Secrets She Left Behind

by Diane Chamberlain

  “I’ve been looking forward to this all day,” she said. “She twirled a couple of times in the water. The sun shone on her glossy dark hair.

  “You’re a good swimmer.” My teeth were chattering even though I wasn’t cold. Just freaking out.

  “You, too,” she said.

  “Well, I grew up on the water. You grew up in Asheville.”

  “I belonged to the Y, so I got to swim a lot.”

  I looked toward the beach, wishing we were a dozen or so yards closer to it. I’d feel so much better. I thought of telling her about floating out to sea with Andy, but decided that would make me feel even more afraid. I needed to talk about something entirely neutral.

  “How long have you been painting?” I asked.

  “Oh—” she tipped her head back and looked at the sky “—forever. Since I was a kid.”

  “And no one ever said you should pursue it seriously?”

  She shrugged.

  “Your parents had to know how good you were,” I said, knowing I was fishing a little for information on her family. “Didn’t they ever encourage you?”

  She shot me a look that felt like bullets pinging off my cheek.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot you don’t like to talk about them.”

  “Damn straight.” She did another twirl in the water again. “Sooo,” she said, dragging out the word, and I knew she was looking for a way to change the subject. “What have you decided about that doctor at the hospital?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going to hit on him?”

  “Of course not,” I said. It bugged me that she thought I would. “He’s married. And anyway, I told you I’m not interested in him. Or anyone. I was just briefly attracted.”

  “Oh. Right.” She laughed like she didn’t believe me.

  I’d told Dr. Jakes about realizing that Ben reminded me of my father, and that Dr. Britten reminded me of Ben. Dr. Jakes thought that was “a major revelation.” I thought it was just a wake-up call for me to watch my step. It also gave me the creeps that I’d slept with a man who reminded me of my father. Yuck.

  “Do you think he’s interested in you?” Jen asked.

  “Jen!” I said. “No!”

  “How do you think he’d…I mean, not just him…How do you think everyone at the hospital would react if they knew about you and the fire?”

  The thought of Taffy and Miss Helen and Mr. Jim and Dr. Britten and everyone knowing the truth about me was so depressing I thought I might cry. I would never let them find out. “You saw what happened at the library,” I said. “I think it would be all over for me.”

  “But the woman who took your application knows, and she was okay with it,” Jen said. “Look how fast she gave you the job. And you said how much they respect you there now and everything. Couldn’t you tell them now? Wouldn’t it feel good not to have to worry all the time about being found out?”

  I felt this slight pain in my calf. The beginning of a cramp? That was how people drowned, wasn’t it? Cramps in their legs?

  “I just can’t tell people, Jen.” I was going to drown any second and she was making it worse.

  “They could find out, though. Wouldn’t it be better if you told them yourself?”

  She totally did not understand. “Look,” I said. “I’m not bugging you about your family, so please don’t bug me about this!”

  She looked shocked by my outburst. I was a little shocked by it myself, but she was pushing all the wrong buttons when I felt panicky enough to begin with.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just thinking of you. You were able to tell me and I didn’t freak.”

  My teeth chattered so hard, I wondered if she could hear them. “You…you’re more accepting than most people,” I said. “I’m afraid to tell anyone else.”

  She suddenly laughed. “I didn’t realize you were such a chicken.” She plowed her palm through the water to splash me.

  “Hey!” I turned my head away. “Stop.”

  She splashed me again, still laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world. But when I looked at her face, there was something mean behind the laughter.

  “Jen! Come on.” I outgrew splashing my friends when I was about ten. Next thing I knew, she’d start dunking me. I wasn’t hanging around for that. “I’m going back,” I said, and I started swimming toward shore.

  She caught up to me, swimming close by my side. We matched each other stroke for stroke. For her, I guessed it was just a race. Some kind of competition. For me, my heart was pounding so hard, I felt like I was swimming for my life.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Sara

  The Other Widow

  A NOR’EASTER SWEPT ACROSS TOPSAIL ISLAND THREE MONTHS after Jamie’s death. It demolished a few of the trailers in the trailer park. It tore the roof and steeple from the chapel and broke every one of the windows. It was not the first time weather had destroyed part of the building. In the past, though, Jamie’d been quick to make repairs, as he did after Hurricane Fran. Now, I knew no one would bother.

  For a few weeks after Jamie died, people came to the chapel on Sundays, and a couple of them tried to re-create the spell he’d cast over the place with his questions about experiencing God, but no one’s heart was in it. Or, as I thought, no one but Jamie had that sorcerer’s touch. So people stopped coming to the chapel, and now that the roof was gone and the windows were gaping holes in the concrete walls, I knew the building would disintegrate bit by bit until it was nothing more than a memory. Just like the man who created it.

  A few days after the nor’easter, I pulled into the trailer park after dropping Keith off at school and saw Marcus’s pickup in front of my trailer. He was sitting behind the wheel, and he got out as I parked next to him. I hadn’t really spoken to him since the service. I’d started working at a new coffee shop in Surf City, Jabeen’s Java, and he came in there often because it was close to the fire station, but he didn’t have much to say to me. So little, in fact, that I was certain Jamie must have told him about me before the accident happened on the boat.

