Little Secrets

by Megan Hart

  Somehow, he was holding her, rocking and stroking her back. She didn’t want to be in his arms, but didn’t have the energy to push him away. He comforted her, but it was his own comfort he sought, and Ginny was just too damned tired to stop him.

  “But I thought…” Sean murmured. “I mean, I saw some of your emails…”

  She didn’t have the strength to even confront him about his snooping; at any rate, she’d sent the emails and had been wrong to do it. She always knew she would own up to what she’d done, if she had to. But that was before she found out about Sean’s betrayal, which was somehow bigger than what she’d done. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it only felt that way to her and would be the opposite to him. It didn’t matter.

  “You didn’t sleep with him,” he said happily, as though that made everything okay. “Good. Oh good.”

  She pushed away from him and went on clumsy feet to the sink to splash some cold water on her face and the back of her neck.

  “I’m glad,” Sean said from behind her. “God, Ginny. You don’t know how glad I am.”

  “Well,” she said coldly without turning, “don’t be that fucking happy. I didn’t sleep with him, but I wanted to. And I was going to. He didn’t show. That’s the only reason I didn’t.”

  The lights went out again.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Instant darkness fell over them.

  Ginny heard the scrape of a chair on the linoleum and Sean’s muttered curse. The table bumped, the glass salt and pepper shakers in the center of it rattling. Sean cursed again.

  “Don’t move,” she said crossly. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  “Where’s the flashlight?”

  “I don’t know. It should have turned on when the power went out.”

  “Did you use it today?”

  She could sense where this argument was going and her answer came out clipped, “No. I didn’t have to. It was daylight when Peg came for me.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t use it and then not put it back?”

  That he could accuse of her this, of all things, while they stood together in the dark, after having the worst fight of their marriage…Ginny lost it. She started to laugh, at first low and then louder. Her laughter cycled up and up, becoming a series of hiccuping, frantic guffaws that hurt her throat.

  “Jesus, Ginny! Stop it!” His hand passed by her close enough to brush her sleeve, but he missed her.

  “I didn’t use it!” she shouted into the shadows. “You’re the one who used it last. Remember? You took it downstairs to check the fuse box the last time it blew. That’s the last time I saw it. You left it down there, probably.”

  “Well shit.” Sean sounded miserable.

  She didn’t want to take glee in it, but she did. If she’d been able to caper with it, she would’ve. She wasn’t proud of that, but it was the truth. The full and awful truth. She was glad he’d been the one to lose the flashlight, that his accusation had bounced back and hit him in the face.

  “You left it down there,” she crowed. More laughter, this time cut off with her hand over her mouth because the sound of it disturbed her. It would’ve been better to vomit than keep laughing that way.

  “I’d better go get it.”

  “How are you going to do that in the dark?” she said derisively. Disgusted by this, by everything. And so suddenly tired all she wanted to do was lie down and close her eyes and maybe not wake up.

  “Let me use your phone.”

  The baby moved inside her, a reminder of why Ginny couldn’t give in to selfishness. She sighed and fished in her pocket for her phone. When she thumbed the screen, the dull blue gleam provided at least a little illumination. A thought snagged her; she pulled her hand back before he could take the phone.

  “Where’s yours?” A beat of silence proved her right again. Ginny sighed, no longer gleeful. No longer glad to be proven right. “You lost it?”

  “I dropped it,” Sean said. “I think I did something to the battery. It won’t turn on.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with your goddamned phone,” she quoted. “Wow.”

  “Just give me yours. I’ll go get the flashlight and we’ll figure out what to do next.” Sean took the phone from her limp fingers. “You stay here. Don’t move.”

  Ginny said nothing. She watched the blue light move out of the kitchen. She heard the basement door open, then the creak of Sean’s feet on the stairs.

  She sat in the darkness.

  She sat for a long time.

  She wasn’t sure when the tears began, only that they started in silence. They burned in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She tasted salt. She put her face in her hands and sobbed, shoulders heaving, body racking.

  In the darkness, Ginny broke.

  And in the darkness, a small hand touched her.

  She didn’t startle from it, because somehow she’d been expecting this to happen. Small fingers curled over her shoulder, then slipped down her arm. A small hand held hers. The fingers were cold and slender, the nails ragged when they pressed lightly into Ginny’s palm.

  “Carrie?” Ginny whispered, and got no answer but a squeeze.

  Then the hand withdrew as the sound of Sean’s feet came up the stairs. The cellar door opened with a familiar creak, and in the next moment the white glare of the flashlight cut through the dark and pierced her eyes. Shadows danced behind her.

  Something crashed.

  “Ginny?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “I told you to stay put.” Sean shone the light around the kitchen.

  Ginny put up a hand to block the glare, but not before she saw a glass of water she’d left on the edge of the counter had fallen and smashed on the floor. She twisted in her chair, but whatever had knocked it off the counter had disappeared. She closed her fingers over the residual feeling of that cold touch.

