Public Secrets

by Nora Roberts

  LOU FOUND BRIAN at the hospital. He wasn’t certain what he’d been expecting. He’d seen Brian a few times, in newspapers, or television, when the singer had spoken out against the war. A peacenik they called him. Lou didn’t think too much of the bunch that went around getting stoned and growing their hair ass-long and passing out flowers on street corners. But he wasn’t sure he thought much of the war, either. He’d lost a brother in Korea, and his sister’s boy had left for Vietnam three months before.

  But it wasn’t McAvoy’s politics, or his hairstyle, that concerned Lou now.

  He paused, studying Brian, who was sprawled on a flower-patterned chair. Looked younger in person, Lou decided. Young, a little too thin, and oddly pretty for a man. Brian had that dazed, dream-struck look that came with shock. There were others in the room, and smoke billowed up from a number of ashtrays.

  Mechanically Brian put a cigarette to his lips, drew in, set it down again, blew out.

  “Mr. McAvoy.”

  Repeating the routine with the cigarette, Brian glanced up. He saw a tall, leanly built man with dark hair carefully combed back from a long, sleepy face. He wore a suit, a gray one, and a conservative tie of nearly the same shade against a crisp white shirt. His black shoes were glossy, his nails neatly trimmed, and there was a slight nick on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving.

  Odd the things you notice, Brian thought as he pulled on the cigarette again.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Kesselring.” He took out his shield, but Brian continued to look at his face, not the ID. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Can’t this wait, Lieutenant?” Pete Page took a long, hard look at the identification. “Mr. McAvoy’s not in any shape to deal with this now.”

  “It would help us all if we got the preliminaries over with.” Lou sat. After replacing his badge, he spread his hands on his knees. “I’m sorry, Mr. McAvoy. I don’t want to add to your grief. I want to find out who’s responsible for this.”

  Brian lit a cigarette from the butt of another and said nothing.

  “What can you tell me about what happened tonight?”

  “They killed Darren. My little boy. The took him out of his crib, and left him on the floor.”

  Sick at heart, Johnno snatched up his Styrofoam cup of coffee and turned away. Lou reached in his pocket for his pad and freshly sharpened pencil.

  “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm the boy?”

  “No. Everyone loves Darren. He’s so bright and funny.” Brian’s throat locked up, and he looked around blindly for his own cup.

  “I know this is difficult. Can you tell me about tonight?”

  “We had a party. We were all going to New York tomorrow, and we had a party.”

  “I’d like a list of the guests.”

  “I don’t know. Bev might …” He trailed off, remembering that Bev was in a room down the hall, heavily sedated.

  “We should be able to put together a fairly accurate list between us,” Pete put in. He tried to drink more coffee, but it was burning a hole in his gut. “But you can be sure that no one Brian invited to his home would have done this.”

  Lou intended to find out. “Did you know everyone at the party, Mr. McAvoy?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.” He rested his elbows on his knees a moment to rub the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. The pain was the closest he could get to comfort. “Friends and friends of friends, and like that. You open the door and people come. It just happens.”

  Lou nodded as if he understood. He remembered the parties Marge planned. The careful guest lists, RSVPs, the detailed checks and rechecks of food. Their fifteenth-anniversary party had been planned as meticulously as a state dinner.

  “We’ll work on the list,” Lou decided. “Your daughter, Emma, is it?”

  “Yes, Emma.”

  “She was upstairs during the party.”

  “Yes. Asleep.” His babies, tucked away, safe and sound. “They were both asleep.”

  “In the same room?”

  “No, they have separate rooms. Alice Wallingsford, our nanny, was upstairs with them.”

  “Yes.” He’d already had the report that the nanny had been found bound, gagged, and terrified in her own bed. “And the little girl fell down the steps?”

  Brian’s hand jerked spasmodically on his cup, his fingers pushing through the Styrofoam. Coffee spilled out the holes and onto the floor. “I heard her call me. I was coming out of the kitchen with Bev.” He remembered, clear as a bell, that quick, horny kiss they’d shared before the scream. “We ran in, and she was on the floor at the foot of the steps.”

  “I saw her fall.” P.M. blinked his red-rimmed eyes. “I looked up and she was tumbling down. It all happened so fast.”

  “You said she screamed.” Lou looked back at P.M. “Did she scream before she fell, or after?”

  “I … before. Yes, that was why I happened to look up. She called out, then seemed to lose her balance.”

  Lou noted it down. He’d have to talk to the little girl. “I hope she wasn’t badly hurt.”

  “The doctors.” Brian’s cigarette had burned down to the filter. Dropping it in the ashtray, he switched to the inch of cold, bitter coffee that was left in the mangled cup. “They haven’t come out again. They haven’t told me. I can’t lose her, too.” The coffee spilled as his hand began to shake. Johnno sat beside him.

