Public Secrets

by Nora Roberts

  Chapter Thirteen

  Saint Catherine’s Academy, 1977

  TWO MORE WEEKS, Emma thought. Two more long, boring, rotten weeks, and she’d be out for the summer. She’d be able to see her father, and Johnno and the rest. She’d be able to breathe without being told she was breathing for God. She’d be able to think without being warned about impure thoughts.

  As far as she could see, the nuns must be full of impure thoughts or else they wouldn’t be so sure everyone else had them.

  She would be going back to the real world for a few precious weeks. New York. Emma closed her eyes a moment, trying to bring its noise, its smells, its life into her quiet room. With a sigh, she propped her elbows on her desk, slouching in a way that would have made Sister Mary Alice crack her ruler. She didn’t bend over the French verbs she was supposed to conjugate, but looked out over the green lawns to the high stone walls that closed the school off from the sinful world.

  Not all the sinful world, she thought. She was full of sin, and was grateful her roommate, Marianne Carter, was equally blighted. Her days at Saint Catherine’s would have been torture without Marianne.

  She grinned as she thought of her funny, freckled, redheaded roomie and best friend. Marianne was sinful, all right, and was even now doing penance for her latest transgression. The caricature Marianne had sketched of Mother Superior was worth a couple of hours scrubbing bathrooms.

  If it hadn’t been for Marianne, she might have run away. Though where she would have run, she hadn’t a clue.

  There was really only one place she wanted to go, and that was to her father. And he would have shipped her right back.

  It wasn’t fair. She was nearly thirteen, nearly a real teenager, and she was stuck in this antiquated school conjugating verbs, reciting catechism, and dissecting frogs. Gross.

  It wasn’t that she hated the nuns. Well, she admitted, perhaps she did hate Sister Immaculata. The Warden. But who wouldn’t hate someone with a pruny mouth, a wart on her nose, and a fondness for giving young girls extra chores for the teeniest infractions?

  But Da had only been amused when she’d told him about Sister Immaculata.

  She missed him; she missed all of them.

  She wanted to go home. But she wasn’t sure where home would be. Often she thought about the house in London, the castle where she had been so happy for such a short time. She thought about Bev and hated it that her father never spoke of her. Even though they had never divorced, Emma thought. Some of the girls at school had parents that were divorced, but you weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  She still thought of Darren, her sweet little brother. Sometimes she could barely remember how he had looked, how he had sounded. But when she dreamed of him, his face, his voice, were as clear as life.

  She remembered almost nothing about the night he had died. Nuns tended to drum such pagan nonsense as monsters out of young girls’ heads. But again, if she dreamed of that night, as she did when she was ill or upset, she remembered the terror of walking down the dark hall, the sounds all around, the dark monsters holding Darren as he cried and struggled. She remembered falling.

  And when she awoke, she would remember nothing at all.

  Marianne came through the door in an exaggerated stagger. She held out her hands. “Ruined.” She dropped backward onto her bed. “What French count would want to kiss them now?”

  “Rough going?” Emma asked, struggling not to grin.

  “Five bathrooms. Dis-gus-ting. Ugh. When I get out of this joint, I’m going to have a housekeeper for my housekeeper.” She rolled over on her stomach, crossing her ankles in the air. Emma only smiled, enjoying the sound of Marianne’s brisk American voice. “I heard Mary Jane Witherspoon talking to Teresa O’Malley. She’s going to do it with her boyfriend when she goes home this summer.”

  “Who?”

  “I dunno. His name’s Chuck or Huck or something.”

  “No, I mean Mary Jane or Teresa?”

  “Mary Jane, you dork. She’s sixteen and built.”

  Emma frowned down at her own flat chest. She wondered if she’d have boobs to speak of when she hit sixteen. And if she’d have a boyfriend to do it with.

  “What if she gets pregnant like Susan did last spring?”

  “Oh, Mary Jane’s folks would fix it up. They’ve got piles of money. Anyway, she’s got something. A diaphragm.”

  “Everyone has a diaphragm.”

  “Not that kind, dummy. It’s birth control.”

  “Oh.” As always, Emma was ready to defer to Marianne’s greater knowledge.

  “You put it in, you know, inside the sacred vault, with jelly and it kills off the sperm. You can’t get knocked up with dead sperm.” Marianne rolled over to yawn at the ceiling. “I wonder if Sister Immaculata ever did it.”

  The thought was enough to bring Emma completely out of the dumps. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she bathes in her habit.”

  “Holy hell, I nearly forgot.” Marianne rolled again, and digging into the pocket of her rumpled uniform, pulled out i half-pack of Marlboros. “I struck gold in the second-floor John.” She scrambled up to search through her underwear drawer for a pack of matches. “Somebody had them taped to the back of the tank.”

