Little Secrets Read online

  Ginny shook her head. “Nothing bad. I don’t want you to think that. They’ve been playing in the yard, but—”

  “Carson James Wood! Kelly Madison Wood! What did I tell you about that?”

  In his high-chair prison, Carter let out a longer, louder wail and pounded his fists until Kendra scooped him out with a sigh. Plunked on her hip, the baby stopped crying out loud, though the silent tears of outrage still coursed down his fat little cheeks. His mother kept her attention on the other two.

  “But, Mama…”

  “Don’t you ‘but Mama’ me. I told you both to stay in our yard… Oh God.” She turned to Ginny. “Were they down by the creek? They were down by the creek, weren’t they?”

  “I don’t…know,” Ginny hedged, annoyed as she’d been by their repeated trespassing, but not willing to send the kids down the river, so to speak. Yet she also felt something like a mother’s kinship with Kendra, like there was some sort of code she’d be breaking if she didn’t take the mother’s side. “And really, it’s okay. I know the leaves can be tempting. And honestly, if my husband actually put them in bags instead of just raking them into piles, they probably wouldn’t even be tempted to come over and jump in them. Right, guys?”

  Kelly’s eyes had gone wide, her lower lip atremble. She shook her head. “We were looking for the little girl. We were leaving her snacks because she’s—”

  Carson elbowed her. “Shhh!”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Kendra clapped a hand to her forehead. Behind her, the kettle started to whistle. “Both of you. To your rooms. I don’t want to hear it,” she said before either of them could protest. “Go. Now!”

  She turned off the burner with one hand, twisting her body expertly to keep the baby away from the heat. She took a couple of mugs from the cupboard and put them in front of Ginny, then a small box of loose tea bags. Finally, the kettle, which she also kept far away from the baby. She put the kettle on a trivet and took the seat across from Ginny.

  “I’d pour,” she said, “but this guy here has grabby hands.”

  “I can get it,” Ginny assured her. “What would you like?”

  Kendra shook her head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  An awkward silence fell as Ginny prepared the tea, but only for a couple seconds because Kendra snagged a cookie and bit into it. “Oh wow. Fantastic! No, baby boy, not for you.” She grinned at Ginny. “He’s nursing, doesn’t even have a tooth yet, but he keeps trying to get at our food. Monkey see, monkey do. I guess that’s how it is for the youngest.”

  “I guess so.” Ginny dunked a tea bag and let it steep, then took a cookie. The dinner she hadn’t eaten seemed delicious now.

  “How many do you have? I mean, is this your first?”

  “Ah…” Ginny paused, caught off guard though she knew she shouldn’t be. It was a complicated question with a simple answer. “Yes. Our first. But my sister has six, so I’ve got my auntie card.”

  “Not the same as having your own, let me tell you that.” Kendra blew out a breath and looked tired again. “When you can’t give ’em back…”

  Another few seconds of strained silence. Ginny sipped her tea. Kendra bounced Carter on her knee.

  “I am sorry about Kelly and Carson,” she said finally. “I’ve told them to stay out of your yard. I don’t want them down by the creek. I know it’s not deep or anything, but kids can drown in just a few inches of water, you know? And besides, they shouldn’t be in your yard. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, really.” Hearing Kendra apologize over and over made it harder for Ginny to be irritated by the kids coming through the hedge. “Really, they mostly just jump in the leaves.”

  She thought about mentioning the stones they’d tossed at the house, the noise of their shrieking, the offerings they left in the window well, but in the end decided that would just get them into trouble and make her sound like exactly the sort of cranky neighbor she didn’t want to become known as. Besides, she reasoned, someday not so far in the future she might have the kid who ran into the neighbors’ yards and did naughty things.

  “Still. I’m sorry. It’s just that they’re sort of obsessed with it.”

  Ginny’s brow furrowed. “The house?”

  “Yeah. Your house. My husband, Clark…” Kendra sighed and shook her head. “Men. They can be such idiots, right?”

  “Umm…sure. Right.”

