Tell No One

by Taylor Sissel, Barbara

  “Someone had run over it.” Caroline was surprised and touched that Jace remembered, and surprised, too, at how the memory still had the power to close her throat.

  “First thing you wanted to do was pick it up. I tried to stop you.” He studied her face. “I grabbed your arm, said we’d go home, get our dads, but you got away from me.”

  She waited, wondering at his point.

  “You remember what happened when you stuck out your hand to the kitten?”

  Caroline saw it again in her mind’s eye. The toy-size bundle of fluff had been lying so still. Blood had formed a halo around its tiny head, come in a stream from its nose. She’d reached for it instinctively, wanting to rescue it—heal it. She’d cried out, shocked, when it had bitten her, sinking its teeth deep into the web of flesh between her thumb and forefinger. The kitten had died by the time Jace got help, but she’d endured treatment for infection and possible rabies, not to mention an endless round of lectures from her dad about touching injured animals, stray animals—any animals she wasn’t familiar with. She turned her right hand over now, putting her left fingertip over the only scar that was left, a white line no longer than a hyphen at the base of her thumb. “I still can’t believe that tiny little thing bit me.”

  “Yeah. It sucks, but that’s life. Shit happens, and sometimes the wrong people get hurt.”

  “What do you mean by the ‘wrong people,’ Jace?” She felt it again, the heated flare of suspicion that he was withholding something from her—still.

  “Like I said before, Caroline, my best advice? Go home. And I offer that as a friend, an old friend,” he added.

  “Old friends tell each other the truth.”

  A moment passed when Caroline thought he might reconsider, but meeting her gaze again, his eyes were hard. “Don’t stir the pot, that’s all I’m saying—because you might not like what floats to the top.”

  Jace’s parting words echoed and died in Caroline’s mind as she watched him cross the parking lot. He got into an ordinary sedan, a cream-colored, newish-looking, regular car. Not the big black SUV she thought she’d seen following her last night. Jace’s outrage at her accusation—maybe he was entitled to it.

  Still, it rankled.

  She crossed the lobby, and while she waited for the elevator, she turned on her phone. It rang immediately. Her mom, calling again.

  “I’m fine,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Oh, Caro, I’m so glad to hear your voice. I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I’m okay.” Caroline stepped inside the elevator.

  “Rob said you have a concussion.”

  “It’s minor. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You hit ice, he said. It’s a terrible time of year to travel up there. I wish you hadn’t gone.”

  “I know, Mom, but it’s all right, really. Can you hold on a minute? I’ve got to get out my key card.” Caroline searched her purse, found the card, and let herself into the room. Sitting on the bed, she toed off her flats, smoothed the striped bedspread with the flat of her hand, thinking of a hot shower, slipping beneath cool, clean sheets.

  “You’re staying the night there in Omaha.” Disapproval nagged her mother’s voice.

  “I’m really too tired to do anything else.”

  “You don’t think you’d be better off at home?”

  “No, Mom, I don’t.”

  “Honey, I know there’s something going on between you and Rob. Don’t say it’s nothing.”

  Caroline imagined it, telling her mom about the completed forms she’d found open on Rob’s laptop last October, the ones he’d filled out for workers’ comp insurance and their last year’s tax return. She could explain how at first they had seemed perfectly in order, that it was only on close and then closer inspection that she’d realized all the numbers were wrong, that Rob had falsified the information both to their insurance company and to the IRS. What would her mother say? She believed like Caroline once had that Rob was a good man.

  “You aren’t going to tell me what this is about, are you?”

  Caroline wanted to. She could use her mother’s advice. What is my obligation? That was the question that haunted her, the one that was chewing her up on the inside. Do I go to the authorities? Could she? That was an even bigger question. Her research had scared her to death. Rob seemed not to register the seriousness of his crimes. She wondered if he even thought of it as crime. Maybe he’d doctored the documents for so long the lies felt normal, like business as usual. He didn’t seem to grasp, either, that he wasn’t the only one at risk, that she could land in a prison cell too. But even if she escaped prosecution and he didn’t—if it was her word that sent him to jail, would she sleep nights? While it was true she didn’t feel the love for him that she once had, out of regard for their history, the vows they’d made to be there for one another, didn’t she owe him her loyalty?