  “Emma’s tough. Kids take tumbles all the time.” He sent Lou a vicious look. “Can’t you leave him alone?”

  “Just a few more questions.” He was used to vicious looks. “Your wife, Mr. McAvoy, she found your son?”

  “Yes. She went upstairs after we heard the ambulance. She wanted to check on … She wanted to be sure, you see, that he hadn’t woke up. I heard her screaming, screaming, screaming. And I ran. When I got into Darren’s room, she was sitting on the floor with him, holding him. And screaming. They had to give her something to put her out.”

  “Mr. McAvoy, have there been any threats against you, your wife, or your children?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No. Well, there’s some hate mail from time to time. Political stuff mostly. Pete has it screened.”

  “We’d like to see everything that’s come in for the last six months.”

  “That’s quite a bundle of mail, Lieutenant,” Pete told him.

  “We’ll manage.”

  Brian ignored them both and rose as the doctor came in. “Emma,” was all he said. All he could say.

  “She’s sleeping. She has a concussion, a broken arm, and some bruised ribs, but no internal injuries.”

  “She’s going to be all right.”

  “She’ll need to be watched carefully for the next few days, but yes, the outlook is very good.”

  He cried then, as he hadn’t been able to when he’d seen his son’s lifeless body, as he’d been incapable of doing when they’d taken his family from him and left him in the green-walled waiting room. Hot tears poured through his fingers as he covered his face.

  Quietly, Lou closed his notebook and, motioning to the doctor, stepped into the hall. “I’m Lieutenant Kesselring. Homicide.” Again, Lou flashed his ID. “When will I be able to talk to the little girl?”

  “Not for a day, perhaps two.”

  “I need to question her as soon as possible.” He took out a card and handed it to the doctor. “If you’d call me as soon as she’s able to talk. The wife, Beverly McAvoy?”

  “Sedated. Ten or twelve hours before she should come around. Even then I won’t guarantee she’ll be able to talk, or that I’ll be willing to allow it.”

  “Just call.” He glanced back toward the waiting room. “I’ve got a son of my own, Doctor.”

  EMMA HAD TERRIBLE dreams. She wanted to call out for her da, for her mum, but it was as though a hand were closed over her mouth, over her eyes. Great weights seemed to press her down and down.


  The baby was crying. The sound echoed in the room, in her head, until it seemed as though Darren were inside her mind screaming to get out. She wanted to go to him, had to—but there were two-headed snakes and snarling, snapping things with black, dripping fangs all around her bed. Each time she tried to climb out they lunged at her, hissing, spitting, grinning.

  If she stayed in bed, she’d be safe. But Darren was calling for her.

  She had to be brave, brave enough to run to the door. When she did, the snakes disappeared. Beneath her feet the floor felt alive, moving, pulsing. She looked back over her shoulder. It was just her room, with toys and dolls tidily on the shelves, with Mickey Mouse smiling cheerfully. As she watched the smile turned into a leer.

  She raced into the hall, into the dark.

  There was music. The shadows seemed to dance to it. There were sounds. Breathing, heavy, wet breathing, snarls and the movement of something dry and slithering on the wood. As she ran toward the sounds of Darren’s cries, she felt the hot breath on her arms, the quick nasty nips at her ankles.

  It was locked. She pulled and pounded on the door as her brother’s screams rose higher, only to be drowned out by the music. Under her small fists, the door dissolved. She saw the man, but there was no face. She saw only the glint of his eyes, the gleam of his teeth.

  He started toward her, and she was more afraid of him than of the snakes and monsters, the teeth and the claws. Blind with fear, she ran, with Darren’s screams rising behind her.

  Then she was falling, falling into a dark pit. She heard a sound, like a twig snapping, and tried to scream out at the agony. But she could only fall silently, endlessly, helplessly, with the music and her brother’s cries echoing in her head.

  When she awoke, it was bright. There were no dolls on the shelves. No shelves at all, just blank walls. At first she wondered if she was in a hotel. She tried to remember, but as she did, the aching began—the hot, dull aching that seemed to throb everywhere at once. Moaning against it, she turned her head.

  Her father was sleeping in a chair. His head was back, turned a bit to the side. Beneath the stubble of his beard his face was pale. In his lap, his hands were clenched into fists.

  “Da.”

  Already on the edge of sleep, he woke quickly. He saw her lying against the white hospital sheets, her eyes wide and a little afraid. The tears welled up again, clogging his throat, burning his eyes. He fought them with what little strength he had left.

  “Emma.” He went to her, sitting on the edge of the bed and pressing his exhausted face against her throat.

