When Secrets Die

by Lynn S. Hightower

  The desk drawers were locked. A new development. Michael had said they were open before, and full of random clutter. Amaryllis had taken her “office” one step further.

  The file cabinets had pens, paper clips, a magnifying glass (for some odd reason), stacks of paper towels, rolls of toilet paper, and one flathead screwdriver with a broken plastic handle. No doubt Michael Borneo had plenty of tools and keys, but there was no point asking him for help getting into the desk. He might object to opening drawers that were locked. It was always best not to ask a question unless you wanted an answer.

  The desk lock was easily picked, but the screwdriver slipped and I broke the latch to the center drawer. It gave me a moment of guilt. I was more careful with the other drawers.

  The center drawer held a clump of string, balled up with little tacks. Some project or other that hadn’t worked out. Pens, paper clips, pencils. Rubber bands, and way at the back, a little cache of order forms preprinted with the clinic’s address and phone and account numbers. The deep drawers on the right held mason jars of peanut butter. All of the jars were dated and labeled. Some of them had little stickers of flowers in the corner, and some did not. That interested me. I took two jars, one with a flower label and one without, and tucked them into my overalls. I took pictures of the drawers’ contents, and the nameplate on the desk. The bottom-left drawer was stuck, and hard to open, mainly because it was stuffed. Dried flowers, flaking and crumbling, plastic flowers, water-stained and worn, heavy foil balloons that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Small bedraggled stuffed animals. A plastic Pez dinosaur that looked newer than the rest. Silk flowers with wire and clips made for attaching to the top of gravestones. A weird collection. I took pictures of those too.

  I relocked the desk, except for the center drawer, which was broken, and put everything back the way I had found it. I could hear a vacuum from the other side of the building. Michael was hard at work. I wandered down the hallway, past office doors, until I came to one labeled DR. TUNDRIDGE. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked. No surprise. Michael likely went through and unlocked all the doors so that he could go in and out freely while he cleaned. So long as he kept the outside doors locked, there was no problem.

  The light was on. I went inside.

  The office had a heavy feel to it, and there were stacks of papers and books on the desk, the floor, and the buttery-soft brown-leather couch. Clearly, Tundridge spent a lot of time working here. The shelves were crammed with books, some in neat rows, some stacked and shoved in tight. There was a large flat-screen computer on his desk, next to a laptop, and another table held yet another computer, as well as a printer and a fax machine.

  I wandered carefully, studying the papers on the desk but not touching. Formulas, chemistry notations that made no sense to me. Nothing in the fax machine. I looked at the desk a long moment, wondering if all of the drawers were locked. I glanced at the file cabinets, the notepad beneath a huge chemical reference book. I was in clear violation of my agreement with Michael Borneo. I backed out of the office and into the hall.

  Tundridge’s office was right next to a stairwell. Lights on, like everywhere else. The basement or the pathology lab or both. I slipped through the fire door and headed down two flights of steps. Opened the bottom fire door and stepped into complete darkness.

  Light switches are never placed for the convenience of short people, and it took me some time to find one. There were three switches, and I flipped them all. The blaze and hum of fluorescent light made me blink.

  It was hard to take everything in all at once, though the white tile floors and whitewashed cinder block walls made me remember immediately how Emma had talked about the way her worn shoes had looked against the floor. The lab was sanitized with the sort of aggressive medical cleanliness that smells harsh and makes your eyes ache. I smelled bleach. The black tables were a visual relief beneath the brightness of the lights, a track of fluorescent tubes that ran along the ceiling.

  The tables were narrow and long and built in. Some of them were bare. Many of them held microscopes, laptop stations, screens and monitors. It was the white metal shelves that drew me. The jars of formalin, the disturbing shapes. I went closer slowly, curious, my stomach tight with butterflies.

  There were pieces of small children in the jars. The first one I saw held an ear. One tiny ear. Next to it was a slender cylinder that held a ropy mass of some kind of internal organ I could not identify. There was a heart, and next to it what were clearly a set of small and immature lungs. Everything was in miniature, a pediatric chamber of horrors.

