Tell Me No Secrets (5 page)

The cold air hit her like a slap to the face. She hunched her shoulders up around her ears and pressed forward down the steps to the street, surreptitiously peeking toward the busy corner, assuring herself that Rick Ferguson was nowhere to be seen. “A hot dog with everything on it,” she shouted with relief, watching as the vendor expertly tossed a giant kosher hot dog into a sesame seed bun and smothered it with catsup, mustard, and relish. “That’s great, thank you.” She deposited a fistful of change into his hand, then took a large bite.

“How many times do I have to tell you those things are deadly?” The voice, full, cheery, masculine, came from somewhere to her right. Jess turned toward the sound. “They’re solid fat. Absolutely lethal.”

Jess was tempted to rub her eyes in disbelief. “My God, I was just thinking about you.”

“Good thoughts, I hope,” Don Shaw stated.

Jess stared at her ex-husband as if she couldn’t quite decide if he were real or something her mind had conjured up to confuse her. He was such a remarkable presence, she thought, watching the rest of the street disappear into a soft blur around him. Although he was only of average height, everything about him seemed oversized: his hands,
his chest, his voice, his eyes, their lashes the envy of all the women he met. What was he doing here? she wondered. She’d never run into him like this before, despite the fact they frequented the same turf. She hadn’t spoken to him in months. And now she had only to think of him and he was here.

“You know I can’t stand watching you eat this crap,” he was saying, grabbing the hot dog out of her hands and tossing it into a nearby trash bin.

“What are you doing?”

“Come on, let me buy you some real food.”

“I can’t believe you did that!” Jess signaled the vendor for another hot dog. “Touch this one, you’ll lose your hand,” she warned, only half in jest.

“One of these days you’re going to wake up fat,” he cautioned, then smiled, the kind of loopy grin that made it impossible not to smile back.

Jess stuffed half the new hot dog into her mouth, thinking it wasn’t as good as the first. “So, how’ve you been?” she asked. “What’s this I hear about a new girlfriend?” She felt immediately self-conscious, whisked some imaginary crumbs off the front of her jacket.

“Who said anything about a girlfriend?” They started walking slowly toward Twenty-sixth Street, falling into the casual rhythm of each other’s steps, as if this impromptu walk had been carefully choreographed in advance. Around them swirled an indifferent chorus of police and pimps and drug dealers.

“Word gets around, Counselor,” she said, surprised to find that she was genuinely curious about the details of his new romance, perhaps even a little jealous. She’d never
counted on him getting involved with anyone else. Don was her safety net, after all, the one she thought would always be there for her. “What’s her name? What’s she like?”

“Her name is Trish,” he answered easily. “She’s very bright, very pretty, has very short, very blond hair, and a very wicked laugh.”

“That’s a lot of verys.”

Don laughed, volunteering no further information.

“Is she a lawyer?”

“Not a chance.” He paused. “And you? Seeing anyone special?”

“Just Fred,” she answered, gulping down the rest of her hot dog, crumpling its wrapper in the palm of her hand.

“You and that damn canary.” They reached the corner, waited while the light went from red to green. “I have a confession to make,” he said, taking her elbow and guiding her across the street.

“You’re getting married?” She was surprised by the urgency in the question she hadn’t meant to ask.

“No,” he said lightly, but his voice betrayed him. It carried serious traces just beneath its surface, like a dangerous undertow beneath a deceptively smooth ocean. “This is about Rick Ferguson.”

Jess stopped dead in the middle of the road, the hot dog wrapper dropping from her open palm. Surely she hadn’t heard right. “What?”

“Come on, Jess,” Don urged, tugging on her arm. “You’ll get us run over.”

She stopped again as soon as they reached the other side of the street. “What do you know about Rick Ferguson?”

“He’s my client.”

“What?”

“I didn’t just run into you today, Jess,” Don told her sheepishly. “I called your office. They said you were in court.”

“Since when have you been representing Rick Ferguson?”

“Since last week.”

“I don’t believe it. Why?”

“Why? Because he hired me. What kind of a question is that?”

