The Secrets She Kept

by Brenda Novak

  A minute or two later, she called him.

  “What’s going on?” Her voice had a nasal quality that made him wonder if he’d interrupted her during a crying jag.

  He slid his seat back to create more legroom. “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  That didn’t exactly shore up his hope. She didn’t even know she’d been found out... “Why?”

  “Family stuff. Between Landon and me.” She told him to hang on while she blew her nose. “What’s happening with the autopsy?” she asked when she came back. “Are they finished?”

  “They are. I just heard from the doctor. He couldn’t provide a lot of details yet, but he did give me the manner of death.”

  “Murder.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a brief silence. Finally she said, “You expected that.”

  Did she? He noticed she didn’t ask how Josephine was murdered. Was she too distracted? Or did she already know? “I wish that weren’t the case.”

  “Me, too.” She’d supported his decision to get a pathologist of their own. Why had she done that? Why hadn’t she stood behind the coroner’s initial assumption of suicide? There I go again. She’s innocent.

  “Is that why you called?” she asked. “Because this isn’t really a good time—”

  “When were you going to tell me, Rock?” he interrupted.

  Another silence greeted this question. “Tell you what?”

  “About Mom and Landon.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  The silence grew even heavier.

  “Rocki?” he said. “Hard as it may be, you need to open up, to trust me.”

  Nothing.

  “Are you still there?”

  “This is a nightmare,” she mumbled more to herself than to him. “And it’s getting worse by the day. I keep hoping I’ll wake up, that my life will go back to normal, but...”

  “We have to deal with what is. When did the affair start?”

  “How’d you find out?” she asked instead of answering.

  He wished he didn’t have to tell her about the photograph. That would add insult to injury. But he felt they both needed to be as open and honest as possible. Complete transparency might be the only way to survive this emotional maelstrom. “There’s a picture of him on Mom’s computer that’s...shocking.”

  “What picture?” She sounded scared.

  “He’s naked. With an erection.”

  When he heard her gulp, he felt a renewed anger at Josephine and Landon. Not only had they ruined their own lives, they’d probably caused Rocki to ruin hers. “I’m sorry.”

  “How’d she get that?” she asked when she could speak.

  “He must’ve sent it to her, right?”

  The sound of water rose to his ears—the taps going on? “Rocki?”

  He heard retching next and felt his muscles tense. After a minute or two, she picked up again. “I’m here.” She didn’t explain what she’d been doing; she didn’t need to.

  “Where’s here?” he asked softly.

  “My...my house. My bathroom.”

  “Where’s Landon?”

  “His dad wasn’t feeling well and needed him to handle a tour.”

  “So he went to work? You’re alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the game store?”

  “It’s closed today.”

  “I’m glad.” He paused. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

  “How can anyone explain the past week?” she said. “No, it’s been longer than a week. The past month and a half?”

  “Please try, and I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

  He heard the rasp as she sucked in a breath. “Okay.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  The volume of her voice dropped so low that Keith had to hold his phone tightly to his ear, but he didn’t dare interrupt in case he couldn’t get her talking again. “I first noticed something...odd a little over a month ago,” she said. “Landon was more preoccupied than usual, not as engaged with the family. He was nice enough, just...not as attentive and not as interested in sex, which I found unusual. I didn’t let it bother me too much, though. We’ve been under a lot of financial pressure lately, and I was busy with the kids.”

  “You noticed nothing before that?”

  “Nothing that stood out. A month ago is when it got...serious. If that’s the right word. Landon can’t give me a specific time. He said it began subtly. A few years ago. Whenever we’d visit Fairham, Josephine would flirt with him, touch him on the arm or shoulder, lean in close when she spoke to him. I was oblivious to it until Mom’s Christmas party. But while I was there, I got a strange feeling about them. They joked and laughed too much, seemed to be in their own little world, and I wasn’t part of it. I’d never seen Mom do that with anyone else.”

  “Because you weren’t around to watch her target so many other guys over the years.”

  “I’m embarrassed to admit this now, but at first I was flattered that she liked my husband so much. And then... It’s hard to verbalize. At that party, as the night wore on, I started to get a bit uncomfortable. She’d look at him too long or something. It was weird.”

  “Did you confront her? Or him?”

  “No. You know Mom. She was above question. I didn’t confront either one of them. I ignored what I’d seen—talked myself out of it. I couldn’t believe that Landon would have any interest in a woman so much older, no matter how pretty she was, especially my own mother.”

  “I can see why you might discount it.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, because now I feel like a fool for being so blind. I thought once I got Landon home, everything would be okay. After all, we don’t live close to Fairham and we rarely saw Mom. But then he told me he had to go to Vegas, and that made me uneasy all over again, because we’d already decided we didn’t have the money to attend the convention this year.”

  “You suspected he might be coming here?”

