Best Kept Secrets Read online

Nora considered her options – her mother’s questions, or those of the police – and made the easy choice.

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ she told Brittingham. After her recent experience in Wyoming, an infuriating and frightening unfairness that still rankled, no way was she getting in a car again with a cop if she could help it.

  She caught the flicker across his face, so fleeting she might have imagined it, a quick tensing of the small muscles along his jaw. He knew, then. Had read the stories, seen photos of her in handcuffs. Which meant he also knew the real perpetrators had been found, her own name cleared. But that image must have lingered, and a shade of doubt along with it.

  ‘Or,’ she said, knowing he’d understand she’d glimpsed his suspicion, ‘you can follow me.’

  Without waiting for his answer, she grabbed her keys from the kitchen counter and made her best attempt at a confident saunter as she headed for the door.

  The police station was a surprise.

  It was where it had always been, in the rear of the courthouse, although in the decades she’d been away the building had acquired an addition. All sleek metal and glass, bespeaking a modern office full of computers and cubicles – a change from the rabbit warren of small dark offices and scarred wooden desks of her grandfather’s time. William Smythe had taken great pride in leading the annual school trips through the station, pointing out to Nora and her thrilled classmates the holding cell that invariably held a fierce-looking, filthy-faced man apt to rattle the bars and scare the bejesus out of them, even at their cowed distance. Only later would Nora realize that her grandfather must have pressed one of the younger officers into service, ordered him to forgo shaving for a few days and wear the clothing usually reserved for barn chores.

  The bigger surprise on this day was the name over the door: The William Smythe Police Station. When had that happened?

  She must have heard about it. Penelope would have made sure the whole world knew. And she remembered, vaguely, something about a ceremony. Years ago, when she and Joe had been in full mid-career madness, each of them scrambling ever higher up the ladder, their perfect image perfectly maintained. Except she hadn’t been perfect enough to take even a long weekend to fly back to her hometown to see her late grandfather honored.

  She sat in her truck, staring at the sign, lost in memories until a car door slammed and Brittingham materialized beside her window, waiting for her to follow him into the building.

  Inside, a cop sat in a booth behind a plexiglass window, a solitaire game open on the computer screen beside him. Nora tried to remember if she’d ever seen a black cop in Chateau. No public admittance beyond this point, a sign proclaimed.

  ‘Nelson,’ Brittingham nodded to him. A buzzer sounded and a steel door swung open.

  ‘After you,’ Brittingham gestured as Nelson turned back to his game without a word of acknowledgment.

  Another officer joined them in a too-small room that harkened back to the old days despite the addition’s newness. Maybe tiny interview rooms were intentional – some sort of police tactic developed with an eye to intimidation. Or maybe she would have felt intimidated no matter what, even though the two cops lounged in their chairs, relaxed, barely taking notes as she brought them through the brief sequences of events.

  ‘It was a little before eight. It was getting dark.’ She was sure of it. ‘I was really tired. I’d been driving since Toledo.’ She bit her lip. Would they consider her too fatigued to be reliable? ‘But I was almost home,’ she hurried on. ‘Just after I pulled off the bypass, this green car passed me so close it nearly hit me. It shook me up, so much that even though I’d been wishing for coffee, I didn’t stop at the little coffee place along the road.’

  She blurted a sudden memory. ‘Oh, and I saw a fox.’ Then blushed, afraid she sounded foolish. What could a fox possibly have to do with anything?

  The other cop, who’d introduced himself as Officer Lewis, nodded acknowledgment. ‘We used to have a few proggers, those old-timers who worked the marsh, trapping muskrat and sometimes foxes, too. But they’re a dying breed, and now we’ve got fox dens all around the edges of town. They come in at night, feast like kings on our trash and vanish by morning. They’re a real pest on the golf course. They like to steal the balls.’

  He rattled on, probably trying to put her at ease. Nora drew a breath and took up her narrative.

  ‘And then, just around the bend, I saw that same car, only this time it had been stopped by one of you guys. I didn’t know at the time it was Alden. I just figured the kid had been caught in a speed trap. I laughed because I thought it served him right.’

