The Secrets She Kept

by Brenda Novak

  “Maybe you’re more like Mom than I thought,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He pocketed his keys as he went into the house. “You’re too proud for your own good.”

  “I’m no prouder than you are.”

  “I’ve borrowed money when I’ve been in a jam.”

  “When you were on drugs, maybe.”

  He flipped on the lights and locked the door behind him. “Listen, don’t be too hard on Landon. I wouldn’t want to go to my wife with that sort of news, either.”

  “He should never have approached my mother without my knowledge. That’s...humiliating. Embarrassing. Especially because Mom and I were only reunited five years ago. It’s not as if she raised me. That changes the mother-daughter relationship, makes it more...cordial and less motherly.”

  She wasn’t very “motherly” with any of them, hadn’t particularly liked the responsibility and sacrifice that went along with having children. “I understand, and I agree. I’m sorry.”

  “It’ll be okay. With time. I think,” she added glumly.

  He stood at the kitchen sink, staring out at the dark night. “Is Landon there now?”

  “No. We’ve been fighting all evening. He just stormed out.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry about that, too. I hope he calms down.”

  “So do I,” she said and disconnected.

  While Keith understood why Roxanne was upset, he felt a whole lot better about the situation. Landon had been on Fairham the day before their mother had been found in that tub. And he’d been upset. Those two things had been confirmed. But Josephine’s refusal to give him a loan wouldn’t lead a reasonable man, a family man such as Landon, to murder. Even if Chief Underwood found out about that visit and turned her attention to Rocki’s husband, they wouldn’t have to fear any unpleasant surprises.

  “Thank God,” he muttered and called Maisey as he walked up to the office, where he’d left his computer. After he told her they could relax, they laughed that they’d been nervous to begin with. All that angst seemed silly in retrospect. Then he got off the phone and spent several hours reading through his mother’s police file and then catching up on work. When he was done, he even managed to get some decent sleep. It wasn’t until the following morning, when he received an email from Chief Underwood, that he began to feel uneasy again.

  Can you tell me who this man is? Because...maybe I’m wrong, but he looks an awful lot like your brother-in-law. I’ve never met Landon—never seen him in person, that is. I have seen the photos that were taken when he was in town for your mother’s Christmas party, however.

  Keith downloaded the attached file. He kept thinking, So what if it is Landon? Rocki had already confirmed he’d been on the island, and Keith now understood the reason. It all made sense.

  But as soon as the image popped up on his screen, he could see why Chief Underwood would find it disturbing. It was a selfie of Landon, all right—standing naked, except for a tie, in front of a mirror. And he was showing off a major erection.

  Where did you get this? he wrote back.

  Her answer came immediately. It was on your mother’s computer.

  * * *

  Roxanne woke with a start. She’d fallen asleep on the couch, so she was stiff and a bit disoriented. She glanced at the clock on the mantel, realized it was nearly ten and jumped to her feet. The kids! She hadn’t gotten them up for school.

  She was halfway to her thirteen-year-old daughter’s room before her mind latched on to the fact that this was Saturday. They didn’t have school. That was a relief, but with proper brain function came the memories of last night, and those memories made her feel sick. Landon hadn’t come home. He’d never done that before.

  She paused in the kitchen, stared at the island he’d built, the cupboards he’d installed, the flooring he’d put in. Then she went back into the living room to look for her phone.

  She found it on the floor under the couch, where it had apparently dropped after she’d fallen asleep. She checked to see if he’d tried to reach her, but there were no missed calls and no answers to her many texts.

  Where are you?

  Why are you doing this?

  Surely you can understand why I’d be upset.

  Had he gone home to his parents’ house? She hoped not. In twenty-one years of marriage, that’d never happened. But he was close to his folks. His father owned half of their swamp-tour business—or, rather, they owned half of his father’s swamp-tour business, which meant Landon worked with his dad almost every day.

  That had to be where he’d gone. Where else could he be? Lafitte, Louisiana, wasn’t a big town. Sometimes Landon’s nephew, a high school senior who ran the video game shop for them on weekends, had something come up and she or Landon would have to fill in. That was the case this weekend, but Landon wasn’t supposed to spell Jackson until later this evening—two hours before closing. And she couldn’t imagine Landon paying for a motel. Dandra Huxtable ran the closest one. Rocki wouldn’t want Dandra to wonder why Landon was checking into a motel in his own hometown any more than she’d want him going to his folks’.

  “How embarrassing,” she murmured to herself. Not to mention upsetting and painful. Rocki returned to the couch and went through her contacts, scrolling for her mother-in-law’s name. She was about to swallow her pride and call Suzanne when Zac, their ten-year-old, shuffled into the room.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Hoping he wouldn’t ask about his father, Rocki put down her phone. She didn’t want to lie to him, but she also didn’t want to admit that Landon had left and hadn’t come back.

