Share No Secrets

by Carlene Thompson

  Trey would also want me to be in love, Adrienne thought sadly. He would want me to feel joyful and passionate, not just safe and comfortable like I do with Lucas. But she said none of this to her daughter. “Oh well, I’ll try to pump more information about the romance later,” Skye relented cheerfully. “Now I need to find Brandon. I hear him barking in the woods.”

  “He probably had a mad urge to pursue a squirrel that would scare him to death if it turned on him. Honestly, I’ve never seen such a cowardly one-hundred-pound dog.”

  “Mom, Brandon is a lover, not a fighter.”

  “Whatever you say. You go save Brandon before he’s attacked by a chipmunk, and I’ll get my camera and sketchpad out of the car. I only have three weeks to get a painting done of this place before it comes tumbling down.”

  “Before Ellen Kirkwood has it knocked down,” Skye said bitterly. “What a waste. Are you sure Kit can’t do anything about it?”

  Kitrina “Kit” Kirkwood, Ellen’s daughter, had been one of Adrienne’s two best friends most of her life. Kit—smart, fast-talking, opinionated—was violently opposed to the destruction of the Belle, but the hotel belonged to Ellen, who was adamant. Kit told Adrienne she’d lost the fight to preserve the place she loved and had thought one day she would inherit. So she wanted Adrienne to do a painting of the hotel, something Kit could hang in her elegant downtown restaurant, The Iron Gate.

  “I don’t see why Mrs. Kirkwood is so amped about pulling down the hotel,” Skye continued to grouse, reaching for the sweater she’d earlier said she didn’t need.

  “Ellen’s convinced it’s cursed. Her mother harped about it to Ellen all her life. And to be fair, there have been a lot of strange accidents and deaths here. But Jamie’s drowning in the pool last year was the end for Ellen.” Adrienne thought of the beautiful four-year-boy Ellen Kirkwood had adopted when he was a baby. “She couldn’t bear to look at the place anymore.”

  “Her husband doesn’t want her to tear it down.”

  “Gavin doesn’t own it, and I don’t think he has much influence with Ellen, either. Or Kit, even though she and Gavin are on the same side for once.”

  “Why doesn’t Mrs. Kirkwood just sell the Belle?”

  Adrienne raised an eyebrow. “Honey, it wouldn’t be sporting to sell a cursed hotel.”

  Skye grinned. “Yeah, real unethical.”

  “We shouldn’t make fun of Ellen,” Adrienne added guiltily. She’d always liked the woman in spite of her peculiarities.

  “Making fun just a little bit won’t hurt,” Skye said. “It kind of takes the sting out of knowing this great old place will be sticks and stones in a few weeks.”

  “You’re right.” Adrienne sighed. “I hear Brandon. He’s in the woods off to the left.”

  “And I’m off to the rescue. Be back pronto.”

  Actually, Adrienne was glad for the temporary solitude. She needed to concentrate on finding the right perspective from which to do her preliminary sketches. It would take several tries, some of which would be interrupted when her daughter and dog returned. She’d have been happier to leave Skye and Brandon at home for the morning, but Skye had insisted on accompanying her, and when Adrienne had balked at bringing Brandon, Skye had put up a guilt-inducing argument about how he hardly ever got to run as much as he should. He was, after all, at least ten pounds overweight. A romp in the woods would do him good, Skye had said convincingly. Unfortunately, his “romp” had turned into an all-out rampage.

  Adrienne reached inside her car for the Olympus Epic Zoom 170 Deluxe camera she’d just bought last week. She’d done practice shots, but these would be her first serious photographs with it and she was looking forward to seeing how the hotel looked caught by a 170 mm 4.5X high-performance zoom lens. It seemed powerful to be so light and convenient to carry.

  She took random shots around the hotel, catching the long porches stretching the length of all four floors that had allowed guests to stand outside their rooms and view the river. She photographed the tall glass cupolas, the red shingled roof, the big clock tower with its Roman numerals, the iron weather vanes topped by black roosters. The vanes sat motionless. A brisk breeze would have quickly chased away the fog, Adrienne thought, but for now she liked these shots with the mist shrouding the hotel like a veil, even if the pictures probably wouldn’t be much help when she worked on the actual painting.

