Public Secrets

by Nora Roberts

  HE WENT BACK to the beach every day, but he never saw her there again that summer.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THEY HAD AN hour before bed check. An hour before Sister Immaculata shuffled her way down the halls in her black, sensible shoes to poke her disapproving, warty nose in each of the rooms to make sure all music was off and clothes were neatly hung in closets.

  They had an hour, and Emma was afraid it was going to be enough time.

  “Are they numb yet?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Marianne narrowed her eyes as she tapped her foot along with her latest Billy Joel album. She was convinced he was right. Catholic girls did start much too late.

  “Emma, you’ve had that ice on your ears for twenty minutes. You should have frostbite by now.”

  Ice was melting cold down her wrists, but she kept it firmly against her ears. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Of course I do.” Marianne’s hips swayed in her prim cotton nightgown as she walked to the mirror. There, she admired the little gold balls in her newly pierced ears. “I watched every move my cousin made when she did mine.” She switched to an exaggerated German accent. “Und ve have all de instruments. Ice, needle.” Gleefully she held it up so it glinted in the lamplight. “The potato we ripped off from the kitchen. Two quick jabs and your dull, dreary ears become sophisticated.”

  Emma kept her eye on the needle. She was searching for a way out, ears and pride intact. “I never asked Da if it was all right.”

  “Jesus, Emma, ear piercing’s a personal choice. You’ve got your period, you’ve got your boobs—such as they are,” she added with a grin. “That makes you a woman.”

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a woman if it meant having her best friend stick a needle in her earlobe. “I don’t have any earrings.”

  “I told you, you can borrow some of mine. I’ve got scads. Come on, let’s see that British stiff upper lip.”

  “Right.” Having a deep breath, Emma took the ice from one ear. “Don’t screw up.”

  “Me?” Marianne knelt by the chair to draw a tiny x on Emma’s earlobe with a purple felt-tip pen. “Listen, just in case I miss and drive this into your brain, can I have your record collection?” Then she giggled, held the potato behind Emma’s ear, and plunged.

  It was a toss-up as to who was more queasy.

  “God.” Marianne tucked her head between her knees. “At least my parents don’t have to worry about me becoming a drug addict. Shooting up must be disgusting.”

  Emma slid bonelessly out of the chair. “You didn’t say I’d feel it.” As her stomach roiled, she concentrated on keeping very still and breathing. “Oh gross. You didn’t say I’d hear it.”

  “I didn’t. But then Marcia and I had swiped a bottle of bourbon from Daddy’s bar. I guess we weren’t feeling or hearing anything.” She lifted her head, focused. There was blood, just a drop of it on Emma’s earlobe, but it made her think of the slasher movie she and her cousin had seen over the summer.

  “We’ve got to do the other one.”

  Emma just closed her eyes. “Oh Christ.”

  “You can’t go around with one ear pierced. We’ve come this far, Emma.” Her hands were clammy as she clipped the needle free of the thread and prepared it for round two. “I’ve got the hard part. Just lie there.”

  Gritting her teeth, Marianne aimed and fired. Emma only groaned and slid the rest of the way to the floor.

  “It’s over. Now you have to clean them with peroxide so they don’t get infected. And keep your hair over them so none of the sisters notice for a while.”

  When the door opened, both girls struggled up. But it wasn’t Sister Immaculata. Teresa Louise Alcott, the bright and annoying girl from across the hall, popped in wearing her pink cotton robe and feather mules.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’re having an orgy.” Marianne flopped down again. “Don’t you ever knock?”

  Teresa only grinned. She was one of the feverishly pert girls who volunteered for everything, always completed her assignments, and wept at the Stations of the Cross. Marianne detested her on principle. Being thick-skinned as well as pert, Teresa considered the insults signs of friendship.

  “Wow. You’re getting your ears pierced.” She knelt down to study the strings dangling from Emma’s lobes. “Mother Superior’ll have a cat.”

  “Why don’t you have a cat, Teresa?” Marianne suggested. “In your own room.”

  But Teresa only grinned and sat back on her heels. “Did it hurt?”

  Emma opened her eyes and wished Teresa to everlasting hell. “No. It felt great. Marianne’s going to do my nose next. You can watch.”

  Teresa ignored the sarcasm and studied her newly manicured fingernails. “I’d love to have mine done. Maybe after Sister Immaculata comes through you could do it.”

  “I don’t know, Teresa.” Marianne pushed herself up to change the record to Bruce Springsteen. “I haven’t finished my report on Silas Marner. I was going to work on it tonight.”