  She started to put her arm around him, but it was weighed down with the white plaster cast. That had the fear bubbling quick again. She could hear in her mind the sound of that dry snap, the screaming pain that had followed.

  It hadn’t been a dream—and if it had been real, then the rest …

  “Where’s Darren?”

  She would ask that first, Brian thought as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. How could he tell her? How could he tell her what he had yet to understand or believe himself? She was only a child. His only child.

  “Emma.” He kissed her cheek, her temple, her forehead, as if somehow that would ease the pain, for both of them. He took her hand. “Do you remember when I told you a story about angels, about how they live in heaven?”

  “They fly and play music and never hurt each other.”

  Oh, he was clever, Brian thought bitterly, so clever to have woven such a pretty tale. “Yes, that’s right. Sometimes special people become angels.” He reached far back for his Catholic faith and found it weighed heavily on his shoulders. “Sometimes God loves these people so much he wants them with him up in heaven. That’s where Darren is now. He’s an angel in heaven.”

  “No.” For the first time since she had crawled out from beneath the dirty sink over three years before, she pushed away from her father. “I don’t want him to be an angel.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Tell God to send him back,” she said furiously. “Right now.”

  “I can’t.” The tears were coming again; he couldn’t stop them. “He’s gone, Emma.”

  “Then I’ll go to heaven too, and take care of him.”

  “No.” Fear clutched in his gut, drying his tears. His fingers dug into her shoulders, putting bruises on her for the first time. “You can’t. I need you, Emma. I can’t get Darren back, but I won’t lose you.”

  “I hate God,” she said, dry-eyed and fierce.

  So do I, Brian thought as he gathered her close. So do I.

  THERE HAD BEEN over a hundred people in and out of the McAvoy house on the night of the murder. Lou’s pad was overflowing with names, notes, and impressions. But he was no closer to an answer. Both the window and the door of the boy’s room had been found open, though the nanny was adamant that she had closed the window after putting the boy to bed. She also insisted the window had been locked. But there had been no signs of a forced entry.

  There had been footprints beneath the window. Size 11, Lou mused. But there had been no impressions in the ground a ladder would have made, and no traces of rope on the windowsill.

  The nanny was little help. She’d awakened when a hand had clamped over her mouth. She’d been blindfolded, bound, and gagged. In the two interviews Lou had had with her, she’d changed her estimate of the time she’d been bound from thirty minutes to two hours. She was low on his lists of suspects, but he was waiting for the background check he’d ordered.

  It was Beverly McAvoy that Lou had to see now. He’d postponed the questioning as long as possible. Longer, after he’d scanned the police photos of little Darren McAvoy.

  “Keep this as brief as possible.” The doctor stood with Lou outside the door. “She’s been given a mild sedative, but her mind is clear. Maybe too clear.”

  “I don’t want to make this any harder on her than it already is.” What could, he wondered as the image of the young boy fixed itself in his mind. “I need to question the girl as well. Is she up to it?”

  “She’s conscious. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you. She hasn’t spoken more than two words to anyone but her father.”

  With a nod, Lou stepped into the room. The woman was sitting up in bed. Though her eyes were open, they didn’t focus on him. She looked very small and hardly old enough to have had a child, and to have lost one. She wore a pale blue bed jacket, and the hands lying on the white sheets were absolutely still.

  Beside her Brian sat in a chair, his unshaven face an unhealthy shade of gray. His eyes looked old, red and puffy from tears and lack of sleep, clouded with grief. When he looked up, Lou saw something else in them. Fury.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “The doctor told us you’d be coming.” Brian didn’t rise or gesture to a chair. He simply continued to stare. “Do you know who did this?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to talk with your wife.”

  “Bev.” Brian laid a hand over hers, but there was no response. “This is the policeman who’s trying to find … to find out what happened. I’m sorry,” he said, looking back at Lou. “I don’t remember your name.”

  “Kesselring. Lieutenant Kesselring.”

  “The lieutenant needs to ask you some questions.” She made no move. She barely breathed. “Bev, please.”

  Perhaps it was the despair in his voice that reached down deep to where she had tried to hide herself. Her hand moved restlessly in his. For a moment she closed her eyes, held them closed, wishing with all her heart that she was dead. Then she opened them again and looked straight at Lou.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you can tell me about that night.”

  “My son was dead,” she said flatly. “What else matters?”

  “Something you tell me could help me find who killed your son, Mrs. McAvoy.”

  “Will that bring Darren back to me?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t feel anything anymore.�
�� She stared at him with huge, tired eyes. “I don’t feel my legs or my arms or my head. When I try to feel it hurts. So it’s best not to try, isn’t it?”