  Thank goodness her oldest daughter was away at college, and her middle child, also a girl, was spending the weekend with a friend. Zac had been listening to his music and playing around on his computer during her heated discussion with Landon last night. His earphones had kept him oblivious. And he was so used to his father working, there was a chance he wouldn’t ask where Landon was. “Hi, honey. Still tired?”

  “Kind of.” He didn’t seem to notice that she was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Fortunately, he wasn’t the most observant kid in the world. Over the years, she and Landon had had very little marital strife, so their children weren’t trained to look for signs of trouble.

  Her son yawned as he came over to give her a hug. The pressure of his body was reassuring, so reassuring it was difficult for Rocki not to hold him a few seconds longer. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

  “Cereal?”

  “You always make pancakes on Saturday.”

  The complaint in his voice told her he wouldn’t be happy to settle for anything less. “You’re not tired of pancakes?”

  “No. I love them.”

  “Right. Then...pancakes it is.”

  He flopped onto the couch and used the remote to turn on the TV while she took her phone into the kitchen. She managed to get all the ingredients out for buttermilk pancakes, but then she had to pause to fight her tears. Why was Landon doing this? She hadn’t gotten that angry last night, still couldn’t figure out how their argument had ignited. The way he was acting, she had every right to question his whereabouts, his actions and his motivations...

  Her phone rang and she snatched it up to check the caller ID.

  It wasn’t her husband; it was Maisey.

  She stared at her sister’s image on that small screen, wondering if she could rein in her emotions long enough to have a conversation that didn’t include tears. But every time her thumb hovered over the accept button, the lump in her throat swelled and she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk without breaking down. So she let it go to voice mail.

  He’ll be home soon, she told herself.

  * * *

  “Why would your mother have this picture on her computer?”

&nb
sp; Keith had no answer. Chief Underwood had brought his mother’s phone and her computer to Coldiron House, and they were both seated at the dining room table. She’d logged on to his mother’s laptop and had shown him exactly where she’d found the picture—in a file named “Tuesday.”

  “Keith?” she prompted when he didn’t reply right away.

  It felt odd looking at something like that for a lot of reasons, but especially with his grandfather, in the portrait behind him, peering over his shoulder. “I can’t even begin to guess,” he admitted. “What was on her phone?”

  “Nothing like this. Just pictures of the family.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “The fewer pictures she has like this, the better.”

  “Isn’t one enough?”

  He sighed as he remembered feeling that everything with Landon was going to be okay. That was just last night. “More than enough.”

  “The fact that there weren’t any on her phone tells me she probably received this little ‘gift’ in an email rather than a text.”

  Or she went to the trouble of saving it somewhere she thought it would be safe before deleting it from her phone.

  But why would his sister’s husband be sending his mother a naked photo of himself in the first place?

  “How well do you know Landon?” Harper asked.

  “Not as well as I do Rocki. I’ve been on the West Coast since I left here. But she and I talk all the time, and I’ve always had the impression that her husband’s a decent guy.”

  “How long have they been married?”

  “They were high school sweethearts, and they’ve been a couple ever since. Went to college together and got married right after. They have three kids, one of whom is in college now.”

  She put her hand on his arm in a gesture of comfort. “I’m sorry. I know this doesn’t look good.”

  He frowned at the screen. Should he tell her what Pippa had told him? Why not? She’d find out, anyway. Now that she’d discovered this, she’d be asking about Landon—and if she asked Pippa directly, Pippa would probably repeat what she’d told him. His mother’s housekeeper hadn’t volunteered that information to the authorities, but she’d be unlikely to lie to them. “He came here and argued with my mother the day before she was found,” he said.

  Harper dropped her hand. “How do you know?”

  “Pippa saw him, heard the raised voices.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. “When did you learn this?”

  “A couple days ago.”

  “And you weren’t going to tell me?”

  “I thought it was irrelevant.”

  “What were they fighting about?”

  “She couldn’t tell. They stopped talking as soon as she came out of the kitchen to see what was going on. Then he stormed out. But I’ve asked Rocki why he was here. She says he tried to borrow money from Mom and the request wasn’t well received.” He left out the lie about Vegas. Landon was looking bad enough.

  Harper seemed to be mulling over that tidbit. “Pippa didn’t mention Landon to me,” she said at length. “She said that nothing unusual occurred before your mother’s death.”

  “Seeing a member of the family wouldn’t be ‘unusual.’”

  “If that was the case, she wouldn’t have told you, either.”

  “Everyone was saying it was suicide. Because of that, Pippa had no reason to believe that what she’d heard and seen might be connected to my mother’s death.”

  Harper didn’t defend the suicide conclusion. Her expression was thoughtful as she continued to stare at the picture.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, but he was almost afraid to find out.

  “You keep asking if I believe your mother’s death was a suicide.”

  “And...?”

  She tapped her fingernails on the table. “I’m less convinced of it now than I was at dinner. Are you sure they were arguing over money?”

  He sighed. “I’m less convinced of it now than I was before.”

