Secrets She Knew: A Secrets and Lies Suspense Novel

by D. L. Wood

  Did I make the right decision?

  The thought of staying there, on that dank, musty floor, waiting for someone to arrive, safeguarding the…evidence…until the blue lights made their way up the gravel drive and finally flooded the shed, had made her skin crawl. Finding Jennifer’s diary there, in that shallow grave, in that abandoned tomb of a building, was like finding her body all over again, hidden beneath the twisted vines….no. No. She couldn’t have stayed there another minute. She had needed to be gone from that place.

  But she couldn’t just leave the diary in the shed. What if something happened to it before the police got back there? Then again, taking it was essentially disturbing the evidence, compromising it on some level, no matter what precautions she took. Procedure dictated that the instant she had realized what she had, the second she had seen Jennifer’s name, she should have dropped the diary back in the bag and called the Chief. Then she should have stayed, securing the scene until the investigating officer arrived.

  Her shell-shocked mind had waffled back and forth, until, finally, the overwhelming need to just not be there won out, as did the training that told her leaving the evidence unprotected was not an acceptable option. So, she had wrapped it back up in its plastic bag and run home.

  Dani let go of the book with one hand to take a sip from the glass of ice water she had poured herself. The liquid rolled down her throat, the sharp cold sobering her thinking a bit. Hoping to continue clearing the fog, she gulped down more, still staring at the diary’s “Belongs To” page and Jennifer’s name written in hot-pink, bubbly cursive.

  She knew she should call the Chief now. She had no excuse. She was home. She was safe. The diary was safe. She should call the Chief so that he could send someone over who would enact the proper protocols and preserve the chain of evidence. She knew this. She was a good cop.

  But she was also a person who had been haunted by the murdered owner of this diary every day for the last thirteen years. A person obsessed with the knowledge that the wrong man had been convicted of that murder—a good man, an innocent man—and that no one believed it but her. After all these years, after so many dead ends and unanswered questions, she held something in her hands that might finally be able to shed light on the truth.

  And that was why she did not call the Chief. It was also why, though every cell of Dani’s being screamed at her to start reading already, to turn to the next page, she had not been able to do so. Because as much as she wanted to know, to understand, to find answers—once she turned the pages, there would be no unlearning the private thoughts and dreams, the memories and secrets, that had been laid bare on them. What if the truths scrawled inside weren’t the truths she had so desperately sought all these years?

  But, I have to know.

  And so, her mind reeling with all the excuses she would spout to the Chief in the morning to explain her lapse in professional judgment, she resolutely turned the page.

  4

  The first thing Dani did was flip through the pages quickly, scanning to get an overall sense of what was contained inside. The entries began with January 1, 1995, and went all the way through July 8, 1995, the day before Dani found Jennifer. She was apparently religious about writing in it, because it didn’t look like she had missed a single day. The entries were all long, at least one page each, though usually more. A record of every day of the final year that she had lived. Which meant there were 193 entries to get through.

  But what about at the end? Maybe there’s something in her last days that might give the murderer away? Could it be that simple?

  That possibility thrilling her, Dani split the book down the middle, found the last entry for July 8, and started reading the precious, perfect, last recorded words of a girl that would be dead by the next day.

  But there was no smoking gun. No name scribbled in ink descending down the page, identifying Jennifer’s killer. No, it was just…about a lot of nothing. She wrote about the heat and how she hated how it made her sweat, and the purple thistles she had seen on the roadside and stopped to pick, and plans with her best friend, Kendall, to go to the movies that weekend. All standard teenage stuff.

  Until the third paragraph, and these words sent a jolt through Dani’s heart. Because Jennifer Cartwright had written about the fight she was still having with her boyfriend.

  Boyfriend?

