The Only Secret Left to Keep

by Katherine Hayton

  “Shannon is innocent,” he said, and then his eyes rolled up into his head, and his body collapsed completely, spent and limp.

  When Shannon ran to his side, dropping roughly to her knees and earning a carpet burn, her father’s lips were turning blue, and the skin of his face appeared dull and gray. She picked up a hand from the floor and rubbed it between her own, holding out hope when it blushed with a hint of pink.

  The policewoman who’d accompanied them into the ambulance, answering questions a mile a minute and elbowing Shannon when a deeper knowledge was required, had disappeared when her father went into surgery. No need to keep tabs on the cuckoo confessed murderer when the surgeon had him within his care.

  Shannon couldn’t imagine what had gone through her dad’s mind while he was out in the police station waiting room. When they’d whisked her away to the station, Shannon had told him not to follow. She’d said that when they let her go, she’d either catch a bus home or give him a call then to pick her up.

  What on earth had been going through his head?

  “Ten years ago, a heart attack would be a death sentence,” the woman beside her said. The words were spat out like pellets, each one evenly timed. A robot issuing nonsense phrases.

  “These days,” Shannon mimicked back, half in jest and half to reassure herself, “they can do marvelous things.”

  “It’s like a miracle,” they said in tandem, and Shannon smiled shyly before dropping her head back down to focus on her magazine.

  The woman’s phone vibrated, a loud sound compared to their shared silence, and she excused herself to walk further along the corridor. A child or younger relative by the sound of it. Mrs. Wainwright’s voice had dropped straight into reassurance mode.

  Shannon turned and looked out the window. They were streaked with dirt and dust from the construction site further along the riverbank. Building a hospital onto the hospital. The flecks had piled up so thick that she reached a hand out to brush the pile away. It was on the other side, of course. All her efforts achieved was to add fingerprints to the glass.

  Below her, on the river, was a couple standing still and nervously staring at the water. Someone forced to take a break from visiting so worrying out in the great wide world instead.

  If the police believed her father’s story, did that mean they’d leave her alone about Sam?

  No. Shannon didn’t think that for a minute. All her father had done was to pull something up from the depths that had firmly settled in the dark mud. Everything would be black with silt and hard to see through until enough time passed for it to drift down deep again.

  The police were being dicks about questioning her, but Shannon didn’t get the sense they believed she was truly involved in Sam’s death or disappearance. The one detective had said they didn’t have a record of her arrest and being detained, but it didn’t sound like they’d gone looking.

  Nothing would link her to the crime, at least nothing she could think of. Poor Sam. Always believing that people were better than they were. Always trusting the wrong person in any given situation.

  A startled yelp from out in the corridor and Mrs. Wainwright hurried back into the room to grab her bag. She whipped her head from side to side, looking to see if the long hours of waiting had led her to deposit more than she remembered. A second later, she ran out of the room. Stupid little steps on stupidly high heels.

  A cold chill pierced into Shannon’s heart. Heart surgeons may be able to work miracles these days, but it looked like they’d fallen short of that goal with Mr. Wainwright. When her palms began to call out in pain, Shannon looked down to see bloody half-circles from where her nails had dug into them.

  At least she could forgo the pretense of reading now. She tossed the magazine back onto the table. After taking her shoes off, Shannon curled them neatly up beside her on the chair.

  If the surgeon gave her dad the all clear, she could easily walk from the hospital to the city mission. If she knew her dad was on the mend, there was a lot of gratitude to pay back out.

  The bright colors of the Antigua Boat Sheds drew Shannon’s eye as she stared out the window once more. A woman slowly ambled down to a cafe chair outside, leaning down to kiss the cheek of her waiting friend.

  That could have been Shannon and Gerry if she’d played her cards right. Out in the afternoon sun, having a lovely chat over a cup of decadent coffee. Instead, she’d let Gerry walk out of her life and might never see her again.

  “Miss Rickards?”

  Shannon turned to see the surgeon standing in the doorway. Her heart jumped in her chest and spots of bright lights shot in a floral shower across her eyes. It was hard to hear him over the sudden pounding in her ears.

  “Would you like to come along to my office, so we can have a quick chat?” the doctor asked. “Your father’s in the recovery room at the moment, and it’ll be a few hours before he’s ready to have visitors.”

  “He’s alive?” Shannon whispered, her voice disappearing into a croak. She cleared her throat to try again, but the surgeon was already nodding.

  “I’ve put a stent into his heart so he should be a lot more comfortable when he wakes up.” Seeing that Shannon wasn’t moving the surgeon sighed and came to sit next to her instead.

  “He’s going to be okay?”

  “The surgery went well. As long as your father recovers well from that, he should have a good five years at least.”

  “What do you mean, if he recovers?”

  The doctor leaned his head forward, closer to Shannon, meeting her eyes. “There are always dangers with any surgery, especially involving the heart. There’s a small chance that some fat might dislodge from the walls of his aortic valve because of the increased blood flow. Also, although the incision in his wrist is small, it still poses the risk of infection.”

  “So, his chances of recovery are . . . good?”

