Sound of Secrets

by Darlene Gardner

  That was exactly why she had made the donation anonymously, Karen turned away from him and pushed her chair back from her desk. She wasn’t generous. She was selfish and self-serving, and she didn’t want anybody — and especially not Tyler Shaw — thinking differently and holding her up to expectations she could never fulfill.

  She stood up and pushed her hands through her hair, trying to think. When she looked back at Tyler, he was gazing at her with a mixture of admiration and desire, as though she were Mother Teresa and Marilyn Monroe rolled into one. Fear kicked at her with frantic feet.

  "Don’t get the wrong idea about me, Tyler," she warned. "I’m not who you think I am."

  He shook his head, and he still wore that sexy half-smile. "You’re exactly who I think you are.”

  His voice was so husky it seemed to reverberate inside her. She tried to think of something, anything, to detract him from the fantasy he was weaving. She cleared her throat and lifted her chin.

  "I only donated the money because I thought it might be a point in my favor with Gray." That hadn't been her intention at all. She'd donated the money because she'd had it and the cause was deserving.

  Tyler’s smile faded. She tried to harden herself against the disappointment on his face, but already a part of her wished he would smile again.

  "When are you going to open your eyes and see what’s in front of them, Karen?" he asked softly. "When are you going to realize I’m right here?"

  She deliberately turned her head, not wanting to see. Through the glass windows of her office, she spotted a familiar figure walking across the newsroom. Peering more closely, she saw it was Cara Donnelly. She moved toward the window, aware of the exact moment Tyler joined her.

  "Who’s that?" Tyler asked.

  "Her name’s Cara Donnelly," Karen answered, still staring at her. The Donnelly woman wore another of those shapeless dresses that hid her figure. This one, though, was a buttery yellow that made her appear soft and almost angelic. "She’s a journalist researching a story about small-town newspapers."

  "Aah," Tyler said. "So that’s who Gray was talking about."

  "What did he say about her?" Karen asked, grateful for the opportunity to change of subject. She had no intention of taking Tyler up on what he was so blatantly offering. She was interested in Gray.

  Tyler shook his head. "I’m not Cindy Lou, Karen. I don’t carry tales from one of my friends to another."

  Her temper flared, and only partly because she wasn’t going to get her way. She had another pipeline of information about Gray. She’d call Jane, his secretary, and pump her for information as soon as she got rid of Tyler. "You’re forgetting I’m not your friend."

  "There’s no reason we can’t be lovers and friends." He touched the side of her face. "I’d prefer that."

  She drew back as though his hand were oven-hot, and her traitorous body felt warm all over. "Get out of here, Tyler."

  "I do have to be going, but I’d be much obliged if you’d have dinner with me this weekend." He was so close she could see the beginning of stubble on his chin, and she wondered how it would feel against her fingertips. "I’ll let you pick the night."

  She could barely deal with Tyler in a business environment. She didn’t think she could handle him in a social setting. She made her voice hard even though her insides had gone marshmallow soft. "I’m not going out with you, Tyler Shaw. Not this weekend. Not ever."

  He bent down and claimed her lips in a soft kiss so brief that it was over before she could stop it.

  "You’ll say yes one of these days.” He walked to the door in that deceptively slow way he had of moving. He pulled it open, turned back to her and grinned his sexy-as-sin grin. "If you don’t close your mouth soon, Karen, I’ll think you enjoyed that as much as I did."

  She reached blindly for something on her desk to throw at him, and her hand fastened on a box of tissues. She let it fly, but Tyler had already disappeared through the doorway. The box thumped against the door frame and fell harmlessly to the floor.

  Mandy, her youngest reporter, breezed into Karen’s office a few moments later. She gave the tissue box a puzzled look and bent to pick it up.

  "That Tyler Shaw is such a hunk.” Mandy pantomimed fanning herself with the box. "I think he has the best butt on any man in Secret Sound. And those eyes! They’re so dreamy."

