One Little Secret (ARC)

by Cate Holahan

  She’d sacrificed her status to augment his, abandoning the career that had given her an identity so that Nadal could achieve his dream of ringing the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange. And, Susan reminded herself, so he could earn so much money that they could send Jonah and Jamal—but especially Jonah—to schools where teachers tailored their lessons to individual children and didn’t dismiss autistic kids. Even the school in Washington State hadn’t done a good job bringing out Jonah’s talents. Though it had at least let him take classes with the “mainstream” students.

  Happy sacrifices, Susan thought. Who wouldn’t be happy to abandon her career for her husband and children? She walked up next to Nadal and draped an arm around his chest. It would all be worth it once Nadal succeeded. Her husband would be happy. Her boys would be happy. And that meant she’d have to be happy. They’d all be happy. Happy. Happy. Unless …

  Rachel’s flirty pout as she’d asked Nadal to help her choose the wine flashed in Susan’s mind. Nadal was handsome, hardworking, and soon to be extremely well-heeled. Women would line up to steal him away. “Are you attracted to Rachel?”

  He stopped shaving to roll his eyes at her reflection. “I was only asking about that crazy fight.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  He pulled from her grasp. “Because it’s a land mine.”

  “Why is that?”

  “If I say no, you’re going to think I’m a liar because I just said she was an attractive woman.” He wagged the razor like an index finger. “Though that doesn’t mean I’m attracted to her.” He resumed shaving. “And if I say yes, you’re going to get all insecure and defensive.”

  “No I won’t.” Susan wrapped her arms tighter around herself, holding up the towel. “I want to know the truth. I’d understand if you found her appealing. I think Ben’s handsome."

  “But you wouldn’t want him. He doesn’t do anything.”

  Each sentence punctured Susan’s ego. After all, like fellow stay-at-home parent Ben, she didn’t do anything either. Susan’s anxieties reared up inside her like a poked python. “How could you say that? Watching the children is doing something, Nadal. It’s doing a lot, in fact. You think I don’t do anything all day?”

  Nadal stopped splashing water on his freshly shaven face. His expression reminded her of the way he looked when he missed a highway exit. She could see him running alternative routes in his head, trying to find a U-turn. “Ben doesn’t homeschool a special-needs kid.”

  “He writes books.”

  “It’s not like they do well. All I’m saying is—”

  “That an individual’s value should be completely measured in dollars and cents.” Her arms flung out in thrashing gestures. “Of course you think that. That’s why my career wasn’t important in relation to your company. And that’s why I’m clearly not as desirable as you, or the hotshot lawyer next door.”

  The last part spilled out before Susan had a chance to consider the implications—or even if she actually meant it. She didn’t really believe her husband had a thing for the married lawyer in the neighboring house, did she? He hadn’t done anything to fuel her suspicions, after all, other than gossip about another couple’s horrific public argument. If anything, he’d been avoiding Rachel all day.

  Susan glimpsed her reflection in the vanity. Her towel had slipped off from all her gesturing. With her naked breasts, sopping hair, and dripping outstretched arms, she resembled some kind of mythological water monster, a shrieking harpy or murderous siren. Nadal, meanwhile, was dashing Odysseus, lashed to the mast.

  “Honey.” Nadal smiled at her reflection as though she were suffering from some unfortunate disease. “You don’t need to be concerned about Rachel. She is not the kind of woman I’d want. Trust me.” He faced her. “I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted recently. But you don’t have to worry, okay? I love you. You’re the rock of our family.”

  “Rock” was hardly a compliment, Susan thought. “Yup. I’m a rock. Hard and flinty.”

  Nadal approached her with his palms out, as though he literally held a peace offering on a platter. “Bad description.” Again, he smiled at her. This time, the expression didn’t seem as patronizing. He slipped his arms beneath her limp limbs. Susan didn’t hug back, though she didn’t move away, either. Instead, she let him press his hard chest against her own and smelled the lingering shaving cream scent on his neck.