  The surgeon smiled, apparently at the surprise in Shannon’s voice. “We’ll know more in a few days, but the major risks were during surgery and coming out from the anesthetic. Your father has managed both of those, so yes. His chances of recovery are good. If he agrees, then we can send him home with you tomorrow.”

  Shannon felt relief flood throughout her body, so much that she began to cry. The tears on her face that she’d usually find embarrassing, she felt relieved about. For once, she cried tears of relief rather than despair.

  “You said I could see him in a few hours?”

  The surgeon nodded and stood up. “You can visit with him as soon as he’s wheeled back onto the ward. Why don’t you take a break for the moment, and then come back in a few hours?”

  Shannon nodded and walked down the hall to the bank of elevators. Five years. It was more than she’d dared to hope.

  Five years that he could spend rotting in prison.

  Before Ngaire or the remainder of the team could get too comfortable with the altered focus, the district commander dropped by to wrest the case out of their hands. Instead, the commander transferred it to the more television friendly hands of Detective Inspector Roger Moimoi with Gascoigne demoted to an assist as needed.

  Somehow, the word had already infiltrated through to the media. While the new team headed out on the priority of letting the parents of the dead boys know there was a miscarriage of justice hovering, Gascoigne had the task of clearing out the journalists that circled the station house, sniffing carrion in the air.

  Minutes after that work was accomplished, Deb had headed out with Redding to investigate a serious assault. A domestic incident, Gascoigne barely considered it before deciding on a mixed gender response. Redding could flash his pearly whites at the woman while Weedon could handle her own with the male. Especially considering the dents already decorating the man’s head.

  Ngaire found herself back in the incident room, scanning the last of the documentation into the computer file before she returned the box to the archives. Already, the new team had called through to the station, wondering
what the holdup was.

  In a way, she was glad to be shot of it. Having worked a cold case in the last couple of years, Ngaire had no desire to try to pry old memories out of Septuagenarian heads. She paused with the full-color photograph of Sam Andie in her hand. The young face, full of the sparkle of new beauty, full of life, gone forever a few months after the shot had been taken.

  It wasn’t her problem anymore, though.

  Ngaire placed the photograph carefully down in the box and replaced the lid, sealing it with masking tape for good measure.

  At least she didn’t need to go back down into that dungeon archive again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Well, I still prefer the original,” Findlay said as he and his date Rhonda walked out of the movie theater. He’d sprung for a double ticket to the remake of Goodbye, Pork Pie and to his surprise had stayed for the entire showing.

  “You’re just saying that because of nostalgia,” Rhonda replied, probably in a fully accurate summation of his feelings. “If you watched the first one again, I bet you wouldn’t think it was as good.”

  “The ending was better.”

  “Just because he got to cop off with his missus, doesn’t mean it was any better,” Rhonda said, giving him a playful nudge in his ribs. “Although, I wouldn’t have minded seeing Dean O’Gorman starkers if it came to that.”

  “Play your cards right, and I might let you see me in my birthday suit, tonight.”

  “If ‘play your cards right’ means beating you at strip poker, otherwise I think I’ll take a rain check.”

  Findlay gave an exaggerated sigh, while inside he was disturbed to feel a tiny smidgeon of relief. “Do you have any Snifters left?”

  Rhonda handed him over the cardboard box, with only a few still rolling around in the bottom. When he’d been a kid, the movie theaters had sold them in plastic cups. Findlay didn’t know when the change had occurred, but since it downsized the total volume of mint and chocolate flavored sweets by half, he wasn’t a fan of the decision.

  “Where to now, then?” he asked. “Did you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

  “I’ve already had one in there,” Rhonda said, jerking her head back. “If I have another, I might not be fit to drive. Besides which”—she gave him a wry smile—“it is only one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Ha,” Findlay replied, turning to walk backward so he could speak face to face. “I work nights, most of the time. This is practically midnight to me.”

  “Is that what you call sitting around, hoping for a police car to chase?” Rhonda teased. “Working means something different on my floor.”

  Rhonda took photographs for the press office, spending the day rushing along from one assignment to the next with barely a breath to spare in between. It was her day off today. Otherwise, they would be passing ships in the night.

  Despite working in the same building for over a year, Findlay had only met Rhonda at the Christmas party a few months before. Not attending, he was covering the night shift and bumped into her sneaking a cigarette in the stairwell. His kind of gal.

  “We can’t all be tearing about at all hours, trying to get a shot in before the crime scene tape ruins the view.” Findlay turned to face forward again just in time, almost crashing into a large man speaking urgently into his cell phone.

  “How about a walk around Hagley Park?” Rhonda asked. “I haven’t been down this side of town for ages. We could loop around and wind up at the Botanical Gardens. The roses will be magnificent right around now.”

  None of that sounded the slightest bit interesting to Findlay. If he were truly a man, then his protestations should be lodged now, before she started to think he was a completely different person than Findlay really was. As luck would have it, his mobile chose that moment to buzz merrily in his pocket, a welcome distraction.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, slowing his walk until he’d completely stopped, straining to read the message from the tiny screen. Smart phones hadn’t made it to Findlay’s budget yet, so his battered Nokia had to make do.

