Best Kept Secrets Read online

  The good table sat largely unused in the dining room, its reddish cherry surface dusted and polished weekly, its slender curved legs balanced on an Aubusson rug whose fringes brushed the baseboards, awaiting the events – holidays, luncheons – that demanded the formality highlighted by Penelope’s oft-repeated recitation of Quail House’s original wonders. ‘Real glass in the windows instead of oiled parchment! Silver instead of everyday pewter!’

  A tea service gleamed from a sideboard, its teapot and the taller coffeepot arrogant as dancers, one arm akimbo, the other curving high and graceful. Unlike the dining-room table, Penelope used it on occasions both special and everyday, smiling in satisfaction as she tilted the teapot over Spode cups, proclaiming as though it weren’t obvious, ‘I like pretty things. Just like those early Smythes who built this place.’ Her tinkling laugh echoed in the clink of spoon against china.

  And the room, indeed the whole house, was pretty, albeit in a chilly, formal way, as though preserved in some sort of colonial amber.

  Can you imagine, teenage Nora often thought rebelliously, the work it took to keep this house so pretty? To polish the silver by candlelight after a day of hauling water from a well, chopping wood for the fire, hoisting heavy rugs over a cord and whacking at them with woven rattan beaters until one’s arms went rubbery? Chasing a squawking chicken across the yard, grabbing its scaly legs, twirling it once, twice to leave it too limp and dazed to flap away from the descending ax? To plunge one’s hands into the still-warm cavity and claw out the steaming guts, sink on to a bench for the brief respite afforded by plucking, feathers sticking to fingers slick with blood? Not so pretty now.

  Still, Penelope’s vision was compelling, and in her more charitable moments, Nora indulged her mother’s evocation of a woman in a long dress and ruched bonnet gliding into the room in predawn darkness, striking a flint against the kindling laid the night before, hanging a cast-iron pot from the hook that extended over the flaring sticks and stirring its contents with a long-handled spoon. Over the years, Nora had imagined this ghostly occupant as one of the unsmiling ancestors whose portraits hung in dark hallways, filmed with dust despite Penelope’s weekly circuits with a feathered brush, staring disdainfully down imperiously arched noses – which, unfortunately, she’d inherited.

  A fond smile played across Penelope’s face as she watched Nora’s survey of the room that had remained unchanged for decades, but for the occasional replacement of appliances hiding behind colonial-style cabinetry painted a slate blue.

  ‘Good to be home?’

  ‘So good.’ Nora sank on to one of the Shaker chairs surrounding the table, mentally shedding the burdens of the past few weeks, the collapse of her marriage, her husband’s subsequent murder and her own near-death at the hands of the people who’d killed him, not to mention the perilous days that had nearly seen her charged with homicide and earned her national notoriety.

  ‘I’ll make us some tea.’ Penelope’s response to every occasion, willfully oblivious to the fact that most of her friends and especially her daughter were committed coffee-holics.

  Nora jumped up. ‘Let me. You shouldn’t be moving around.’ She gestured to the booted contraption that went nearly to her mother’s knee. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She knew, even before the answer came in a voice nearly as insubstantial as the steam wafting from the pot Penelope must have put on the stove as soon as she heard Nora’s approach. Her mother hadn’t wanted to bother her.

  ‘A hairline ankle fracture. I was carrying laundry downstairs and – you won’t believe this – a mouse ran right across my foot. I tumbled the rest of the way down. I suppose I’m lucky it wasn’t worse.’

  ‘A mouse!’

  ‘Sometimes they come in from the fields.’

  Nora stepped away from the stove to hear. She’d always suspected her mother’s voice was a trick, a way to make everyone around pay close attention for fear of missing something. It wasn’t just the hushed tones, but the urgency with which Penelope Best infused every sentence, as though even an innocuous account of a clumsy slip and fall bore a thrilling secret. She opened her green eyes wide as she spoke, a smile hovering on her lips, and when she finished, it was as though her listener had been given a gift, although later, out of her presence, a question nagged: Of what, exactly?