  "Then ask him out," Karen snapped, restraining herself from adding a hissing rejoinder that it would be at Mandy’s own peril if she did. Horror filled her at the treasonous thought. She couldn’t be jealous. She wouldn’t be.

  Still, it took several more seconds before she felt in control enough to ask Mandy what she needed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "I don’t mean to rush you," Curtis Rhett began, although Cara was quite certain he did, "but it would help if you’d get right to the point. My day is filling up faster than a tank at a gas pump."

  A memory of beady-eyed Sam Peckenbush sending her a malicious glare came vividly to mind. His fierce look was rivaled only by the one Stoney Gillick had leveled at her while he'd shouted his threat. Then again, Karen Rhett could glower with the best of them.

  At least Curtis Rhett wasn’t glaring even if he’d hardly laid out the red carpet. He had the air of a man with a lot on his mind and even more to do. She’d only been in his office for a few minutes, and already a reporter had stuck his head in to ask advice on a story and the office secretary had passed on a ream of messages.

  Considering the way the rest of her day had gone, Cara should be grateful to be here. She’d had the feeling Gray would have tried to prevent her from talking to the managing editor if he hadn’t been tied up with the aftermath of the harrowing domestic incident.

  "I’ll make it as quick as I can, Mr. Rhett.” She tried to sound professional. She’d already asked for permission to tape the conversation with the recorder she’d purchased the day before. She set it on his desk and switched it on. "I’m interested in whatever you can tell me about how the Rhetts managed to make such a success of the Sun. I’m particularly interested in the period after Reginald Rhett Sr. died, when the operation of the newspaper changed hands."

  Curtis sliced the air with a hand as though cutting to the heart of her question. "You mean you’re interested in why I’m still working here when my father left the newspaper to my brother?"

  "No." Cara shook her head, surprised at his candor. "I didn’t mean that at all."

  "Why not? An astute reporter would ask the question. An astute reporter would wonder how I deal with working here day after day, year after year, knowing I’d have nothing if my brother got it into his head to fire me."

  "Oh, but, Mr. Rhett, surely that would never happen." Cara wanted this information, but she hadn’t intended to be confrontational. "I’ve heard you’re the main reason the Sun is as successful as it is."

  The managing editor’s eyes, which reminded her of mahogany, seemed to grow even darker. He pressed together lips that were already too thin and scratched the thinning gray hair at his temple.

  "An astute reporter, nevertheless, would wonder what’s in this for me." He paused and tapped his hand on the desk with a staccato beat. "I’ll tell you what’s in it for me. The satisfaction of knowing the people of Secret Sound know what’s going on in their town and the world around them."

  The opening he had presented was so obvious Cara had to restrain herself from leaping into it. Careful, she told herself.

  "So you’re saying," she began slowly, "that Secret Sound doesn’t have secrets of any significance."

  "No." He shook his head with a decisive, curt movement. "Thanks to the efforts of the Sun, secrets don’t stay secret for long."

  "That’s a curious thing to say considering the secret in your own family."

  His eyes narrowed, and he stopped drumming his fingers. He held himself rigidly, as though every nerve in his body were on alert. "What secret?"

  Cara swallowed. "The secret of how your nephew died. It seems to m
e nobody wants to talk about how a five-year-old boy managed to get hit by a car miles from his home without a grown-up in sight."

  The words hung between them, heavy with challenge. Curtis stared at her hard, an assessing light in his eyes. Cara’s breathing grew shallow and she could almost believe that he held the key to the mystery. That he was another in the growing line of people who didn’t want her to find out what had really happened to Skippy Rhett.

  She was tempted to stammer an apology and rush out of the office. Then she remembered the beseeching look the little wet-eyed boy had given her when he’d materialized in her hotel room.

  He’d looked at her as though he believed she could help him.Cara lifted her chin and met Curtis Rhett’s stare with one of her own.