  “I didn’t suspect, exactly. I was...worried, concerned. Enough that I checked up on him after he left.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “I put an app on his cell phone that’s designed to show where everyone in the family is.”

  “Without him finding out?”

  “I had all the pings and other notifications go to an email account he and I created years ago that we no longer use.”

  “But couldn’t he see the icon on his phone?”

  “He has loads of apps. I knew he’d never notice.”

  “So that’s what gave him away.”

  “That’s what gave him away,” she echoed. “The app showed him on Fairham, not in Vegas, although he called me, pretending to be at the MGM Grand. So I arranged for the kids to stay with their friends, and I went to Fairham to confront him—and Mom.”

  Keith released his seat belt; he hadn’t even noticed that he still had it on. “When was this?”

  “A week ago Saturday night.”

  The night Josephine was killed. Keith rubbed his eyes. “What’d he have to say when you surprised him?”

  “I never actually saw him. By the time I got in, the app showed him as disconnected, so I assumed he’d realized I’d put that location device on his phone and deleted it. I found out later that he’d turned off his phone because he was on a plane to Vegas.”

  “You told me he left on the five o’clock ferry.”

  “He did.”

  “Does that mean you arrived on the eight o’clock?”

  “Yes, I barely made it.”

  If only she’d missed it... Keith felt a chill that had nothing to
do with the cold air creeping into the car. “And did you see Mom?”

  “I did. She was packing for her trip.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Like who?” She seemed surprised that he’d asked such a seemingly unrelated question, but he was keeping track of timelines, wanted to determine exactly who knew what and when everything had happened.

  “The ferry captain. Tyrone. Pippa.”

  “The ferry captain might’ve noticed me, but it was dark and rainy and we didn’t speak. It’s not like I was driving Mom’s Mercedes, or there was anything else to connect me with Coldiron House. I’d rented the cheapest economy car I could find. I doubt he paid me any attention.”

  “What about Pippa and Tyrone?”

  “They were both off by the time I got to the house. And I was glad. As you can imagine, I wasn’t at my best. I didn’t want Maisey or anyone else to even know I was on the island. I was hurt and angry and reeling at the thought of my mother and...”

  When her words fell off, he could tell she was once again fighting to suppress her emotions.

  “...and my husband,” she finished a few seconds later.

  Keith twirled the keys around and around his finger. “So you came across on the ferry and drove to Coldiron House in the rain without speaking to anyone.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Like I said, Mom was packing for her trip. She didn’t want to talk to me, kept trying to put me off. Said I didn’t know anything. That nothing was how it appeared. That she couldn’t deal with my issues right then.”

  “And you...”

  “I told her she was the most despicable human I’d ever met. That I was glad Gretchen stole me and raised me. That Gretchen, despite her faults, had more integrity in her little finger than Mom had in her whole body. That she’d ruined my family. That I’d never speak to her again as long as I lived.” She paused, then said, “I can’t even remember it all.”

  “So you didn’t leave.”

  “Not right away. I wish I had, though. I wish I’d never gone there, never spoken to her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because those are the last memories I’ll have. And whether she deserved what I said or not, those memories are ugly.”

  “How did it end?”

  “She was mortified. I don’t think she’d ever been caught so red-handed. She always acted as if she had more to be proud of than the rest of us did, that she had more dignity...or more something. She was so damn arrogant. She tried to ignore me while she packed. Kept saying Landon meant nothing to her. But that only made me angrier. If he meant nothing to her, why’d she have to do what she did?”

  Keith wished he could answer that question. “Some sick desire to be more attractive, more appealing than you?” Her daughter. He didn’t say anything about Landon’s role in the whole mess...

  “I guess. Anyway, in the end she apologized that I was ‘upset.’ That was when I knew staying wouldn’t help anything. So I screamed a few more terrible things and ran out.”

  Keith was relieved to hear that she’d left. But she couldn’t get off the island until the ferry started running the next morning. Did she return to Coldiron House later, hoping to see their mother again, hoping to achieve more satisfaction the second time around? “Where’d you go after that?”

  “To Smuggler’s Cove. I wanted to go to Maisey’s, but I was too humiliated, didn’t want anyone to know what Landon—and our mother—had done.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay at the Drift Inn? There are always vacancies in the winter.”

  She laughed without humor. “I didn’t have the money—and no room on my credit card. I’d gone over the limit paying for my airfare, which wasn’t cheap since I booked at the last minute.”

  He felt so guilty about what she must have been feeling that night. It couldn’t have helped that she had such limited resources. “So where’d you sleep?”

  “I managed to get inside one of the rentals. It was cold, because I couldn’t get the heater to work. The pilot light must’ve been out, but I wasn’t about to try to deal with that.”

  So how did their mother wind up dead? “Did you go back to see Mom again that night, Rocki?”