  As far as Dani knew, Jennifer Cartwright had not been dating anyone at the time of her death. Of course, it was possible Dani wouldn’t have known about it—they weren’t close, after all—but someone, at the very least Jennifer’s best friend Kendall, would have known. And then, it would have come out during the investigation because Kendall would have told the police. Unless Jennifer had kept his existence a secret from Kendall too. But why would Jennifer have done that?

  A boyfriend. She had a secret boyfriend. Which means there was another potential suspect.

  Excitement bubbled in Dani as, hoping for clarification, she flipped backward through several entries—July 7, July 6, July 5—scrutinizing each one. The entries consisted of multiple pages, and while they mentioned that Jennifer and her boyfriend were fighting, other than saying it was related to something they were keeping from people and how she was making him feel badly about himself, she didn’t provide helpful details.

  The next entry, July 4, was completely useless. There was nothing about the boyfriend at all. Instead it offered a lengthy description of a party at the lake at Jennifer’s cousin’s house, including details ranging from who was there to what they ate to who stayed up the longest on the wakeboard.

  Dani realized that reading the entries in reverse order wasn’t going to work. Yes, it had let Dani confirm that Jennifer hadn’t identified the killer in the days leading up to her death, and it had revealed a mysterious, unnamed boyfriend, which was very promising. But Dani could waste a lot of time reading it backward, hoping to stumble on the right entry and, what’s more, hoping that she would understand it completely once she did. But to really understand what had happened, and to be sure to not miss a single relevant tidbit or nuance, she would need to read every entry in order. It would be slower and excruciatingly suspenseful, but there was no way around it. Otherwise she would risk accidentally missing something important because she didn’t understand the context. How would Dani know what was important, unless she started at the beginning?

  Settling in for a long night, Dani hunched over in her kitchen chair, turned back to the beginning of the diary and started reading.

  She didn’t get very far.

  After wading through just half of January 1995, her lower back started really aching, so at ten thirty she moved from the kitchen table to the couch to get a bit more comfortable. She propped a pillow behind her head and one behind her lumbar region and read on. The third week of January was mostly consumed with details about the new Jetta Jennifer’s father promised to buy her on her sixteenth birthday in August, an ongoing fight with her friend Kendall over a boy Jennifer didn’t think Kendall should be dating, and Jennifer’s obsession with the shows Beverly Hills 90210 and Party of Five.

  Party of Five.

  That was a throwback. Dani had loved the show too. She closed her eyes, grasping for the names of the male leads, both of whom she’d had a crush on. The next thing she knew, she was waking up at seven a.m. on the same couch, make-up smeared, hair askew, with the diary laying open on her chest.

  Now, two hours later, Dani sat behind the wheel of her rental car, parked in the second row of the lot of the main—and only—precinct of the Skye Police Department, sipping coffee from a travel mug emblazoned with “First Bank of Skye,” that she had borrowed from her parents’ cupboard. She had finally managed to grind, brew and drink her father’s coffee without shedding a single tear, so, hopefully, she was starting to get a grip on herself.

  As she swallowed, she relished the heat that spread through her. She held the mug, waiting for the caffeine to kick in and energize her mucky brain as she stared t
hrough her windshield at the long, rectangular brick building with its sculpted steel letters posted above the door identifying it as the police station. She had been sitting there like that for fifteen minutes trying to decide what to do, or rather, how to do what she came to do. It wasn’t just energy she needed. A bit of courage would come in handy too. Glancing over at the passenger seat, a mass of guilty knots twisting her gut, she eyed Jennifer’s diary, cocooned in the plastic bag Dani had found it in, all tucked protectively inside a large, clear zip-top bag.

  Maybe I could just run in, drop it off at the front desk with a note and run out.

  As if that would ever work. The Chief knew where to find her. Had known since the day she was born. There was no way around it. She was going to take a licking, and that was all there was to it, but the longer she waited, the worse it would be. Depositing the mug in the center holder, she snatched up the diary and her purse and pushed open her door.