  Or did she?

  Her feelings, her sense of their situation, were so chaotic, skittering as they did from one side of the issue to the other. She’d chased them around in her brain so long she’d lost sight of what the right thing was. As horrible as it seemed, she was almost grateful to be sidetracked by her search for her dad.

  “Caroline?”

  “I won’t tell you it’s nothing—”

  “Rob seemed to think you’d already confided in me. That weekend in October when you were here.”

  That weekend. When she’d run into Steve Wayman and made a complete fool of herself. It had been just days after she’d discovered Rob’s dishonesty. They’d argued in circles, and to escape, Caroline had done the clichéd thing. She’d packed a bag, come home to her mother.

  She’d actually forgotten that the reunion a few of her former high school classmates had organized around their old alma mater’s homecoming football game was that weekend. She’d been in a taxi on her way to her mother’s house from the airport when an old girlfriend had called to remind her of the event. Caroline couldn’t have agreed any faster to attend the festivities. She barely greeted her mother before she left her standing, mouth agape, on the front porch. Sitting in the bleachers later among her long-ago friends, she yelled for the Riley High School Colts as if she were still their head cheerleader—until she looked behind her and spotted Steve two rows up.

  Their eyes collided, but only for a moment. She faced front, feeling her heart flutter, her stomach knotting with some mix of anticipation and dread. Steve was the road not taken, the boy she’d left without seeming reason or warning, and there he was, right behind her. The last time she’d spoken to him, more than twenty years ago, she’d broken his heart. He hadn’t understood why, but neither had she.

  The rest of the football game on that October night passed in a haze. She was conscious only of his presence and her fretting over it. Neither one sought out the other when the fourth quarter ended, and she felt deflated. She almost didn’t go when a gang of her former classmates invited her to join them for drinks at a little bar off Montrose. The place was packed, but she picked Steve out as if he were the only one in the crowd. He indicated there was an empty chair beside his at the table where he was sitting, and she sat down, heart tapping.

  They made small talk, and while his manner toward her was relaxed and friendly, she was agitated by voices in her head volleying questions: Was he going to bring up the past? Should she? Would he welcome it? Did she look old to him? Did her exhaustion, worry, and unhappiness show on her face?

  He looked mostly the same. Maybe the blue of his eyes was more faded. Maybe there were more fine lines fanning the corners of his eyes, but his dark hair was still thick, albeit cut military short, and his smile was still adorable, one sided and full of mischief.

  The voice in her brain kept up its nerve-racking dialogue.

  She had a vodka tonic to calm herself, and then another vodka tonic—what became too many vodka tonics—while he nursed a beer, maybe two, and instead of the past, she told him about New Wheaton Transit, the succe
ssful transportation company she and her husband co-owned. Her name was all over the documents, she said to Steve, including the records her husband had falsified. Her personal information was there for anyone to find like fingerprints on a murder weapon, like DNA at a crime scene.

  Later she wouldn’t remember at what point during her rambling monologue Steve told her he was with law enforcement. Caroline almost choked. Last she’d heard he’d wanted to be a veterinarian. His chosen occupation did explain the haircut, though. Those were her thoughts while Steve patted her back. He told her not to worry. He was a Texas lawman, a sheriff’s deputy in Madrone County in the Hill Country. He lived and worked in Greeley, the county seat. He had no jurisdiction in Iowa and no particular inclination to inform anyone there of her husband’s possible wrongdoing. At least she thought that was what he said. Words to that effect.