  “Mine’s done.” Teresa smiled her pert smile. “If you do my ears, I’ll give you my notes.”

  Marianne moved her shoulders as if debating. “Well, okay then.”

  “Great. Wow, I almost forgot why I came over.” She dug into the deep pocket of her frilly pink robe and pulled out a magazine article. “My sister sent this to me because she knows I go to school with you, Emma. She cut it out of People. Have you ever seen that magazine? It’s just great. It has pictures of everybody. They have like Robert Redford on the cover and Burt Reynolds. All the hunks.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Emma said, because she knew it was the only way to shut Teresa up.

  “Sure you have, because your dad’s been in there lots of times. Anyway, I knew you’d just be dying to see it, so I brought it over.”

  Because her stomach had settled, Emma propped herself up, then took the article. The nausea came back with a vengeance.

  ETERNAL TRIANGLE

  There was Bev rolling on the floor with another woman. And Da, with a look of stunned fury on his face, reaching down for her. Bev’s dress was ripped, and there was a kind of wild anger in her eyes. The same kind, Emma remembered, as had been there the last time she’d seen her.

  “I knew you’d want it,” Teresa was saying cheerfully. “So I brought it over. That’s your mother, isn’t it?”

  “My mother,” Emma murmured, staring at Bev’s picture.

  “The blond lady in the glittery dress. Wow, I’d just die to have a dress like that. Jane Palmer. She’s your mother, right?”

  “Jane.” She focused on the other woman now. The old fear came back, just as real, just as ripe as it had been ten years before. Just as stunning as it had been when another girl had shown her a smuggled-in copy of Devastated with Jane’s picture on the back cover.

  It was Jane. Bev was fighting with her, and Da was there. What could they have been fighting about? Hope flashed through the fear. Perhaps Da and Bev were together. Perhaps they would all be together again.

  She shook her head to clear it and focused on the text.

  Those of the British upper crust who paid two hundred pounds a head for salmon mousse and champagne at a charity dinner at the Mayfair in London got more than their money’s worth. Beverly Wilson, successful decorator and estranged wife of Brian McAvoy of Devastation, went head to head with Jane Palmer, McAvoy’s former lover and author of the best-selling roman à clef, Devastated.

  What prompted the hair-pulling match is up for speculation, but sources say the old rivalry has never cooled down. Jane Palmer is the mother of McAvoy’s daughter, Emma, age thirteen. Emma McAvoy, who inherited her father’s poetic looks, attends a private school somewhere in the States.

  Beverly Wilson, who has been estranged from McAvoy for several years, was the mother of McAvoy’s only son, Darren. The child was tragically murdered seven years ago in a case that still baffles police.

  Mc
Avoy did not attend the function with either Miss Palmer or Miss Wilson, but with his current flame, singer Dory Cates. Though McAvoy separated the wrestlers personally, few words were exchanged between Wilson and McAvoy before she left with date P. M. Ferguson, drummer for the veteran rock group. Neither McAvoy nor Wilson were available for comment on the incident, but Palmer claims she will include the scene in her new book.

  To borrow McAvoy’s own lyrics, it seems “old fires run hot and run long.”

  There was more, talk about others who had attended and the comments they made about the incident. There was a description of the clothes and a tongue-in-cheek remark about, what both Jane and Bev had worn, and torn off each other. But she didn’t read any further. Didn’t need to.

  “It’s neat, isn’t it, the way they were ripping each other’s dresses, right out in public?” Teresa’s eyes shone with excitement. “Do you think they were fighting over your father? He’s so dreamy, I bet they were. It’s just like in the movies.”

  “Yeah.” Since strangling Teresa would only get her suspended, Marianne vetoed it. There were other, subtler ways to deal with idiots. She picked up the needle. She’d pierce Teresa’s flappy ears all right. And if she forgot the ice, it was an honest mistake. “You’d better get going, Teresa. Sister Immaculata’s going to be coming through any minute.”

  With a little squeal, Teresa sprang up. She didn’t want to spoil her perfect record with a demerit. “Come over at ten, and I’ll give you the notes. Then you can do it.”

  “Fine.”

  Teresa put her hands on her earlobes. “I can’t wait.”

  “Neither can I.” She waited until the door closed. “Little shit,” she muttered, then moved over to drape an arm around Emma’s shoulders. “You okay?”

  “It never goes away.” She stared at the picture. It was a good one, she thought dispassionately, well focused, well lit. The faces weren’t blurred, the expressions quite clear. It was easy, all too easy to see the hate in her mother’s eyes. “Do you think I could be like her?”

  “Like who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Come on, Emma. You haven’t even seen her since you were a baby.”