  ‘Kid,’ Brittingham said. ‘So you could tell his age.’

  ‘Just that he was young. But maybe I thought that because of his music.’

  ‘What music? How could you hear it? Were your windows down? In this heat?’

  This much, at least, she remembered. ‘Yes. I’d opened mine to get some air, thinking it would help keep me awake. I’d forgotten how hot it was. And his were open, too. What kind of music was it? I don’t know. Bouncy. Some kind of hip-hop.’

  She remembered the energy of it, her own inadvertent dip and sway to the rhythm, the way she’d laughed at herself despite her irritation.

  ‘You remember what song?’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Yeah, you don’t look like the hip-hop type.’ Lewis again, smiling now, maybe in an effort to belie the tinge of racism. Maybe that’s not even how he meant it. Maybe it was just an age thing. Still, it rattled her, and she was more unnerved still at his next remark.

  ‘So, road rage, then.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He just seemed like he was in a hurry, not mad or anything.’

  ‘But you said he nearly hit you. Scared the shit out of you.’

  She hadn’t said that at all. ‘I said it jolted me wide awake. Startled, more than scared me.’

  ‘Car comes out of nowhere, almost hits me, I’m scared.’ He looked at Brittingham, who nodded.

  ‘Same. That’s some aggressive shit right there.’

  They weren’t talking to her anymore, batting the words between them, a new and more ominous scenario taking place with each sentence.

  ‘Almost dark, you’re just driving along, minding your own business. No other traffic on the road, no need for him to do that. Could have put on his blinker and passed, just like a solid citizen.’

  ‘Yeah. You gotta wonder why somebody would do something like that. Road rage, sure, that’s possible.’

  ‘Drunk, maybe. Or high. Even scarier, in its own way.’

  They turned to her in unison, eyes flashing like high beams.

  ‘You’re lucky. You could’ve been forced off the road. Rig like the one you were driving, all that weight, could’ve ended up rolling over. You could’ve been killed.’

  She tried to feel it, the menace they had invoked. But all she could remember of that night was her exhaustion, the flash of fear followed by annoyance, and her own amused satisfaction – now tinged by guilt, given the outcome – at seeing the driver stopped for what she thought was a simple traffic ticket a few minutes later.

  ‘I guess,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t killed.’ He was. A reality that lay heavy and unspoken in the room.

  ‘Did you recognize him?’

  ‘Of course not.’ What an odd question.

  ‘I thought you might,’ Brittingham said. ‘Given his connection to your family.’

  He stared at her, waiting.

  She stared back. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Lewis started to say something, but Brittingham held up his hand. ‘She probably doesn’t remember. She’s been gone a long time. Grace Evans,’ he said to Nora.

  So Grace was related. Nora remembered her initial curiosity when she’d read the youth’s name in the paper.

  ‘She used to work for you, right?’

  Nora almost laughed. God knows Grace had worked, and worked hard, whipping through Quail House three da
ys a week in a frenzy of mopping and scrubbing and dusting, but somehow managing to convey the great favor she was doing them as she performed tasks of which they themselves were perfectly capable.

  ‘This boy’s her nephew.’

  The incipient laughter dissolved in Nora’s throat, the shock of the information pushing past the initial jolt at the word boy. ‘I never knew her to have a nephew.’

  ‘Had,’ Lewis said quietly.

  In the way of all children, Nora had never considered that Grace had a life outside her time at Quail House, let alone a sibling who’d produced this nephew – both of them now dead, if she remembered the newspaper story correctly.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

  Didn’t she?

  She thought hard, conjured a chubby child. Gurgling laughter during a game of hide-and-seek, ducking among the high-backed chairs and enfolded in the floor-length drapes in the library. Her grandfather looming in the doorway, the sudden bad feeling in the room like the queasy plunge in air pressure that heralds worst storms. She never saw the child again – if, indeed, she’d ever seen him at all, her memory so vague and unreliable she thought it best not to say anything.

