Little Secrets (25 page)

Chapter Thirty-Six

“She was always scribbling.” Miller looked at the case Ginny had pushed across the table in front of him, but he didn't touch it. “My dad called her Doodle. She'd draw for hours in these big notepads, that soft white paper…what was it called? Newsprint. She'd draw cartoons and landscapes and people, animals, just whatever. And when she got older, she'd write stories to go with them.”

“Did she keep a diary?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. I didn't pay attention.”

Something in this sentence seemed to break him again, because he put his elbow on the table and his face into the comfort of his hand. Ginny had learned the trick of seeing when someone was faking pain, but everything about this guy's anguish was real. Her fingers crept over the table toward him, but she stopped herself from touching his sleeve. He didn't seem the sort to welcome it.

“I didn't pay attention,” he repeated. “I didn't want to know. I didn't want to see.”

“See what?” Ginny asked gently.

“My mother didn't either, though that's not really an excuse.” He shuddered. His fingers dug into his skin. His hand covered his eyes, so she couldn't see if he was crying, but his voice had gone rough and hoarse.

Ginny was silent, giving him time.

When he finally looked at her, his eyes were rimmed red but dry. “She was always his favorite. I was the son, right? He should've been taking me out to play ball in the backyard, toss around the pigskin. He should've been taking me fishing, camping, all that shit. But nope, Caroline was his favorite. They'd spend hours tucked up together in his big chair, reading books or looking at those stories she wrote. She could do anything and get away with it. Once she carved her initials in the dining room table, can you believe it? I thought my mom was going to murder her, but my dad just told her to leave it alone. Caroline was a daddy's girl, all the way. My mother called her ‘the little wife.' Like she was joking, but I don't think she was.”

A worm of nausea twisted inside her. Ginny's fingernails scraped at the table as she withdrew her hand. She linked her fingers, squeezing them tightly together on the table in front of her.

“Yeah,” Miller said, though Ginny hadn't spoken. “You know what I'm talking about. It was cute when she was little, right? But not when she started to get boo…breasts. She shot up a few inches, started to get curves and wear makeup.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirteen. And, Christ…” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead for a moment, then shook his head. “I have two daughters. Seventeen and fourteen. I know what it's like, you know, when they start developing. It gets weird.
They
get weird.”

Distaste rippled across his face, and he gave her a look of such loathing that she'd have recoiled if it had been directed at her instead of his memories.

“You have to make some distance between you. You just have to. They're not your little girls anymore, you can't be having them sit on your lap and whisper in your ears. It's just…that's not what a dad does.” His lips drew back to reveal perfectly straight but yellowed teeth. “I have daughters. I know.”

Ginny had a flash of a summer night years ago. She'd been what, twelve? Thirteen? She'd worn a thin, sleeveless nightgown with flowers on it, and it had shrunk in the wash. More likely, she'd grown. It hit her midthigh instead of reaching her knees, and the fabric had grown faded in the wash. It had been her favorite for a long time. She'd come out of the shower, her hair still wet, and gone to sit with her dad on the couch to catch a rerun of some comedy program. He'd been annoyed, told her to go change her clothes or stay in her room. She hadn't understood then and maybe not ever, until just now.

“What did your mother do?”

Miller grimaced and looked down at his hands, which had linked much the same as Ginny's. “She had her favorite too, I guess. Even if by default.”

“And then your sister disappeared.”

“She never came home from school.” He kept his voice low and his gaze on his hands. His fingers twisted tighter, knuckles going white with the pressure. “She went in the morning and stayed all day. Her friend Laura was the last person to see her, and she was crossing the park, heading for home. She never made it.”

“And they never found out what happened?”

Another shrug. He looked out the window, toward the street. “No. Someone reported they saw her getting into a white van, but, really, that's such a cliché; who knows if it's true. We had some other reports of her being spotted in different places across the country. California, Montana. None of them ever panned out. She was just…gone.”

“What did your parents do?”

He looked at her. His smile was terrible, thin-lipped and more like a snarl. “They fell apart. They'd been on rocky ground for a while before that.”

“Fighting a lot?”

He shook his head. “Oh no. They never fought, at least not where I heard them. No. They stopped talking to each other before Caroline went missing. After she was gone for a while and the news started to taper off and the investigation went cold, they stopped even seeing each other. It was like they were invisible to each other. They'd pass in the hall, not even look at each other.”

“It must've been horrible for you. I'm sorry.”