  The memory of that night still mortified her. Steve had felt obligated to drive her home; he’d walked her to her mother’s door and handed Caroline his business card after scribbling his personal mobile number on the back of it. Call me if I can ever be of help, he’d said. She still had his card, she realized, in her purse.

  “I don’t think Rob believed me when I told him I had no idea what the trouble was between you,” her mother said now.

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  “I gather you saw Ryan Kelly.”

  “Rob told you.”

  “You do realize he’s not a friend—not to you, maybe not even to Hoff.”

  “You mean Coach Kelly isn’t your friend.” Caroline was glad enough to be sidetracked from a discussion about Rob.

  “He was always loud and full of himself, a showboater.”

  “He remembered how much I liked hot cocoa,” Caroline said.

  “How sweet.” Her mother’s tone was ice.

  “I saw Jace.”

  “Ryan’s son? Last time I saw him, he was still sucking his thumb, and you were in diapers.”

  “He mentioned Coach Kelly may make it into the Hall of Fame.”

  Caroline’s mother hooted. “Hall of Shame is more like it.”

  “Dad always talked about how much his players loved him.”

  “They did. He was a great motivator. I admired him once myself.” She paused. “He’s one of those men who can’t hold his liquor.”

  “Dad has—he had a girlfriend in Wichita.”

  “Who told you that? Ryan?”

  “Jace.”

  Her mother made no comment.

  “Her name’s Tricia—Tricia DeWitt—she must have addressed the envelope for whatever reason. Jace said I should talk to her if I want to know where Dad is.”

  “So Hoff cheated on his second wife too. And you think he’s worth finding.”

  Caroline looked at the ceiling. As far as she knew, the circumstances under which her dad had left his four-year marriage to Julia in 1989 were a mystery. “I’m going to Wichita to talk to the woman, or Dad himself, if he’s there. I want to bring him to Aunt Lanie, Mom. I’m doing this for her.”

  “Well, I hope that’s true, but I have a hunch you’re also looking for some kind of apology from him for remarrying and abandoning you, or possibly you think you’ll renew your relationship with him. It makes me afraid for you, Caro. I don’t want him to hurt you again.”

  Caroline said it would be fine, and she was glad when her mother let it go.

  Her mother’s misgiving was still echoing through her mind, though, when she finished taking her shower. She understood why her mom was so bitter against her dad, more now in the wake of her discovery of Rob’s corrupt behavior. He had cheated, too; not in the same way, but it was a betrayal of trust all the same. The difference when it came to her dad was in their relationship. Caroline shared his blood, his DNA. She had her dad’s eyes, the same dimple in her left cheek, his wavy auburn hair, long limbs, and loose, easy stride.

  She picked at the pasta salad she’d ordered from room service, but she’d lost her appetite. She turned on the television and almost at once turned it off.

  She’d planned to stay the night in Omaha, but hours later, when it became apparent she wouldn’t sleep, she flung aside the bedcovers and got up. It took only moments to dress, repack her belongings, and check out of the hotel.

  She was waiting for her car engine to warm up when she opened her wallet and retrieved Steve Wayman’s business card. Madrone County Sheriff’s Department, it read below his name. She’d kept it deliberately, a sort of guilty keepsake. Running her fingertip over the raised lettering enlivened a mélange of memories: the two of them in a gondola, dangling from the top of a Ferris wheel at a county fair, walking hand in hand in Hermann Park, where they’d ridden the little train along with a dozen or more preschoolers. That day they’d planned their family of three children. At his folks’ house on Lake Livingston in Steve’s canoe. Steve had been trying to teach her to paddle, not row, he’d corrected her. You don’t row a canoe, he’d insisted. She’d stood up, meaning to give him a playful punch or kiss him, or who knew? The canoe had flipped, and into the water they’d gone. They’d been laughing. Slippery as fish. She could almost taste the lake water on his lips.

  Caroline rested her head against the seat back. They’d known each other all through high school, even dated occasionally, but that summer, after their graduation, they’d fallen in love. She might question now whether it was real. What had they known of love at eighteen? But through the years he’d never left her mind, not entirely. Her sense of him, of what they’d shared—that it had been special—filled her with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia.