  ‘That’ll make things easier,’ Lewis said. He left the room and she relaxed, thinking they must be done with her.

  But he returned and laid something before her. Five faces stared up from a computer printout.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Just wanted to see if you could identify him.’

  Help with a timeline, Brittingham had said. Things had gone way beyond that. She pushed the piece of paper away.

  ‘But I barely saw him. It’s the car I recognized. A green Kia. Older model. You didn’t even ask me about that.’

  ‘Didn’t need to. You just told us.’ Brittingham put his fingertips to the paper. His nails were cut short and square, and they were very clean. The paper came back across the table toward her.

  She glanced at the array of five young black men and wrenched her gaze away.

  ‘I don’t know. Like I said, I barely saw him. And besides’ – she clutched at a just-recalled fact, her way out of this – ‘I saw his picture in the paper. So I’ve been influenced, prejudiced, whatever you call it.’

  ‘That was an old picture.’ Brittingham pitched his voice low and comforting. ‘Just take some time with them all. You’d be surprised what you remember. And if you don’t recognize anyone, that’s fine, too. We just want to make sure we’ve covered all the bases. Don’t overthink it. Just go with your first impression, the split-second thought, just like when you saw him on the road.’

  Thus reassured, she let her glance skim over the faces before her, this one’s hair a little longer than the others, this one’s eyes open a little wider, as though surprised to find himself facing the camera in such a situation. This one with a small scar that tugged at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Let’s leave her alone with them.’ Brittingham gestured to Lewis, and they moved across the room, standing in a corner, backs to her, chatting.

  ‘What are you doing this weekend?’

  ‘Fishing. Trying to get as much time on the boat with the kids before school starts. You?’

  ‘Golf.’ Brittingham raised his arms, mimicking a swing. ‘Fore! How many kids do you have again? Seems like there’s a new one every year.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man. Give your poor wife a break. We’re heading over to Smokey’s for crabs after work. What time you get off today?’

  ‘Unless something comes up, same as usual. Four.’ Nora jumped at the vehemence of that last word.

  She scanned the photos again. The guy with the scar: probably not. A scar hadn’t made an impression during that nanosecond encounter. Number Two’s hair was too long. Number Five, too heavyset, dewlaps worthy of a bulldog. Number Three, maybe. Or Four. She studied the latter, forgetting the admonition about a quick look. Short hair, high forehead, stunned expression. So young, just a teenager.

  She closed her eyes and tried to remember the kid; saw only the green flash of the Kia just off her bumper, the apologetic shrug – goddammit, she was sure of that, way more sure than she was of this photo. Did Number Four look like the youth in the newspaper? Maybe.

  ‘It might be Number Four,’ she said, and they stopped talking and sauntered back to the table.

  ‘But I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Noted,’ Brittingham said. He pulled a pen from his pocket and circled Number Four. ‘Just initial here.’

  ‘This doesn’t mean I’ve positively identified him, does it? Because I’m not really sure. I just said it might be.’ She wanted to be clear on that, almost as much as she wanted out of this airless room and away from these men who seemed determined to push her into something she hadn’t said.

  ‘You made that very clear,’ Brittingham said. He held out the pen. ‘We really appreciate the time you’ve taken today. It’s a big help.’

  ‘With the timeline, right?’ It seemed they’d gotten way off track from the timeline.

  ‘Exactly. It’s pretty much what we already knew. Here.’ The pen hung between them. ‘You’re free to go.’

  But Brittingham stood blocking the door and he didn’t move aside until she’d inked her initials in a jagged scrawl next to the photo of a youth whose stare suddenly seemed one of accusation.

  It didn’t hit her until the click of the closing door.

  All those hints. Fore!

  The four kids, beers after work at four.

  And it had worked.

  ‘Bastards!’

  She whirled and reached for the door.

  Stopped with her fingers folded around the handle.

  Imagined returning to that claustrophobic room, facing Brittingham’s avuncular superiority, Lewis’s chatty condescension. Explaining herself. But how?

