Killer Secrets

by Marilyn Pappano

  Poppy stopped barking so she could listen to him, her head tilted to one side. She still pulled, but with determination, not frantic dancing. She was sniffing so fast and hard that it was a wonder she wasn’t light-headed—though, really, based on her usual behavior, how would Mila know?—and drool puddled on the floor in front of her.

  “Go ahead and let go of her,” Chief Douglas—Sam—said.

  “She’ll knock you over.”

  “Nah, I don’t fall so easily.”

  Both cautious and curious, Mila released her hold on Poppy’s collar, and the dog made that sensible distance look like millimeters. Since the chief had wisely gotten on her level, she didn’t leap at him, but neither did she stop in time. Her body slammed into his, but he was prepared, absorbing the shock. Poppy couldn’t decide whether to hyperventilate while sniffing every inch of him or to enjoy the good scratching he was giving, so she contorted herself this way and that to take advantage of both.

  “She’s a beautiful girl,” he remarked, his focus on the dog’s ecstatic behavior. “Your grandmother said she rescued her.”

  “Some boys threw her in Cedar Creek,” Mila answered, her gaze focused on his behavior. She’d never known she was a dog person until the day she got Poppy. Obviously the chief was, too. “Gramma pulled her out. The boys ran off, no one claimed her and she became mine.”

  A scowl lined his forehead. “I wish she’d called me.”

  “What would you have done?”

  He looked up and grinned. “I may not know every single resident in town, but I know all the troublemakers.” Disappointing Poppy to no end, he finally stood. The dog pressed herself to his side so he could continue scratching with one hand. “One lesson everyone needs to learn—misbehavior has consequences.”

  Chills skipped down Mila’s bare arms. She’d learned consequences long before she could pronounce the word. In her family, breathing too loudly had had consequences. So had getting hungry between meals or having to go to the bathroom when they were traveling.

  Still rubbing Poppy’s ears, the chief—Sam—glanced around the tiny room. Books filled the shelves, the newspaper sat on the coffee table with a few magazines and pictures hung on the walls. She thought most people would just see the love seat, comfy chair and television and never notice that there was nothing truly personal in the room. They wouldn’t think that Mila could live here or anyone else...or no one, for that matter. It could be staged to suit anyone.

  She gathered from the intent look in the chief’s eyes that he did notice.

  “I like your grandmother’s apartment,” he said when his gaze came back to her.

  She grabbed the lifeline he’d unwittingly thrown. “Then you’ve seen why I choose to make my space a little more bland.”

  He chuckled. “It’s kind of like walking into an explosion in a paint store, isn’t it? It’s, um...”

  “Eye-searingly bright?” she supplied drily, and he nodded. “Gramma’s not a subdued person.” She lived in a top-floor apartment of a downtown office building, and every inch of space was filled with stuff. New, old, in prime condition or about to fall apart, cheap, pricey, someone else’s antique, someone else’s trash...if it spoke to her, it went home to live with her.

  “If it makes her happy, that’s what matters. It does make this—” he gestured around the room “—more soothing to the spirit.”

  Mila liked the idea of her space soothing the spirit. It made her smile even as a beep sounded outside. “That’s Gramma’s signal that she wants help carrying something. I’ll be right back—”

  She’d taken only a few steps when he moved. “Keep the dog from making a break for it. I’ll do the lifting.”

  Poppy whimpered a time or two when he stepped out the door, then nuzzled against Mila. “Ah, you ignore me from the moment he knocks, but now that he’s gone for a minute, you want my attention again, huh? You’re easy, Poppy.”

  And a good thing she was, because the last word anyone would ever use describe Mila was easy.

  * * *

  Jessica Ramirez drove a bright orange vintage convertible Bug. Of course. What other car could possibly suit her as well? She was standing in the street, bent over the back seat when Sam reached the sidewalk. Looking up, she grinned. “You don’t look any the worse for wear after meeting Poppy.”