  She wondered if Steve even remembered. He’d given no indication, at least that she could recall, at their unfortunate meeting last fall. She felt guilty for the persistence of her memories of him—of them—since then. She worried she was like her dad—faithless. She was still married, after all, even if her connection to Rob no longer felt secure.

  She turned over Steve’s card, where he’d written his cell number. She’d hurt him, badly, when at the end of that long-ago summer, she’d fled to college in Iowa without explanation. But she hadn’t understood it herself then. It had taken a few months’ worth of sessions with a therapist after she was married to Rob to uncover the presence of the anxiety—a kind of posttraumatic stress reaction—that had haunted her since her parents’ breakup. She now knew that after their high school graduation, when Steve had asked her to move in with him and attend the University of Houston, his proposal had set off a wild, irrational, and panic-stricken fear of commitment. It was as if her feelings for Steve had been too huge, too lovely—

  Too good to be true.

  That was how her mother had always described the bond between her and Caroline’s dad when they’d fallen in love at eighteen and married right out of high school. And just look what happened to them. Caroline’s brain had kept pointing her back to it, the divorce, her mother’s terrible grief, the long, dark days of her depression. At first she’d been able to dismiss her misgiving. She’d clung to the rationale that she and Steve were different. But her consternation had grown to eventually consume every shred of logic that they weren’t her parents. Back during her junior year of high school, when a cousin of her mother’s who lived in Des Moines had invited Caroline to visit Drake University there, she and her mom had made the trip. Caroline had liked the school, but Drake had never been an option until she’d needed a place, preferably a place far away from Houston and Steve, to run to.

  It had been a horrible wrench, one from which she had thought she might never recover. She knew Steve had suffered, too, and she couldn’t blame him now if he harbored vestiges of old anger toward her. If he avoided talking of the past. She wasn’t going to push it.

  But he had offered his help. He’d given her this card.

  Taking her cell phone from her purse, she started to punch in his number; then, remembering that even in Texas it was still an ungodly hour, she stopped herself. What would she say, in any case? Hello, this is Ca
roline, Caroline Corbett, the drunk woman you drove home from the bar in Houston last fall? I know you don’t deal with business fraud, but I was hoping you could help me find my missing father?

  But her rehearsal was moot at this point, wasn’t it? Caroline shoved her phone back into her purse and fastened her seat belt. If her dad was in Wichita living with Tricia DeWitt, she wouldn’t need to contact Steve and further humiliate herself, would she?

  6

  Harris—Tuesday, January 9

  He leaves the house for work without speaking, without giving Holly so much as a peck on the cheek. The boys were quiet this morning too. Harris is pretty sure they’re aware of the increasing dissension between their parents. The arguing he and Holly try to contain behind their closed bedroom door is seeping out. It’s loose in the air, coloring their words, the looks they avoid, the ways they don’t touch, and it’s getting worse. Last night, citing her refusal to spend another hour or a single minute in the same bed with him while he thrashed at the mercy of some dream monster he wouldn’t name, she took her pillow downstairs to the office they shared, where they kept a pullout sofa for guests.

  Alone on his back in their bedroom, he watched the moon shadows tremble over the walls and ceiling, thinking he should be the one to leave their bed. His mind was at war. The good guy said he should go to Holly, talk to her, but the other guy didn’t like it. The stuff she wanted him to spill his guts about—namely his childhood—was ancient history and had no bearing on his life now. She knew everything about him that was important. Who cares about before? the other guy, the smart-ass, wanted to know. Where’s she want you to start, anyway? Back when you were in diapers?

  He gets into his truck now, slamming the door, and backs it out of the driveway too fast. His to-go cup tips out of the holder, hitting the floor. “Goddammit!” He pulls to the curb to retrieve it, then sits, motor idling, staring out his windshield.