  Finally, the fog began to clear a bit in spite of the still air of the morning and Adrienne decided to get started. She’d selected a sketchpad of rough paper and a 3B graphite pencil for her preliminary sketch. She went to the east side of the hotel, where the morning sun shone brightest, sat down on a piece of wrought-iron lawn furniture, and stared up at the hotel, drawing pencil poised.

  Sunlight shimmered through the remaining mist, giving the hotel a magical look. Skye was right, Adrienne thought La Belle Rivière possessed a fairy-tale air, evoking the beautiful women who’d once walked in graceful gowns down the wide first-floor porch steps onto the lush green grounds. Their handsome companions, men in excellent suits with exquisite manners and equally exquisite bank accounts, would have accompanied them. Adrienne sighed at her vision of the hotel as it must have looked in the early twentieth century.

  But just a few years ago, the place had still retained its grandeur as well as its reputation as one of the most beautiful resort spots in the country. The hotel had drawn everyone from statesmen, to movie stars, to foreign royalty. Ten years ago, it had been the site of a high-fashion shoot featuring local girl turned haute couture model Julianna Brent. How beautiful Adrienne’s girlhood friend Julianna had looked in sumptuous evening gowns as she posed at the hotel, a landmark Ellen Kirkwood had maintained with all the diligence its builder, her great-grandfather, could have desired.

  Adrienne’s reverie snapped when a sharp caw broke the morning silence. She looked away from the cloud to a telephone line, on which sat three shining black crows. One cawed again, its sound strident and irritating. The lookout crow, she thought, signaling to the other members of its group. A murder. That’s what a group of crows was called. Not a flock. Not a gaggle. A murder of crows.

  Another bird landed on the telephone line. He looked bigger than the usual crow, more like twenty-five inches long rather than the average nineteen or twenty. Two more arrived. They sat close together on the telephone line, all seeming to glare at her with their hard little eyes.

  An old riddle about crows she’d learned in childhood came to Adrienne’s mind, and she caught herself saying it aloud:

  One’s unlucky,

  Two’s lucky.

  Three is health,

  Four is wealthy;

  Five is sickness,

  And six is death.

  The last word pulled her up sharp. A murder of six crows sat on the telephone line, and six meant death. Abruptly she felt colder and reached for the cup of coffee sitting next to her on the bench. But it too had turned cold. She set it down and grimaced. Then she shook her head, annoyed with herself for being fanciful enough to let a few birds spook her. She’d never liked crows, but they were hardly a danger like the ones in Hitchcock’s movie The Birds.

  “Get lost,” she called to them. One cocked its head and threw her an especially sharp caw. “You’re not scaring me, you know,” she went on. “You’re just getting on my nerves.”

  “Caw. Caw. Caw!” all six returned loudly as if understanding her and indignant at her attitude.

  “Cram it!” she yelled, then glanced sheepishly around, hoping Skye hadn’t been near enough to hear her. She sounded crazy out here bellowing at birds. Adrienne looked back at the hotel, determined to ignore the noisy, glistening little creeps on the telephone line and get back to the business of capturing the hotel’s essence on paper.

  But she felt peculiar, as if she were being watched. Well, she was, she thought. The birds had her in their sights like prey. But as much as she disliked crows, she knew it wasn’t their beady gaze making her uneasy. She glanced
toward the woods and caught a flicker of movement. It must be Skye or Brandon, she reasoned. But neither of them would dart from tree to tree, lingering for a moment behind each.

  “Who’s there?” she called. No answer. Brandon was too exuberant for hiding. Besides, he wasn’t over five feet tall as the flickering figure seemed to have been. And Skye would have answered her. So would the caretaker Claude Duncan. Perhaps it was a teenager lurking around, although it seemed too early for that kind of nonsense. Still, there had been the car wreck close by. Maybe someone had been drawn to the scene, then wandered up around the hotel, which was off limits without permission from Kit or Ellen Kirkwood.

  Adrienne caught a flicker of movement again. Uneasiness flowed through her and impulsively she picked up her camera, taking several shots. If they discovered that someone had broken into the hotel and stolen or damaged furnishings, she might have caught an image of the thief or vandal.

  She sat still for a few more minutes, camera poised. Then the idea that whoever was lurking in the woods might do her or Skye harm abruptly popped into her mind. Her nerves erupted to life. Something was wrong.

