The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Okay, guys, let’s go say hi to Grandma, then we can go home.”

  His mother’s bookshop was around the corner from the main plaza, in one of the narrow archaic lanes that zigzagged away from the central square and into the more secretive landscape of the town. It was a long, deep affair, rambling through ten thousand square feet. The Quill and Page was known as one of the best independent bookstores in the country, and Judy had built it from the ground up, pouring her love of all poetry and literature into the shop when he was a baby. To Vince’s knowledge, Judy had never had a boyfriend—only Vince and her bookstore.

  Like many other independents, the Quill had been slammed hard by the Internet and Amazon and other avenues through which readers could get the hard-to-find and obscure titles that had been her lifeblood. She had developed some specialties that kept her afloat—collecting first editions of classics, tracking down the very rare, and, most of all, developing a social marketing program to make the Internet work for her.

  “You guys look around. I want to find some new books to read before we go home.” They scattered to their favorite spots. Vince ambled down the fiction aisles, not sure what he was in the mood for. Something dark, maybe. Serial killers always made life look good.

  Or not.

  He pulled a book off a shelf here and there, flipping through, putting it back. This is what you missed on the Internet, he thought, turning a corner into a long set of stacks—the pleasure of discovering something you’ve never heard of, that was never in anybody’s sights, or maybe it was a big bestseller in 1974. Harold Robbins or Irving Stone. Maybe he’d read Exodus or The Carpetbaggers. That would be fun.

  When he rounded the last aisle, he saw Tessa, leaning one shoulder against the wall, her head tilted as she read so that her glittery hair spilled down one arm in waves. Vince halted. As if she sensed his shadow falling on her, she looked up and stuck one finger in the book braced on her cast. He couldn’t see the title.

  He wavered between turning around and walking away or going forward. He had too much on his plate to add an irrational obsession with a woman who was leaving town in a couple of days. And yet, as if she were a magnet, he found himself moving toward her, his cells boiling the closer he came.

  He stopped a few feet away. “I don’t know what the sorry was for.”

  She lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know, either. I just—I don’t know.”

  He might have turned around then, but her eyes were on his mouth, and he touched the sore place with his tongue, and as if she were mirroring him, she touched her tongue to her own lip. Vince stepped closer, his skin blistering as he reached for her, and slid a hand around the back of her neck to pull her into his kiss. She made a soft, swallowed noise, and the air around them smelled of wood smoke and grass, and that made him think of something just out of reach, something he yearned for. He moved closer still, putting his other hand on her face, fingertips lightly against her cheekbone, her jaw against his palm. Her hair scattered over his forearms, creating a silken shock as she kissed him back. Hungry. Starving.

  He gentled a little, tracing her cheekbone, her jaw, suckling her lips. It made him dizzy.

  Suddenly she pushed him away. Held up a hand to stave him off. “No. I can’t do this, Vince. You have your girls, all that. You don’t know me. I’m not the right person for … all that.”

  “All what?” he said quietly, moving closer again, looking over his shoulder to make sure they were alone. “I thought this was just a hot little connection we could explore until you leave town or it burns out.”

  The long anime eyes, pale and sensual, blazed. “Is that so.”

  “It’s pretty hot, at least from my side.” He reached for her. “You seemed to enjoy yourself.”

  She caught his hand. Shook her head. “No,” she said, and tried to duck under his arm.

  He caught her easily, one arm around her waist, her back to his chest. “It was more than that, wasn’t it?” he whispered against her neck.

  “Yes,” she said, and bowed her head. “And I just can’t go there.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just not that person. The right person.”

  “Okay.” Vince bent and put his face against her hair, kissed her ear. Let her go.

  She fled.

  Breakfast #42

  Eggs Benedict: The great classic—two poached eggs and thinly sliced back bacon served open-faced on a toasted English muffin, smothered with tangy hollandaise sauce. Served with fruit.