His laughter was worse than the terrible smile. “It could've been worse. I could've been in the back of someone's van, right?”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen.” The cup in front of him had stopped steaming, and now he drank. “We stayed there for another year after she went missing. We never talked about her. I mean, I tried, but I wasn't allowed to.”

“They told you that?”

“They didn't have to. I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't heartless. I could see it upset them. So it was sort of like…I'd never had a sister in the first place. They took down her pictures. They put away her things. I wanted to save some of them…I tried.”

He cleared his throat once, then again. He looked at her, his gaze naked. “She always wanted a cat, but my dad hated them. Said he was allergic, but he wasn't. He just didn't like them. It was maybe the one thing he didn't give her that she wanted, you know? But he let her have hamsters instead. A whole bunch of them, they just kept having babies. Well, after she was gone, nobody remembered to take care of the hamsters. They started eating each other.”

Ginny swallowed, thinking of the plastic bags in the closet. The bones. The fluffs of fur. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Brendan Miller gave a short, sharp laugh. “I didn't want them to take them away, though. I kept thinking, hey, maybe she'll come back. If she ran away, right? She'll come back for them. She loved those stupid hamsters. So I took them, and I hid them. But they died anyway.”

She didn't have to ask what he'd done with them; she already knew. But she didn't know why. “You hid them in the closet?”

He nodded, looking guilty, then lifting his chin as though daring her to accuse him of something. What, she didn't know. “Yeah. I was a kid. A dumb kid. I thought maybe, even though they were dead, she'd want them. So I put them away for her until she could come back.”

“But she never came back.”

“No. Then my mom left him, and I went with her.”

Ginny's cup was long empty and her bladder had begun its protests. “And you never went back? Or had anything to do with your dad ever again?”

Miller shook his head. “No. And that bastard…he never…”

She waited for him to compose himself, embarrassed not just by his story but by the somehow confessional nature of it. She shifted in her chair, needing the bathroom and not wanting to get up before he was finished. Miller swallowed hard and gave her another of those bright, hard stares.

“He never bothered trying to see me, I mean. We left, he never bothered or cared about us after that. He sent checks on time; that was all my mother cared about. And that was it.” He drew in a shaky breath and let it out. “Like I said. He had his favorite, and it wasn't me.”

Before Ginny could say something, even to offer sympathy, Miller had pushed the train case back toward her.

“So I don't really care to read my sister's journal or whatever it is. Throw it in the trash. It's old news. She's gone, and she's never ever coming back.”

“You're sure of that?”

He shrugged. Then nodded. Stood. He tossed a couple dollar bills on the table, though she'd offered to pay for the coffee he'd barely touched. Miller stared down at her.

“I'm sure of it. All those stories about seeing her in California or wherever are bullshit, and you think so too, or else you wouldn't have come after me so hard. You think my sister's haunting your house, Mrs. Bohn? Well. You might be right. But, guess what, I don't care. And I don't want to know about it. Never contact me again, or I'll have no problem going to the authorities. And if you find anything else…” he paused to give the box a sneer, “…consider it yours. I don't want it back.”

She didn't want to shout after him, but it took her two or three steps for every one of his just so she could catch up. Ignoring her suddenly violent urge to pee, Ginny caught him again at the curb. “You think your father did something to her, don't you?”

Miller gave her the side eye. “I don't
think
it. I know he did.”

Then he stepped off the curb and crossed the street, leaving her behind.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

This was it. She was going to open it and read it. Ginny plucked the key from beneath the stack of faded pictures, and fit it into the lock. She turned it. She opened Caroline Miller's diary and started to read.

Four pages of random thoughts scrawled in an uneven hand. Nothing important, no revelations. Then…nothing. Blank pages.

“Wow. So that's kind of a letdown, huh?” Sean leaned over her shoulder. “Bummer.”

Ginny had told him the entire story, come clean about everything. The things she'd seen and heard and felt and thought. The time for secrets had ended, for both of them. Sean didn't believe her about there being a ghost in the house, but he did believe that Ginny thought it was true. That was enough for her; it had to be.

In the past, Ginny hadn't asked him to quit smoking or sell his motorcycle. He'd decided those things on his own. She didn't ask him to stay, either. She hadn't asked Sean if he'd thought of leaving her, but she'd faced the idea of leaving him and hadn't done it; now she waited. Some things that were broken could be repaired, good as new. Others, even if they worked again, would always bear evidence of the damage that had been done. That was their marriage. Broken, repaired, working somehow. But not unscathed. Perhaps someday they'd both stop tiptoeing around each other, or maybe they'd always hold what each had done between them for the rest of their lives. The baby would make a difference. Or not.