  “Skye, come back right now!” Adrienne yelled shrilly at the exact moment a nearby Skye shouted, “Brandon, come here!”

  “Skye, let the dog go and come sit with me! I think someone is in the woods.”

  “Yeah. Me and Brandon.” Adrienne could hear the exasperation in Skye’s voice. “I’ll be back as soon as I get him.”

  Adrienne was annoyed that the girl wouldn’t do as told, but at least she was safe and she was close by. It probably had been Skye she’d seen darting through the thinning mist, Adrienne reasoned. The fog and the loneliness of the abandoned La Belle Rivière had unnerved her. Besides, all of her life she’d experienced dark premonitions and not one of them had come true. It was always the unexpected disaster that jumped up and slapped her in the face.

  Assured that charging into the woods after Skye would be foolish, Adrienne forced down her uneasiness. Tucking the camera into a slit pocket in the flannel lining of her jacket so she wouldn’t lose it, she shifted her gaze far to the right where a six-foot-high white lattice fence enclosed an Olympic-sized pool. It had been drained over a year ago, when Ellen Kirkwood closed the hotel, but Adrienne could still almost feel the tingle of its cold water on a blazing summer afternoon.

  She and Kit and their friend Julianna Brent had spent endless hours poolside, Julianna always earning the most attention with her astonishing body clad in one of her many skimpy bikinis. Adrienne smiled at the thought of the venomous looks Julianna had drawn from so many females, while the males gazed at her with expressions varying from shyness to pure lust. Not in the least reserved, Julianna had loved every moment of the fascination she caused. If either Adrienne or Kit had been jealous of her, the feeling was overwhelmed by their pride at having a gorgeous friend everyone knew was destined to someday smile from the covers of national glamour magazines.

  On the warm summer evenings after an afternoon of swimming and sunbathing, the three of them had ridden around town in Kit’s red convertible. They’d flaunted their tans in cutoffs and halter tops, flirted with boys congregated on street corners, and endlessly listened to Julianna’s favorite song, “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics, which she played at ear-shattering volume, singing along with Annie Lennox. Those were the summers when Kit, Julianna, and Adrienne were sixteen and seventeen. They were great summers, Adrienne thought. Probably the best, most carefree times of the

  Okay, now you’re being morbid, Adrienne thought as she felt depression descend. It’s stupid for me to get so devastated over a building scheduled for demolition when everything else is so good in my world.

  A crow cocked its head and looked down at the mumbling woman with unmistakable ridicule. At least it seemed unmistakable to Adrienne. She glowered back. She’d talk to herself if she liked. Then all six birds flapped up from the telephone wire when an explosion of barking ripped through the quiet morning.

  “Brandon!” Skye shouted. “Don’t you dare go in that hotel!”

  In the hotel? Adrienne thought. At this time of morning, every entrance door to the hotel should be shut and locked.

  More barking from Brandon. More yelling from Skye. “No! You’re wet and dirty! We’re gonna get killed if you go in there—” A moment of silence except for the birds fluttering back to the telephone line. Then a familiar, “Morn, I need you!”

  Adrienne dropped her sketchpad and pencil and headed to the west end of the hotel, from where Skye’s voice had come. She was glad she’d worn running shoes because the grass was laden with dew. “Where are you, Skye?”

  The slender girl with her long pale blond hair and fashionably torn jeans appeared at the corner of the hotel. “There’s a door standing wide open on this end and Brandon ran inside. Mrs. Kirkwood will kill us if he does any damage!”

  “He’s not destructive,” Adrienne said in relief when she reached her daughter to see the only problem was a runaway dog. “He won’t hurt anything.”

  “But he’s acting weird.”

  “He’s just acting like a high-spirited dog. Don’t get so worked up, Skye. We’ll find him.”

  Good grief, Adrienne thought in irritation. Skye acted as if Brandon were a six-week-old pup. But she understood the girl’s protectiveness. At her tenth-birthday party, Skye’s father, Trey, had presented her with Brandon, already full grown and rescued from the dog pound less than twenty-four hours before he was to be “put down,” which made him even more precious to the animal-loving girl. That night, Trey had been killed in a motorcycle accident. In a way, for Skye the dog had become the last precious legacy her father had left to her.