  “And you took them.”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves. I helped myself. Lock the door, Emma.”

  They shared one, blowing little puffs of smoke out the open window. Neither enjoyed the taste particularly, but gamely dragged on. It was adult and sinful, two things both of them craved.

  “Two more weeks,” Emma said dreamily.

  “You’re going to New York. They’re sending me to camp again.”

  “It won’t be so bad. Sister Immaculata won’t be there.”

  “That’s something.” Marianne tried to adopt a sophisticated pose with the cigarette. “I’m going to try to talk them into letting me stay with my grandmother for a couple of weeks. She’s pretty cool.”

  “I’ll take lots of pictures.”

  Marianne nodded, thinking further ahead. “When we get out of this place, we’re going to get an apartment, like in Greenwich Village or L.A. Someplace cool. I’ll be an artist and you’ll be a photojournalist.”

  “We’ll have parties.”

  “The biggest. And we’ll wear all kinds of gorgeous clothes.” She held out the hem of her uniform. “No plaids.”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “It’s only four more years.”

  Emma turned to gaze out the window. It was hard to think in terms of years when she wasn’t sure how to get through the next two weeks.

  A CONTINENT AWAY, Michael Kesselring studied himself in cap and gown. He couldn’t believe it. It was finally over. High school was behind him and life was just around the next bend. There was college, of course, but that was a summer away.

  He was eighteen, old enough to drink, to vote, and thanks to President Carter, had no military draft to interrupt his plans.

  Whatever they were, he thought.

  He hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do with the life that was ahead of him. His part-time job at Buzzard’s Tee Shirt Shop was mainly for gas and date money. He had no intention of spending his life screen-printing T-shirts. But just what he would do was still a cloudy mystery.

  It was a little scary taking off the cap and gown. Like shedding his youth. He held them both in his hands as he scanned his room. It was cluttered with clothes, mementos, record albums, and since his mother had long since given up on cleaning it herself, his cache of Playboys. There were the letters he’d earned in track and baseball. The letters, he remembered, that had convinced Rose Anne Markowitz to climb into the backseat of his secondhand Pinto and do it to the tune of Joe Cocker’s Feeling Alright.

  He’d been blessed with a tough athletic body, long legs, and quick reflexes. Like his father, his mother was fond of saying. He supposed in some way he took after the old man, though their relationship had had its share of battles.
Over hair length, wardrobe, politics, curfews. Captain Kesselring was a stickler.

  Came from being a cop, Michael supposed. He remembered being careless enough once to bring a single joint into the house. He’d been grounded for a month. And a few lousy speeding tickets had cost him just as dearly.

  The law was the law, old Lou was fond of saying, Michael thought now. Thank God he himself had no intention of being a cop.

  He took the tassel from the cap before tossing it and the gown onto his unmade bed. Maybe it was sentimental to keep it, but nobody had to know. He routed through his dresser drawers for the old cigar box that held some of his most valued possessions. The love letter Lori Spiker had written him in his junior year—before she’d dumped him for a biker with a Harley and tattoos. The ticket stub from the Rolling Stones’ concert he had, after a lot of blood and sweat, convinced his parents to let him attend. The pop top from his first illegal beer. He grinned and, pushing it aside, found the snapshot of himself and Brian McAvoy.

  The little girl had kept her word, Michael thought. The picture had arrived in the mail only two weeks after the incredible day his dad had taken him to meet Devastation. The new album had come with it, the hot-off-the-presses copy. He had been the envy of his contemporaries for weeks.

  Michael thought back to that day, the almost unendurable excitement he’d felt, the sweaty armpits. He hadn’t thought about that day in a long time. Now, perhaps because of his newly acquired adult status, it occurred to him that it had been a terrific thing for his father to do. And uncharacteristic. Not that the old man couldn’t come up with terrific things, but he had gone to the rehearsal hall on police business. Captain Lou Kesselring never mixed police business and personal pleasures.

  But he had that day, Michael thought.

  It was strange, but now that he was remembering it all, he could picture his father dragging home files, night after night. As far as Michael could recollect, his father had never brought home work that way before, or since.

  The little boy, Brian McAvoy’s little boy, had been murdered. It had been in all the papers, and still cropped up from time to time, perhaps because the police had never solved the case.

  His father’s case, Michael recalled.

  That had been the year Michael had been named MVP on his Little League team. And his father had missed most of the games. And a lot of dinners.

  It had been a long time ago, Michael mused, but he wondered if his father ever thought about Brian McAvoy and his dead son. Or the little girl who had taken the picture. Some people said that she’d seen what had happened to her brother and had gone crazy. But she hadn’t looked crazy when Michael had met her. He remembered her only vaguely as a slight girl with pale hair and big sad eyes. And a soft, prettily accented voice, he recalled now. A voice a lot like her father’s.