  "It’s human nature to not want to discuss something as terrible as a little boy’s death." Curtis finally broke the silence, although he was still studying her so intently she had to fight not to squirm. He paused to take a breath, and Cara almost shouted encouragement for him to go on. "But—"

  "Mr. Rhett." A tinny female voice came over the intercom. "I have Mayor Jenkins for you on line one. He insists you talk to him about the story we ran on the city manager taking bribes, and he won’t be put off."

  "Put him through," Curtis said, then returned his attention to Cara. "I’m sorry. I need to take this call. We can continue this another time."

  "Could I wait?"

  "Wait?" He seemed surprised she had suggested the possibility. Then he shrugged. "I suppose that wouldn’t create too much of a problem."

  She walked toward the closed door of his office, intending to give him privacy while he talked. He waved her off.

  "No need to leave." He picked up the phone, entering an animated conversation with the mayor where he vehemently defended that morning’s story. More than once, he pointed out the city manager had been given the opportunity to respond and had declined to comment.

  Cara paced the length of his office while he talked. As managing editor, Curtis Rhett held what was arguably the most powerful position at the newspaper. His office, however, was no larger than those of the rest of the Sun’s editors.

  The interior of the building was designed so that the offices of the editors formed a semicircle around the desks of the reporters. The offices had glass windows that allowed the editors to see out and reporters to see in. No secrets, Curtis had said.

  Cara caught a flash of pink out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a stylishly dressed Karen Rhett bent over the desk of a young reporter. They both gazed at glowing words on a computer screen, and the impatience Karen hadn’t bothered to hide when Cara questioned her was nowhere in evidence.

  She wished Karen would have told her what she remembered of Skippy. Even though Karen had only been four years old when he died, she was, after all, his sister. Just as Curtis was the boy’s uncle.

  An oversized framed photograph to the side of Curtis's desk drew Cara’s attention. She moved closer to it. It pictured generations of what appeared to be family members, and she surmised from the hairstyles of the women that it had been taken sometime in the 1980s.

  An old man, his expression severe and his spine rigid, stood at the center of the photograph. He was flanked by two couples in their thirties, but only one of the younger men bore him a strong resemblance. With a start, Cara realized that the man with the thick dark hair and arm slung casually over his smiling wife was Curtis Rhett. The other man, the one who looked like the old man, must be his brother Reginald.

  Cara’s eyes dropped to the bottom of the photo, where three smiling children stood in front of the adults with their hands folded in front of them. Two were girls clad in pink, frilly dresses. The third was a boy with a nose heavily sprinkled with freckles and a mop of dark hair. Huge, brown eyes gazed at her out of the cellophane, and Cara's heart froze in mid-beat.

  This child was about a year younger than the one who had been crying silently in the corner of her hotel room, but it was undoubtedly Skippy Rhett.

  Her hand flew to her mouth. It was one thing to suspect it was Skippy Rhett she saw. It was quite another to have it confirmed.

  "I see you found the family photo."

  Cara started. She hadn’t heard Curtis Rhett terminate his telephone conversation. He was suddenly behind her, standing too close. She deliberately dropped her hand to her side, not wanting him to know what she'd discovered.

  But no. It was a ridiculous thought. Curtis couldn't possibly guess she kept seeing his dead nephew. She swallowed her reaction and tried to appear unaffected by the photo.

  "We were a handsome bunch, don’t you think?" Curtis didn't wait for an answer. "You’ve probably already figured out the stern-looking old man in the center is my dour, old dad. He died about six months after this was taken."

  He moved past her, nearer the photograph, and pointed at each figure in turn as he talked. "That’s my globe-trotting brother Reginald and his wife Marty, and this, of course, is me before I worried away all my hair. The woman I have my arm around is my ex-wife Janet, who couldn’t stand being married to me. She was good at faking it, don’t you think?"

  He paused, and Cara thought his jaw quivered. "The girl on the left is our daughter Suzy, who was sweet and kind and unlucky enough to die of leukemia when she was only twenty-four." He cleared his throat. "The little girl next to her is my niece Karen, who is now the Sun’s features editor."

  "And the little boy?" Cara asked softly when he paused in his narrative.