  Adrienne entered the side door behind Skye. It was dark, but Adrienne saw a panel of switches in the dim morning light coming through the open door. She flipped two, and bulbs sprang to light beneath crystal fixtures on the ceiling.

  Brandon barked in the distance. “Hurry up, Mom! If he jumps in that fountain in the lobby—”

  “The worst he’ll do is bump his head. The fountain is empty. You’re acting like a hysterical mother, Skye. Settle down.”

  They entered the lobby in time to see one hundred pounds of shining black and white hair charging up a winding staircase to the second floor, barking for all he was worth. Odd how slowly Brandon ambled across the backyard when she wanted him to come in for the night, Adrienne mused. She’d thought he was getting arthritis, but today he moved like he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  “Brandon, come back here!” Skye shouted.

  “Save your breath,” Adrienne said. “He’s not coming back on his own.”

  “But what about that caretaker guy?”

  “If he’s upstairs, he’ll catch Brandon. Claude certainly won’t hurt him.”

  Skye took the stairs two at a time. Adrienne suddenly felt every one of her thirty-six years as she tried to keep up. I need more exercise, she thought. Jogging, aerobics, yoga. Learning to use the Pilates machine she’d just bought. It all sounded exhausting.

  The second-floor hall was dimmer than below. Only one light glowed beneath a crystal cover midway down the hall, and a strange, sweet scent filled the area. Skye stopped. “What’s that smell?”

  Adrienne sniffed. “Flowers. Jasmine.” She sniffed again in slight alarm. “I also smell smoke. Maybe we should go back downstairs—”

  Brandon let out three deafening barks. Skye darted down the hall yelling the dog’s name. He barked again.

  He wouldn’t be leading us into a fire, Adrienne thought, panicked nevertheless by her daughter’s headlong rush toward the barking. “Skye, wait!”

  The girl halted almost immediately, but Adrienne could tell it wasn’t in response to her command. Skye stared into one of the hotel rooms from which flickering light spilled into the dim hall. Her lips parted and she said softly, “Brandon, come here,” as she knelt and held out her hand.

  Adrienne reached Skye’s side. She looked into the room
and saw candles flickering on the dressers. The heavy, sweet scent of jasmine floated from the wax. Brandon sat stolidly near the foot of a bed. That was all Adrienne could see. Brandon and the foot of the bed covered by a lush bedspread of ivory brocade. What the dog stared at near the head of the bed escaped her range of vision. But she had the strange sensation that she was supposed to go into the room. Something waited for her in that room.

  The feeling grew. I should pull my daughter away from the door, Adrienne thought as dread grew in her mind. I need to get Skye away from here because nothing good lies on that hotel bed Brandon is staring at. Nothing that Skye should see.

  But Skye rose and strode into the room before Adrienne could grab her shoulder. Skye jerked to a stop about five feet away from Brandon, her eyes widening as they fixed on the bed. Brandon looked up at her and whined. The frozen look on Skye’s face and the dog’s pathetic whine drew Adrienne into the room almost against her will. She stopped at the foot of the bed, staring, unblinking, disbelieving.

  Two thick pillows in creamy satin pillowcases rested against the padded headboard. A woman’s head lay against one. She was deathly pale, but her expression was peaceful, the lips shut, the eyelids closed, the long russet-colored hair smoothed like silk away from her face. The hair had been combed behind the right shoulder but spread over the neck and down over the left shoulder, partially obscuring her cheek and neck until it fanned out where the top of her left breast disappeared beneath the bedspread.

  In the wavering candlelight, Adrienne caught the flicker of a barrette on the left side of the woman’s hair, near her temple. It was nearly two inches long, made in the shape of a butterfly with tiny chips of blue, green, and pink Austrian crystals sprinkled on the gossamer wings. Adrienne had seen the barrette a hundred times and she suddenly knew with sick certainty who lay pale and stone-still in that lavish bed.

  Julianna Brent. The Julianna whom Adrienne had known since childhood. The beautiful Julianna who used to smile and flirt and throw back her head and sing with the pure joy of life. Later, Adrienne recalled the one inane thought that tolled through her mind during the awful moment when she felt as if she were free-falling through space …