Secret Lives

by Diane Chamberlain

  “I don't love her as I'm capable of loving a woman,” he said. “She's put me off as a lover, saving herself for marriage as if she's some great prize. I can respect that, I suppose. I'd even be appreciative of it if I were truly interested in her, but I'm not even excited by the prospect of sleeping with her.”

  Kyle and I sat very still while he spoke because we'd never heard Matt speak with such candor.

  “I'm dreading our wedding night because I'll be making love to Delores, but thinking of you, Kate.” His face took on such color that he probably didn't even notice it in mine.

  “I haven't been able to concentrate on this wedding or work or anything because I'm so obsessed with thoughts of you. If I married Delores I would lose you for good. I can't bear to have that happen. I'd rather have the little bit I have of you than nothing at all.”

  A long silence stretched between the three of us. I wanted Kyle to break it but knew he was looking at me and I had no choice but to speak.

  “You have me on a pedestal, Matt,” I said. “I'm never going to be a wife, to you or anyone else. I don't think you should marry Delores if you're so unhappy about it. But don't avoid marrying her on my account.” All the while I was speaking my heart was galloping. I am selfish straight to the core. I was glad of his decision. I want Matt here in the cave, but on my terms. That's what he said a long time ago. “Everything has to be on your terms, Kate.” He was right.

  –27–

  She made chicken salad for their picnic supper, taking her time, savoring the simple domesticity of the task. She set the salad in the basket along with a bottle of wine, a couple of peaches, crusty rolls from the Millers' bakery, and two brownies Lou had baked that morning. Her actions were slow and deliberate, and she knew she was putting off seeing Ben, putting off hearing whatever it was he needed to tell her. Finally she could procrastinate no longer. She put on a blue sundress—Michael Carey's favorite—and set out for the site.

  She'd spent the afternoon working on the screenplay and it had gone very well. She could see Michael clearly as Matt, especially now that she knew her father had a little of the rake in him. She would have to ask Kyle to tell her more about Matt's pursuits in Luray and Strasburg, how he had quenched his thirst for Kate in the arms of other women.

  She was perspiring by the time she reached the site. Ben knelt in the third pit, in much the same position as the first time she'd seen him. She stood still for a moment in the burning sunlight, watching the muscles in his back contract beneath his blue T-shirt as he brushed the ground. There was a stirring in her body, a warmth that had nothing to do with the sun.

  She called to him as she walked toward the pit and he waved and climbed up the ladder. The front of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat and he wiped his arm across his forehead. “How about up on the bridge?” He nodded toward the footbridge that crossed Ferry Creek. “Maybe there's a breeze up there.”

  They walked to the center of the bridge and sat with their legs dangling over the edge. The water below was black and silent as it cut through the forest to the hazy green mountains beyond. Eden clung to the suspension wires as the shivering of the bridge, and her vertigo, subsided.

  “I used to play up here when I was a kid,” she said as she unloaded the basket. The bridge had seemed as long as the river then. She remembered running across it, alone as always, stopping in the middle to pump her legs and make it sway. “You know how kids love to get dizzy.” She handed him the bottle of wine and a corkscrew.

  He stared at the distant hills, holding the bottle in his hand as though he had no idea why she'd given it to him, and she realized he had said nothing to her since leaving the pit.

  She touched his shoulder. His shirt was damp beneath her fingers and his body felt rigid, unfamiliar. She drew her hand away. “Ben? Could you open the wine?”

  He licked his dusty lips and turned to look at her. “Let's talk first and eat after, okay?”

  She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to know what was draining the life from his face. And it was too hot out here. She pressed one of the napkins to her face, her throat. “I'm famished,” she said. “I'd just as soon eat—”

  “Eden.” He shook his head at her and she knew she was making it more difficult for him.

  She lowered the napkin to her lap. “Is it that serious?” she asked.

  “It's extremely serious.”

  She put the bowl of chicken salad back into the basket and closed the lid. “All right.”