  It was the floating arm that stopped me. Up until now, every jar had been labeled with a series of numbers and letters, like a code, and a last name next to the age of the child. This one had a strip of yellowed masking tape slapped across the front, and someone had written BABY ELMO in capitals. It was my first experience with being offended by someone’s off sense of humor. Some things were sacrosanct. Some things were not funny.

  The arm was small, infant-sized, and the little fist rested against the top of the lid, as if it wanted out.

  Whose child did that little arm belong to? How long had it been in the jar? Did some family actually consent to that arm being put in a jar and kept on a shelf, or had they signed a generalized blanket consent form with no inkling that their child’s tiny fist would be labeled Baby Elmo for a stranger’s fleeting amusement? The impersonal clinical coding seemed infinitely kinder—benevolent in comparison.

  The echo of footsteps made my stomach jump. I looked over my shoulder, expecting Michael, but did not recognize the face I saw behind the wire mesh window.

  I began patrolling the lab tables with my trash bag open, and glanced up, trying to seem bored, to stare at the man who walked in. Tundridge was about five six and stocky, his thin dandruffy brown hair cut short. He had green eyes, a narrow worried face, and an air of anxious distraction. He was not what I expected. Not tall or commanding or evil. Just a stocky, average man who looked preoccupied.

  I tilted my head, gave him a quick nod, and went back to the patrol, looking for trash cans to empty.

  “Excuse me?”

  The voice was curt but not particularly unfriendly.

  “Garbage cans are through there.” He pointed to a metal door at the back of the room that I hadn’t even noticed. Even if he hadn’t had a name tag over a creased white coat, I would have known he was Dr. Tundridge. He picked up a printout from one of the machines and turned his back, heading up the stairs. I wondered when he’d arrived and why Michael hadn’t warned me. No time, I supposed, and of course Michael hadn’t known I was down here.

  I spent another twenty minutes in the lab. I did my job, looking at everything I could look at. Some of the things I saw floating in jars still come to me at unexpected moments. I did not like to think of Emma Marsden standing in this lab all alone.

  EMMA

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They left late, Blaine and Emma, late enough that Emma was going to have to write Blaine a note to get into school. Blaine punched one radio station after another, till Emma reached out and turned the radio off. The night before, with Marcus there between them, Emma thought Blaine had taken the news about the details of her half-brother’s death surprisingly well. But this morning, enduring the attitude and the atmosphere, and seeing the quick and ready tears when Blaine had dropped one of her old elephant bowls and broken it into three big pieces, she thought maybe not. Blaine was usually at her best around Marcus. Something about having him there lightened the atmosphere in the house and put a cheerful buffer between mother and daughter. It was hard not to be pleased by a man who seemed to adore both of them and had no mission but to please. And there was none of the tension, the odd-man-out feeling around Blaine, not with Marcus. Emily did not realize how strained things had been with Clayton until Marcus came into their lives.

  Sad to admit, but her daughter was a hell of a lot easier to get along with when Marcus was around. But they only had to get th
rough a fifteen-minute drive to school.

  “We’ve got the whole weekend,” Emma said. “You want to rent a movie tonight? Order pizza? Or do you have plans?”

  Blaine was looking out the window, and she shrugged, and did not answer for a while.

  “Can I have somebody sleep over tonight?”

  “Ummm …” Emma was tired and the house was a wreck, and she didn’t want anybody who wasn’t Marcus around. On the other hand, Blaine needed friends, peers, not just parents all the time.

  “Never mind,” Blaine said. “I’ll just have a loser night with my loser mom.”

  “That’s a charming way to get what you want. You can have somebody sleep over if you want, Blaine, you don’t have to spend the evening with your loser mom. And Marcus will be here. He’s not a loser.”

  “How about Twyla? It would be fun to go bowling, all four of us. Or she and I could stay home, and you and Marcus could go out.”

