he would beat her to death, of that she was sure. Again, she was reminded of Elaine, the twins’ biological mother, who’d died when she fell down a flight of steps. Molly had always suspected there was more to the woman’s death than a mere accident, but she’d always kept those thoughts to herself.