  Penelope – never Penny – waved a hand, a broken bone regally dismissed. And yet the boot, the walker standing ominous in a corner. ‘Truly, it’s nothing. Not compared to what you’ve been through.’

  Nora had fled the searingly public wreckage of her marriage, only to run straight into the clutches of a kidnapper. The stab wound he’d inflicted upon her, the deep scrapes and a Rorschach array of bruises she’d suffered in her escape, counted as good fortune, given his ultimate lethal intent.

  ‘But how are you managing? Can you drive? Of course not.’ Nora deflected her mother’s comment with her own question. The boot enclosed her mother’s right leg from knee to toes. Impossible to press an accelerator with that contraption.

  Penelope surprised her with a small, transgressive smile. ‘I’m not supposed to. But I can. I take the boot off once I’m in the car.’

  ‘But if you had to brake suddenly …’

  Penelope nodded. ‘Inadvisable, according to the doctor. Anyway, Miss Grace comes by on occasion.’

  Another wash of memory, so strong the teacup rattled in its saucer as Nora set it before her mother. The casual courtesies of the South, Maryland the northernmost state on the wrong side (depending on which side you were on) of the Mason–Dixon Line, infused with attitudes and traditions in equal parts charming and lethal.

  People were Mister or Miss First Name, and although a married woman still proudly adopted the title of Mrs along with her husband’s last name, in direct conversation she remained Miss So-and-So, morphing into ma’am as she aged. Or, for men, sir.

  Unless the person in question was black and the speaker was white. Then it was first name only, except in Penelope Best’s house, where the honorific applied to all concerned. Nora had never known otherwise until a friend’s mother had pulled her aside and quietly imparted a message underscored by centuries of this-is-the-way-things-are: ‘You don’t ma’am the help.’

  ‘Miss Grace? She’s still alive?’ She’d been old when Nora was young.

  ‘Of course she is, dear. We’re very nearly contemporaries. She was only a few years older than me when she came to work for my parents.’

  THREE

  1963

  In point of fact, Grace was a gangly thing of eighteen, three years older than Penelope, just out of high school and needing a job, preferably not one in the cannery where her own mother sat for ten hours a day running a rubber-gloved fingernail under the crown in a blue crab’s shell, snapping the carapace up and away, peeling off the gray rubbery lungs – aptly nicknamed Dead Man’s Fingers – and flinging them aside before digging deep to prize free the sweet meat within; and finally, a single swift blow with a wooden mallet to crack each hooked claw and extract its treasure in an unbroken chunk. Work that left Davita Evans’s hands swollen and crosshatched with a thousand tiny cuts, perennially sore despite her daughter’s dutiful nightly massage with the clear, gelid applications of Corn Huskers Lotion.

  ‘Spoiled girl,’ she said, when her daughter showed her the ad under the Domestic Work heading in the Chateau Crier classifieds. ‘Thought you were all about that Black Power business, and now you want to go work for white people.’

  Grace did not want to work for white people, especially not now, with change gusting through the country, the occasional breeze stirring even in Chateau, where segregation had reigned long after its legal end. Grace had just graduated from the Smythe Grove school, which remained all black because, as Chateau’s town fathers explained to the federal education types who persisted in sniffing around, schools in Chateau served neighborhoods, and Smythe Grove was in a black neighborhood. Never mind that the black kids who rode buses from the d
istrict’s rural reaches could just as easily have been dropped off at the white school.

  Grace had paid close attention to the actions in other towns – the sit-ins, the demonstrations and even riots – and had heard rumblings of groups from those cities planning to stage similar events in Chateau. When they came, she planned to make herself useful, so useful that maybe she could enlist their help in getting her out of Chateau and into someplace better, a plan she had no intention of sharing with her mother.

  The ad she showed her mother wasn’t just for work in any white person’s house, not even just any rich white person’s house. It was the home of Chateau’s Police Chief, and the more she could learn about him and how he operated, the better.

  Her mother sniffed and rubbed her oversize knuckles. ‘Go on, then. Apply. But they won’t take you. They’ll want some big-legged mammy-looking woman.’

