Best Kept Secrets Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Gwen Florio

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Gwen Florio

  The Nora Best mysteries

  BEST LAID PLANS *

  The Lola Wicks series

  MONTANA

  DAKOTA

  DISGRACED

  RESERVATUINS

  UNDER THE SHADOWS

  Novels

  SILENT HEARTS

  * available from Severn House

  BEST KEPT SECRETS

  Gwen Florio

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Gwen Florio, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Gwen Florio to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9026-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-807-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0545-2 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To my parents, Tony and Pat Florio, who – unusual in that time and place – raised us with a deep awareness of the corrosive effects of racism.

  ONE

  Nora Best is done running.

  Almost.

  She’s put two thousand miles and change on the odometer in the last two and a half days, the numbers ticking along in a caffeinated blur, twelve hours and more on the road each day, the mountains of Wyoming long ago giving way to lonely rolling prairie, tamed in turn into the endless cultivated fields of the Midwest and, finally, the crowded and claustrophobic East, skyscrapers replacing grain elevators, Priuses outnumbering pickups.

  Home, just ten miles ahead.

  Because that’s where she’s going, to claim the great American privilege of starting over. Not in the way she’d thought just a few weeks earlier, tossing aside an unexpectedly broken marriage in an escape that initially felt freeing but almost ended in her own death. And not in the way, decades ago, she’d fled Chateau, the hometown to which she was now returning; that earlier trip a blend of teenage heartbreak and pique, a fuck-you cross-country move in a metamorphosis from lovestruck country girl to urban careerist.

  All those determined redefinitions, and not a goddamned thing to show for it except for the truck she’s driving and the Airstream trailer she hauls behind it. Heading into her latest transformation, one that given her age – fifty – she supposed would be termed a midlife crisis.

  ‘Not a crisis.’ She started talking to herself halfway through the endless second day, an attempt to stay awake through the monotony of miles. ‘Opportunity.’

  Until she’d blown up her life just a few weeks earlier, Nora had worked in public relations, paid well to put distracting hues of lipstick on various pigs, though never a boar quite as tusked and bristly as the last few weeks of her life. She’ll spend a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, on this long-overdue visit with her mother and use the time for – what are they calling it now? Self-care. The physical wounds of her recent ordeal nearly healed, she’ll tend to the wounds of the soul. Take to bed, draw the curtains, shut down the phone and get a good night’s sleep for the first time in ages. She lifts a hand from the wheel and knuckles her eyes.

  It’s going on eight o’clock, the August sun dipping a little lower each night as it releases a final blast of pulsating heat. Its dying light haloes the pale tassels topping the man-high cornstalks in the flat fields that flow past her truck, unspooling like a reel of her childhood, memory assailing her so hard and fast that for a brief moment she wonders at her decision to return, moving backward instead of forward.

  The soaring grandeur of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge briefly revives her, sailboats bobbing cheerfully on the startling blue of the bay, marshland stretching golden in the foreground, a watery counterpoint to the prairies she’d left behind. But the monotonous straightaway of Route 50 nearly undoes her. She reaches for her Thermos, only to find it empty but for a single swallow of coffee gone cold and ineffective. Sleep tugs at her eyelids, teasing them down, down …

  ‘Christ!’

  Nora jerks at the wheel, the three-and-a-half-ton Airstream swaying dangerously
with her involuntary swerve at the blast of a horn. A kid in a Kia, music vibrating so loud she can hear it through her rolled-tight windows, cuts so close in front of her their bumpers nearly kiss.

  She catches a glimpse of his face, the apologetic smile and the shrug, and he’s gone, leaving her heart skittering and bumping in her chest, sweat-slick hands slipping on the wheel as she wrestles pickup and trailer back into her lane, the Kia disappearing around a curve, its driver seemingly even more in a hurry than she is.

  Then, a sight that makes her nearly forget the Kia. Nora blinks, and blinks again, sure her eyes deceive her. As she pulls off the bypass skirting Chateau, a coffee kiosk appears, enticing as a church promising salvation to a sinner. A sign says Open, in warm, welcoming letters. A red fox darts across the road, so quickly that Nora’s foot barely has time to tap the brake before it’s gone. She looks longingly toward the kiosk. But the encounter with the Kia and the surprise of the fox have jolted her into wakefulness, just enough adrenaline for these last few miles.