  “What can I say that would encapsulate how beautiful, wonderful, and perfect for me my wife is?”

  He kissed her after each compliment, his lips traveling from her temple to right below her left ear. Susan’s anger started to recede. Nadal couldn’t help it if other women wanted his attention, she admitted to herself. What mattered was that he wanted hers, and he was here with her. Caressing her body. Becoming excited by the feel of her skin against his own. Susan tilted her head for a real kiss.

  Nadal grinned. “I thought of rock earlier because you make me—”

  A knock interrupted his analogy. They both froze, a pair of teenage lovers hearing the parents’ car pulling into the driveway. The knock sounded again. Rachel? Susan thought. No, she wouldn’t dare. Would she?

  “Hey, Nadal, you in there?” Louis’s baritone blasted through the door. Nadal lifted his chin to the ceiling and closed his eyes, pleading with someone above to bless their neighbor with a sense of decorum. Who knocked on another couple’s closed bedroom door after ten o’clock?

  “What does he want?” Susan whispered.

  Nadal stepped back from her. The abrupt withdrawal of his body heat made her shiver. “I think I know.” He walked around her into the bedroom. “Just a minute,” he called.

  Susan hastily grabbed for the towel on the floor and tied it around her torso. It barely covered the necessary private parts. A door creaked open. She hid behind the half wall, peering through the opening separating the master bath from the bedroom.

  Gym shorts covered her husband’s backside. Susan wished he’d simply left on his boxers. Louis needed to sense they’d been in the middle of something.

  “Hey, hope I am not interrupting anything,” Louis said.

  “Um. No.” Nadal rubbed the back of his neck. “Not really.”

  “I was hoping we could grab a scotch downstairs and chat for a few.”

  Nadal kept scratching at his hairline. “Um, sure. But if this is about the thing with—”

  “It warrants discussion.” The sharpness in Louis’s tone surprised Susan. What was he so worked up about? Ben and Rachel’s fight? She stuck her head a bit farther into the doorway.

  “Thing is,” Nadal said, “I doubt I can be of any help, like I told—”

  Louis cleared his throat loudly. He glared at Susan as though he’d caught her spying. She flushed with shame at being seen eavesdropping, and no small amount of anger. She’d been interrupted during foreplay and waited in the bathroom out of decency. Louis had no right to make her feel like an intruder.

  Susan clutched the towel a bit tighter between her breasts. “I’d come out, but I’m not dressed.”

  Nadal looked back at her. He raised his eyebrows and smiled with half his mouth. Susan knew that expression. He was apologizing. “I’ll be back in a minute. Louis needs my advice on something. Quick.”

  Before she could object, Nadal had closed the door behind him. Susan released her towel and ambled toward the narrow armoire across from the bed, disappointment seeping into her damp skin along with the room’s cold air. How could Nadal simply abandon her, half-naked and aroused? Didn’t he realize that their marriage needed quality time? When they were at home, work and the kids were always interrupting. Finally, she had wrested Nadal away from both, and he was going downstairs to commiserate with the neighbor.

  Susan tried to imagine what Louis had wanted as she rifled through the wardrobe drawers into which she’d unpacked. Probably, he wanted to discuss contingencies if Rachel and Ben bailed on the vacation. Their two families couldn’t afford the hou
se alone, and they couldn’t back out of the rental at this point. Rachel and Ben would either have to pay their share or find another family to take it over, which meant vacationing with someone they might not know at all.

  Susan tried to push the unsettling thought from her mind as she jostled into a pair of boxer-style pajama shorts. She grabbed a baggy tank from her drawer, which was considerably more comfortable than the chemises she’d brought to entice her husband, though not as likely to return Nadal to the moment before Louis’s knock. The borrowed-boyfriend look had been hot in college. But middle-aged married mothers had to aspire to higher standards.

  For the past few weeks, Nadal had worked so late she’d been in button-down pajamas with her teeth brushed by the time he’d come home. They’d been sleeping next to one another like brothers on a hotel bed, squarely on their individual sides of the mattress, too wiped from their respective days to entertain cuddling, let alone what it might lead to.