  "Why, surely you’ve guessed that’s Skippy. You were asking about him before I got called away to the phone."

  "I asked. You didn’t answer," Cara said, amazed at her boldness. "You didn’t tell me why nobody can explain why he was alone when he died."

  Curtis turned to her, an odd expression on his face, as though he were seeing her for the first time. She almost thought he looked approving, as though, as a newspaperman, he couldn’t help admiring her persistence at getting an answer to her question.

  "Maybe that’s because nobody knows why."

  "How could nobody know?" Cara pressed. "He was five years old. He couldn’t have gotten to Sam Peckenbush’s station unless somebody drove him there."

  "Very good, Miss Donnelly. Even my best reporter couldn’t’ have put that better." Curtis smiled slightly. "I should have said nobody knows what my nephew was doing there in the middle of the road except, perhaps, the person who kidnapped him."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cara was still considering the possibility that Curtis Rhett’s resentment toward the terms of his father’s will had something to do with his nephew’s death when she returned to her hotel room later that night.

  Curtis certainly hadn’t made a secret of his bitterness, referring to his father as "dour, old dad" and daring her to ask questions about how he dealt with an arrangement he obviously considered unfair.

  Maybe Curtis had dealt with it by kidnapping his nephew and demanding a ransom from his brother’s vast stash of cash, half of which should have belonged to him.

  Even as she considered the possibility, she rejected it. Despite the strangeness of the interview, it had seemed as though Curtis Rhett had actually relished it. He had been more forthcoming than anyone else she had met in Secret Sound, and she couldn’t help liking him for that.

  She also found it hard to believe he could have engineered the kidnapping and death of his own nephew, no matter how wronged he’d been. And would Skippy have run from his uncle?

  Cara sat down heavily on the bed and took off her shoes, rubbing at the spots where the sandal straps had cut into her feet. Her problem was that she didn’t have nearly enough information to solve the puzzle of what had happened to Skippy or to cast blame on his uncle.

  Curtis Rhett had supplied the previously unknown fact that Skippy had been kidnapped and a ransom had been paid. He hadn’t said anything more.

  She’d tried to find out more details after she left the Sun and went about her business in
town. However, the mechanic who had repaired her car after she’d had it towed from Peckenbush’s garage hadn’t been born until after the tragedy.

  Her luck hadn’t been any better at the diner where she’d eaten dinner. The waitress who’d served her the house specialty of meatloaf and mashed potatoes had only lived in Secret Sound for ten years.

  Cara stared at the corner of the room where Skippy had appeared the night before. She squeezed her eyes tight, trying to will the little boy to appear again. When she opened them, all she saw was a Queen Ann armchair flanked by a cherry nightstand.

  "Oh, Skippy," she whispered aloud, "what happened to you?"

  The answering ring that filled the room was so jarring that for a moment Cara didn’t realize it came from the phone. She covered her mouth with her hand to stop her nervous laugh and reached for the receiver.

  Before she picked it up, she had the silly, unwelcome wish that Gray DeBerg would be on the line.

  "Hello," she said, and she thought that foolish hope made her sound breathless.

  "Cara? Is that you?"

  Richard. Cara was relieved he couldn’t see her face, because she was sure it was flushed with guilt. She had promised to phone him when she reached Miami Beach, but she hadn’t given him a moment’s thought in days. Worse, she’d given Gray DeBerg hours of them.

  "Yes, Richard." She fought to make her voice sound normal. "It’s me."

  "That’s a relief. I’ve been calling your cell and not getting an answer.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot my charger and haven’t gotten around to picking up a new one yet.”

  “Just as long as you’re all right,” he said. “Your Aunt Clarice gave me this number after your friends told me you hadn’t arrived in Miami Beach. You are okay, right?”

  It was just like Richard to ask about her without demanding answers for himself, Cara thought with another stab of guilt. She’d detoured from her plans, neglected to phone him and all but forgotten his existence, but he wanted to know whether she was all right. She couldn’t imagine that any man would make a more caring husband.