  She draws a breath. Her heart resumes its metronome lub-dub, her hands stop shaking. She’d driven the pickup-and-trailer combo for the first time only a month earlier, steering it in a rage away from a marriage in ruins. But now, despite the assholes who seemed to regard Baltimore’s Beltway as the sole province of harried commuters and would she please get the hell out of their way, she’s confident of her ability to maneuver it on to the narrow back road that will take her to Quail House, where her mother will be waiting up to reassure herself that her daughter, despite the disasters that have befallen her, is truly alive and well.

  ‘Just a few more minutes,’ Nora reminds herself. She’s got this.

  Lights flash – not the reassuring red blink of a driver slowing for a potentially suicidal roadside deer but the red and blue spelling trouble for someone who, for a change, isn’t her. She slows to steer around the poor sucker who got caught in the speed trap that has existed outside Chateau since speed limits were invented.

  Nora slows nearly to a crawl, edging truck and trailer a little over the center line – no oncoming traffic at this hour – and sees it in slow motion: the blue-and-white cop car with the annoying lights, a green Kia idling in front of it and, sure enough, that same kid at the wheel, shaking his head in response to something the cop has asked.

  Nora checks the road ahead – still nobody – swings truck and trailer wide and drives on past, mouthing ‘Karma’s a bitch’ at the kid. The music still blasts its driving beat, her own head inadvertently bobbing along, shoulders shimmying. A rueful laugh escapes. When’s the last time she danced?

  TWO

  Nora rolled the window down, thinking to revive herself with fresh air. And laughed.

  She’d been so long in the West – two decades in Denver when she’d thought herself happy, the brief time in Wyoming after she’d realized she wasn’t – that she’d forgotten about East Coast heat and humidity. She touched a hand to her forehead, confirming the dampness there. Sweat? Or just a layer of steamy air, clinging to her skin like plastic wrap?

  Something bumped against her – something else she’d forgotten about. By the time she’d ineffectually slapped her hand to her neck, it had helped itself to a chunk of her flesh and buzzed safely away, leaving a wound that would swell red and lumpy by morning. A greenhead fly, the bane of her childhood, the insect version of a vampire, except that there were more of them – by a factor of millions – and they attacked in daylight and were harder to kill. Old farmers told tales of plow horses being driven mad by their relentless assault; watermen, of jumping overboard to escape the scissoring bites.

  She raised the window against more intruders, shutting out the skunky aroma that rode the air. She was well past town now, the cornfields giving way to marshland that crept a little closer to the road every year, a warning that human intrusion would ultimately prove temporary. The scent let her know it was low tide, black mud exposed and glistening, miasma nearly visible in the gloaming.

  Just as the window closed, she caught a clean, sharp whiff of the Lenape River, flowing through the marsh, spreading out, relaxing in its final miles before its fresh water was vanquished by the salt of the Chesapeake.

  Nora turned truck and trailer on to a winding lane lined by leaning cedars, falling away only at the last minute to reveal the rambling brick farmhouse, the river beyond, gone pewter in the sun’s last light. A sign announced Quail House, built in 1720 by Thomas Smythe off the proceeds of market hunting and in the same family ever since, named for the bobwhites whose two- and three-note calls arose from the surrounding fields every fall. Chateau had gone crazy with historical markers in recent years, and the house she’d grown up in, even though it was on nobody’s idea of a beaten path, was no exception.

  Quail House was one of the earliest of the grand old homes that staked out the prime riverbank land. Its owner was one of the few who turned his back on the loamy earth that enriched his neighbors, who planted tobacco and later corn and soybeans, and instead turned to the river and the bay beyond, making his fortune from shooting geese from the sky by the thousands, and pulling rockfish and blue crabs from the bay. Generations of black women trooped into the series of Quonset huts at one end of town, where they sat at long metal tables extracting sweet meat from the crab shells and packing it into tins stamped with the colonial-style lettering of Smythe’s Best Backfin Crab.