  She’d have to accuse them. Piss them off. At the very least, they’d say she’d misunderstood. She’d come across as flighty. Unreliable. All the usual labels applied to women.

  Besides, what did it matter if they’d steered her to the right guy? He’d been driving the Kia and now he was dead.

  Her fingers released the door and she hurried away from the police station, feeling as guilty as the miscreants its inhabitants were meant to pursue.

  TWELVE

  Heat bent in waves above the hood of Nora’s truck parked in the sun outside the police department, its black surface soaking up the sunshine and radiating it back.

  Someone had tucked a piece of paper beneath the windshield wiper. It curled as though trying to avoid contact with the scorching metal. Nora reached for it, expecting a come-on for a pizza place or maybe a car wash, but instead found a flyer advertising a march along Commerce Street to the courthouse.

  She stepped into the pool of shade beneath a tree, activated the truck’s remote start, and studied the leaflet as she waited for the air conditioning to cool the truck’s interior.

  It showed the same photo of Robert Evans that had run in the newspaper, with large red block letters below.

  March for Truth.

  Demand Answers.

  History must not repeat itself.

  That last line was above the black-and-white photo of Robert’s uncle, who must have been just about his nephew’s age in the photo, although the corona of Afro and embroidered dashiki proclaimed a different era. Nora thought she saw a family resemblance in the high forehead, the set of jaw.

  ‘How’d they get this together so fast?’

  Nora looked up.

  An older white woman removed the leaflet from her own car, pinching the folded paper between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from her body.

  ‘The internet,’ said Nora. She didn’t recognize the woman. Maybe she was one of the Washingtonians who’d increasingly colonized Chateau, either with second homes or in their retirement. No one would ever mistake her for old wealth – diamond jewelry a little too ostentatious, clothing a little too bright – or eve
n the yearning-to-be-old-wealth people snapping up the historic homes along the river. But at least an address in Chateau gave her proximity. Nora imagined her buying a one-level duplex in the new ‘planned living’ community outside town, or a condo in the multi-story monstrosity that loomed beside the river, marveling at how cheap everything was not two hours beyond the Beltway. The woman’s next words disabused her of that notion.

  ‘Coming down here from Baltimore, just like they did before, stirring up trouble, just when this has finally gotten to be a nice place again.’

  She opened her fingers. The leaflet fluttered to the sidewalk.

  ‘If I were you, I’d find someplace else to be that day. How many times can one town burn?’

  Nora stood rooted on the sidewalk, watching the woman drive away. The hands on the courthouse clock pointed straight up toward the sun that hung directly overhead, pressing heat upon the town with baleful efficiency. It emanated from the sidewalk through the soles of Nora’s running shoes. Her pores sprang a collective leak.

  She spindled the flyer in her hand and, in a combination of impulse and muscle memory, clicked off the truck’s starter and walked next door to the library, one of the first places in Chateau to be air-conditioned, and a reliable summer refuge in her childhood. She pushed through the door and into welcome cool darkness.

  A voice as familiar as it was improbable greeted her. ‘May I help you?’

  ‘Miss Emily?’

  A woman crept uncertainly from behind the desk, her head thrust forward from the indignity of a hunch that resulted from childhood polio. ‘I’m sorry. I turn the lights off when I’m alone here. It keeps it cooler.’ She clawed at the wall and found a switch. Light struck like a blow.

  ‘Oh, my soul. Nora Best, is that you?’

  Her head came only to Nora’s chest, which is where it rested when she wrapped her arms around the younger woman, holding her for a long moment before pushing her away.

  ‘Let me look at you.’

  She stared up at Nora with the tilt-headed scrutiny mandated by her inability to straighten.

  Emily Beattie’s white hair was wound into a bun, the way she’d worn it as long as Nora could remember. The fierce attentiveness in her hazel eyes was likewise unchanged, belying her body’s birdlike fragility. ‘Come sit with me back behind the desk. If anyone comes in, I’ll let you check out their books. Just like old times.’