  He had to wait several seconds for her response, but then she said, “Are you asking me if I killed her, Keith?”

  He could hear tears in her voice. “I’m afraid so. I have to ask, Rock. I have to know what really happened.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said fervently. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. Ranting and raving the way I did—that’s the most violent I’ve ever been. I could never have...drowned anyone. Even her.”

  Keith’s breath lodged in his throat. Drowned? The pathologist had determined that there was no water in Josephine’s lungs, which meant she’d been dead when she was placed in the tub. Rocki was still going on information she’d received when the police had found Josephine.

  But was it an attempt to mislead him? Rocki wasn’t stupid...

  “Maybe your cell phone records will prove you were on the far side of the island.” Chief Underwood had been able to pinpoint where Tyrone’s son had called dispatch, hadn’t she?

  “I doubt it. Once I left Coldiron House, I had to turn my phone off. I’d rushed off without a charger and I needed to conserve the little battery power I had left.”

  Keith bit back a curse. But since she’d paused, he felt he had to fill the silence. “You realize what that means, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have an alibi.”

  Exactly. The police probably wouldn’t be able to place her outside Coldiron House at the time their mother was murdered—if she was outside Coldiron House...

  “I didn’t kill her, Keith,” she said. “Please, you have to believe me. I wasn’t capable of carefully planning to sneak back and set the scene so that it looked like a suicide. Whoever murdered Mom was one cool customer. Even if I could kill someone, I wasn’t capable of that kind of precise strategy—not that night.”

  What she said made sense, but was she telling the truth? Or was this sister, who he’d known for only the past five years, such a good actress that she could pretend to be distraught while hiding the fact that she’d taken the ultimate revenge?

  Keith tried to remain skeptical. She hadn’t come forward with the information that she’d been on the island when Josephine was killed until she was forced to. That didn’t lend her a great deal of credibility. But she was his sister. And he could understand why she wouldn’t want anyone to know she’d followed her husband to Fairham. “I believe you,” he said. “And I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

  When she broke down and started sobbing, he felt tears fill his own eyes. “This whole thing has been terrible, Rocki. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Are you going to tell Maisey about Landon?”

  “She already knows.”

  “And she didn’t call—didn’t tell me she knew my husband was cheating?”

  This was another blow. “She wasn’t sure of it. We were hoping that picture didn’t mean what we thought it might. I haven’t told her yet what Chief Underwood found when she subpoenaed the phone records.”

  “Even without that...I can’t imagine what she must think.”

  “She feels bad for you. Like I do,” he said. “What’s going to happen between you and Landon?”

  It took her a long time to answer. When she finally did, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “Does he want to try to work things out?”

  “He says he does. But I’m not sure this is something we can recover from.”

  “Has he moved out?”

  “I haven’t asked him to. We don’t have the money to get him a place, and we’re trying to maintain as much stability as we can,
for the kids’ sake, until we each decide what we want.”

  Keith couldn’t bear the thought of them splitting up. Since he and Maisey had discovered Roxanne, living with her husband and children in Louisiana five years ago, they’d thought Rocki was the lucky one. She’d been raised by a much less complicated and far more loving person.

  But maybe Rocki hadn’t escaped the wrecking ball that was Josephine, after all...

  22

  KEITH WAS JUST finishing up several things he had to take care of for his business in California when Nancy called. He jumped at the buzz of his phone—and grabbed it—because he’d been expecting to hear from Chief Underwood. Some technician at the lab she used was supposed to be examining the hair found in his mother’s tub to see what information, if any, could be gleaned from that small piece of evidence. Even if they couldn’t recover any DNA, she’d told him they should at least be able to determine the race of the person who’d left that hair. If it wasn’t a Caucasian, maybe she wouldn’t even need to ask for a sample of Rocki’s hair...

  “You haven’t brought my dog home,” Nancy said by way of a greeting.

  Simba, who’d followed him around the house ever since he got back, was lying at his feet. He lifted his head and his ears perked up, suggesting he could hear Nancy’s voice.

  “I’m holding him ransom,” Keith said, leaning over to scratch under Simba’s collar.

  “How much is it going to cost me to get him back?”

  “We are having dinner together, remember?”

  “I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

  She hadn’t decided against it, though. He could hear the playfulness in her tone. “You can’t disappoint Pippa. She’s spent the past hour making us a delicious meal.”

  “I am hungry,” she confessed as if that was the only reason it tempted her. “What’d you order?”

  “A pomegranate and feta salad. Two steaks, grilled to perfection. Some kind of vegetable—I left that to her, but now that I think of it, I hope it’s asparagus. And a fancy dessert, something with chocolate.”

  “If I come, I’ll have to skip dessert. I’m on a diet.”

  “You can’t miss Pippa’s dessert.”