  “You could’ve cut yourself,” Sean said.

  “I didn’t do that.” Outside, the wind howled and a spatter of snow hit the windows over the sink.

  It startled Sean, who crunched glass under his feet. He muttered another invective and swept the light over her. “It just fell?”

  Ginny shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me it was a ghost.”

  She said nothing, told him nothing. His shoes crunched more glass and he swept the light around the room again. He grunted.

  The lights came on as all the appliances beeped. Sean clicked off the flashlight. Ginny didn’t move.

  “It’s broken,” Sean said unnecessarily, and she didn’t know if he meant the glass or everything else.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Mr. Miller?”

  The man getting ready to cross the street paused, brow furrowed as he tightened his scarf around his neck. “Yes?”

  Ginny had been good at her job, back when she did it. Good at getting people to talk to her without alarming them. Something in her face, she thought. Something pleasant and deceptively innocent. She wasn’t investigating Brendan Miller for insurance fraud, so, really, he had nothing to fear from her, but he looked at her warily anyway.

  “I’m Ginny Bohn.”

  It took him a second or two, but he figured it out. From his expression, Ginny thought he might bolt, and what would she do then? Waddle after him? The thought was laughable.

  His gaze fell to the bump of her belly beneath her puffy coat. “If there’s a problem with the house, you need to talk to the realtor about it. We signed papers; you took it as is…”

  “It’s not about the house. Well. It sort of is about the house.” She stepped to the side, in front of him, when he moved to go around her. She’d stopped working because she was pregnant, but now realized something—he might’ve shoved her aside if not for her belly. She held up the train case. “I have this.”

 
Miller stopped trying to get around her. “What is it?”

  “It belonged to your sister.”

  The cold wind had rubbed two pink spots in his cheeks. Now they grew brighter. His mouth worked for a few seconds before he actually spoke. “Impossible.”

  “I found it in the house. I thought you might want it.”

  He fixed her with an angry, sullen glare. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with anything from that house. Okay?”

  “Okay. Okay.” She knew how to soothe, how to gentle. Like taming a skittish horse or a strange, tooth-baring dog. “I’m sorry. I just thought you might like to read it.”

  “Read it?”

  “There’s a diary,” Ginny told him. “At least, I think that’s what it is. It has your sister’s initials on it. Look, can I buy you a cup of coffee or something? Get in out of the cold?”

  She pointed down the street. “My treat.”

  For a moment, she thought he’d say yes. She was so certain, in fact, that she’d already taken a few steps in that direction. But Miller shook his head and backed up.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Ginny paused. There was an art to working people, getting them to agree to things they didn’t want to do, or to admit to what they’d prefer to keep a secret. “I know what happened to your sister.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. His gaze flickered. His mouth thinned. “Nobody knows what happened to my sister.”

  This time, he did push past her. Ginny managed to snag his sleeve, not hard enough to stop him but enough to give him pause. “There’s something in the house, Mr. Miller.”

  He’d just stepped off the curb, and stood between two parked cars. Everything about him vibrated the urgency to flee across the street. He looked at her over his shoulder.

  “I told you. You bought it as is. If you have a problem, talk to your realtor.” Then he stepped out into the street.

  “I think it’s your sister!”

  That stopped him. He turned. He wasn’t much older than Ginny, though the lines on his face and gray in his hair made him seem so. He was good-looking, behind the scowl and the furrowed brow, but there was nothing welcoming about him. Not at all.

  His gaze dropped to her belly. “What is it that you want, exactly?”

  “I just want to know what happened. That’s all.”

  She’d gotten to him. Everything about him sagged. He put a hand over his eyes, briefly, before looking down the street to the coffee shop.

  “Fine. I’ll give you half an hour, but that’s it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “She was always scribbling.” Miller looked at the case Ginny had pushed across the table in front of him, but he didn’t touch it. “My dad called her Doodle. She’d draw for hours in these big notepads, that soft white paper…what was it called? Newsprint. She’d draw cartoons and landscapes and people, animals, just whatever. And when she got older, she’d write stories to go with them.”

  “Did she keep a diary?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention.”

  Something in this sentence seemed to break him again, because he put his elbow on the table and his face into the comfort of his hand. Ginny had learned the trick of seeing when someone was faking pain, but everything about this guy’s anguish was real. Her fingers crept over the table toward him, but she stopped herself from touching his sleeve. He didn’t seem the sort to welcome it.

  “I didn’t pay attention,” he repeated. “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see.”

  “See what?” Ginny asked gently.

  “My mother didn’t either, though that’s not really an excuse.” He shuddered. His fingers dug into his skin. His hand covered his eyes, so she couldn’t see if he was crying, but his voice had gone rough and hoarse.

  Ginny was silent, giving him time.