  “I grew up on a farm with a lot of big animals.” He pulled a laundry basket from the front seat with various dishes tucked inside between thick towels, then picked up an insulated tote bag that clinked when he shifted it.

  “Siblings?”

  “Cousins. There are more Douglases around here than you can...”

  “Shake a stick at?” Carefully Jessica balanced her own laundry basket. “I never understood that saying, but it’s older than I am, and that’s says a lot. Have you lived here all your life?”

  “Since I was a twinkle in my daddy’s eyes.”

  Stepping onto the sidewalk, she bumped her shoulder against his. “Now that one I understand. Let’s avoid the sweet beast and go straight around to the back porch. I’m sure that’s where Mila plans to put us.”

  Sam followed her across the garden, through a tall gate on the south side of the house and into the backyard. Like the front, it was all flowers and colors and sweet smells. The sun stretched long shadows over the beds and the path, a lone mimosa tree in the middle making a dappled pattern. A string of lights illuminated the porch, a gauzy island of white, thanks to the thin...

  “Mosquito netting?” he asked.

  “Ugh, the little buggers go crazy for me.” Jessica climbed the steps, then shouldered aside an opening in the net so he could enter. “The only way I can be outside after dark without becoming a meal for them is if I’m going a hundred miles an hour in my little car.” Then she grimaced. “Oh. Cop. Forget I said that.”

  Laughing, he set the basket on a worn wood cabinet against the wall. Jessica deposited hers there, as well, then gestured toward the dining table and the chair pushed into the outside corner. “Have a seat there, if you will. When Mila and I have a dinner party, we like to wait on our guest instead of climbing over him every time we need something.”

  It was a tight fit back in that corner, but it would give him the prettiest view: the two women. No Douglas ever turned down the chance to look at pretty women, his uncle Hank preached, and Sam agreed.

  As he settled in, the back door opened and Poppy shot out. Sam wondered if she would upend the table to get to him, or rip the yards of mosquito netting right down from their hooks, but she skidded to a stop at the top of the steps, waiting politely until Mila parted the overlapping fabric. Trotting into the yard, Poppy lowered her nose to the ground and disappeared down the path.

  Every day was an adventure for Poppy. Hell, every hour was.

  “Sit, Mila,” Jessica commanded. “My food—I get to serve.”

  Mila took the chair to Sam’s right, crossing her legs, smelling of jasmine and vanilla. While he’d helped Jessica, she’d put her hair up off her neck in a style that was messy and careless and touchable and tempting. She wasn’t wearing makeup—apparently didn’t need it, because her skin tone was smooth and even, her lashes were dark and curly, and her lips were tinged a natural pinkish shade.

  She was prettier than he’d noticed yesterday. Of course, yesterday she’d looked one scare away from collapsing into a heap. She was back in control of herself today. Not her circumstances, necessarily—he knew well that if left to her own choices, she wouldn’t have invited him to dinner this evening—but her eyes weren’t haunted now, and she didn’t seem so weary and worn.

  “Your garden is beautiful,” he said as he spread his napkin over his lap. “If you ever get tired of working for Lawrence—” a tiny wrinkle appeared between her eyes “—you could go into business as a landscaper. I really like your bluebonnets and the coneflowers. The golden esperanzas
are gorgeous, too.”

  Her gaze shifted to his. “You know flowers?”

  “Depends on who’s asking. If my mom says, ‘Go get me ten flats of apricot zinnias,’ I forget what color apricot is and what zinnias look like. If you ask, ‘Do you like the apricots better than the thumbelinas right next to them?’ my answer would be yes, though thumbelinas are awfully pretty, too.”

  The faint hint of a smile stirred across her face. Okay, so if all else failed, he could talk flowers with her until his store of knowledge ran out. Should’ve paid more attention all those times he’d helped out his parents.