  HOLLANDAISE SAUCE

  It takes a little practice to make a good hollandaise, but don’t be intimidated. Keep the heat low, add butter slowly, and have some faith that you can make it great.

  ⅓ cup plus 2 T cold butter

  2 egg yolks

  2-3 tsp lemon juice

  2-3 tsp water

  ¼ tsp salt

  Dash cayenne pepper

  Melt the ⅓ cup of butter, set aside.

  Get a heavy skillet ready with several inches of water on simmer.

  Place the egg yolks in a small heavy saucepan and whisk until thick. Add 2 tsp of lemon juice and 2 tsp of water and the salt. Whisk for another 30 seconds or so. Add half of the cold butter. Put the pan over the simmering water and whisk until egg yolks are creamy, about 3-4 minutes, being careful not to let the yolks scramble. When the sauce is clinging to the whisk and you can see the bottom of the pan through the whisking, remove the mixture from the heat and add the remaining cold butter. Whisk until melted, then begin to add the melted butter a few drops at a time until it is fully absorbed into the yolks. Add a dash of cayenne pepper; taste for additional lemon juice and salt. If it is too thick, whisk in a few drops of water. Hold the sauce for up to a half hour in a bowl over warm water.

  FOURTEEN

  Rattled, Tessa knew she needed a walk to clear her head. The afternoon was stifling. Finished with her work list for the day, she gathered a bottle of clean water and snacks and took Felix out for a walk. She had a leash, but he didn’t seem to need it.

  It was time to face the river. With Felix as company, she would be less afraid. They walked through town at a good clip, Tessa watching from the corner of her eye in case Vince and the girls showed up again—it was just weird how often they ran into each other—and let her breath go only when she found the path to the river.

  It was about a mile from the plaza, reached by a newly minted trail through pine forest and scrub oaks. Little signs along the path told the story first of the missionaries who’d arrived and built their camp along the river, then of the Indians who had ousted them, and the settlers who eventually built the town. Felix stuck close by, trotting ahead a few feet, then checking back to make sure Tessa was coming. “I’m right here, sweetie. I promise I won’t abandon you.”

  It felt great to walk, to be in her body, smelling the air, feeling muscles move and legs lift and feet hit the earth. Her left foot was markedly better today, and she took pleasure in that, too. With an injury it always seemed there was a turning day, and it seemed that day had passed for the foot. Excellent.

  She wiggled her arm inside the cast. Soon the cast would be gone, too. Thank God. It was really getting itchy the past few days.

  They emerged abruptly from the trees to the banks of the river, the landscape opening to a watercolor vista of red earth and coppery water and the blues of mountains all around. Tessa paused to take it in, bathed in the colors, drinking them in as if they were nourishment.

  “Amazing,” she said aloud. Felix looked at her and sat down patiently.

  Near the water, the advance of autumn was obvious. The cottonwoods suddenly had yellow leaves, and the grass along the path was more yellow than green. They walked on a little farther, sheltered by grand old trees, and finally came to a clearing. Tessa halted, breathing in, getting her bearings. Felix, headed at full tilt for the water, seemed to sense her hesitation and returned, tail down, to make sure everything was okay. He nosed her palm.

  A quiver crossed
her throat. Just keep breathing. She was determined to avoid a panic attack. Birds flitting through nearby trees made more noise. She could smell the water faintly, a waft of coolness brushing against her ankles in the heat of the day.

  So far, so good. No speedy pulse. No roiling belly. Nothing.

  “Okay, baby,” she said to Felix, “let’s go. Are you a water dog? Are you going to get all soaked if I let you stay off the leash?”

  He woofed softly, though it was unclear whether that meant yes or no. She grinned at him. “Okay. I’ll take my chances.”

  Tessa walked behind him, her thumbs tucked through the straps of her pack. All of her life, she had known that she nearly drowned as a child, but she had never had a memory of it until she went into the river in Montana. Going under, gasping for breath, fighting for air, she had remembered. Seen it. “Mommy!” her childhood self cried. “Mommy, help me!”