  I had nothing to say to him, either. There was some speculation that Marcus may have been involved in Jamie’s death. A humpback whale in June? The investigators didn’t think so. But they hadn’t been able to pin Jamie’s death on Marcus, and he’d walked. As for me, I didn’t know what to think. Who to blame. Did Marcus love Laurel, as Jamie had thought? Did he love her enough to want Jamie out of the way? Or was a whale the actual culprit? Either way, Jamie was gone.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked as I got out of my car.

  “Just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” he said. He was holding a large manila envelope in his hand. “I have something for you.”

  I hesitated, then nodded toward the trailer. “Okay,” I said. “Come in.”

  I opened the blinds in the living room and let in the morning light. Marcus looked uncomfortable as he handed me the envelope. “That’s for you,” he said, sitting down on the sofa. “Really, for Keith. I was going to just leave it, but then I thought I’d better wait and give it to you in person.”

  I sat down and opened the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter and a document.

  “You don’t really need the letter,” he said. “Since I’m here, I can just explain it to you.”

  I held up a hand to stop him as I read:

  Dear Sara,

  I know that Keith is Jamie’s son. He told me about it the morning he died. It’s taken me some time for that to sink in and when it finally did, I realized how unfair it is that Maggie and Andy will always have plenty of money, but Keith won’t. If Jamie had lived, he would have provided for him. So I started this college fund for Keith. I set it up so he can have the money for college whenever he’s ready to go. If he doesn’t end up going to college, he can get the money when he’s twenty-five. I hope this eases your mind a little.

  Sincerely, Marcus

  I read through the document quickly
, but thoroughly enough to see that Keith now had a college fund worth forty thousand dollars. Forty thousand!

  I looked at Marcus. “Where…” My throat felt tight. “Where did this money come from?” I asked.

  “It’s mine,” he said. “It’s not a big sacrifice for me. I’m never going to need all the money I have. So, that’s invested now.” He motioned toward the document that shook in my hand. “It should be worth quite a bit more when Keith is ready for college.”

  “Marcus…I don’t know what to say.” I didn’t want to cry. I was so, so tired of crying. “Thank you so much.”

  He nodded awkwardly. “How are you doing? Financially, I mean? I don’t want to pry, but Jamie told me he was giving you a few hundred a month to help out.”

  I nearly laughed. “That’s what he told you? A few hundred?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “It was quite a bit more than that,” I said. “It was enough so that I was able to save some every month.” I had a nest egg. It wouldn’t last Keith and me forever. But if I could somehow continue to live rent-free in the trailer, plus earn a little extra at Jabeen’s, we’d be okay.

  “Oh.” He looked surprised. “Well, I’m glad.”

  “I…I guess that all his money—all the property he owned—went to Laurel,” I said.

  “Yeah. That was pretty automatic. He had a living trust with everything he inherited from our parents in it, and Laurel was the beneficiary.”

  Son of a bitch, I thought. For the first time, I was truly, deeply angry with Jamie. “Well…I’m a little worried about one thing,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “This trailer. I know he owned this trailer park, and he let me live here without paying rent, which is how I could get by. But now, if Laurel owns the trailer park, I don’t know what to do. Should I move out?”

  “Hmm.” He sat back on the sofa. “No. Don’t move. Here’s what I think. First of all, I’m sure Laurel would want you to stay here rent-free,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything about you and Jamie and she’s never going to know anything about it, okay? You and I—as far as I know—are the only people who know about it. Is that right?”

  I thought of Steve, but he was long out of the picture. “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t think Laurel will even give a thought to you living here. The truth is, she now owns so damn much property on this island, that she may not even realize—or care—that she owns this trailer park. It’s a drop in her financial bucket.”

  I tried my best to hide my resentment. He didn’t even seem to realize how hurtful his words were.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Marcus leaned forward and I noticed how golden his brown hair looked in the light from the window. He really did look like Andy. “I know you and Jamie had plans,” he said. “You know, plans for the future.”

  I pressed my lips together.

  “You must feel like a widow, too,” he said. “Only you’re not supposed to act like one.”

  He understood. Tears welled up in my eyes. “Exactly,” I said.

  “Let me know if I can help, Sara,” he said, getting to his feet. “I have to get back to the fire station.”

  I stood up, too. “Why do you work when you really don’t need to?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Why did Jamie?” he asked.

  “Because he loved it. He felt like he was doing something valuable.”

  “There you go.” He pushed open the door and walked out onto the deck.

  “Marcus?”

  He turned back to look at me.

  “Are you in love with Laurel?” I asked.

  He raised his eyebrows, looking surprised. Then he smiled. “Only since I was sixteen,” he said. Then the smile faded. “But nothing’s going to happen there. She thinks I…She doesn’t believe there was a whale.”

  I clutched the document in my hand. There’d been no need for Marcus to do this. No need for him to come here and offer his sympathy. I looked at him again.

