Secrets Everybody Knows (12 page)

Elaine stopped with the door half open and turned to study her sister. Kitty had a peculiar blank expression on her face. Not the usual smarmy, seductive grin or the fake pleading moue. No, this was Kitty in hard-core thinking mode. Elaine squeezed the door handle. “Kitty, I’ve had a long day. Don’t play games with me.”

“I assure you, I’m not.” Kitty shook her Coke can. “Inside?”

Elaine pushed open the door. It didn’t matter what Kitty was planning on leveling at her, she wasn’t ready. She hadn’t been ready for anything lately. “Kitty, I don’t know what you’re plotting, but I really don’t have the energy to deal with it.”

Kitty dropped onto the couch and set her can on the end table. “So how long have you been sleeping with Johnny McMannus?”

Shock froze Elaine’s knees and kept her from falling into a heap on the floor. “Excuse me?”

“It was something you said that got me on track. You see, I’ve been trying to figure this out off and on since I was thirteen. You went through an interesting personality change right about then.”

“Kitty, Mom and Dad were fighting about Mom going back to school. They got divorced two years later. I think everybody in our house went through a personality change around then. You started running around with Jeff Wilson and Greg Fitzroy. I’m still surprised you didn’t end up pregnant.”

“Yours didn’t follow form. No, all of a sudden you got to be very happy and easy to get along with. And I didn’t run around with those guys for long. Greg Fitzroy told me to buzz off before I got his neck broken.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Elaine folded her arms and leaned against the wall, trying to relax. Kitty was smart, but not that smart.

“I have been wondering about that for years. I’ve also been wondering about your second personality change about a year later. That was when you turned into the bundle of joy and love you are now.” Kitty sat up and steepled her fingers. “You know what the doctor said to me and Mom today while you were getting dressed?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“He said you were profoundly depressed.”

Elaine frowned. “And how would he know that?” The doctor had had this conversation with her too. It felt worse coming from her little sister.

Kitty shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But he said your eating habits and your sleeping patterns among other things led him to believe you were depressed. I laughed and told him that you’d been like this since you were seventeen.” She grinned. “That’s when I put it together.”

“And what did you do to get a doctor to enter into this breach of ethics?”

“Duh, I stuck with Mom. She should be an interrogator for the government.”

That was true. Mom could get information about anything from anyone. “Fine, Kitty, what exactly did you ‘put together’? Is it a major government conspiracy? Should we call
The National Enquirer
? Or maybe Fox Mulder?”

“I wouldn’t pass on Fox Mulder, but I doubt
The Enquirer
would be interested. You were sleeping with Johnny McMannus before he left town fourteen years ago, and now he’s back and it’s got you all in a tizzy again.”

Elaine laughed. It sounded like a stick being dragged across a fence. “Johnny McMannus? What interest would he have had in me at sixteen?” Her throat thickened around the truth of her question. What interest? The same interest of any delinquent. To see how much he could get away with. She had let him get away with too much.

Kitty folded her arms. “I wondered that too, still am in fact, but then I remembered how you were always hanging out at his house and Sue didn’t know about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was talking to Sue a couple of years ago when she started doing my nails. I asked her how she could stand having you around that much because you drove me nuts. She said you weren’t there very often, but I know you were, or said you were, over there two or three times a week all that year. Then suddenly, poof, you stopped. Right after Johnny left town.”

“Kitty, your logic is faulty. You’re taking things that don’t fit together and adding them up wrong. I admit the timing is a little funny, but that’s all it is. Coincidence.”

“But you see”–Kitty licked her lips–“I’ve always been very good at math. And this adds up too neatly. Mom and Dad started fighting right about the beginning of the year when I was thirteen. I remember on your birthday having cake and ice cream in total silence right before Mom took you to get your contacts. Then about a week later you came home very mellow. I didn’t know much about sex then, but if it were anyone else I’d swear you’d gotten some. Right about then Greg told me to buzz off. Greg, who was friends with Johnny back then. You stayed happy all that year while Mom started school and Dad worked constantly. You also suddenly knew how to diagnose car problems. I learned how to hot-wire a car from you.”

“You did not.”

“Did so. Remember when we went Christmas shopping and you lost the keys to your car? Dad would have killed you if he found out, so you made me promise to never tell and you hot-wired it to get us home. I never told anyone, by the way. But I did watch.”

Elaine moved to the table. She remembered shivering in the mall parking lot with Kitty that Christmas searching and re-searching her purse for the keys. Dad would have brought them the spare set, but he would have been icy and silent about it for weeks and Christmas wasn’t promising to be magical in any event. She’d helped Johnny hot-wire the Packard a few weeks before and learned how.

“I always thought it was a little strange that you went into a funk as soon as Johnny McMannus left town. I mean, who was Johnny McMannus to you? He was Sue’s brother, so you knew him, but you were always such a good girl I couldn’t imagine you saying anything more than ‘pass the butter’ to him.”

Elaine picked up the mail and sorted through it. She couldn’t come up with anything to derail Kitty’s logic. “And I thought the only person you ever thought about was yourself,” she muttered.