“I love you”
was all she'd said, over and over, as Sean paced and ran his hands through his hair and when he'd asked her if it was his fault, any of this.
“I love you,”
she'd told him.
“That's what matters.”

She wasn't sure if he believed in her love, any more than he believed in the ghost of Caroline Miller, but it seemed as though he believed Ginny believed in it. And that also had to be enough.

Now, he squeezed her shoulders before withdrawing. “I'm sorry. I know you hoped it would give you some clues. Or something.”

“It's okay. I'm not sure I'd have learned anything I didn't already know. Or couldn't guess.” Ginny closed the diary and put it back into the train case, along with the pictures and all the other bits and pieces of things that had once belonged to Caroline Miller. She looked at him. “And maybe…maybe someone in a white van really did carry her off. Or maybe she's okay.”

“We'll just never know,” Sean said.

And maybe it was better that way.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The worst winter in twenty years was turning into the worst spring. While usually an early thaw would've been welcome, this year the massive amounts of snow that had accumulated were melting too fast for the earth to handle it. Water rushed day and night, down the street and into the drains, which overflowed and made lakes across the sidewalks and into the yards. Kids sloshed in it and ran paper boats down it.

Ginny looked for Pennywise, the clown.

Not really, though she did avoid the drains when she went out to get the mail. Debris had clogged many of them, making the problem worse. So did the gray skies dumping more rain every day. She was sick of the sound it made on the roof. Sick of sloshing. Sick of everything being damp.

She was sick of waiting, waiting, for things to change.

She could see the star of her due date on the calendar now. The obstetrician told her she could go early. She could go late. This wasn't her first pregnancy, but it was her first to go to term and there was no predicting what her body was going to do. The baby would come when it was ready, the doctor told her. That was the way babies worked.

From the nursery window, Ginny watched Kelly and Carson duck through the hedge and into her yard. The snow had gone, replaced by mud and the grass that had been overlong before winter came. They ran through it in their rain boots and slickers, slashing at the overgrowth with long sticks. Then back through the hedge, widening the hole for a moment before the brush closed behind them again.

The rocking chair Sean had struggled so hard to put together still squeaked, but rather than finding this annoying, Ginny took comfort in the consistent noise. She closed her eyes and rocked in the nursery she'd finally allowed herself to decorate, both hands on her big belly. She listened to the squeak and the creak of wood on wood.

She listened for the sound of footsteps.

Something like a sigh brushed past her on a swirl of cool air. They'd turned off the heat at the beginning of last week, and even in an unseasonably warm late February, it was not yet time for air-conditioning. She wanted to open the windows at least, but the rain prevented it. Instead, Sean had turned on the house fan.

Ginny rocked and breathed. Another whisper, another sigh, the soft pad of footsteps in the hallway. If she opened her eyes, she'd see nothing but shadows. Ghosts never showed themselves in the daytime. But she felt a presence, eyes watching. She felt a hopefulness. It was the only way to describe it.

So, she sang.

Her gran had sung this lullaby to her when she was small. Like the best of Grimm's fairy tales, the song about a pair of children lost in the woods had delighted her childhood love of all things macabre, and it wasn't until Ginny got older that the horror of the lyrics had become clear. She sang it now anyway, to the baby in her womb and for those she'd lost.

For the one who seemed unable to leave.

In the yard, Kelly and Carson chased each other again. Their screams snapped open Ginny's eyes. She sighed herself, annoyed that they couldn't seem to stay in their own yard, that they had to be so loud. Her child would never, she thought mildly. Never, never.

They disappeared around the side of the house, heading back toward their yard again. Ginny's eyes drooped. She drifted. She'd been sleeping better at night, but now it seemed all she wanted to do was sleep. Her body's way of getting ready, she supposed.

Sleeping, she dreamed.

* * * * *

She stood next to the crib Sean had so painstakingly put together. It had been dressed in pale-green-and-yellow linens decorated with jungle animals. She recognized it as the pattern someone had given her at her baby shower—though, as was the way of dreams, she couldn't remember who'd given it. Cartoon lions and elephants and monkeys capered next to palm trees all over the sheets and bumpers. Over the crib hung a mobile, and it spun lightly and tinkled out a classical tune she couldn't recall the name of.

