CLUTCHING THE STEEL HANDLE OF THE BUCKET, I WALKED QUICKLY TOWARD THE GREENHOUSE SINK, WANTING TO GET THE WATER AND GET OUT OF THERE. . . .
But when I reached for the faucet, I stopped. On the shelf above the sink sat a jade plant, its fleshy almond-shaped leaves glimmering in the moonlight. It moved. I took a step back, staring at it, knowing it was impossible, but certain I had seen it. The branches had moved, as if invisible fingers had riffled them.
I was going crazy. I was seeing what my mother had seen before she died, things knotting, things moving. “There’s no hand touching them, baby. They move by themselves.” Maybe Aunt Jule was right: I was obsessed with my mother, so much so that I was imagining her experiences.
I fought the panic rising in me and reached for the faucet again, turning the handle hard. When the bucket was half full, I shut off the stream.
I thought I felt a trickle on my neck-spray from the faucet or my own sweat. Reaching up to wipe it, I touched dry skin and my necklace. It wasn’t water, but the chain creeping along my neck. I looked down at the silver heart, rising like a slow tide, moving closer and closer to my throat. I dropped the bucket and spun around, as if to catch someone pulling the necklace, but no one was there. I clawed at the chain, grabbing it before it could choke me ...
Dark Secrets: Legacy of Lies
Dark Secrets: Don’t Tell
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DARK SECRETS
Don’t Tell
Elizabeth Chandler
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IL6+
To Bob,
You’re the best!
Love you.
one
Seven Years Earlier
The screen door creaked open. I shut my eyes, hoping Mommy would think I was asleep and go away. I wanted to burrow under my bedsheets, but I lay as still as I could, hardly breathing.
“I can’t sleep, Lauren.”
I sat up. “Nora! Next time, say it’s you.”
She stood by my bed, looking like a skinny ghost in her pale cotton nightie.
“Someone keeps whispering. And Bunny is missing. I can’t sleep,” she said.
Bunny was a stuffed animal with fur worn flat as Aunt Jule’s washcloths. Though Nora was twelve, two years older than I, she still took Bunny everywhere.
“I think he’s on the dock. Want me to get him?”
Nora was afraid of water, this summer even more than last.
“No, I can go as far as the dock,” she replied, then left my bedroom the way she had come, through the door to the upper porch.
I lay down, soothed by the sound of a sailboat line clanging against a mast. I came here every summer and loved Aunt Jule’s big wooden house with its long double porches, the old boathouse on the river, and the overgrown gardens. Every year, as far back as I could remember, I came to play with my godmother’s children, Nora and Holly, and their friend Nick.
Nick and Holly, a year older than I, had taught me all kinds of stuff Mommy didn’t like. Aunt Jule never minded. She took care of us the way she took care of her house and garden-trusting somehow that we’d all survive. Being a kid was easy here in Wisteria.
But not this summer. Mommy had come, and she and Aunt Jule were fighting. It got worse at night, especially if Mommy drank wine. Afterward I would hear her walking the porches up and down, up and down. Sometimes she’d come into my room to talk to me.
“Someone has been in my room, baby,” she’d say. “Someone has tied knots in all my scarves and necklaces. Someone hates me.”
It scared me when she talked like that. When we were back in Washington, she often feared that people were following us. It was just reporters and photographers who wanted a picture of the famous senator’s wife and daughter. I got used to it, but Mommy got more and more frightened by them. I thought it would be better at Aunt Jule’s, but it wasn’t.
She’d tell me things were moving in her room. “There’s no hand touching them, baby. They move by themselves.”
After a while she’d fall asleep, curled up on my bed. I’d lie awake for a long time, and when I finally closed my eyes, I’d dream of things moving with no hand touching them. In my dreams people chased us and tried to choke us with scarves and necklaces.
But Mommy hadn’t come tonight, not yet. Maybe I’d fall asleep and feel safe and happy the way I used to at Aunt Jule’s. The mist on the river was thick tonight, like a big soft comforter laid over the water, the edge of it lapping the house. I sank down in its friendly darkness, closed my eyes, and dreamed of playing treasure hunt with Nick.
In my dream the clank of a line against a sailboat mast became louder until it sounded like a bell being rung. The ringing wouldn’t stop. I sat up suddenly. It was the dock bell—the big bell we were supposed to ring if there was trouble on the river.
“Nora!” I cried, then jumped out of bed and ran to the porch outside my room.
Holly, whose bedroom was next to mine, hurried out at the same time.
“Nora went down to the dock,” I told her, panicky.