  “There’s genes, heredity and all that.”

  “All that’s bull.”

  “Sometimes I’m mean. Sometimes I want to be mean, the way she was.”

  “So what?” She rose to take Springsteen off. Sister Immaculata might come along any minute and confiscate it. “Everybody’s mean sometimes. That’s because our flesh is weak and we’re loaded with sin.”

  “I hate her.” It was a relief to say it, a terrible, terrible relief. “I hate her. And I hate Bev for not wanting me, and Da for putting me here. I hate the men who killed Darren. I hate them all. She hates everyone, too. You can see it in her eyes.”

  “It’s okay. Sometimes I hate everyone. And I don’t even know your mother.”

  That made her laugh. She couldn’t say why, but it made her laugh. “Neither do I, I guess.” She sniffled, sighed. “I hardly remember her.”

  “There, you see.” Satisfied, Marianne plopped down again. “If you don’t remember her, you can’t be like her.”

  It sounded logical, and she needed to believe it. “I don’t look like her.”

  Wanting to judge fairly, Marianne took up the article and studied the pictures. “Not a bit. You’ve got your father’s bone structure and coloring. Take it from an artist.”

  Emma lifted a hand to her tender lobes. “Are you really going to pierce Teresa’s ears?”

  “You bet—with the dullest needle I can find. Want to do one?”

  Emma grinned.

  Chapter Sixteen

  STEVIE HAD NEVER been so scared. There were bars all around and the steady drip, drip, drip, of a faucet somewhere down the hall. Voices were raised occasionally and echoed. There was the shuffling of feet, then the godawful silence.

  He needed a fix. His body was trembling, sweating. His stomach was knotted, refusing to let him release the nausea in the scarred porcelain John in the corner. His nose and eyes were running. It was the flu, he told himself. He had the freaking flu and they’d locked him up. He needed a bloody doctor, and they’d shut him up and left him to rot. Sitting on the cot, he brought his knees up to his chest, pushing his back into the wall.

  He was Stevie Nimmons. He was the greatest guitarist of his generation. He was somebody. But they had put him in a cage like an animal. They had locked him up and walked away. Didn’t they know who he was? What he’d made himself?

  He needed a fix. Oh Jesus, just one sweet fix. Then he’d be able to laugh this off.

  It was cold. It was so goddamn cold. He yanked the blanket from the cot and huddled under it. And he was thirsty. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t even work up enough spit to swallow.

  Someone would come, he thought as his eyes began to fill. Someone would come and make it all right again. Someone would fix it. Oh God, he needed a fix. His mother would come and tell him everything had been taken care of.

  It hurt. He began to weep against his knees as the pain wracked through him. Every breath he took seemed to hold tiny slivers of glass. His muscles were on fire, his skin like ice.

  Just one. Just one toke, one hit, one line, and he’d be all right again.

  Didn’t they know who the fuck he was?

  “Stevie.”

  He heard his name. With eyes bleary with tears, he looked toward the cell door. Dragging the back of his hand over his mouth, he struggled to focus. He tried to laugh, but the sound came out in a whooping sob as he struggled up. Pete. Pete could fix it.

  He tripped over the blanket, and lay sprawled on the floor a moment as Pete watched him. Stevie’s body was stick-thin. His legs angled awkwardly out from it and ended in five-hundred-pound snakeskin boots. His face as he pushed himself up was gray and pasty with lines dug deep and dug hard. The whites of his eyes were streaked fiery red. There was a trickle of blood from his lip where he had hit the floor. And he stank.

  “Man, I’m sick.” He began to pull himself up, hand over sweaty hand on the bars. “I got the flu.”

  The junkie flu, Pete thought dispassionately.

  “You got to get me out.” Stevie wrapped his trembling fingers around the bars. Though his breath was stale, Pete didn’t back away. “It’s fucking crazy. They came into my house. Into my goddamn house like a bunch of bloody Nazis. They waved some kind of paper in front of my face and started pulling out drawers. Jesus, Pete, they dragged me in here like I was some kind of freaking murderer. They put handcuffs on me.” He began to cry again and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “People were watching when they took me out of my own house with handcuffs on me. They were taking pictures. It ain’t fucking right, Pete. It ain’t fucking right. You got to get me out.”

  During the outburst Pete had stayed very still. His voice was low and calm. He’d handled crises before, and knew how to turn them in his favor. “They found heroin, Stevie, and what’s politely called drug paraphernalia. They’re going to charge you with possession.”

  “Just get me the fuck out.”

  “Are you listening to me?” The question whipped out, cool and