  “God,” Emma said.

  “What? What’s wrong with Twyla? Or do you feel like you need to pick my friends for me, like you control everything else in my life?”

  “You know what, Blaine? You can have anybody but Twyla. Last time she was here she kept trying to start a fire in the fireplace.”

  “Yeah, where else would you start one?”

  “How about you don’t start one, which is what I told her at least three times. It being hot outside, with the air-conditioning on. And not to mention the chimney being seventy years old with cracks in the mortar. She could have set the whole house on fire.”

  “Yes, I know, Mother, you’ve brought it up a million times. I get it. You hate Twyla.”

  “If a guest can’t respect the rules, she isn’t welcome to come back.” Emma glanced at her daughter. The sulky look, as usual. “You’re just spoiled, Blaine, you know that? The first time something doesn’t go your way, you throw a temper tantrum.”

  Emma flicked the turn signal on and moved onto Melton Road. It was a pretty stretch of highway, on the back roads so the traffic was minimal, and it wound alongside a lake on the left, and woods on the right. She heard the road noise first, then looked and saw that Blaine had opened the passenger-side door on the Jeep and was poised over the side of the car.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Emma grabbed her daughter by the hair and yanked her back into the car, and Blaine screamed and hit her, hard, on the arm. The car veered to the right and into the oncoming lane, but there was no traffic, and Emma got the car back into its own lane before a car came toward them from around the bend.

  “Pull over, Mom, right now, pull over, I want out, let me out, let me out of the car.”

  Blaine’s voice hit the upper registers of hysteria, and Emma drove with her left hand, keeping her right hand wound tight in her daughter’s hair. Blaine hit her over and over and over, until she pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, the two of them screaming at each other.

  It made Emma sick. Sick at heart. Sick to her stomach. Her arm hurt where Blaine had punched her.

  Emma let her daughter go. Blaine jumped out of the Jeep, tripping on her way out, then scrambling to her feet, and running, then disappearing, into the woods. Emma sat in the car, chest heaving, tears running down her cheeks, watching the woods, wondering what in the hell had just happened. She waited a long time, door hanging open, cars whizzing by her on the left, but Blaine did not come back. And Emma did not know what to do.

  BLAINE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Blaine’s feet hurt, and she could feel blisters bubbling up on her left heel. She would pick today to wear the platforms and skirt. The sun was out, but it was cold and she wished she’d worn a jacket.

  Blaine looked down the road. She had a long walk ahead of her, a long walk to nowhere. A rusty orange pickup truck went by, slowing, the driver honking. Blaine kept walking, and did not even give the guys in the truck a look, reaching inside for what Mom called the “inner bitch.” The truck kept slowing and Blaine felt her heart beat fast, but then another car came behind the truck, and the driver picked up speed and moved on.

  It was really stupid, being on the side of the road like this. Her mother had put her in a terrible position. Blaine had stayed in the woods and waited awhile, and then she had looked out just in time to see her mother drive away. And part of her had crumpled. Her mother just leaving her like that. What kind of a mother leaves her daughter by the side of the road?

  But it was a relief not to have to go to school. The girls all hated her. They’d all been good friends since kindergarten, and they didn’t need any new people in the clique, especially not ones as pretty and smart as Blaine Marsden. The boys liked her too much. They followed her to class and honked at her in the parking lot, and girls she didn’t even know came up and got in her face because some boy they liked was looking at Blaine. She couldn’t go to the cafeteria—none of the girls would sit with her, and the boys wouldn’t leave her alone.

  She hated it here. She hated school, she hated the other kids, and she hated her math teacher, who could not speak English, made no sense at all, and ignored all of her questions. Blaine needed to keep her grade point average high to qualify for the kind of scholarships that would get her through college, and right now she was carrying a low D in Algebra I. She needed a tutor, but saw no point in asking Mom for a tutor when she had that worried look every time they went to Kroger. Her friend Brandon was good at math, and he’d promised to help her. Not that she’d ever see him again. She was on her own now, and never going home.