  Kendra laughed a little. “Yeah. Anyway, Clark was trying to get them into bed one night when I was out with some of my girlfriends for ladies’ movie night… Oh hey, you should totally come! Stacy from down the street, that blue Colonial on the corner? They fixed up their basement pretty nice, big-screen TV and stuff, and her husband likes to have the guys over for poker and beer and sports or whatever, so she told him if he was going to do that, she was having chick-flick-and-wine nights, and it’s been great. Maybe your husband would be interested?”

  “In…chick flicks and wine?” It took her a second, but she laughed once she caught up to Kendra’s train of thought. “Oh. Sports and poker. He might be. I don’t know. He’s pretty busy.”

  “Oh. Travels a lot? I thought I saw that he was gone a lot. Not,” Kendra said, “that I’m a Sneaky Pete or anything, just that, you know, you guys being the new neighbors and all, in that house, we just all wondered what sort of people you were.”

  This pricked at Ginny’s ears. “That house? What do you mean?”

  “Oh…just that most of these places in the neighborhood have sold two, three, four times over in the past few years. I mean, we’ve been in here…five? Yeah, five years. And we’re old-timers. But Mr. Miller from next door, he built that house before he got married. It was one of the first in the development. And he was the only owner. Until now, you guys. That’s all I mean.” Kendra looked vaguely guilty. “I mean, it’s not like someone died in the house or anything.”

  Something in the way Kendra said it sent up a flare. Ginny leaned forward. “They told us he died in the hospital.”

  “Oh, he did, he did, totally,” Kendra assured her. From upstairs came the sneaky, sly sliding of feet. “You’d better be in your rooms!”

  The noises stopped. Carter giggled suddenly, as though pleased by his siblings’ punishment. Kendra chucked him under the chin.

  Ginny’s head spun a little from trying to keep track of Kendra’s conversation, but then she was used to Sean’s mom, who was the queen of non sequiturs. “So…your husband?”

  “Is an idiot? What?” Kendra laughed again, looking confused.

  “He was trying to get them to go to bed…?”

  “Oh, right, right. Yeah, so he was trying to get them into bed, and he told them that if they didn’t go to sleep, he was going to tell the ghost next door about them, and she’d come over and get them.” Kendra’s mouth twisted, her smile rueful. “Like I said, he’s an idiot. Those kids didn’t sleep for a week.”

  Noises in the walls.

  Cold spots.

  “A girl…with dark hair…like yours when you were small.”

  “The…ghost?”

  Kendra laughed again. “Oh, he just made that up. It’s not true at all. I mean…” she looked suddenly doubtful. “It’s just that Mr. Miller’s daughter, Caroline. Well. You know about her, right?”

  “I don’t.” Ginny sipped more tea and took another cookie, suddenly ravenous.

  “Oh. Well, she went missing when she was about fourteen or so. They never found her, so far as I know.” Kendra’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Her expression suggested she was both disturbed and solemn with the responsibility of being the one to share this story, but her gaze told a different, gleeful truth. “Mr. Miller had an older son, Brendan. He’d be the one who sold you the house, right?”

  “Right. Yes.”

  “You know he built it himself? Old Mr. Miller?”

  “I did
n’t know that.”

  Kendra nodded. “Yep. Custom-built. That’s why it has so many nice features. I mean, all those built-ins, right?”

  The house did have nice features, but Ginny didn’t care about them now. “So…what happened?”

  “Oh right. Right. Well, old Mr. Miller’s son and his wife, not the son’s wife. Mr. Miller’s wife. They moved out after about a year of not being able to find her. The story is that both of them refused to ever come back or set foot in the house again.” Kendra lowered her voice, conspiring, though Ginny had no desire to share secrets. “Mr. Miller lived there all alone for the past fifteen years. Nice guy. Always seemed super sad, though. And no wonder, right?”

  “No wonder,” Ginny murmured. The tea had a flat taste she didn’t like, but she sipped it anyway to give herself something to do. “So…if they never found the girl…?”

  “I heard, just a rumor, you know, but I heard that someone found her on one of those Internet sites, living out in California or something. Runaway.”

  “So…she definitely didn’t die.”