  “I believe there was a whale,” I said.

  Chapter Fifty

  Keith

  MISTER JOHNSON SHOOK MY HAND WHEN I WALKED INTO THE conference room at the police department that Friday night. Dawn and Laurel were already there, and Dawn slung an arm around my waist as we waited for Flip to set up the DVD player.

  “How’s my guy?” she asked.

  “Hangin’ in,” I said.

  “You doin’ okay over at Marcus’s?”

  “It’s good.” I liked that she was so cool with me around other people. She made me feel halfway normal.

  “I think Marcus likes the company.” Laurel smiled at me.

  I looked away from her. “Whatever,” I said. Man, I could be a son of a bitch.

  “Okay,” Flip said as he stepped back from the DVD player. “Take a seat, everybody.”

  We all sat around a long table, Dawn between Laurel and me on one side, Flip and Mister on the other. Mister was dressed in a suit that didn’t fit into the beach world in any way, shape or form. He looked like a rapper. Like if you took away that collar and tie, you’d find some bling.

  “As I told the three of you on the phone,” Flip said, “Mister filmed his interview with Sara’s memoir teacher, and while he doesn’t think there’s anything much here, he wanted you to be present as we watch it.”

  Mister leaned forward on the table. “There’s always a chance y’all might pick up on something I’d miss,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. My mother’d been gone three and a half weeks, and I was ready for somebody to pick up on something. How long could this go on?

  The interview was kind of creepy, and the creepiest part of it was the teacher himself. His name was Sean, and he reminded me of Reverend Bill—very tall and skinny—but he had spiky, bright red hair and pale skin. He shook Mister’s hand, then sort of folded himself into a chair across from the P.I.

  Mister asked the dude some basic questions, and we learned that the class met six times in a church meeting room. There were five women and two men. The only person my mother seemed to know was Dawn, he said, and as far as he could remember, she never talked much with the other class members.

  “As in, not at all,” Dawn said.

  “I can’t say if she ever got together with any of them after class or during the week, though,” Sean said.

  “Nope,” Dawn said.

  “How much of Ms. Weston’s memoir did you read?” Mister asked him.

  “Just the first few pages.” The teacher waved his hand around when he spoke. Gay, I thought. “It was very well written, but she was the only student who wrote by hand. I asked her to type her entries in the future, but she said a) she didn’t have a computer or typewriter and b) the memoir was for her eyes only. She just wanted me to see the beginning to be sure she was…I think she said ‘doing it right.’”

  “I told you,” Dawn said. I had the feeling Dawn had been a wiseass as a kid who got in a lot of trouble at school.

  “Do you recall the content of the pages you read?” Mister asked the teacher.

  “Yes, because it was unique,” Sean said. “She was in her early twenties, attending a church in North Topsail for the first time. The building was on the beach or…I don’t recall precisely where, but it was at least partially surrounded by water and was pentagonal. She was taken with the minister and unhappy with her husband.” He chuckled. “I have to admit, I wanted to know where her story was going. But not at the cost of my eyesight.”

  Thank you, Jesus, I thought to myself. If my mother was heading in the direction of telling all about her relationship with my father, I was glad she decided to keep it to herself. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Laurel playing with her fingernails. I sort of felt sorry for her. She knew where that story was going, too.

  “She never spoke during class,” Sean said. “Everyone else wanted to read from their work, but Sara kept hers to herself. I once asked her if she needed any help, but she said she was doing fine with
it. I honestly don’t know how much she took away from the class. I don’t think she missed any of them, though.”

  “Just one,” Dawn said, and as if he could hear her, Sean sat up straight in his chair.

  “Oh,” he said. “She did miss one because of her son. He was one of the teenagers injured in that church fire in Surf City and he wasn’t feeling well and she needed to stay home with him.”

  I wondered if that had pissed her off, having to miss the class because of me.

  The interview went on a few more useless minutes. Then Flip turned off the video and Mister looked across the table at me and Laurel and Dawn. “The fact that Sara was working on this…journal or memoir may mean nothing,” he said. “But what interests me is that she was looking back into her past, and when someone does that, they sometimes try to get in touch with someone from that past. Laurel, Flip tells me you’ve known Sara the longest. Does any of this ring a bell for you?”

  Laurel laughed. Man, I had to give her credit for that. Before she laughed, I thought the tension in the room was going to suffocate me. “Well,” she said, “to begin with, the minister was my husband.”

  Mister’s eyes widened. Dawn rubbed a spot on the table with her fingertip.

  “He died in 1997,” Laurel said, “so I doubt she was trying to get in touch with him.”

  “I see.” Mister made a steeple with his hands on the table. “I think…Maybe you and I could speak in private later, okay?”

  “Sure.” Laurel nodded.

  “As for the other gentleman mentioned in the memoir,” Mister said, “I have met with your father, Keith.”

  It was my turn to look surprised. “That’s a neat trick,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Flip asked. I shook my head. Laurel was back to playing with her fingernails.