Sound of Secrets
Authors: Darlene Gardner
| Sound of Secrets |
| Darlene Gardner |
| (2012) |
An original publication
Synopsis
Is he reaching out from the grave to ask her to solve the mystery of his death? A romantic mystery with ghostly overtones.
Cara Donnelly is sure she's never visited the sleepy Florida town of Secret Sound. So why does the very name ring a haunting bell? Why does so much of the scenery look familiar? Most importantly, why does she see a little boy get hit by a car thirty years after the incident happened?
Cara wants to get out of town fast after experiencing the strange vision despite the connection she feels to police chief Gray DeBerg. The townspeople, including Gray, are not happy about Cara stirring up the pain of that tragic event.
But after Cara learns the boy was kidnapped shortly before the event and his kidnapper never found, she feels the boy is reaching out from the grave to beg her to solve the mystery of his death. If she runs from him and Gray, she fears she'll also be running from herself.
Reviews
“Darlene Gardner creates characters with substance by giving them problems and heartaches and making it easier for the readers to understand them... [She] crafts magnificent romances. “
-- Fresh Fiction, June 2011
“Darlene Gardner continues to perfect the art of writing amazingly heartfelt romances.”
-- Noveltalk, May 2010
“Ms. Gardner writes fabulous, real-life characters readers can care about... [She] likes to create an intriguing family situation to see how characters react to it -- and each other."
-- Romance Reader at Heart, July 2007
“For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest
Other eBooks by Darlene Gardner
SOUND OF SECRETS
Darlene Gardner
Copyright © 2011 Darlene Gardner
Cover art by Paige Gardner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Darlene Gardner.
“For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest." — Luke 8:17
"Everyone is like a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." — Mark Twain
While Cara Donnelly fought the feeling that she was returning to a place where she had never been, her gaze snagged on the majestic oak tree whose branches cast eerie shadows over a once-grand church.
Its limbs were bent like the arms of an octopus, just as Cara had known they would be. The tree had been there for so long that many of the branches intertwined while others beckoned like long, bony fingers.
Gripping the steering wheel, Cara swung her eyes to the other side of the road. The graveyard with the haphazard rows of granite tombstones came into view in less than a minute, with tall weeds and dying plants nearly obscuring some of the weathered markers. A lone grave in the middle of the cemetery, carefully tended and covered with a blanket of red blossoms, stuck out like a gaily dressed mourner at a funeral.
Cara's brain screamed that she shouldn't be on this lonely road. The fuel indicator showed her tank less than half full, but she should have waited to get gas until one of those highway symbols showed that an approaching exit had a service station.
She would have waited if she hadn’t seen a singular name on a road sign.
Secret Sound
.
She couldn’t place where she’d heard the name of the town before, but it seeped inside her and resonated with haunting familiarity. Before Cara could reconsider, she’d abandoned the carefully constructed road-trip plan that was supposed to land her in Miami Beach by early evening.
The friends she was meeting at a beachfront hotel had been able to get away days earlier than Cara, which had prompted her to consider canceling the trip. Flying made her so nervous that she wouldn’t get on a plane, and she hadn’t relished the idea of making the twelve-hour drive from her South Carolina home town.
In the end, her need to get away eclipsed her reluctance to travel alone. She’d plotted most aspects of the trip in advance, even deciding which interstate exits to use for meals and bathroom breaks.
Then she’d seen the sign, impulsively swung her car off the exit ramp and headed east toward Secret Sound by this eerily familiar route.
The two-lane road cut a swath through a thicket of tall Australian pine trees. Cara imagined that the branches of soft needles gently swaying in the wind gestured for her to turn around, which was patently ridiculous.
So was the overwhelming sensation that she was returning to a familiar place, because Cara had never before been to Florida. It wasn't like her to imagine things, but the certainty that this wasn't the first time she had traveled this road grew with every passing second.
Cara had switched off the radio before veering from the interstate, and the silence was almost as creepy as her premonitions of what lay ahead.
When she spotted the cemetery, Cara's heart thumped as wildly as the sticks of a drummer in a rock band, making her chest tighten and ache. The fast-food chicken sandwich she'd eaten for lunch roiled greasily in her stomach.
She'd rolled down the windows, and the air blew freely through the car, but she couldn’t suck enough oxygen into her lungs. She realized that the rapid, shallow rasps she heard were her attempts to breathe.
Her hands, slick with sweat, slipped on the steering wheel. Two of her tires slid off the road, kicking up dust and gravel. Cara squeezed hard on the wheel and jerked the car back onto the pavement. A pickup truck traveling in the other direction swerved as it passed her, its horn blaring, the sound becoming less insistent as the truck grew smaller and smaller in her rearview mirror.