  Jessica handed a dinner plate across the table to him, heaped with smoky ribs and thick slabs of bologna bearing grill marks and a glaze of barbecue sauce. Around the sides she’d tucked in fresh cherry tomatoes sprinkled with herbs and a light dressing, potato salad and a mound of vegetable salad. After handing a smaller serving to Mila and setting a third one at her own place, she passed around tall glasses of iced tea and added a loaf of Rainbo white sandwich bread and a roll of paper towels for napkins. Flashbacks to meals on the farm.

  “You don’t happen to run a restaurant,” Sam said tentatively. He gestured to the food and considered the relatively quick manner she’d pulled it all together.

  “No, but I always thought I’d be good at it. I do like to be prepared for any circumstance.”

  Between them, he noticed, Mila was trying not to smile. He fixed his gaze on her. “What’s her secret?”

  It was the wrong question to ask. Her lips went flat, the light faded from her eyes, and the muscles in her jaw clenched so tight that he expected to hear her teeth grinding. After a moment and a helpless look at Jessica, her wariness—almost fear—changed to panic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

  Jessica reached across and gripped her granddaughter’s hand tightly in hers. “Aw, there’s no secret,” she said, sounding almost as natural as before. “I do like to be prepared for everything, and that includes knowing where to buy the best home-style ribs and potato salad—at Reasor’s and that new little deli across from the courthouse—plus always having a crop of fresh cherry tomatoes in my roof garden and keeping the ingredients for sauerkraut salad on hand. That’s the way we host in this family, isn’t it, Mila?”

  Mila’s response was unconvincing, but Sam pretended, like her grandmother, that he didn’t notice anything unusual. “Sauerkraut salad,” he repeated, forking it apart. “Is it like coleslaw?”

  “Were you a detective before you became police chief?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then detect. Take a bite.”

  He obeyed, tasting sauerkraut, sugar and vinegar, bell pepper, onion, and pimiento. “Wow. Way better than coleslaw.” He complimented everything else as he tasted it, keeping up with his end of the conversation while some part of his mind stayed locked on the episode with Mila. Whose secrets had she been conditioned to keep, and how bad had the punishment for letting them slip been?

  He couldn’t imagine Jessica Ramirez ever mistreating her granddaughter. Instinct never led him wrong, and it said Jessica loved Mila dearly and would protect her with her life. What was it Mila had said about her yesterday? She’ll come. She always comes. And with such intense affection.

  So the next likely person for forcing secret keeping would be Mila’s mother or father. There’d been no mention of them, and honestly Sam hadn’t thought anything of it. His family was extraordinarily close, all ten or twelve dozen of them, but of course, others weren’t so blessed—or cursed. Things had gone sour between Lois and her side of the family after she’d become a cop. Ben Little Bear hadn’t heard from his younger brother in ten years. There was nothing unusual about Mila being close to her grandmother while her parents were out of the picture.

  The only thing that would make it unusual was why her parents were out of the picture. Had they abandoned her? Had she abandoned them? Had they died when she was too young to live on her own? Were they in jail, in a hospital, out of the country, out of touch?

  An inquisitive nature was a requirement for his job. He couldn’t be satisfied with the normal flow of information between people. He had to be curious, spot questions that might never come up, find inconsistencies in stories, recognize lies, know when reactions didn’t match stimuli and be just damn nosy about everything and everyone. He was snoopy, his mom said. Terminally curious, his grandfather called it.

  Mila’s reaction had been odd, and of course he’d like to know what had caused it, but in the overall scheme of things, it was okay to let it go. It was perfectly okay to forget it, to focus on the good food, the good company and the small things that drew her out—talking about flowers, her grandmother and, of course, Poppy.

  He was off duty tonight. No cop-ly intuition, no inherent need to arrange everything in neat facts. He was having dinner with a woman he liked a lot and her granddaughter, whom he thought he might also like a lot in whole other ways, and he was going to enjoy it.

  There was always time to wonder later.

  * * *

  Mila had learned the hopefulness in writing during a ninth-grade assignment in her online school. “Write your best vacation experience,” the teacher had said, in a thousand words. Mila had never actually been on a vacation, so she’d created one out of thin air. It wasn’t much, just the kind of getaway that she and Gramma might have taken if they’d had the money and Gramma hadn’t worked two jobs most of the time to support them. She’d researched cabins for rent in the state parks, picked one and created a fantasy weekend of boating, fishing and hiking in the woods. The paper had earned an A and a comment of “lovely” from the instructor.