“Rick Ferguson is an animal. I can’t believe you’d agree to represent him.”

“Jess,” Don said patiently, “I’m a defense attorney. It’s what I do.”

Jess nodded. While it was true that her ex-husband had built a very lucrative practice out of defending such lowlife, she would never understand how such a kind and thoughtful man could champion the rights of those whose thoughts precluded kindness, how a man of such fierce intelligence could use that intelligence on behalf of those who were merely fierce.

While she knew that Don had always been fascinated by the marginal elements of society, the years since their divorce had magnified this attraction. Increasingly he took on the kind of seemingly hopeless cases that other lawyers shunned. And won more often than not, she realized, not relishing the thought of facing her ex-husband in court. That had happened on two occasions in the last four years. He’d won both times.

“Jess, has it ever occurred to you that the man might be innocent?”

“The man, as you generously refer to him, has been positively identified by the woman he attacked.”

“And she couldn’t be mistaken?”

“He broke into her apartment and beat her almost unconscious. Then he made her undress, one item at a time, nice and slow, so she had lots of time to get a good look at his face before he raped and sodomized her.”

“Rick Ferguson has an airtight alibi for the time of the attack,” Don reminded her.

Jess scoffed. “I know—he was visiting his mother.”

“The woman put her house up as collateral for his bail. She’s fully prepared to testify for him in court. Not to mention that there are thousands of men matching Rick Ferguson’s description in this city. What makes you so sure Rick Ferguson is your man?”

“I’m sure.”

“Just like that?”

Jess told him about Rick Ferguson waiting for her when she arrived at work that morning and their subsequent altercation in the courthouse lobby.

“You’re saying he threatened you?”

Jess saw Don struggling to stay neutral, to pretend she was just another assistant state’s attorney, and not someone he obviously still cared deeply about. “I’m saying I don’t understand why you waste your precious talent on such obvious lowlifes,” she told him gently. “Weren’t you the one who told me that a lawyer’s practice is ultimately a reflection of his own personality?”

He smiled. “Nice to know you were listening.”

She reached over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I better get back to work.”

“I take it that means you won’t consider dropping the charges?” His statement curled into a question.

“Not a chance.”

He smiled sadly, taking her hand and walking her back toward the Administration Building, squeezing her thin fingers inside his massive palm before releasing her.

Watch to make sure I get inside safely, she urged silently as she raced up the concrete stairs.

But when she reached the top and turned around, he was already gone.

T
he nightmare always started the same way: Jess was sitting in the sterile reception area of a doctor’s office reading an old magazine while somewhere beside her a phone was ringing. “It’s your mother,” the doctor informed her, pulling a phone out of his large black doctor’s bag and handing it over.

“Mother, where are you?” Jess asked. “The doctor’s waiting for you.”

“Meet me in the John Hancock Building in fifteen minutes. I’ll explain everything when I see you.”

Suddenly Jess stood before a bank of elevators, but no matter how many times she pressed the call button, no elevator came. Locating the stairs, she raced down the seven flights only to find the door to the outside locked. She pushed, she pulled, she begged, she cried. The door wouldn’t budge.

In the next instant, she was in front of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the sun bouncing off the sidewalk into her eyes. “Come inside,” an auburn-haired woman
with gray eyes called from the top step of the impressive structure. “The tour’s about to begin, and you’re keeping everybody waiting.”

“I really can’t stay,” Jess told the crowd, whose faces were a blur of brown eyes and red mouths. The group paused for several minutes in front of Seurat’s masterpiece,
Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte
.

“Let’s play connect the dots,” Don called out, as Jess broke free and hurried outside in time to leap on board a bus that was pulling away. But the bus headed in the wrong direction and she ended up in Union Station. She hailed a cab, only to have the driver misunderstand her instructions and take her to Roosevelt Road.

He was waiting for her when she stepped out of the taxi, a faceless figure all in black, standing perfectly still by the side of the road. Immediately, Jess tried to get back in the car, but the taxi had disappeared. Slowly, the figure in black advanced toward her.