  “What is it?” Rhonda asked. Like any good member of the reporting staff, she tried to read over his shoulder. Findlay started to raise it up, obscuring her view, then tilted it toward her instead.

  “Who is Shannon Rickards?” she asked a moment later.

  Findlay searched his memory banks, pulling the name from the massive file of useless information and cold cases that littered his brain. “She went down for the murder of two teenage boys.”

  “No way,” Rhonda exclaimed, pulling out her own phone to start searching for more information. “Oh,” she said, disappointment clear, “it was ages ago.”

  “I bet it won’t seem like ages to those kids’ families,” Findlay said. “We should get over there now and see if they want to give a statement.”

  Although to the general public, the act of the media requesting interviews from victims’ families seemed a lot of the time to be cruel or prying, Findlay had enough experience to know that more often it was cathartic. The opportunity to tell someone the good things you remembered about a dead loved one were usually restricted to a few fumbling minutes at a podium, in front of people who were as often bored as they were grieving.

  The flip side for journalists, as well as filling up those column inches, was the unique perspective it offered to the inside of a life, another comparison to their own.

  Not to mention, when it turned out the grieving relative or friend was also the one responsible for the horrendous crime. That was the juice that Findlay lived for.

  “Do you have a camera with you?” Findlay asked, interrupting Rhonda as she called through to her own contacts. She held up a finger, one second, and then turned her back to shield the call.

  Get down to the Central Christchurch Police Station, the message on his phone read. Bob Rickards has just confessed to the murders that Shannon Rickards served time for.

  Findlay looked at Rhonda’s back for another second, then flicked through his contacts for Ngaire’s number. With his thumb over the button, ready to call, he hesitated. Should he try Deb Weedon’s number instead?

  Deb didn’t like him much, but they’d bumped up against each other enough that Findlay thought she wasn’t beyond doing him a favor. Ngaire would be easier to press for information but the thought of doing that while he was on a date, seemed very wrong indeed.

  Stuff it.

  Findlay dialed the number and curved his shoulders forward in a protective stance to help hear over the street noise. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. A click on the end before the line began to buzz again, told him that it had automatically rerouted from the direct line.

  He dialed Deb’s phone and got the same response, so tried Ngaire’s private number instead.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Findlay,” he said, then stopped and blinked in confusion, wondering if his abruptness was rude. A few seconds went by before he realized that ceasing to talk was far worse. “Sorry,” he tried. “It’s a bad line. How are you doing?”

  He winced at that. The insincerity of his tone made him feel ashamed enough to wonder if there was a nearby hole he could crawl into. Why didn’t his parents teach him manners when he was little? he scolded inside his head, conveniently forgetting the many wails from his mother.

  “I’m busy,” Ngaire said back, just as blunt. What he deserved, but still it carried a barb on it that would leave a small scar. “What are you after?”

  The old Findlay would have gone straight into jocular mode. Even now, he could feel the teases stacking up against his tongue. Too late for that. Whatever had gone wrong between them, a joke wouldn’t fix it.

  Back to blunders and blurting. “I’ve just received an alert from my editor saying that you have Shannon Rickards down at the station.”

  “Nope. She’s long gone,” Ngaire answered. An absolutely straight answer but Findlay could feel it wriggle and bend.

  “It says here that her father just confessed
to the crime that she went to prison for.”

  “Does it?”

  Damn it. Now it felt like he was in the middle of a fight. Findlay flicked his fringe off his forehead with long fingers and tried not to let his voice come out adversarial. “I know you were looking at a case from back then. Is it in any way related?”

  There was a pause and a small sigh. Findlay felt a creep of hope that it heralded a softening in Ngaire’s manner.

  “Another station took the whole thing over. I’m not working on anything more than paperwork right now.” Another short pause then she said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “To work on paperwork?” Findlay joked then realized that the call had ended. Ngaire had hung up without even saying goodbye. He looked over at Rhonda and felt a weight of guilt so large it extinguished any joy he’d felt in their date up until then. What am I doing?

  “You get anything?” Rhonda asked, snapping her fingers in front of Findlay’s face when he didn’t answer immediately. “I need to get back to my car and get moving.”

  “My contact didn’t offer anything enlightening. I can give you a lift to the family homes if you want.” Back to plan A.

  “Nah,” she said. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got my gear in the trunk. Besides, then you’d just need to drop me back here.” She started to walk away, from her expression Rhonda was plotting out angles already in her head. “Thanks for the offer, though,” she called back over her shoulder. “If I don’t bump into you again today, then I had a really nice time.”

  “Me, too,” Findlay said, swallowing the liquid guilt down into his stomach where it would burn like acid. With Rhonda walking out of earshot, he whispered, “We should do it again sometime.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Anyone want to help me out with a dead floater?” Doug called across the office. “It’s not fresh so only the strong of stomach need apply.”

  Ngaire scrunched her face up and turned away. Suddenly, coordinating the statements from the past few days seemed a far more engrossing task than it had ten minutes before.