  Susan pulled the shirt over her head, telling herself she could wear the lingerie later in the week. There was little point donning uncomfortable lace just to wait, alone, in the room. Dressed, she slumped onto the white duvet covering the wooden bed like a mushroom cap. The filling puffed around her. She leaned into it, reaching for her husband’s laptop charging atop the nightstand (much like her own forgotten computer in her bedroom back home). As long as Nadal was busy, she might as well check her email. The boys might have sent her an “all’s well” message, or at least notes confirming that they’d arrived safely at their camps.

  The computer prompted her for a password as she pushed back the screen. She entered the twins’ birth date followed by an N, a four, for the number of people in their family, and an exclamation point. Her techie husband was adamant about passwords having a requisite number of characters and symbols. He was less concerned about using the same code to unlock all of his personal electronics—or that she knew it. After all, she wouldn’t try to hack into his company.

  The computer screen flashed, revealing a white window packed with emails. Nadal’s inbox. Apparently he hadn’t bothered to log out of his last session. She pulled her finger over the touch pad, bringing the cursor up to the X in the right-hand corner. Before she clicked, an email caught her eye. It sat in a list, three down from the top. The sender was KLEIN, RACHEL.

  For the second time in an hour, she recalled how Rachel had pouted at Nadal, batting her blue eyes like a butterfly flapping its scaly wings. She pulled the cursor to the message and paused atop the subject line: ABOUT THURSDAY NIGHT …

  Last night. Susan’s breaths shortened as she wracked her brain for Nadal’s whereabouts the prior evening. He’d come home late, as usual, though not because of work. He’d gone to watch Jamal’s final baseball game of the season. She’d gone too, but had left with Jonah during the fourth inning after he’d started to complain about the shouting. Afterward, Nadal had said, he’d taken Jamal out to a diner for hot dogs and ice cream. He’d acted as though they’d gone alone. Had Rachel and Will tagged along? Will was on the same team.

  Susan tapped the track pad, not hard enough to open the message. She knew Nadal’s passwords because he trusted her not to do any crazy spouse things like snoop through his emails, and she trusted him not to hide anything important from her. Reading the message would be a violation of their mutual trust. And she did trust him, didn’t she? Nadal wasn’t the one, after all, who had spent a year engaged in a flirtation with a slightly senior—and married—colleague. The relationship with Susan’s “work husband” had ended the way all so-called “harmless” platonic relationships between people inclined to mutual sexual attraction did—spectacularly poorly. Her friend had been promoted, resulting in celebratory drinks that had culminated in an awkward shared cab ride to the train station during which he’d confessed his “complicated and undeniable” feelings. She’d awkwardly denied any similar emotions, embarrassing him and straining their working relationship to the point where basic civility had become difficult. When Nadal had suggested moving East to expand his business, Susan had willingly agreed, fearing what might happen if she and her new boss ever had another occasion to share drinks.

  She was the (reformed) flirt, Susan reminded herself, not her husband. Surely whatever Rachel had written about concerned the boys’ baseball game. Her neighbor probably would have sent the message to Susan had she stayed through the whole six innings. Unless, of course, Rachel was confessing her regrettably inappropriate yet unavoidable attraction to Nadal.

  Susan double-clicked the message, ignoring the pinch of her conscience in favor of the queasiness in her gut.

  Hi Nadal,

  I saw you at Thursday’s game, but you’d gone by the time I went over to say hello. I hope you don’t feel like you have to avoid me. I know this is awkward, to say the least. I don’t usually become involved like this with neighbors, let alone friends, but I can’t walk away now. I think if we can keep this just between us, we should be able to come to an arrangement that works for everyone.

  Looking forward to the vacation.

  Rachel

  The pain in Susan’s stomach disappeared. She reread the message. Numb. Involved like this. Can’t walk away. Keep this between us. Come to an arrangement. What other secret arrangement did unhappily married women come to with married men?