“Oh no, dear sister. I think about you a lot. You are my sister, and you’ve been a total bitch the last few days.” Kitty sat up. “But this is the thing I don’t understand. You hooked up with Johnny at sixteen and he left town a year later. You stayed single, completely unattached to the point where half the town thinks you’re in the closet. Johnny comes back to town after his dad has a heart attack and you are still single. Why is that?”

Elaine’s face flexed into a painful mask against the flood of tears. She covered her face and turned toward the kitchen.

“Lanie?” Kitty had her arms around Elaine’s shoulders. “What’s the matter?”

Elaine pressed her cheek into Kitty’s flat stomach. Sobs shook her. “He’s embarrassed to be with me. I thought he loved me. I am so gullible.”

Kitty stroked her hair. “Oh honey. I had no idea. You’re really in love with him.”

“He said. . .he said someone might see us. They might figure out what was going on.” Elaine felt husked and scalded. “He was always worried someone would find out. He said he could go to jail.”

“Jail? I think there’s a statute of limitations on statutory rape.”

“No, not now. Then. Now he just doesn’t want anyone to see us together. He keeps talking about what people would say. What would the parents of my students say? People would know.”

“You’re both consenting adults now. Who cares what they would say?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Good for you. That son of a bitch.” Kitty slapped the table so hard the fruit bowl jumped. “How could he do this to you? No wonder you’ve been such a bitch. He really burned you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been so awful.” Elaine wanted to pull herself together, stop crying, straighten her backbone, throw it off, but she couldn’t imagine where to begin. She didn’t want anyone but Johnny McMannus.

“No, you don’t have to apologize. I totally understand now. That bastard. I’m gonna go clean his clock.” Kitty started to pull away.

“No, don’t. The humiliation is more than I can bear. Just let it go.”

“I’m not gonna let it go. Are you nuts? He ruined your life. He deserves to be called on the carpet for it. Everybody said that statutory rape thing was bogus, but obviously it wasn’t. I mean, Shelly Myers was a slut, but not you. That he would do that to you.”

“We never had sex.”

Kitty stepped back, studying Elaine’s face. “Come again?”

“We never had sex.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“You messed around with Johnny McMannus for a year and never–?”

“No. He said that would get him put in jail.”

Kitty walked across the room making little circles with her index fingers. “So you never had sex with him. In a year. Did you do anything at all?”

Elaine put her head in her hands, peeking through her fingers.

“Okay, good enough answer. TMI. I understand.” Kitty shook her head. “I just don’t understand how you could not. Johnny McMannus is legendary for his hotness. Legendary.”

“It wasn’t because I didn’t want to.”

“I’m gonna clean his clock. That’s it.”

“Kitty, please don’t. Don’t talk to him.”

“I can’t let him get away with this.” Kitty sat down at the table. “Damn. What are you going to do?”

“I told him if we couldn’t be seen in public together, I didn’t want to be with him.”

“Which was a lie, right?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Come on, Elaine, everybody wants to be with Johnny McMannus. He’s the holy grail. Way hotter than Zack Jarvis...” Kitty trailed off, her imagination clearly running wild.

“Kitty, can you try to keep your mind out of the gutter for a couple minutes? I meant ‘be with’ in a general sense.”

“That’s a relief. I was beginning to think what everybody said about you might be true.” Kitty fanned herself. “Let me talk to him at least.”

“No. Just don’t go there. Let me handle it.”

“Because you’ve been doing such a great job handling it all these years.” Kitty stood up. “Fine. I won’t talk to Johnny about you. I’ll tell Mom I stopped in to check on you and you were fine. She wants you on Prozac or something, so don’t be too surprised if she pops up with a psychiatrist appointment for you.” She patted Elaine on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself, sis.”

Chapter 8

Johnny excused himself from the dinner table as soon as he could. Sitting between the puffy, clumsy version of his mother and the waxy, hollow version of his father gave him indigestion. Sue didn’t look much more comforted by the more familiar presence of their parents than he was. The meeting last night had been a shock for her. Too many familiar faces with similar stories. They weren’t so much surprised that she was there but that it had taken her so long to show up.

In the barn, he spread the papers Larry had given him out on the workbench. The only one that really amounted to anything was the summary, and the number at the bottom was likely to give him a heart attack. He couldn’t stop staring at it. That’s what he was doing when the door opened.

“Don’t panic. It’s not Dad,” Sue said. “What’s all that?”

“Stuff from the bank.”

Sue held up her hand. “Don’t tell me anything else.”

“I can’t do anything with it either, but it’s like a car accident. I can’t stop staring.” Johnny shook his head. “What did you want?”

“I have to want something?”

“To come in here you do.”

Sue looked around the room. Traces of the car that had sat there for forty years, but left fourteen years earlier, still lingered on the floor. “What did you do with that car you rebuilt out here? Dad said you stole it.”

“It was Grandpa’s. I took it back to him. He cried when he saw it. We did car shows until he got too old, and then he sold it to a collector.”

Sue nodded. She dragged her foot across an oil spot. “I talked to Kitty Hammersmith today.”

Johnny swallowed and decided to plead ignorance. “Kitty? Who’s that?”

Sue met his eyes. Her face hardened. “Don’t screw with me.”

“What do you mean?” Johnny leaned on the workbench and struggled to maintain his poker face.

“I talked to Kitty Hammersmith today,” Sue repeated. “She said she had a really interesting conversation with her sister yesterday.”