  So where was she going to go? She could call Great-Aunt Jodina, but what would she say? I beat up Mom, come and get me? She couldn’t bear it if Aunt Jodina stopped loving her. Plus she lived all the way up in Harlan, and it would take a long time for her to get down here.

  Franklin had given her his home and office numbers, in case she needed him. Blaine had been touched, but there was no way she’d call him. It was just too awkward.

  And Blaine realized that she didn’t have any money. She’d jumped out of the Jeep without her purse or her backpack. Shit. Her mother had driven her nuts that morning, asking over and over, Do you have lunch money, Do you have lunch money, and had finally shouted, “I’m putting ten dollars in your purse for lunches this week.”

  That ten bucks was still in the Jeep.

  Blaine sucked her bottom lip. At her old school, there would have been friends she could have called. At this dumb school they confiscated the cell phones, so nobody had theirs on. Twyla couldn’t drive anyway.

  At least Twyla had been nice to her. True, Twyla was a lot more out there than her mother knew. For one, she was pregnant again, and trying to decide what to do about it. Two, she was cutting school to hang out with Brian and Art, who were Mormon rednecks, looking for trouble and wives, which was a combination found only in weird places like her own high school. And Twyla was doubly attractive to both boys, being both trouble and open to marriage. She sure wasn’t looking to go to college like Blaine was, although Blaine hadn’t given up on the girl. She was smart enough, if she could just focus, although asking Twyla to focus on anything other than getting a fake ID so that she could sing country music at karaoke bars and get discovered was like trying to get Wally to stop barking when the doorbell rang. Impossible and noisy, both of them convinced you were interfering with their sacred role in life.

  It was true that things happened when Twyla was over. The girl could not leave the fireplace alone, she had to light the kindling, like it was some kind of compulsion, and she was more likely than not to forget to open the flue, so the room would fill with smoke. But Twyla was no better at starting fires than she was at anything else, so at least they went out pretty fast.

  The problem was, there was nobody else to hang out with. And whose fault was that? Who had moved her every two years, who had made her go to the stupid high school in Kentucky where she didn’t have any friends except guys who wanted to do her? And then when she wanted to ha
ng out with the one kid who was halfway interesting and acceptable as a friend, her mom says no, she can’t come over, pick somebody else. There wasn’t anybody else.

  Anger or despair, which way did her mother want her to go? Her real dad did not care enough to even call her or send her a birthday card, he forgot her at Christmas, and Mom had kicked Clayton out the door. At least Clayton had tried. Her mother shouldn’t have let him move in unless she was going to keep him.

  Blaine felt light-years away from her peers. Their biggest worries were which college to select; hers was whether she could even go to community college. Grades and financial aid would make or break her.

  And now it was over between her and Mom. She might never see her mother again.

  And the dumb thing was that school was finally getting better. Brandon was helping her with math during lunch, and Twyla sat with them, begging off half of Blaine’s lunch every day, and with the three of them there in the cafeteria, bent over the books and laughing at stupid stuff, Blaine had felt normal, finally, like she blended.

  Back at her last school she had been popular, she’d had lots of friends and was on the actual short list for homecoming princess. And she’d traded this for a hick high school with no computer lab and a foreign language program that was a joke.

  Since Ned got sick, everything was always awful. Blaine was just trying to break out of that, and it was clear her mother wasn’t going to let her. She and her mom had been okay before Clayton came along. Blaine knew her mother needed adults in her life—she needed a boyfriend. And it wasn’t like her mother ever let them spend the night, or be there all the time. Not unless Blaine liked them. Blaine had nixed more than one, but she was more careful about that now, and sometimes, though she would never say it out loud, she wished her mother wouldn’t give her quite so much power. But it was mostly a comfort. She had too many friends whose lives were ruled by the parent’s boyfriend or the girlfriend of the hour, who came in and changed everything and shoved the kids out of the way.