There was nothing scary in this dream, but a sense of unease twisted inside her, getting strong as she crossed the room to look into the empty crib. She touched the mobile with one finger to stop its turning, and the music ground to a sudden, unlovely halt. One, two, final notes plucked at the air and fell silent.

Gauzy curtains blew inward, reminding her again this wasn't real. She'd never have such long curtains. They were dangerous. Could tangle around a curious toddler's neck. And ugly, she thought. Pink and purple, sheer, tab tops.

These were not her curtains.

Ah, this, then, was not her baby's room. Ginny turned in half a circle, looking around. Again, in the way of dreams, she looked down at her flat belly and mourned the loss of it, even as she knew it had to mean she'd given birth. That meant there was a baby here, somewhere. Not in this room, which clearly belonged to an older child. A girl who favored pink and purple, a white-painted bed hung with netting Ginny would also never allow because it could strangle a child in the night.

Everywhere she looked, she saw danger. A tangle of too many electric cords plugged into a socket. A bookcase laden with toys and books, unsecured to the wall, just begging to be toppled over onto a soft head. In the closet, a pull string, too long, and an empty socket, tempting a child's curious fingers to probe. Too many things that could cause harm. Her heart pounded. She clutched at the air, but touched nothing.

Somewhere, far away, her baby cried for her. Ginny's nipples got tight and hard, burning. She covered them with her palms and felt the sharp points, but the pressure didn't relieve the tingling and hot fluid leaked through her shirt. An answering pull tugged in her womb, deep inside. Like menstrual cramps, but harder and more painful.

She turned around and around, but this room had no door. She was trapped here, and she ran her hands over the walls, now a garish pink. Like the inside of an organ. Like a wound. The steady thud-thud of a heartbeat throbbed in her ears as the floor beneath her shifted and pulsed.

The crying didn't stop. Desperate, Ginny pushed at the walls, feeling for the door or a window, and found nothing. She turned around and around. She punched at the walls and felt an answering pulse of pain deep inside her. She kicked, she punched, she swore and got nothing but more pain for her efforts.

Ginny quieted. Listening. The baby—her baby, she had no doubts—still wailed and wept. Ginny pressed her fingers to her forehead. This was a dream. She knew it, yet couldn't quite control it.

She was sitting in a rocking chair by the window but couldn't wake herself. She tried, with a leap and a howl, but the room stayed the same. She heard the creaking of the rocker on the wood and imagined her foot pressing. Releasing. Her breathing, soft and slow. But she could not wake herself.

The baby was still crying.

There was a door in this room, she remembered that. A small door, child-sized. It went from one room to the next. She didn't need to get out another way, if she could get through there…and suddenly it was there, that little door. That tunnel strewn with mouse shit and insulation, the hazard of nails poking through the roof, ready to score her scalp and make her bleed.

Then she was in the library. She still heard the baby, though it was farther away now. Harder to hear.

Ginny's baby was crying, it was somewhere in the house, it was lost and she had to find it. Ginny had lost her baby. She'd lost her baby. She had lost her baby, and it was crying, it was screaming for her, it was crying and there was a pounding…a pounding…

A pounding at the front door, and the bell rang. Steadily, insistently demanding she wake up, wake up, wake up.

* * * * *

Ginny woke, startled, gasping, her hands pushing out instinctively to ward off the touch of whoever was shaking her awake. She was alone. She blinked and ran her tongue over her sleep-sticky teeth. She'd been asleep in the rocking chair, her head drooping, and now her neck hurt.

She rubbed it as she listened. No baby crying, but the doorbell rang again. Then a moment after it. Then there was a knocking.

With a sigh, she heaved herself up from the chair, ready to pound whoever was banging so fiercely. It had better be a special delivery package of something expensive, she thought as she lumbered down the stairs and shuffled to the front door. But it wasn't.

It was Kendra, hair wild, eyes wide. “Ginny. I knew you were home, I saw your car.”

“I was sleeping.” It was a pointed response, but Kendra didn't get it.

“Are Kelly and Carson over here?”

Ginny stifled a yawn with the back of her hand, noticing that Kendra looked soaked. Her jeans were black to the knees from wet, her shoes sloshing. She had no umbrella and her pale-pink T-shirt had gone semitransparent. She needed a sweatshirt.

“No.”

“No?” Kendra looked past her into the hall. “Are you sure?”

Annoyed, Ginny leaned against the doorway to relieve some of the pressure on her back. Her entire pelvis ached, along with her hips. Her joints were separating, according to the doctor. She was lucky she could stand upright at this point, that's how it felt.