Although she knew it was crazy, she leaned forward in her seat, angling her body so she could peer upward through the windshield. She half expected the eagle that haunted her dreams to swoop out of the sky and pluck her from the open window of the car. But all she saw was the darkening gray of twilight.
It didn’t matter that the eagle wasn’t there. Her heart knocked insistently against her breastbone while her breathing grew even more shallow.
Oh, no,
Cara thought,
not again
.
This couldn’t be happening now, not when she hadn’t had an anxiety attack in more than six months. She’d thought, hoped, that she’d finally conquered the shameful attacks she worked so hard to conceal from her friends and family.
She once again scanned the landscape that couldn’t be familiar, and her anxiety grew thicker than the palm trees lining the road. She gasped for air, more certain than ever that the swaying fronds were telling her to retreat.
Obeying, she eased her foot off the gas pedal while she looked for a place to turn around.Then she glanced down at the car's dashboard.
The red indicator light shone like a beacon, and she gradually became aware of the acrid smell of hot metal. How long, she wondered, had her car been trying to tell her something was wrong?
Attempting to swallow the lump of dread in her throat, Cara pressed the gas pedal down hard and headed for the service station that was just ahead on the right side of the road.
It came into view just as she had known it would, and her hands shook so violently she had difficulty maneuvering the vehicle into the parking lot.
How had she known a service station was here? How could she know anything about a place she had never been in a state that had been a distant temptation until yesterday? How could an obscure name on a traffic sign and even the encroaching darkness that cloaked the street seem familiar?
"Get a grip, Cara," she said aloud. She tried the breathing exercise she had used with some success over the years, gradually filling her lungs with fresh, clean air before slowly releasing her breath. She spoke the next sentence carefully, emphasizing each word. "You have never been here before."
Cara had barely unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door before she doubted her proclamation. She hadn't pulled up to one of the gasoline pumps, but off to the side of the station, and her eyes swept the establishment.
Even though darkness had descended on the poorly lit station, everything about it looked familiar. There was a small office, a large garage and only two pumps, one of which had a car in front of it. This service station, obviously, hadn’t yet been swallowed by the wave of impersonal super stations sweeping the country.
It wasn't until Cara's eyes gravitated back to the street that she saw the child. Judging from his size, he couldn't have been more than five years old. She wasn't able to see his features clearly, but she could tell a shock of dark hair framed his face.
He was on the shoulder of the road, turned toward Cara, and she had a powerful sense that he expected something from her. Cara's desire to reach out to him was so strong that she extended her arm, but then the child turned and dashed across the street.
His movements weren't graceful, but herky jerky in the manner of a young child not yet in full control of his motor skills. He's running scared, Cara thought, although she wasn't sure how she knew that.
The glow of a distant streetlight silhouetted the child's shape for one interminable second, almost as though he were caught in a freeze frame of a horror movie.
Then the world spun into motion once more. Cara heard the onrushing car, and her eyes widened in horror as she anticipated the terrible moment when the two would collide.
She opened her mouth to scream a warning, but it was too late. The brakes squealed in agony, and then Cara recoiled from the sickening thud as the car slammed into the child's tiny body.
She couldn't be sure whether the child's scream or her own pierced the early evening tranquility as he went flying like a rag doll through the air.
Gray DeBerg's fingers eased on the nozzle of the gas pump as the woman's piercing scream split the air.
His eyes worked as well as the next guy’s so naturally he’d noticed her when she got out of the overheated car with the out-of-state plates. He’d seen the steam seeping out of the hood first, but the long legs she swung out of the car quickly overshadowed that image.
The rest of her presented a picture as appealing as her legs. He couldn’t make out her face from a distance, but he’d never been attracted to the reedy models who graced billboards and magazines, and he liked the way she filled out her clothes.
He’d taken a long look and then went back to filling up the gas tank of his unmarked police car. Both because it was part of his job and his nature, he normally would have offered assistance to a woman with car trouble. But this woman was at a service station, more in need of a mechanic than a cop.
He might have been able to convince himself of that if she hadn’t screamed.
She held herself rigidly, almost like a small child too afraid to move, and she stared transfixed at the road. Gray's eyes swung to the road, but he saw nothing. Not a car. Not a dog or cat crossing the street. Not even an oil slick.
Great. Just great. Whatever had her spooked was most definitely in her mind.
With a snort of impatience, Gray quickly surmised that she was an out-of-towner on a very bad trip. He guessed LSD was her drug of choice, because people reckless enough to ingest that poison experienced vivid hallucinations. From the sound of her scream, she thought she was looking at something horrendous.
Gray glanced at the service station office which doubled as a small convenience store and saw that the door was closed. Through the window he spotted Sam Peckenbush, the proprietor, talking on the phone with his back to the street.