  Davita Evans knew the denizens of Quail House, of course. Everyone in town knew who the Smythes were. But she didn’t know Philippa Smythe personally, didn’t know she had the same love of elegance and pretty things that she passed on to her daughter. And so when Philippa beheld the tall, slender young woman on the back steps – Grace knew better than to knock at the front door – in her starched shirtwaist, her snowy white cotton socks edged with lace and matching white gloves, she clapped her hands in delight. ‘Oh, aren’t you just perfect!’

  She led Grace into the kitchen and seated her at the table, offering her a cup of tea – although it arrived in a heavy crockery mug, not the delicate, near-translucent china cup rimmed in gold from which Philippa herself sipped. Belatedly remembering why Grace was there, Philippa asked, ‘But do you know how to clean?’

  A snort sounded in an adjoining room. Grace cut her eyes sideways and saw a teenage girl lounging on a flowered loveseat, auburn hair pulled back into a messy ponytail as she bent over a bare foot, applying nail polish to her toenails with minute brushstrokes, the sharp scent cutting through the aroma of whatever was baking in the oven. She wore pale-green babydoll pajamas, even though it was nearly noon. And Davita thought Grace was spoiled.

  Grace wondered why this family was advertising for household help when they clearly had a child at home more than capable of performing routine chores, as Grace herself had done as long as she could remember.

  Grace assured Philippa she was equal to the tasks that Philippa outlined, cleaning the floors and dusting, wiping down the bathrooms daily with a deep-clean once a week, polishing the silver …

  ‘I don’t polish silver.’ The words were in the air before Grace could stop them. They hung there, nearly visible, shimmering with resentment. Her hand rose as though to snatch them back.

  Her mother had been consigned to a lifetime of work in the crab processing plant after her job in Johanna Hampton’s house came to an end when Mrs Hampton accused her of boosting a Gorham teaspoon, its floral Versailles pattern making polishing a nightmare, the tarnish sinking deep into the grooves and whorls.

  Davita had been offended on multiple levels, the outrage to her integrity first and foremost, but her intelligence insulted as well. ‘If I was gonna take anything, it wouldn’t be a damn pain-in-the-ass piece like that Versailles. Useless.’ Before the Hamptons, she’d worked for the Eberlines, who’d left Chateau for Washington when he got a wartime job in the Office of Civilian Defense, and Mrs Eberline had used Reed and Barton’s Hepplewhite, elegant in its simplicity and polished to a blinding gleam in half the time.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Grace added, far too late. She’d seen the change flash across Philippa Smythe’s face. She dropped her hand to her lap, lowered her eyes and awaited her dismissal. Her head snapped up at Philippa’s chiming laugh.

  ‘I suppose Penelope is capable of doing the silver,’ and Grace chanced a glance, catching the look of pure hatred shot her way from the girl in the next room. Penelope’s hands were in the air in front of her, the nail polish drying, all her fingers but the middle one curled inward.

  ‘I don’t imagine you do windows, either.’

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am, I’ll wash your windows,’ Grace hurried to reassure Philippa. Did she still have a chance?

  Philippa shook her head and bit her lip. ‘No. They’re so tall. We might need to find someone to help with those. Carry the ladders and such. We had a boy who used to do the heavier work – cut the grass, things like that – but he left along with his wife; up and moved to Philadelphia. Which is why we’re looking for household help now. Philadelphia! Can you imagine?’

  Grace could imagine, oh, yes, she could, because if she were in Philly, no way would she be working for some skinny-ass white woman and her lazy-ass daughter, but she twisted the cloth of her skirt tight between her palms, wrinkling it unattractively, and forcing herself to say to Philippa Smythe in her mildest, most flattened tone, ‘Maybe my brother could help. He’s a little younger than I am, just sixteen. But he’s strong. He plays football.’ Her chin lifted and a smile lit her face before she remembered herself. She lowered her eyes. Rounded her shoulders in submission. ‘Ma’am.’

  Which was how Bobby Evans came to work at Quail House.