A light went on downstairs, cutting a path of white through the mist. Aunt Jule ran across the lawn toward the water, her bathrobe billowing behind her like a cape. Holly and I rushed to the end of the long porch and raced down the outside stairs.
The heavy mist blotted out the river and the dock. We paused for a moment at the top of the hill, straining to see, then ran down the grassy slope. I stepped on something sharp. Holly heard my cry and turned around. “It’s okay. Okay,” I told her, waving her on.
Close to the river edge she stopped and bent over. As I got nearer, I saw that Nora was safe, huddled on the ground.
“Where’s Mother?” Holly asked her sister when I had caught up.
Nora pointed toward the water, her hand shaking.
Aunt Jule’s voice sounded strange in the heavy
mist, as if it were separate from her. “Holly, call 911.”
Holly turned to me. “Lauren, go call.”
“You run faster,” I argued. “And you’re wearing shoes.”
“Go, Holly!” her mother shouted. She was wading in from the dark river, carrying something. I watched the way she swayed from side to side, as if the burden were heavy. I started into the water.
“Stay there, Lauren. Get back on shore.”
I backed up onto the dry land, but away from the whimpering Nora, my stomach in a knot. I could tell from Aunt Jule’s voice that something was wrong. The bundle she was carrying was long and limp. Even before I could see her clearly, I knew it was my mother. When Aunt Jule reached me, she laid her down in the grass. My mother’s dark eyes stared up at me.
“Mommy?” I said softly. “Mommy? Mommy!” I cried. I picked up her hand and shook it.
Aunt Jule caught my wrist “She—she can“t hear you, love,” she said, then closed my mother’s eyes.
two
The grief counselor had said I would go back to Wisteria when I was ready. It took me seven years.
Sunday afternoon, as I stood at the top of High Street in one of the prettiest river towns on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I wondered why I had stayed away so long. Wisteria was not only the home of the godmother I loved, but the place where I was born. It was the summertime kingdom in which I had been allowed to run safe and free.
I walked down the sidewalk, enjoying the familiar feel of bumpy brick, hot beneath my sandals. Pots of red geraniums sat on broad steps. Impatiens tumbled over baskets hanging from painted wood porches. The Colonial Days Festival, held every June, was in full swing, and people crowded into shops like Urschpruk’s Books. In front of Faye’s Gallery wind chimes hung as they always had in one of the sycamores lining the main street.
Then the wind shifted. I smelled the river. Everything went cold inside me. Despite the sunlight, I started to shiver. For a moment I thought of returning to my car and driving straight back to Birch Hill Academy. This was why I hadn’t come back here. This was why boarding with teachers and vacationing with my father and his political staff had seemed the better way to spend a summer.
I forced myself to keep walking and tried to focus on the present, making it a game to identify everything that was different: the new sign on Teague’s Antiques, the dogwoods planted on the town hall lawn, the color of the window shutters along Lawyers Row.
“Are you lost?”
I turned around. “Excuse me?”
Two guys were sprawled on a bench close to the sidewalk. The one who had spoken wore tattered shorts and a colonial three-cornered hat-nothing else. He had wide shoulders and long, muscular legs. He stretched dramatically, then lay his tanned arms along the back of the bench. “You look lost,” he said. “Can I help you find something?”
“Uh, no, thanks. I was just looking.”
He grinned. “Me, too.”
“Oh?” I glanced around, thinking I’d missed something. “At what?”
He and his friend burst out laughing.
Way to go, Lauren, I thought. He had been looking at me! He was flirting.
Feeling stupid, I stuck my hands in my pockets and kept walking. I knew I was blushing.
“Have a good time looking,” he called after me.
I turned halfway around. “Thanks.”
On the one-to-ten scale of the girls at Birch Hill, he was a definite eight, maybe higher if he took off the hat. I could see from the slight tilt of his head that he was assigning a number to me, too. I turned back quickly and kept walking.
“Make sure you stop at the dunking booth,” he added. “It’s part of the festival, two blocks down. See you in about ten minutes.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Okay ... maybe.” I felt the warmth spreading on the back of my neck and wondered if the backs of my legs were pink as well.
Would he really meet me there? But then what? Nothing, of course. I was good at math and English, and good at sports, but lousy at guys. Of course, a girls’ boarding school didn’t allow for much experience with guys, but the real reason was that when I got the chance, I ducked it.
I wondered if Aunt Jule’s daughters were dating a lot now. My godmother visited me twice a year and downloaded me on everything I had done, but she always brushed off my questions about Nora and Holly with short answers. And she never remembered to bring photos, so I couldn’t even picture them as teens. Maybe Nora and Holly knew this guy, I thought, then put him out of my mind.