  When he finally looked at her, his eyes were rimmed red but dry. “She was always his favorite. I was the son, right? He should’ve been taking me out to play ball in the backyard, toss around the pigskin. He should’ve been taking me fishing, camping, all that shit. But nope, Caroline was his favorite. They’d spend hours tucked up together in his big chair, reading books or looking at those stories she wrote. She could do anything and get away with it. Once she carved her initials in the dining room table, can you believe it? I thought my mom was going to murder her, but my dad just told her to leave it alone. Caroline was a daddy’s girl, all the way. My mother called her ‘the little wife.’ Like she was joking, but I don’t think she was.”

  A worm of nausea twisted inside her. Ginny’s fingernails scraped at the table as she withdrew her hand. She linked her fingers, squeezing them tightly together on the table in front of her.

  “Yeah,” Miller said, though Ginny hadn’t spoken. “You know what I’m talking about. It was cute when she was little, right? But not when she started to get boo…breasts. She shot up a few inches, started to get curves and wear makeup.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Thirteen. And, Christ…” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead for a moment, then shook his head. “I have two daughters. Seventeen and fourteen. I know what it’s like, you know, when they start developing. It gets weird. They get weird.”

  Distaste rippled across his face, and he gave her a look of such loathing that she’d have recoiled if it had been directed at her instead of his memories.

  “You have to make some distance between you. You just have to. They’re not your little girls anymore, you can’t be having them sit on your lap and whisper in your ears. It’s just…that’s not what a dad does.” His lips drew back to reveal perfectly straight but yellowed teeth. “I have daughters. I know.”

  Ginny had a flash of a summer night years ago. She’d been what, twelve? Thirteen? She’d worn a thin, sleeveless nightgown with flowers on it, and it had shrunk in the wash. More likely, she’d grown. It hit her midthigh instead of reaching her knees, and the fabric had grown faded in the wash. It had been her favorite for a long time. She’d come out of the shower, her hair still wet, and gone to sit with her dad on the couch to catch a rerun of some comedy program. He’d been annoyed, told her to go change her clothes or stay in her room. She hadn’t understood then and maybe not ever, until just now.

  “What did your mother do?”

  Miller grimaced and looked down at his hands, which had linked much the same as Ginny’s. “She had her favorite too, I guess. Even if by default.”

  “And then your sister disappeared.”

  “She never came home from school.” He kept his voice low and his gaze on his hands. His fingers twisted tighter, knuckles going white with the pressure. “She went in the morning and stayed all day. Her friend Laura was the last person to see her, and she was crossing the park, heading for home. She never made it.”

  “And they never found out what happened?”

  Another shrug. He looked out the window, toward the street. “No. Someone reported they saw her getting into a white van, but, really, that’s such a cliché; who knows if it’s true. We had some other reports of her being spotted in different places across the country. California, Montana. None of them ever panned out. She was just…gone.”

  “What did your parents do?”

  He looked at her. His smile was terrible, thin-lipped and more like a snarl. “They fell apart. They’d been on rocky ground for a while before that.”

  “Fighting a lot?”

  He shook his head. “Oh no. They never fought, at least not where I heard them. No. They stopped talking to each other before Caroline went missing. After she was gone for a while and the news started to taper off and the investigation went cold, they stopped even seeing each other. It was like they were invisible to each other. They’d pass in the hall, not even look at each other.”

  “It must’
ve been horrible for you. I’m sorry.”

  His laughter was worse than the terrible smile. “It could’ve been worse. I could’ve been in the back of someone’s van, right?”

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.” The cup in front of him had stopped steaming, and now he drank. “We stayed there for another year after she went missing. We never talked about her. I mean, I tried, but I wasn’t allowed to.”

  “They told you that?”

  “They didn’t have to. I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t heartless. I could see it upset them. So it was sort of like…I’d never had a sister in the first place. They took down her pictures. They put away her things. I wanted to save some of them…I tried.”

  He cleared his throat once, then again. He looked at her, his gaze naked. “She always wanted a cat, but my dad hated them. Said he was allergic, but he wasn’t. He just didn’t like them. It was maybe the one thing he didn’t give her that she wanted, you know? But he let her have hamsters instead. A whole bunch of them, they just kept having babies. Well, after she was gone, nobody remembered to take care of the hamsters. They started eating each other.”

  Ginny swallowed, thinking of the plastic bags in the closet. The bones. The fluffs of fur. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” Brendan Miller gave a short, sharp laugh. “I didn’t want them to take them away, though. I kept thinking, hey, maybe she’ll come back. If she ran away, right? She’ll come back for them. She loved those stupid hamsters. So I took them, and I hid them. But they died anyway.”

  She didn’t have to ask what he’d done with them; she already knew. But she didn’t know why. “You hid them in the closet?”

  He nodded, looking guilty, then lifting his chin as though daring her to accuse him of something. What, she didn’t know. “Yeah. I was a kid. A dumb kid. I thought maybe, even though they were dead, she’d want them. So I put them away for her until she could come back.”

  “But she never came back.”