  The house was miles from the grubby reminders of what funded it, a stairstep brick edifice added on as the Smythe fortune increased, anchored by the original single-story, two-room house at one end that contained the kitchen, with a two-story addition in the middle and a final, three-story ell that held the sitting rooms and library necessary to people of consequence.

  On either side, mossy brick paths wandered among tall boxwood hedges shaded by spreading oaks, while, to the rear, a clipped green lawn ran down to the river, where a rowboat clunked gently against a dock.

  The first time Nora brought Joe, the husband she’d met in Colorado, home for a visit, he’d turned to her in awe. ‘You just said the house you grew up in was old.’

  ‘Because it is.’

  ‘You never told me it was a mansion.’

  She’d never thought of it that way. It was just home, its quixotic arrangement of rooms providing the sorts of corners and cubbyholes that sheltered a solitary child. The river was her personal playground, and on midsummer days when the sun ricocheted off the water in a punishing glare, she tied the rowboat up at the dock and sought shade in the neighbors’ cornfields, running barefoot between the tall rows of rustling stalks, searching for the chipped flint arrowheads left by the land’s earliest inhabitants.

  The dying light coppered the tall windows of Quail House, its chimneys silhouetted black against a fiery sky. Her mother stood on the stoop, a hand raised in eager greeting. Michael Murphy, the Chesapeake Bay retriever long retired from his hunting days, slanted down the steps on legs stiff as stilts. Nora cut the engine and climbed from the truck on knees nearly as creaky as the dog’s from too many days on the road. He jammed his graying muzzle against her thigh, tail lashing the air in furious delight.

  She bent to wrap her arms around him, clutching the dog the way she wanted, childlike, to cling to her mother. ‘Murph, you old man. You must be nearly a hundred.’

  She rubbed her face dry against the dog’s kinked fur and straightened. Her mother remained on the stoop, one hand braced against the wall behind her for balance, the other clutching a silvery metal walker, a heavy black boot encompassing her leg. Nora forgot her own need.

  ‘Mother! What happened?’

  Penelope looked past her. ‘So this is the famous Electra.’

  In the innocence of anticipated adventure, Nora had named the trailer Electra after Amelia Earhart’s airplane and paid for a decal of the Lockheed Electra on its side. More than one person had reminded her of Earhart’s fate – comments that had come back to haunt her during her own travails. But now her mother was the
one with the problem.

  She tried again. ‘What happened?’

  Sound drowned out Penelope Best’s response. She, Nora and the dog turned as one toward the rising whine. Nora first took it for the mosquitoes that arose in great clouds from the marsh at dawn and dusk, bookending the daytime misery inflicted by the greenheads. But it grew in intensity and volume, finally resolving as the wail of sirens.

  Kids came down to the river this time of year, congregating beside its inlets, building bonfires, drinking beer and smoking weed, just as Nora herself had done decades ago. Sometimes the fires got away from them, leaping to the marsh grass and racing merrily through it. She scanned the sky for smoke as she helped her mother into the house. Saw none. Shrugged.

  She closed the door against the wail that went on and on into the night.

  They sat in the kitchen, the oldest part of Quail House, its whitewashed brick walls three feet thick keeping the heat at bay, the room cool even without the air conditioning that Nora’s mother refused to install.

  A six-foot-wide fireplace stretched across one wall, once the room’s sole source of heat, its shining brass andirons these days purely decorative; the chimney capped with tin against the incursion of winter’s rainy downdrafts, spring’s nesting birds and summer’s voracious insects. A handyman replaced the chimney caps every few years, carefully tightening shiny new sheets around the bricks and removing ragged squares pockmarked with the physical evidence of the flickers’ futile yet relentless assault, the early-morning machine-gun burst of their beaks against it serving as Nora’s alarm clock as long as she could remember.

  Copper pots hung from ceiling hooks. Pewter plates, flanked by candlesticks, stood along the mantel. A long table, scarred from two centuries and more of use, vied with the fireplace for domination of the room.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ Penelope often asked, running her fingers over the gouges in the wood, their rough edges long ago sanded smooth and nearly filled with layers of furniture wax assiduously applied over the decades, ‘what it meant to turn this old table that they made by hand over to the kitchen help? To replace it with one shipped from Europe? How much that must have cost, how long they must have waited?’