  At the echo of her own words, her lips curved into a rueful smile.

  “Why would she label this file ‘Tuesday’?” he asked, wondering if that small detail could clarify or illuminate anything.

  Harper leaned back. “It’s innocuous—nothing that would attract attention if someone were to get on her computer. That’s my guess.”

  That was his guess, too. Because there wasn’t one other picture or document in the same file.

  “Or Tuesday held some special significance in their relationship,” Harper added. “Maybe that was the day of the week they first slept together—if they went that far.”

  Keith winced at the image that presented, but his mind had jumped to the same conclusion. An affair. “I can’t imagine my mother would ever be interested in a man with so little money,” he said. “Landon had nothing to offer her.”

  “I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

  Keith couldn’t even laugh. He merely grunted to let her know how unappealing that comment was to him—connecting his mother to his brother-in-law as it did.

  “Not only does that look like a pretty impressive...um...erection,” she said, “he’s significantly younger, and he’s attractive. Being able to catch his eye probably fed her vanity.”

  If anything would tempt his mother to make such a terrible mistake, it would be her fear of getting old, her need to remain desirable. That had to be the reason Keith felt slightly nauseous. Considering the way his mother had behaved around men—the way she reveled in their attention—he could actually see something like this happening.

  “She was in a relationship with Hugh before she died,” he said, but it was a feeble attempt to resist believing what he was seeing, and he wasn’t surprised when Harper immediately shot it down.

  “Shocking though it may be, some women sleep with more than one man at a time. It wouldn’t be unheard of. With Hugh in Australia, they couldn’t see each other often.”

  And when it came to the opposite sex, his mother had always had her pick. Old, young, it didn’t matter. They all loved her. Keith could see her dangling several guys at once, especially if she knew Hugh was married. She’d feel perfectly justified in pursuing other men. She could collect hearts as easily as other people collected seashells along a sandy beach.

  But wouldn’t she draw the line at her daughter’s husband?

  Keith gestured toward his mother’s computer. “Any other pictures of him on there?”

  “None like that,” she said. “There are a few of him with his wife and kids. That’s it. My tech has scoured both devices.” She picked up his mother’s phone to show him the family shots.

  Keith pored through the photos, grimacing when he saw one with Landon, Rocki and the kids posed in front of his mother’s ornate Christmas tree. According to the date, that was taken just a month ago at his mother’s party. There were other shots and short videos from the same night. In one picture, Keith saw Pippa carrying in a shrimp platter. In the longest video his mother had, which had obviously been taken by someone else, she presented each of the employees with his or her Christmas bonus. That included Nancy, who thanked his mother politely but didn’t seem too keen to accept the hug that went with it.

  “Did my mom and Landon ever call each other?” he asked. “Text?”

  “If so, she deleted their correspondence—or someone else did—before she died. The only texts that show up on her phone are to Rocki, and they’re what you’d expect them to be.”

  “But you can still get any texts that’ve been deleted, right?”

  “Yes. I’ll be able to see how often and how long they talked, even when they talked. And I’ll be able to read their texts. I’ve already prepared the subpoena for the cell phone company. I’ll submit it first thing tomorrow morning.”

 
“How soon will they respond?”

  “It should take a day, maybe two.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “Hey, it’s the digital age.”

  “Well, shit.” He scratched his head. He knew he was making his hair stand up, but he didn’t care. He didn’t like where this was going. “Are you positive he sent this picture to her?”

  “It’s a selfie, Keith. How else would she get it?”

  Rocki wasn’t likely to send it to her; that was for damn sure.

  Keith nearly shoved the computer away. He couldn’t bear to look at that picture anymore. But then he noticed a detail that made him sit up. That tie! It was the same tie Landon had been wearing in the family picture in front of the tree. And now that Keith was over his initial shock and could focus on something besides the fact that a nude picture of his brother-in-law had been found in his mother’s possession, Keith could tell the photo had been taken in one of the bathrooms at Coldiron House. He recognized the bust behind Landon; it was in a guest suite, near the jetted tub.

  So why, if Landon was staying in the house, would he send Josephine this picture?

  Because they’d been flirting, and he wanted to take the next step, but Rocki was awake in the adjoining bedroom? Was he titillated by the thrill of sexting someone else right under his wife’s nose? His wife’s mother, for God’s sake?

  “I can tell you when and where that picture was taken,” he said.

  “I already know when it was taken,” Harper said. “December 26. At least that’s the date your mother saved the file on her computer.”

  “No, it was taken on the thirteenth, the night she threw her big Christmas party.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at his tie.”

  “It’s the same. I saw that. But maybe that’s his favorite, and he wears it often.”

  “No. He doesn’t wear any tie often. I’m surprised he even owns one. Rocki probably bought it for the party. Anyway, he’s standing in a bathroom off one of the guest suites here at Coldiron House. He took that picture on December 13.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I’ll talk to Pippa, see if she can tell me how they were acting toward each other that night.”