  He looked out at the stream again. “I don't know how to say this to you. I wish I knew a way to pretty it up.” He set the bottle of wine down on the bridge and drew in a long breath. “The reason I'm divorced, the reason I lost my job, and the reason I can't see Bliss is that I was convicted of molesting her.”

  She frowned at him. “You molested your daughter?”

  “No.” He glared at her, then dropped his eyes. “I don't mean to yell, I just ... No. I didn't do it. I was convicted, but I'm innocent.”

  Her body shrank away from him, ever so slightly, but he didn't miss it. She saw him working at control, the muscles in his jaw tensing, releasing.

  “I didn't do it, Eden.”

  “Why would anyone think you did?”

  He sighed and wrapped his hands around the edge of the bridge. His knuckles were white, the skin stretched taut above them. “There was evidence…It was enough to convince them that I had…Damn.” He turned his head away from her, ran a shaky hand through his hair. “This isn't going to work. I don't know what to tell you to make you believe me. Everything I say is going to make it look worse.”

  She wanted to stay calm, to still the gallop of her heartbeat. She rested her hand on his arm. “Just tell me the truth, Ben. Who do you mean by 'them'? Was there a trial? With a jury?”

  “Yes.”

  She pressed her fingers to her lips as the night before disintegrated in her memory. Had she actually slept with him? “Twelve people heard evidence and decided beyond a reasonable doubt that you were guilty?”

  He turned to her. “I swear to you, Eden, I'm the last person on earth who would hurt Bliss.”

  “But you must have done something to make them think you did it.”

  He looked toward the hills again, and when he spoke he sounded very tired. “I didn't do anything. Doesn't matter though. Whenever someone finds out about it, they turn their back on me. I was hoping that wouldn't happen with you."

  She remembered his joyful run to the drugstore for condoms, the thunderous lovemaking in the woods. He was a man who rescued lobsters from restaurants, who protected spiders in his bathroom. He couldn't possibly have molested his own child.

  “I don't know what to think, Ben,” she said quietly. “'There's nothing you could tell me you'd done that would disgust me quite as much. I think I'd be less horrified if you told me you'd been convicted of killing someone.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I didn't do it.”

  “Whether you did or not, I wish you'd told me about this sooner."

  “You didn't want to know.”

  She thought of last night again. She'd felt listened to. Safe. Loved. Or had she just been used by a man no one else would have? If he'd told her sooner she never would have slept with him. I fucked Eden Riley. The muscles in her arms contracted; her hands curled into fists. “I had no idea it was anything like this,” she said, her voice rising.

  “You're right,” he said wearily. “I should have told you sooner. I could have saved both of us a lot of grief.”

  She looked down at the water. “Last night was so nice,” she said. “I felt…hopeful. I felt…” She bit her lower lip to stop its trembling, then turned to face him. “If you'd only been accused, Ben, I might feel differently. But a conviction.” She thought of the little blond girl in the photograph and tears sprang to her eyes. “What did they say you did to her?”

  He didn't answer. Instead he turned around so quickly she had to grab the guy wires to keep her balance. He packed the
wine into the basket and pushed it closer to her. “Go,” he said, his eyes a cold, hard gray. “Please just go.”

  Kyle and Lou were eating chicken salad sandwiches at the kitchen table when Eden returned to the house. She set the picnic basket on the counter and took a seat at the table.

  “I wish you'd told me about Ben,” she said to Kyle. “It's not as though he was caught shoplifting a candy bar.”

  Kyle put down his sandwich. “I tried to warn you off him, honey, but I didn't think it was my place to tell you the whole story. And frankly, I never expected the two of you to be interested in each other.”

  “You don't believe him?” Lou asked.

  “I don't know what to believe. Of course he's going to deny it—who wouldn't? But he was convicted, Lou.”