  FOUR

  Nora Best loved her mother fiercely, and so was inclined to overlook Penelope’s unapologetic snobbery, the way she clung to long-outdated notions of femininity and propriety, an insistence upon closed-toe pumps and sheer hose even on summer’s sultriest days, her refusal to acknowledge anything deemed unpleasant, but the one thing she could not excuse was Penelope’s belief in the superiority of tea.

  Which meant that there was likely no coffee to be had in Quail House unless one counted whatever was left in a folded-over brown paper bag tucked in the back of the freezer. Or, worse yet, the crusted remains in the bottom of a canister of instant on a pantry shelf with other little-used items – the tins of sardines, envelopes of fossilized bouillon, jars of olives floating in oil gone cloudy, and Maraschino cherries, their neon-red hue distracting attention from the long-gone expiration date stamped into the jar’s metal lid.

  If she was going to spend any amount of time in Quail House, she needed the good stuff and she needed it fast.

  ‘I’ll probably do some work on the book later at the library,’ she told her mother on her first morning home, ostentatiously packing her laptop and a file folder into a bookbag, counting on the fact that Penelope wouldn’t realize she could just as easily look up what she needed while googling like mad at the kitchen table. ‘Do you need anything in town? I thought I’d bring us home one of those rotisserie chickens. We can eat it cold with a salad on the side. It’s too hot to cook.’

  Penelope turned wide pleading eyes upon her.

  ‘Nora, do you have to write that book? What good does it do to air all of that unpleasantness?’ It wasn’t the first time she’d asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you what good it does.’ Nora pushed her hair away from a forehead already moist, even within the relative cool of Quail House. ‘If I don’t write it, I have to pay back my advance, which is all I’ve got to live on for the foreseeable future. If I’m lucky, I’ll make a little extra on it once it’s published. Not like that first book.’

  ‘Oh!’ Penelope’s hands flew to her cheeks. ‘Don’t remind me. I couldn’t leave the house for weeks after that one.’

  Nora’s first book, Do It Daily, a treatise on the benefits of sex nearly every day for a whole year, hadn’t sold as well as expected, probably because she’d made the mistake of placing it within the context of monogamy, a variation on the old how-to-keep-your-marriage-hot theme. ‘In hindsight, a tactical error,’ Lilith, her agent, had grumbled. ‘If you’d written about sex with a different person every day, we both could have retired on the proceeds.’

  ‘Having sex with a different person every day sounds just as awful as having sex with the same person day after day,’ Nora had pointed out, alluding to the problem she herself had had with carrying out the book’s recommendations – an issue not discovered until she’d already signed the contract.

/>   ‘But it would have been controversial. Wonderfully scandalous. The religious right would have had a cow. You can’t buy publicity like that.’

  An observation Lilith trotted out again after Nora’s near-demise in the mountains, which she’d persuaded Nora should be the focus of her next book – a substitute for the cross-country travelogue in the Airstream that been her original topic.

  ‘Sex and death,’ Lilith said with satisfaction. ‘The two eternal subjects. But you’ve got to turn this one around fast, before everybody forgets about you.’

  Which, frankly, Nora wished everyone would do, almost as fervently as Penelope wished it.

  Penelope sighed theatrically, lifted her cheek for a kiss and said that if Nora was going to stop at the store on the way home anyway, she might as well pick up some buttermilk.

  ‘I can make us some biscuits for breakfast tomorrow morning before it gets too hot. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Nora allowed that she’d like that very much and made her escape.

  Nora remembered the coffee kiosk she’d passed the night before and gave the truck a little gas. It had been open late into the evening. She hoped its morning hours were correspondingly early. But when she pulled close, she saw that it was shuttered, its drive-through lane empty. She continued on into town, telling herself that convenience-store coffee was better than no coffee at all, her craving so strong her hands were beginning to shake.

  The road from Quail House led into Chateau from the poor side of town, although no one would so openly call it that. For starters, its appearance spoke for itself, the narrow frame houses set so close in their dirt yards that if their occupants chose to extend their arms from the side windows, they could pass neighborly cups of coffee between them. Paint dangled in faded curls from the clapboard. Porches sagged. Screen doors flapped an arrhythmic backbeat in the hot, desultory breeze.