  Kendra looked guilty again. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. And surely not in the house. It was before we moved in, of course, but stories like that…”

  Got exaggerated, Ginny thought. Inflamed. But that was exactly the reason why she should find it easy to believe the girl hadn’t died in the house. “Something like that would surely have gotten around.”

  “Well…yeah. I mean, like I said, Clark was being an idiot. He was just trying to scare the kids, which was stupid. I’m sorry they were in your yard, though. I’ll have a talk with them.”

  “They were peeking in the basement windows. They scared me. I scared them, pretty bad, I think.”

  “Ohhhhh Gawd. Well, that explains why Carson came tearing in here the other day like wolves were chasing him. I’m sorry!”

  Ginny found a smile. “Really, it’s okay. I think they learned a lesson, didn’t they?”

  “Still, I’m going to make them come down here and apologize.” Before Ginny could stop her, Kendra had gone to the bottom of the stairs to shout up, “Carson! Kelly! Get your butts down here, now!”

  The pounding of feet came again. The children looked caught and guilty, scuffing their feet on the linoleum. Kendra took them both and shoved them forward in front of Ginny. Carter grabbed a handful of Carson’s hair and pulled hard enough to twist the older boy’s head. There was a kerfuffle.

  Ginny was already exhausted.

  “You tell Mrs. Bohn you’re sorry for going in her yard and for peeking in her windows.”

  “We just wanted to see the little girl,” Kelly said through a lisp Ginny hadn’t noticed before. “She lives in the basement.”

  “Kelly, enough stories! Apologize right now.”

  “I’m sorry.” Kelly’s lower lip trembled.

  “Me too,” Carson added. “We just wanted to see her, because sometimes she looks so sad.”

  “That’s enough,” Kendra snapped. “Enough stories.”

  Ginny held up a hand. “Wait a second. What do you mean, Carson?”

  “We always ask her to come out and play, but she—”

  “Enough! Up to your rooms!” Kendra yanked his sleeve to turn him toward the stairs, even as her son tried to finish his sentence. She cut him off with a swat to the rear, earning her a sullen glare, but both children obeyed. Kendra turned with a heavy sigh, Carter still bouncing on her hip. “Honest to God, I’m going to kill my husband.”

  “It’s fine. Really.” Ginny stood. “I have to get going anyway.”

  “I’ll let you know about girls’ night, okay? And I’ll have Clark give your husband… What’s his name?”

  “Sean.”

  Kendra nodded as though she’d already known. “Right, right. I’ll have Clark give Sean a call about boys’ night. Okay? Sound good?”

  “Sounds…great,” Ginny said, though her head was already awhirl from just forty minutes in this woman’s presence. She couldn’t imagine how it would be to spend any longer amount of time. She was nice and all, but…scattered.

  Kendra led Ginny to the front door. “Thanks for the cookies. I’ll make sure to keep the kids out of the yard.”

  Ginny paused in the doorway to look over her shoulder. “Oh, you know what? Don’t worry about that. I like seeing them there. They can come over anytime they want.”

  “Are you sure?” Kendra looked doubtful.

  Ginny thought of Carson’s earnest face, his sister’s lispy lilt. Both of them had seemed pretty convinced there was a little girl in her basement. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  CMM

  Ginny traced the letters on the diary. At least now she knew who the diary belonged to. It stayed locked, though. Caroline Miller might be dead, or she might be alive and living on a commune in California with a husband and a bunch of kids. But this was her private diary, and Ginny still didn’t feel right breaking into it.

  “You should just read it,” Peg said. “Maybe there are some clues!”

  “Like what kind of clues?” Ginny put the diary back in the train case and closed the lid.

  Peg rolled her eyes. “About what happened to her, duh.”

  “She obviously hid the diary away so nobody could find it because she didn’t want anyone reading it, Peg. I feel like maybe I have to honor that.”

  “So her ghost doesn’t get you?” Peg lifted a brow and sliced into the chocolate cake Ginny had put in front of her. “God, so good. When did you get in to baking?”

  When I stopped being in to anything else, Ginny thought but didn’t say. She pressed her fork into the crumbs on her plate. “I told you there’ve been some strange things happening.”