“Yeah. I'm sure.” Ginny paused. “I saw them earlier, in the backyard.”

This was also a pointed statement Kendra didn't seem to get. She shook her head, water splattering. “I told them to stay in the yard. Not to come over here. But they just really like your yard, I guess…”

“I guess they do, but they're not inside, I'm sure I'd have noticed that. Did you go around the back of the house and check? Maybe they're peeking in my windows again.”

“They're not there.” Kendra heaved a breath and burst into tears.

Ginny watched her impassively for a moment. Surely this was still a dream. Part of a nightmare that was worse than the one she'd been having. But it got worse, because Kendra let out a low, sobbing breath.

“OHMYGODTHECREEKTHEYWENTDOWNTOTHECREEK!”

The words came out in a rush, one butted up against the other so that Ginny needed a half minute to parse out what the other woman had said—but when she did, her resentment and snark fled as swiftly as a hare chased by nipping hounds. She reached for Kendra and found her wrists. Tugged them.

“Stop.” She sounded calmer than she felt. “Stop, we'll find them. We will go look, okay? I'm sure they're fine.”

Kendra, panicked, shook her head so fast her hair stuck and clung to her cheeks. She moaned, a brittle, fragile noise that set the hair on the back of Ginny's neck standing upright. She bore down on Kendra's wrists, pinching the skin and maybe even crunching the bones. Kendra cried out, but looked at her.

“We will find them. Okay? Come on. Let's go look.”

Kendra resisted. “Noooooo…”

Ginny wanted to slap her. “If they're really down there, don't you think you'd better haul your ass and get to them?”

“What if they
are
there?” Kendra cried through chattering teeth. She jerked free of Ginny's grip and crossed her arms over her stomach, bending as though she might puke. “What if they are there, and we find them?”

Ginny stepped out of the way, no patience left for this woman whose terror she could empathize with, but whose uselessness she could not. “We want to find them—”

Kendra shook her head again and looked at Ginny with wide but somehow sightless eyes. “WHAT IF THEY'RE DEAD?”

“They aren't dead,” Ginny said solidly and looked past Kendra to the pouring rain. “I'm sure they're wet and cold and scared of getting into trouble, but you won't ever know if you don't move your ass.”

Kendra still didn't move, not until Ginny grabbed up her coat from the rack and pushed past her. She'd forgotten boots and had none anyway, her feet too swollen for anything but these slippers. Sodden grass squelched under her feet as she stepped off the porch and sidewalk, with Kendra finally following. They should've gone through the house and out the back, but too late now. Ginny hunched against the rain, which sent chill, dripping fingers trickling down the back of her neck.

The yard sloped gently but in her ungainly state she needed support and grabbed Kendra's arm to get it. Fortunately the woman didn't let her topple. She gripped Ginny by the arm, and then with a handful of her jacket in the back. She barely kept them both upright when Ginny slipped in the mud, though. The sudden shift in her weight sent pain rippling through her thighs and deep inside.

Ginny groaned. “Oh God. Kendra, seriously, I'm like eleven months pregnant here; you're going to have to go down the bank yourself.”

The creek had already risen up and over, flooding the lower yard. Ginny hadn't realized how close to the house it had crept, even in the few short hours since last she'd looked out the window. The grass floated like seaweed in the cold brown water. Rippling waves pushed some debris, newspapers or junk mail, it looked like, against Ginny's calf and she wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“I can't!”

Ginny stood as straight as she could and backhanded Kendra across the face. The slap wasn't nearly as hard as she'd meant it to be, but it still cracked Kendra's cheek and left a red imprint.

Kendra gasped and put a hand to her face.

“Look at me!” Ginny demanded. “Should I be out here going after your kids? No! What the hell is wrong with you? Get your ass down there and look for them!”

Kendra stepped back, and Ginny wavered in the squishy muck. More rippling water washed over her legs, splashing the hem of her nightgown. She looked to where the creek had once burbled and chuckled along over smoothly polished stones, as cheerful and dangerous as a fluffy kitten. It rushed and roared now.

Just across it, in a pond like the one in which Ginny and Kendra stood, was a figure in a red hooded coat. It turned at the sound of Ginny's shouts, and Kendra let out a wail of relief.

“Kelly! Kelly! Where's Carson?”

He was there too, a little farther on. Both children waved at their mother, who set off at a run through the overflowing creek toward them. She went down in a minute as her foot plunged into a hole or something. Kendra face-planted into the water and flailed.