Death
, Jess understood, bolting for the open road. “Help me!” she cried, the shadow of Death advancing effortlessly behind her as she raced up the steps of her parents’ house. She pulled open the screen door, pushing it shut after her, desperately trying to secure the latch as Death’s hand reached for the door, his face coming into clear view.

Rick Ferguson.

“No!” Jess screamed, lurching forward in her bed, her heart pounding, the bedding soaked with sweat.

No wonder he’d felt so familiar, she realized, drawing her knees to her chin and sobbing, her breath slamming against her lungs, as if someone were playing racquetball in her chest. A product of her darkest imaginings, he’d stepped,
quite literally, out of her dreams and into her life. The nightmares that used to haunt her were back, and the figure had a name—Rick Ferguson.

Jess pushed away the wet sheets and struggled to her feet, only to feel her legs give way beneath her. She collapsed in a crumpled heap on the floor, trying to catch her breath, afraid she was going to throw up. “Oh God,” she muttered, addressing the panic as if it were a physical presence in the room. “Please stop. Please go away.”

Jess stretched toward the white china lamp on the night table beside her bed and flipped on the light. The room snapped into focus: soft peaches mixed with delicate grays and blues, a double bed, a dhurrie rug, a white wicker chair over which hung her clothes for the next day, a chest of drawers, a small mirror, a poster by Niki de Saint Phalle, another by Henri Matisse. She tried to will herself back to normalcy by concentrating on the wood grain of the light oak floor, the stitching on the pale peach curtains, the white duvet, the expanse of high ceiling. One of the nice things about living in an old brownstone, she tried to remind herself, was the high ceilings. You didn’t find that in modern glass high rises.

It wasn’t working. Her heart continued to race as her breath curled into a tight little ball in the middle of her throat. Once again she forced herself to her feet, teetering on legs that threatened to send her sprawling, toward the tiny, purely functional bathroom that the landlord had laughingly described as en suite when she’d moved in just after her divorce. She ran the tap and threw cold water across her face and shoulders, letting the water sneak down underneath her pink nightshirt and onto her breasts and belly.

She rested against the side of the tub and stared into the toilet bowl. There was nothing she hated worse than throwing up. Ever since she was a small child and had overdosed on red licorice sticks and banana splits at Allison Nichol’s birthday party, she’d dreaded throwing up. Every night for years afterward, she’d gone to bed asking her mother, “Will I be all right?” And every night her mother had answered patiently that yes, she’d be fine. “Do you promise?” the child had persisted. “I promise,” had come the immediate reply.

How ironic then that it had been the mother, and not the child, who’d been in danger.

And now the nightmare that had plagued her after her mother’s disappearance was back, along with the shortness of breath, the trembling hands, the paralyzing, nameless dread that permeated every fiber in her body. It wasn’t fair, Jess thought, leaning over the toilet bowl, gritting her teeth against the possibility of what might follow, clutching at the pain that stabbed repeatedly at her chest, like the dull blade of a long knife.

She could call Don, she thought, resting her cheek against the cool lid of the toilet. He always knew what to do. So many nights he’d held her trembling against him, his hands softly stroking the damp hair away from her forehead as he engulfed her inside his large arms, and assured her, as her mother had, that she would be all right. Yes, she could call Don. He’d help her. He’d know exactly what to do.

Jess pushed herself back toward the bedroom, perched precariously on the edge of her bed, and reached for the phone, then stopped. She knew all she had to do was phone Don and he would dash right over, leave whatever he was doing, whomever he was with, and race to her side, stay
with her as long as she needed him. She knew Don still loved her, had never stopped. She knew that, and that was why she knew she couldn’t call him.

He was involved with someone else now. Trish, she repeated, examining the name in her mind. Probably short for Patricia. Trish with the wicked laugh. The
very
wicked laugh, she heard him say, recalling the proud twinkle in his eyes. Had the possibility that she might be losing Don to another woman been enough to precipitate this anxiety attack?

The attack was over, she realized with a start. Her heart was no longer racing; her breathing had returned to normal; her body was no longer awash in perspiration. She fell back against her pillow, luxuriating in the sense of renewed well-being. Surprisingly, she discovered she was hungry.