  “You think it’s a ghost, really? Because of what Gran said? C’mon, Ginny. That’s just…stupid.” Peg gave herself a quick sign of the cross.

  “Gee, thanks,” Ginny said dryly. “Glad to know my older sister’s on my side.”

  Peg sighed and reached to pat Ginny’s hand. “Everything you told me about could be explained. Noises in the walls? The exterminator came, right? Cold spots? The furnace is fixed.”

  “Not really.”

  “So, it’s still broken. Besides, it’s more like your house is cold with hot spots, not cold spots, right?” Peg pulled the front of her blouse away from her throat and fanned it back and forth. “I mean, your kitchen’s like a sauna.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  She hadn’t told Peg about the other things. The mug that went missing. The figurines that turned up in random places, like the ones lined up in the window well. The distant sound of a jingle-bell collar from a cat that had been missing for weeks.

  “Listen…” Peg squeezed her hand again and waited until Ginny looked at her before continuing, “…how are…things? With you and Sean.”

  Ginny gently extricated herself and got up from the table, ostensibly to carry her plate to the dishwasher, but really so she didn’t have to look at her sister’s face. “Fine. They’re fine.”

  “You know, when I was pregnant with Jennifer, I thought I might actually end up in prison for killing Dale. It was that bad.”

  Ginny turned. “You never told me that.”

  “What could I tell you? That I was crazy? That I dreamed, actually dreamed…” Peg paused, her voice cracking just a little. A glimmer of tears was swept away before they could fall. Peg cleared her throat. “Jesus help me, Ginny. I dreamed about taking a knife to his throat and just slitting it open like he was a pig.”

  Stunned, Ginny leaned back against the counter, gripping it with her hands on either side. “Jesus.”

  “I know, I know. It was terrible. I’d have these explicit, vivid dreams like I’ve never had before. And sometimes, in some of them…”

  Ginny watched her sister blush. Peg, an emergency
room nurse, dealt with everything imaginable. Bad language, bodily fluids, objects inserted and stuck in orifices that were meant to be exit only. She had a bawdy sense of humor, so long as it wasn’t sacrilegious. She’d been the one to tell Ginny about the intricacies of blow jobs and warn her about possibly crapping herself on the delivery table, so what could possibly be so bad, so strange, that it could fluster her?

  “Sometimes, I’d dream that I’d…you know,” Peg said in a low voice.

  Ginny had no clue. “You’d kill him?”

  Peg shook her head, then nodded. Shook it again. “Yes. I mean, no, yes, I dreamed that, but there were other dreams, not the same ones, usually. But sometimes. Yes, okay? I admit it. Once or twice, I dreamed that sort of dream, that violent dream, a big knife, lots of blood squirting. Once I woke up laughing.”

  Ginny thought of her own dreams, those slick, slippery, delicious visions of lust that had been visiting her almost nightly. “Don’t worry, I think that’s normal. I mean, not the part about killing your husband, but if you want to analyze it, that big knife probably wasn’t a knife. If you know what I mean.”

  “Sometimes,” Peg said darkly, “a cigar really is just a cigar, Ginny.”

  “Are you saying you really wanted to kill Dale? I don’t believe it.” Ginny pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with orange juice from the fridge.

  Peg waved away the glass Ginny offered. “God help me, Ginny. I really did want to…well, maybe not kill him. But I sure did want him out of my life, away from me. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. Everything about him drove me insane. The way he breathed at night, I’ll tell you the truth, I had visions of putting a pillow over his face.”

  Ginny stifled another laugh, though it sounded slightly horrified. “Oh, Peg.”

  Peg shrugged. “I had Jenny, and after that everything was fine. And it didn’t happen any of the other times, just with that first. So I thought, you know, maybe…”

  “It’s not my first time,” Ginny said gently.

  Peg flushed again. “I know. I’m sorry, that was stupid.”

  “No. It’s okay.” Ginny was tired of having to feel sorry for other people’s grief surrounding her pain, but this was her sister, and she was trying to help. “You want to know if I’m having crazy dreams too?”