  Susan’s shock gave way to a heavy ache that started in her chest and spread to her limbs. Rachel’s last words to them at dinner echoed in her memory. Ben had suggested that his wife sleep with other people, and Rachel had responded, Maybe I already have.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE DAY AFTER

  The home wasn’t visible from the street. Gabby considered how convenient that would be for a serial rapist as she turned the Dodge onto the bleached pebble driveway. She parked behind a sky-blue Subaru, well away from the concrete building peeking from the trees ahead. Approaching the house on foot was preferable to driving right up to the front door. Andy didn’t deserve advanced warning of her arrival.

  The driveway branched out to a tiled path the same off-white color as the stones. She followed it to the beach house, immediately understanding why the home had been hidden in the forest. Save for the concrete shells of the structure’s overlapping rectangles, the entire building was glass. Gabby could see straight through the front of the house to the pool and beach beyond—the same beach where Rachel had been murdered. If Ben had run about a mile east from Rachel’s body, he would have seen the party.

  A shirtless figure emerged from a portion of the house obscured by the concrete sides. He passed a dark wooden wall and pulled on a handle, revealing the interior door of a fridge. The man had brown hair, made darker by its wet state, and a muscular build. Strong thighs bulged from knee-length board shorts.

  He, apparently, hadn’t noticed her yet. She strode to the glass doors, looking for a bell but finding only a sleek metal handle. When the walls were all transparent, Gabby guessed, guests didn’t need to announce themselves.

  She tapped on a pane. The man withdrew his head from inside the fridge and faced her. His expression appeared mildly interested, and maybe also confused, though not evidently concerned. Perhaps he wondered whether she was someone from the prior night’s party, returning for lost sunglasses. He shut the fridge and strode toward the glass wall.

  Instead of opening the door, he paused by the handle and examined her face. No doubt, close up, he realized she couldn’t have been a party guest. Gabby’s thirty-seven years weren’t painfully apparent from a distance. Anyone that got an HD view, however, could determine that she wasn’t in her twenties.

  “Hi, may I help you?” The voice penetrated the glass.

  Gabby grabbed her badge from her belt buckle and pressed it to the pane. “I have some questions about last night.”

  The man’s eyes widened, highlighting their river-green color. Gabby heard the click of a lock disengaging. She pocketed her badge as the wall of glass slid to the side, exposing half the house to t
he elements. “If this is about the underage drinking, it was all a misunderstanding.” The man brushed his palm over his hair, shaking droplets from the clumped wet strands. “We’d had no idea that some of the girls were in high school until one of the dads showed up all crazy, throwing punches and shouting about sixteen-year-olds. My roommate Chris went out to apologize. He told all those girls to go home.”

  The man pinched the edge of his nose, wiping away some unseen mucus. “We don’t even know how the high school kids heard about it, honestly. We’d invited a group of girls at this bar and told them to bring friends. Everyone there should have been twenty-one.”

  Gabby continued to stand and nod, letting the silence ask the questions that the man so clearly wanted to answer. Perhaps he’d keep talking about his innocence regarding underage girls until he made some sly admission about Mariel or a “strange man with a split lip.”

  “Anyway, since we didn’t know, there wasn’t anything intentional on our parts.” He scratched the faint shadow on the edge of his chin. “We just wanted to have a party with some cute girls. We’re not a bar. There’s no one checking ID. And, even if we’d hired someone, we don’t have the capability to determine what’s fake or not. Most of these girls have international passports.”

  The man finally stopped talking. He stared at Gabby, no doubt waiting for her to say whether or not his excuse had satisfied the complaint she’d been called to investigate. She extended her hand through the open wall and stepped forward, throwing the guy off guard with the friendly greeting that she didn’t really want to give. As he shook, she told herself the faux chumminess would be worth it once she got him in cuffs. “I’m Detective Gabriella Watkins. I understand the situation you were in, and I get that people sneak into parties. But we have to follow up on every call …”