  With that, she’d learned that words could take you to other places, other lives, other outcomes. They could give voice to the emotions eating her raw inside and make her feel better at the same time. For a kid as strange as she was, they could give her friends—not the kind she went shopping or to movies with, the kind who knew everything about her, but online friends who lived elsewhere, who didn’t know her real name or where she lived or how old she was or if she was even a girl, but they chose to take her on faith.

  They’d given her a way to start coping with her nightmares—catharsis, her psychologist called it—and now she wondered if they might give her a way to cope with the new issues in her life.

  Sam Douglas in particular.

  Don’t you want a boyfriend someday? Mila had always said no. She had always lied. More than anything in the world, she wanted to be normal, and that meant friends and best friends and boyfriends and dating and falling in love and getting married and having kids.

  The thought of all that made her skin tingle and her lungs tighten. She couldn’t handle that many people, that much complexity, that many opportunities to hurt or be hurt. But everything in life started with one step. Choose a plant. Dig a hole. Put it in. Water. Water. Water. Watch it grow. Feed it. Clip the blossoms to enjoy inside. Deadhead it. Water it more.

  Friend–best friend–boyfriend–dating–love–marriage–kids surely must be the same way. There was only one step she had to take first, before any of the rest of it could become even a remote possibility.

  She had to open herself up. Gramma told her so. Her psychologist told her so. Common sense told her so. Granted, Gramma, her psychologist and common sense didn’t know how incredibly difficult a first step that was, and she did, because she’d been trying and failing for fifteen years. It was so much less scary alone in her little house with Poppy. If she let no one in, then no one could hurt her. If no one saw how vulnerable she was, no one would take advantage of her. If she didn’t ask anyone to trust her, no one could expect her to trust them.

  No one could be disappointed in her. No one could ever see how damaged she was. How afraid she was. How lonely she was.

  She sat on her front porch, the sun barely lighting the Monday-morning sky, with a cup of i
ced coffee in one hand, her feet propped on the porch railing and a notebook leaning against her knees. It was a cheap spiral notebook, bought at Walmart in a back-to-school sale. She’d filled a few pages this morning with her jumbled thoughts, trying to find some order.

  She hadn’t found it by the time Ruben pulled up, but her mind was calmer. Sliding to her feet, she set the book and ink pen just inside the door on the end table, called goodbye to Poppy, and locked up before hurrying to the truck.

  In her mind, she practiced words that came naturally to everyone in her world except her. She climbed into the front seat, yanked the door shut and balanced her coffee, breathed deeply, stared straight ahead and said, “Good morning.”

  A moment’s silence, then Alejandro muttered something, and Ruben grunted.

  Again she breathed deeply. That wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be. If she’d learned it when she was little, like most kids, it would have been as easy as breathing.

  They’d gone a mile or so when Ruben flicked his gaze her way. “Good weekend?”

  If she hadn’t seen him look at her, she wouldn’t have considered he might be talking to her. “Yes,” she said. “Uh, yeah.”

  How about that? She’d made small talk.

  Their second client on Mondays was the worst one. Mr. Greeley had invested wisely and retired at fifty. With Mrs. Greeley long since moved on to husband number two and having taken the kids with her, he didn’t seem to have anything to keep him busy besides harassing the help. He told his housekeeper how to mop the kitchen floor, argued the pH of the water with the pool service, insisted Mila deadhead at a precise forty-degree angle and pestered every other soul who set foot on his property.

  She’d once overheard Mario tell Alejandro that what the man needed was a woman. What he needed was a purpose in life. He should go back to work, volunteer at some charity, give himself a reason to get out of bed in the morning so he didn’t have to berate others to feel useful. Who retired at fifty—in this case, quit living at fifty—just because he could?