  Overhead, in the hot New Mexico day, an enormous black-and-white magpie squawked, jolting Tessa into the present. She stood on the banks of the Ladrones River, gazing at the water, which was flowing quickly now, but it would barely cover her ankles in many spots. A person could walk on sandbars for a long way. How could she have nearly drowned in it?

  She turned north, toward the bridge that led to Green Gate a few miles upriver, and started to walk. Salt cedars, ferny pink and noxious for their ability to consume water—three hundred gallons a day—lined the banks on this side but had been cleared, probably by the farm, on the western bank, replaced with native shrubs and trees that would help choke them out. After a while she stopped and realized that she must be directly across from Green Gate Farms.

  Felix trotted ahead, stopped and waited for her, trotted ahead. Tessa followed him without expectation, admiring the hot blue sky, dark as a postcard, the mountains huddled protectively above the valley on both sides, and the river running copper over the bed of red earth. She banged her walking stick on the ground to warn snakes of her approach. There wouldn’t be any water snakes here, at least not any poisonous ones, but there might be rattlers. She hoped Felix wasn’t a snake chaser. So far, he didn’t seem to be.

  A wind blew across the salt cedars, ruffling them like hair, and carried on it was a horrific howl, a moan. Tessa halted, and Felix rushed back, quivering.

  “That’s a bad place. There are bad spirits there,” Sam had said.

  It came again, a low, long cry of anguish, as if the very air itself had become a wail. Despite herself, gooseflesh rose on her arms, and the flutter of panic beat in her throat.

  No. She banged her walking stick on the ground and set her jaw. Not spirits. Not evil. It was wind and rocks and some effect of nature. She started walking again.

  But as they came to a stand of boulders that marked a long, round bend, a new prickling rose on Tessa’s neck. She slowed her steps, feeling the warning rush down over her shoulder blades and pool in her hips. She emerged from the salt cedars and halted.

  In front of her, on the other side of the river, the land jutted upward and broke away, no doubt sheared by the river itself over time, to leave ragged, red-stained dirt cliffs.

  The cliffs.

  “Stay away from the cliffs, girls!”

  Dizzy, Tessa took a long breath. Felix trotted back to her, nudged her hand with a wet nose, and made a soft whine. “I’m okay,” she said, petting the dog’s head. “I think we need to stop here for a few minutes.” Her heart fluttered against her ribs, then rose like a bird flapping frantic wings against her collarbones. She forced herself to breathe in and out—a long long long inhalation, long long long exhalation—bringing oxygen back into her system. She put a hand on her diaphragm. “Steady,” she said aloud to herself. Her other hand rested on Felix’s head.

  This was it. The spot where she’d gone in the water as a four-year-old, an incident she had not remembered at all until she tumbled into the river in Montana, desperate to keep her eye on Lisa.

  Her childhood memories surfaced:

  Darkness, stars overhead. A cliff and the rushing water below. She screamed, “No!” and then a long fall in the darkness, so scared she peed her pants, and then the plunge into icy-cold water. Fighting to find the surface, coming up, sucking in air, pulled under again, surfacing, and she managed to catch a branch. “Rhiannon!” she screamed, and there was a sense of excruciating loss. “Mommy! Help!”

  Now, standing in the hot sun, with a dog holding vigil with her, Tessa opened the drawer of memory and took out the shredded pieces of that night. Who was Rhiannon?

  What else was there?

  She closed her eyes, starting at the beginning. The stars overhead, very clear, so many in the darkness. Was there anyone with her? What was she doing at the cliffs in the dark?

  A sense of running away from something terrible.

  A flare of memory, quite literally: a fire. A fire on the horizon, behind her, filling the air with smoke. An animal running with her. On the other side, holding someone’s hand.

  Peering at the water with narrowed eyes, Tessa tried to gather more information, but with a nearly audible thunk, the drawer slammed closed again. The screen of memory went black.