  Kyle shook his head. “I think he was wrong not to tell you right off the bat, but I understand his thinking. Everyone who knows about him has taken off in the other direction as fast as they could run. I had a couple of graduate students working with me before he came, and when they found out it was Ben Alexander I'd hired to help out they quit on the spot. Everybody thinks like you do, Eden, that if he was convicted he must be guilty. But I'm as sure as I can be that he's not.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because I've known him for sixteen years. I watched him grow from an enthusiastic but very young student into a well-respected archaeologist. Do you know he didn't even have to apply for that professorship? Universities were soliciting him. He had his pick. But he's lost all that now. At first there was a lot of disbelief among his colleagues. Then it turned to disgust and now he's pretty much become the butt of their jokes.”

  “Kyle.” She shook her head at her uncle's naïveté. “Profession has nothing to do with it. Neither does skill or enthusiasm or anything else. You can't possibly know who's capable of molesting a child by those things.”

  “We traveled all over with him. Shared hotel rooms. Spent weeks together without ever being out of each other's sight. There would have been a clue, something, that he had a problem.”

  “He hung himself at the trial,” Lou said. “They were going to put his daughter on the stand to testify against him and—”

  “A four-year-old?” Eden interrupted. She tried to picture Cassie in a courtroom, telling a roomful of adults the terrible things that had happened to her, and her heart broke for that blond wisp of a child on Ben's dresser mirror.

  “Yes,” Lou said. “Ben couldn't stand to see her up there, so he pled guilty, right in the middle of the trial. He told the judge he wasn't really guilty, but that he wanted to spare his daughter going through any more torture.”

  “He was a fool to do it,” Kyle said, “but I guess you don't think straight under those circumstances. The judge ordered a recess and Ben's lawyer talked him into sticking it out, but the damage was done because the jury heard him say it. I think they should have started over with a new jury, but then I wasn't the judge.”

  Eden sighed. “I don't know, Kyle. I can't imagine why he'd blurt out he was guilty if there wasn't something to it.”

  “I've watched him with Sharon and I've watched him with his daughter,” Kyle said. “He was a real family man. He was as content as he could be with his marriage and his life.”

  “That's what convinced me he was innocent, if nothing else,” said Lou. “If he had admitted he hurt Bliss, all they would have done was slap him on the wrist and put him in a counseling program and he could have had his family back. But he couldn't admit to something he hadn't done. So instead he was locked up for six months and told he could never see his daughter again. He would never have made that choice unless he saw no way out of it.”

  In spite of herself, in spite of the revulsion that still festered in her stomach, she felt sorry for him.

  “When he first moved down here, we talked about it for hours and hours,” Lou continued. “We sat right here at this table and talked. You should let him tell you, Eden. I don't think you can listen to his side of the story and still think he's guilty. They twist things in a courtroom. He made a grave tactical error, and the prosecution had a better lawyer. That's what it boils down to sometimes.”

  Kyle leaned away from the table and shook his head. “He was in bad shape when he first got here. I think he sometimes wanted to kill himself. Scared us, didn't it?” He looked at Lou, who nodded. “We made him stay here a few nights because he got so upset talking about it we were afraid to let him go back up to his cabin. He never came right out and said he was suicidal, but he'd talk about wishing he were dead, not seeing much point to going on. It was hard to argue with him. Everything he'd worked for and cared about was gone."

  She remembered the photograph he'd shown her of his house in Annapolis. His pride. His loss. She thought of the way he'd told her to leave him alone, the coolness in his eyes. The Valium in his bathroom.

  “I had a couple of nightmares when he first got here,” Kyle said. “I dreamt that I'd go up to the cabin and find him sitting in a rocker—though he doesn't have one up there—with a shotgun in his arms and his head splattered all over the wall behind him.”

  “I don't think he'd use a gun,” she said quietly. “He has some Valium.”

  Kyle narrowed his eyes. “Was he upset when you left him?”

  A think so.”

  “Maybe I'd better go up and check on him.”

  “No.” She stood up. “I'll go.”