  “You have got to be kidding me!” The bellowing call sounded from behind the wall of plexiglass that separated the squad room from the waiting area out front. It ushered from a towering man, broad-shouldered with brown, slicked-back hair and a scruffy beard that looked like it hadn’t been trimmed in months. He charged doggedly through the room directly toward the locked door in front of Dani. A buzzer sounded as he reached it and he swept through, swiftly crossing the six-foot distance to her and wrapping her up in a bearhug so that her face was buried solidly in the chest of his blue uniform. He smelled of cheap cologne and sweet, pungent pipe tobacco.

  “What in the world are you doing here?” Police Chief Bobby Killen asked, pulling back and revealing a beaming face as Dani sucked in a breath. “Big ol’ fancy Boston cop showing her face in my station.”

  “Big ol’ fancy Boston detective you mean,” she replied, grinning.

  “No! Seriously? Aw, Dani, that’s great.” The Chief signaled to the officer behind the front desk, who buzzed them back through to the squad room. He strode ahead of her, as if heralding the arrival of the star of a parade. “You hear that, guys?” he announced to the room in general. “It’s Detective Danielle Lake now.”

  “We heard ya, Chief,” said the officer who had buzzed them in. He tilted his head toward Dani in acknowledgment. “Congrats, Dani.”

  “Thanks, Mickey,” she said, smiling broadly.

  The Chief kept going, headed, she knew, straight for his office at the back. Of the half dozen desks in the squad room, only a couple were occupied at the moment, and Dani didn’t know either of the officers. One, a female working on her computer, merely glanced up and nodded at Dani before returning to her screen. But the second, a man in plainclothes, locked eyes with her, cocking his head slightly as a small curve raised the corner of his mouth. He was raven-haired and clean-shaven, with a strong build that filled out his white button-down exactly as it had been meant to be. His eyes, as dark as his hair, continued tracking her as she followed the Chief.

  Dani received this kind of attention sometimes—not in her own station so much, but sometimes when visiting others. She didn’t like it, but it was what it was. Hoping to end the exchange, she offered him a little nod, which seemed to work. He nodded in return, his gaze drifting back to the paperwork he was holding, although, as she passed him, out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw that the little curve at the corner of his mouth had stretched into a full smile.

  Men.

  “Good grief, Dani. You should know better.” Chief Killen sat behind his desk, staring at the diary that now lay at the center of his blotter, secured in an evidence bag. He rubbed his hand across his beard before slapping it hard on the desk’s surface. “You should have called as soon as you found it.”

  “I know, Chief.” Dani felt even worse now than she had when sitting in the car. He was taking the news exactly as she feared he would. “But you’ve got to understand. I was in some kind of shock or something. I wasn’t thinking straight. I mean, of all things…to find her diary? When I saw there was something down there, I thought maybe, drugs or something. You know, teens using the shed. And then, when the diary rolled out, I didn’t know it was hers. I was just thinking some kid was using the place as a hideout and had stashed it down there—”

  “Some kid, like Jennifer Cartwright?” he asked, his face screwing up and his eyebrows rising.

  “No, not Jennifer. Like, some kid recently. Not a kid from thirteen years ago. Jennifer didn’t even cross my mind.”

  “You should have called—”

  “Would someone have come if I had? I mean, right then? It’s a thirteen-year-old case which, according to everybody, has been long solved. Can you honestly say that dealing with it wouldn’t have been pushed till morning? That you wouldn’t have told me to just take it with me for safekeeping and come down here today?”

  He eyed her from under narrowed lids. She knew that scenario was a real possibility. Skye’s population hovered around six thousand. At most, the Chief probably had three patrols running in the middle of the night and she was doubtful any of them would have been spared to deal with her non-emergency situation regarding an old case. Especially given that now, sitting here, watching his reaction, she was sure he would have wanted to handle it himself—and there wasn’t much chance he would have traded the comfort of his easy chair and wife, Nancy, at well past eight for a dead girl’s diary.