  But a fire—that was something that would be a matter of record. With a sense of sudden purpose, she said, “C’mon, darlin’. Let’s go home. I need to do some research.”

  Sunday afternoon, Vince met with his mother in her exceedingly tidy office for their weekly business discussion. His girls clambered through a playhouse tucked into the back of the store. It was two stories, furnished with miniature furniture and toys, and it had a complete kitchen that Natalie adored.

  “We’ve had new offers,” Judy said, “on the acreage along the river.”

  “Not selling.”

  She shrugged, tossed the papers down in front of him. “It’s my job to tell you, your job to decide.”

  He picked up the papers. Shook his head. The offers were beginning to verge on the ridiculous—money flung by people who had more than they knew what to do with, people who earned multiple millions for a six-month gig on a movie or had inherited grocery fortunes or manufacturing fortunes or oil fortunes or whatever. Those who earned their money by trade flocked around those who earned theirs through beauty, hoping for glamour.

  More evidence—as if he needed it—that Los Ladrones had become a very hip location.

  “Not interested,” he said.

  “I respect your desire to protect the land, son, but think about the legacy you’re building for your daughters.”

  He paid her to give him advice. He looked again at the papers. Huge sums of money.

  Once, Vince’s only desire had been to flee Los Ladrones, run away from the provincial little village, away from seasonal tourists who rented houses so they could ski and snowshoe and drink too much on the plaza at night. Away from locals with their Catholic or Native American superstitions, and from hippies with their rope belts and long hair. His dreams, fueled by books he took from his mother’s bookstore shelves, were to make his mark, win races, use his athleticism to pave his way into a new life.

  And it had worked. Cycling, then mountain biking, had taken him into the international arena. He’d raced all over the world, landed juicy endorsements—and because he didn’t need much or even want to settle anywhere, he packed the money away, year after year, into various investments that had, in the end, been the single smartest thing he’d done in his life. His mother, who had studied accounting at Cornell before she ran away to the West, had taken care of his investments, and it had been a boon to both of them. By the time he had his seventh and final accident at the age of thirty-three on a mountain in France, he had amassed a staggering sum.

  By then he’d married Carrie and settled in Denver near her family. His mother, noticing the slow explosion of wealth creeping north from Santa Fe, counseled him to buy land. He took her advice, little thinking he would ever come back. It had been only an investment.

  After Carrie’s death, he craved stability and familiar
ity, and he returned to a town he found much changed and to land worth millions more than he’d paid for it.

  Most of it was around Los Ladrones—he’d started with a ranch that had fallen on hard times, which was where they lived now, and had begun to buy parcels around it as they came up for sale. He now had more than ten thousand acres of land, with more than six thousand acres on the river itself. Highly prized.

  “No,” he said. “The land is the legacy.”

  She filed the papers in a folder. “They have plenty, that’s for sure.”

  On his way out of the office, he thought of Tessa, of kissing her in the stacks. Thought of the young buck who’d made all that money out of exuberance, the guy who never took things too seriously.

  That man would have pursued a woman, taken his chances in the hopes of a payoff, whatever it might have been. As long as he didn’t bring his girls into the equation, there was nothing wrong with pursuing Tessa. If he was rebuffed—well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  He turned back. “Can the girls hang out here for a little while? I have some business to take care of.”

  “A little while, but I need to get to the grocery store on my way home, and I’d rather miss the five o’clock rush.”

  “No problem.”

  He jogged across the plaza to the hotel and asked the clerk to ring Tessa’s room. “No answer, sir,” the Mexican national said politely. “Would you care to leave a message?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “If you’d like, we are serving hors d’oeuvres and complimentary wine in the lobby, right through those doors.”

  Vince glanced through the French doors and saw a shiny crowd nibbling on strawberries. He slapped a palm on the counter. “Thanks. I’ll wait outside.”

  But then he felt like a lovesick fool, parked in front of the hotel, waiting for a woman to return. He tried her cell phone, but the signal was dropped before it went through. The mountains sometimes made cell reception unreliable.