  Lou caught her hand, squeezed it hard. “You're wise to be leery of him, Eden,” she said. “He's going to carry that conviction around with him for the rest of his life. You're a public figure and a mother—you wouldn't be able to shake it. If you want to end your relationship with him, do it on those grounds, not because you think he hurt his daughter.”

  –28–

  Ben wanted to get to his cabin, to the whiskey, before the jagged teeth of his memories had a chance to do their damage. But they caught up to him at his front door, and by the time he had the top off the bottle, by the time he felt the liquid burn his throat, he was theirs.

  The moment that had changed his life forever had come on a cold January day, one week into the spring semester. He had stopped at the public library on his way home from the university, as he did at least once a week, to pick up some books for Bliss's bedtime stories. When he arrived home he found Sharon sitting at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap. Her strawberry-blond hair was up in a ponytail and she wore her usual jeans and sweatshirt, but there was some-thing peculiar in the way she sat, in the way she looked at him. It was six-thirty but there was no sign of dinner, and the house was strangely quiet, no customary wild greeting from his daughter. He set the books on the counter and loosened his tie.

  “Where's Bliss?” he asked.

  “At Alex and Leslie's.”

  He frowned, trying to remember. Were he and Sharon supposed to go out tonight? Had he forgotten something?

  Sharon was so still that he shuddered. He took a step closer and leaned down to kiss her, but she turned her head away. “What's the matter?” he asked.

  She looked up at him as though he should know.

  “Is it your father?” Her father had been sick for months.

  She shook her head and then stood up. “Pat Kelley and Joan Dove spoke with me when I picked Bliss up today.”

  “About what?” Pat Kelley was the director of Bliss's daycare center and Joan Dove, Bliss's teacher.

  “She said they've noticed a change in Bliss's behavior. She's irritable and she cries a lot and she's more fearful than she used to be.”

  “Same as at home,” he said. Bliss had started sucking her thumb again and crying at bedtime. A few times recently she'd wet the bed.

  “Joan said that during naptime yesterday Bliss was masturbating and trying to snuggle up to Jason Peterson. Joan thought it was a little odd but didn't say anything to her except to move her away from Jason.” Sharon was watching him carefully, waiting for him to piece the puzzle of her
words together. But he had no idea where she was going with this. “Then yesterday during her nap Bliss wet herself. I'd taken Joan a change of underpants a few weeks ago in case Bliss had an accident during the day. When Joan changed her she noticed a rash.” Sharon put her hand to her mouth and tears filled her eyes. “I noticed it during her bath yesterday, but I thought it was just from wetting herself. I never asked her about it.”

  Sharon looked so guilty that he put his arms around her, but she jerked away from him.

  “You know what I'm talking about, Ben, don't you?”

  He frowned, shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “Joan asked Bliss how she got so sore down there and Bliss said you did it.”

  “What?”

  “She said you put your finger inside her.”

  He stood very still. He could feel his heart beating. “Why would she say that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Joan must have misunderstood her.”

  Sharon shook her head. “I thought so too. But on the way home in the car I asked her myself. I said, 'Ms. Dove says you have a rash around your vagina,' and she said, 'She said I can't put a Band-Aid on it.' And I said, 'How do you think you got a rash there?'—I was careful, Ben. I didn't want to lead her—and she said, 'Daddy put his finger in my vagina.' She said it just like that, every word clear as a bell, and then she said, 'I wish he'd stop that. It hurts sometimes.' I started crying and I had to pull over. That scared her, seeing me fall apart like that, but I couldn't help myself.”

  A wave of nausea passed through him and he sat down at the table. “Sharon, I never touched her. I would never hurt her.”

  “Then why would she say you did?”

  “I don't know. Could she have dreamt it?”

  Sharon shook her head. “Joan says there's too much evidence that she's been molested. The fearfulness, the wetting, the seductive stuff with Jason. You don't dream up a rash. And she's been masturbating so much lately. I thought maybe she irritated herself.” She looked at him hopefully.