The two and a half blocks from Washington Street to the town harbor were closed off to cars for the festival. I began to wander through the tents set up in the street. At a political booth I said a silent hello to my father. An unflattering picture of his face was blown up to beach-ball size and nicely framed by a red circle, a diagonal line drawn through it—the banning symbol. The farmers and watermen on the Eastern Shore hated his political agenda; if I were them, I would, too.
I passed the Mallard, a colonial tavern converted to a bed-and-breakfast, then stopped in at Tea Leaves Café, where the best cookies in the world were made. Standing inside the door, I enjoyed the cool draft from the ceiling fans and the rich, familiar smells of brown sugar and butter. Then a feeling of dread spread through me. My skin prickled with sweat and turned ice cold. I remembered sitting in the café as a little girl, watching my mother slowly descend the steps from the second floor, where fortunes were told.
Mommy’s face was the color of pale icing. Old Miss Lydia had peered into her crystal ball and seen grave danger and death. When my mother told me that—like a fact, not a prediction—I was so scared I cried. I didn’t know how I could protect her.
Looking back on it now, I realized that Miss Lydia hadn’t needed a crystal ball to make such a dark prediction. After a hundred tabloid stories about my father’s romances and my mother’s wealth, and having endured years of cruel comments from political advisers who saw my mother as a liability, she had come to believe that everyone was against her—everyone except me. She had clung to me as if I were a life preserver. Fear and anger had been written on her face, and that was all the fortune-teller needed to read.
I left the café and continued on, barely seeing the shops and booths I passed. Not until I crossed Cannon Street did I come back to the present, startled back into it by an amplified voice.
“Come on, all you spaghetti arms! Who’s going to wind up and throw that ball? You there—come on, skinny. Put me out of my misery. Dunk me!”
It was the guy from the bench, still wearing his three-cornered hat. He razzed the fairgoers from a plank suspended above a vat of water. According to the sign, the dunking booth was raising money for Wisteria High School.
Two middle-aged men took the bait and threw at the target, a four-inch disk which, if struck, would upend the plank.
“Nice curve ball, buddy. Too bad it was five feet off. Come on, girls, your turn. Show that guy how it’s done.”
Several groups of girls about my age had gathered around the booth, and guys were hanging out to watch the girls hanging out. There was a lot of body language going on—a glance over a bare shoulder, the sweep of eyelashes, the lifting of long waves of hair. I could learn something from these girls, I thought—not that I planned to use it anytime soon.
“Come on, limber up those pretty arms,” the guy with the hat urged. “Want me to make the target bigger? How big? Big as a beach towel? Think you could hit that?”
I could, I thought. I could peg that little red disk. But I stayed at the back of the crowd, observing the flirting.
“Hey, it’s the looker!” he announced with delight. “I didn’t think you’d show, looker. Step right up! Why’re you standing all the way back there?”
I glanced to the left and the right, hoping someone would materialize next to me.
“You,” he said.
Everyone in the crowd turned to me. I’ve been stared at in Washington, where people know I’m “Brandt?
??s daughter,” and I’ve learned to shut it out. But this was different My instincts told me I couldn’t shut him out.
“You’re not shy, are you?”
“Shy of what?”
Some of the kids laughed. I hadn’t meant to be funny.
“Shy of showing off that arm.”
“No,” I said.
He waited for me to say more. There was a long pause. I felt as if I were back in the days when my father would call me up to the speaker’s podium and I was supposed to say something cute. I remained stubbornly silent.
“Then come on up. Do everybody a favor and shut me up,” he said. “Put down your money, pick up that ball, and let it fly, looker.”
“I’d rather not.”
People laughed.
He flapped his arms and squawked like a chicken. “Afraid you can’t throw that far?”
“I know I can.”
He lifted his hat in a small salute to my claim. Blond curls slipped out, then he plopped the hat back on and said, “I dare you.”
The guy with whom he had been sitting on the bench put down a dollar and motioned to me.
“Come on,” the blond guy taunted from the dunking bench. “Show us some muscle.”
This is what you find in a small town, I thought, guys from the last century when it comes to their attitude toward girls.
I made my way to the front of the crowd. The guy on the plank started singing what must have been the Wisteria High School anthem. His buddy handed me a softball. I focused on the target, imagining it was the first baseman’s glove at Birch Hill and we needed one more out to win the championship. I planted my feet and threw.
Bull’s-eye! He went down on a high note.
The crowd cheered loudly. For a moment all we saw was the floating hat, then his blond head popped up.
“Lucky shot,” he said.
“No way,” I replied.
“Law of chance. Eventually someone had to hit the target.”