  Poor kid, he thought as he placed the tassel over the snapshot. He wondered what had ever happened to her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  EMMA COULDN’T BELIEVE her time was almost up. In less than a week she would head back to New York and Saint Catherine’s. True, she missed Marianne. It would take weeks for them to talk through all the things that had happened over the summer. The best summer of her life, even though they’d only spent two weeks of it in New York.

  They’d flown to London to film part of a recording session for a new documentary, and had had tea at the Ritz just as she and Bev had so many years before. She’d been able to spend time with Johnno and Stevie and P.M., listening to them play, eating fish and chips in the kitchen while they discussed their next album.

  She’d taken rolls of pictures and could hardly wait to store them in her photo album where she could look at them over and over and relive the memories.

  Her father had treated her to her first grown-up salon session as an early birthday gift. Now her shoulder-length hair was permed in corkscrew curls that made her feel very grown-up.

  And she was starting to develop.

  Emma took a quick, surreptitious look down at her bikini top. They weren’t much as breasts went, but at least she wouldn’t be as easily mistaken for a boy. And she was tanned. Emma hadn’t been too certain she would enjoy spending her last weeks in California, but the tan made it worthwhile.

  And there was the surfing. She’d had to launch a major campaign before Brian had agreed to let her try her hand at shooting the waves. Emma knew she had Johnno to thank for the bright red board. If he hadn’t joked and teased Brian into it, she would still be whiling away her hours on the beach watching everyone else skim the water.

  Maybe she couldn’t do much more than paddle out and fall in, but at least the process took her farther away from the bodyguards who sweated under nearby beach umbrellas. It was ridiculous, she thought as she carried her board toward the water. No one even knew who she was.

  Each year she was sure her father would let them go, and each year they remained with their solemn faces and big shoulders. At least they couldn’t follow her out here, she thought as she stretched out on her board and began to paddle through the cool water. Though she knew they watched her through binoculars, she pretended she was alone, or, better, with one of the groups of teenagers who haunted the beaches.

  She crested over a wave, enjoying the swells and the way her stomach seemed to dip with the motion. The roar of the sea was in her ears, mixed with the riot of music from dozens of portable radios. She watched a tall boy in navy trunks catch a curl and ride it smoothly to shore—and envied him both his skill and his freedom.

  If she couldn’t have the second, Emma decided, she would work on developing the first.

  She waited with the edgy patience of a surfer watching for the right wave. Sucking in her breath, she brought herself up to a crouch on the board, then stood, and with the faith of the young let the roll take her. She was up for nearly ten seconds before she overbalanced. When she surfaced, she saw the boy in the navy trunks glance her way, tossing his wet, dark hair out of his face with a careless hand. Pride had her struggling back onto the board.

  She tried again, and again, each time lasting only seconds before the wave snatched the board from under her feet and sent her flying. Each time she dragged herself back on the board, and with muscles aching, paddled and waited.

  She imagined the bodyguards sipping their warming drinks and discussing how clumsy she was. Each failure became a public humiliation and made her only more determined to succeed, just once. Just once to ride the wave all the way to shore.

  Her leg muscles trembled as she pushed herself up. She could see the wave curling toward her, the glassy blue-green tunnel, the dancing white froth. She wanted it. Needed it. Just one ride—one success completely and totally her own.

  She caught it. Her heart slammed into her throat as she skimmed along the pipe. She could see the beach rushing toward her, the glint of the binocular lens. The drum of water was like music in her head, in her heart. For an instant she tasted it. Freedom.

  The tower of water closed in behind her, shoving her off the board, tossing it and her up. One moment she was in the sun, the next she was tumbling in the wall of water. It slammed her, knocking away her breath, sending her wheeling, arms and legs flailing like rubber.

  Lungs burning, she struggled to break the surface. She could see it shimmering above her, but the power of the water dragged her deeper, viciously pitching her. She clawed at the water, then was plunged down, gyrating helplessly until the surface was below her and just as out of reach.

  As her strength failed she wondered giddily if she should pray. The Act of Contrition floated dreamily through her brain.

  Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee.

  As she was sucked back, sucked down, the prayer faded and music seemed to fill her head.

  Come together. Right now. Over me.

  Panic stabbed through her. It was dark. Dark, and the monsters were back. Her efforts to reach the surface were only wild flailings now. She opened her mouth to scream and gagge
d.

  There were hands on her, and in her terror she fought them, beat at them as the water beat at her. It was the monster, the one who had smiled at her, the one who wanted to kill her as it had killed Darren. As an arm hooked around her throat, red balls danced in front of her eyes. They faded to gray as she broke the surface.

  “Just relax,” someone was telling her. “I’ll get you in. Just hang on and relax.”

  She was choking. Emma started to drag at the arm around her throat before she realized it wasn’t cutting off her air. She could