  “Maybe,” he finally said.

  “Okay, then.”

  “But still—”

  “But still, I should have called.”

  “And you’ve contaminated it. Your fingerprints will be all over it.”

  “When I opened it in the shed, I didn’t know what it was. As soon as I did, the diary went back in the bag, which went in that bag,” she said, pointing to her clear zip-top bag. “After that, I wore gloves when I touched any of it.” She held up her hands in surrender. “I swear.”

  “What were you doing there anyway? I thought you hated that place. You told me you’d never been back there.”

  Dani shrugged. “All I can say is that I felt like it was time. With Mom and Dad gone, I’ve got enough burdens to carry. Enough ghosts. Maybe I just felt it was time to let that one go.”

  Chief Killen sniffed and shifted in his seat which groaned under the weight of his ample frame. “So did you read it?”

  “Some.” She explained how her initial review of the latter entries revealed a boyfriend Jennifer had been fighting with, but otherwise produced nothing notable, and that after starting back at the beginning, she found the entries to be lengthy and generally mundane. “It’s a teenager, writing about teenage things. If there’s a nugget hidden in there, it may take scouring the book several times to catch it.”

  “And you didn’t read it all?” There was a note of surprise, and—unless she was just imagining it—disappointment in his voice.

  “I planned to.” Her face grew warm and she wondered if a sheepish expression had emerged there to match the embarrassment she felt. Great detective I am, falling asleep on the evidence. “Guess I was more exhausted than I realized,” she offered weakly.

  She studied him for a moment, trying to read the emotions behind his narrowed gaze. He leaned back, his chair creaking as it tilted toward the bookcase behind him. The oak shelves displayed a wide array of football paraphernalia—signed balls, banners and action shots—photos of Nancy and their six grandchildren, and the horses on his farm. He seemed to contemplate things for a moment, lacing and unlacing his fingers, then rocked forward, leaning his elbows on the desk.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. You had a full day of travel and the emotional gut punch of going to your parents’ house—God rest ’em—and then finding this,” he tapped the diary, “in that place. It’s no wonder you passed out.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and she meant it. His words eased at least some of the inadequacy she had been feeling. But now, she had to press him. “Chief, are you going to give it to him?”

  “Who?”

  �
�You know who.”

  His shoulders sagged. “I thought you were done with this.”

  “He didn’t do it, Chief.”

  “Dani, you spent your last summers in high school interning here, chewing my ear off about how Dr. Beecher wasn’t guilty and that we needed to get off our butts and prove it.”

  “He isn’t guilty.”

  “A jury said he was. Jennifer’s bracelet was found in his nightstand. They had a fight earlier on the day she died. His own daughter said she’d seen him go down to the riverbank, following after Jennifer and that he’d come back upset—”

  “And his skin was found under her nails,” Dani rattled off sharply.

  “Exactly.”

  “I know the list. I’ve heard it a million times. But there are explanations for that evidence.”

  “Explanations which Beecher’s attorney gave, but the jury didn’t buy.”

  “He didn’t have a motive,” she said, her words clipped.

  “He was obsessed with her and she wasn’t having it.”

  “That was just speculation.”

  “Not after a jury believes it, it’s not.”

  For thirteen years Dani had been confronted with these reasons, this “evidence” that proved Dr. Beecher—her friend, her mentor—had killed Jennifer Cartwright. For thirteen years, these reasons had made her blood boil because every single one of them was either circumstantial or could be explained another way—had, in fact, been explained by Dr. Beecher himself. But he was the target they had all settled on and no one would listen.

  Today was no exception. Dani clenched the arm of her chair as she eyed the Chief. “You know you have to give it to his attorney.”

  Chief Killen sighed. “That’s a decision for the D.A.’s office. They’ll take a look and decide whether we have to hand it over to them.” Though the original case had been initially investigated by the Skye P.D., it had been turned over to the county district attorney’s office for prosecution.