Secrets She Knew: A Secrets and Lies Suspense Novel Read online

She and Nikki had cleared out the perishables back in March, in the days following the funeral. But that was as far as they had gotten. Neither of them had had it in them to do more. So now, two months after the estate had closed, it was all still there as if Allen and Marie Lake had only just driven to church or dinner or something. All of it. Including her father’s coffee beans.

  Dani knew exactly where to find the grinder. Second cabinet to the left of the sink. Her dad didn’t—hadn’t—believed in buying pre-ground. The panic-inducing, sudden sound of coffee beans becoming gritty dust at six in the morning had essentially been her alarm clock for the eighteen years she had lived at home. The tightly sealed bag of beans—a dark roast from Hawaii, one of her dad’s favorites—was predictably waiting in the cabinet just above the coffee maker. But as she ground the beans, rather than making her feel better, Dani sensed the wetness beginning to gather at the corners of her eyes, then forming drops as she poured the water in the coffee maker and finally, cascading down her cheeks as she stood at the counter, waiting as the pot brewed.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Tears and percolating coffee fell in partnership as such overwhelming sadness overtook her, exacerbated by growing anxiety as her brain scrolled through all the things—so, so many things—that had to be done before she returned to Boston in one week. Her shoulders now shaking as muffled sobs racked her, she shuffled over to the shelf on the wall opposite and selected a mug from her mother’s collection—a pink one emblazoned with the words “Do not speak to me until this cup is empty.” Zombie-like, Dani poured the strong, full-bodied brew into the mug, so distracted that it nearly overflowed before she righted the pot at the last second, barely avoiding scalding herself. She returned to her chair at the table and sat down, took one sip which burned her lip, and burst into a torrent of weeping.

  That was two hours ago. Two hours of crying uncontrollably as the coffee grew cool, then cold, every memory ever contained in that house breaking over her, ripping her heart to shreds, the raw pain of it as strong and cruel as if she had only just learned that her parents had died. As if that news hadn’t been delivered four months earlier, in a late-night call from Nikki while Dani was working her way out of a laboratory-themed escape room on a rare girls-night-out in Boston.

  Two hours. But slowly, very slowly, the intensity diminished. The sobbing turned to sniffling. The desperate grief to exhaustion.

  Enough.

  Rubbing her red-raw eyes and dragging a sleeve across her nose, Dani stood. She lifted the cold, still-full cup of coffee, and dumped it into the sink.

  I need to get out of here.

  Without a plan, without any notion of where she was headed, Dani strode to the door leading to the garage and walked out, pulling it shut behind her with a gentle click.

  Now what?

  Dani’s mind was numb, and she intentionally fought to keep from thinking about anything at all as her feet kept going, out of the garage, down the drive and turning right down her old block. She had done far too much thinking in the last hours. Step after step she continued down the asphalt, the same street on which she had ridden that old yellow-and-pea-green bicycle thousands of times.

  She passed one house and then another. The way was so familiar that it was easy to not think and to just…go. None of it was new. It was all so unchanged. Nothing to notice, nothing to process, for which her spent mind was grateful. She was beginning to really feel the exhaustion though, a dull ache starting to whisper in her joints and feet after this very, very long day. But she didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to go back. Not yet.

  The glowing tangerine sun had finally set, leaving behind a dusky twilight soundtracked by a rising chorus of cicadas. They called to Dani, beckoning her to continue, and she did. Until she finally came to it.

  Of course she had known it was coming. But it made her breath catch in her chest all the same: that pathway, that cut-through between the two houses that would take her to Dr. Beecher’s property if she went past the line of pine trees that formed the border of their backyards.

  Inexplicably, her feet turned toward it, and she felt almost disembodied, as if she were watching someone else's feet walking in that direction, and then between the houses, through the backyards and farther, until she found herself leaning against the long white fence of Smith and Wesson’s old pasture.

  What am I doing?

  The horses were, of course, gone. Thirteen years was a long time. Still, she closed her eyes, imagining them and how they had looked that day, ignoring her clicking tongue as she beckoned to them beneath the blazing sun. Right before everything changed forever.

  Why am I here?

  She had never come back after finding Jennifer. Not once. Any time the thought of returning occurred to her, it would make her insides writhe, even as a grown woman sitting on her lumpy second-hand couch in her tiny Boston apartment, thousands of miles away from that riverbank. But here she was, as close to this place as she had ever been since that day, still cresting the waves of the emotional storm she had just ridden out in her parents’ kitchen, and oddly, the thing that began to fill her…was calm.

  Dani’s eyes flicked open at the surprise of that realization, and suddenly she knew that she needed to do this, needed to face it. Forcing her feet to move, she started down the dirt path between the pasture on the left and the field on the right. Unlike that day in 1995, no corn stalks grew there now. The field was empty, just raw unused reddish dirt. She had heard that, at some point, the rear property had been divided from the main estate and sold to Mr. and Mrs. Pitts, the caretakers that used to farm that field for Dr. Beecher. She wondered if they still lived in the small house set way back at the southern edge of the property, or if they, like Smith and Wesson, were long gone too.

  Her feet left the dirt path, striking the gravel drive that ran perpendicular to it, which, if she followed it all the way to the left, would lead her to the main road. But she wasn’t headed to the main road today. Instead, the rocks crunched against the soles of her sandals as she crossed the drive, headed for the riverbank beyond. The second, the very second, she lifted a foot from the last of the gravel and placed it on the uneven grassy earth, a low vibration began humming within her, spreading from her chest, to her jaw, then her fingers and toes. She was close. So close. And her body knew it.

  To this point, she had avoided looking to the right, instead keeping her focus straight ahead, in line with the dirt path. But now, with nowhere else to go, she slowly swiveled her gaze in that direction.

  It was still there.

  The honeysuckle vine with its yellow and white and green billowing over the barbed-wire fence was still there. She hadn’t been sure it would be, because the summer after she found Jennifer, someone ripped the vine out—cut it from the fence, chopped it at the roots and pulled it up, leaving gaping holes in the earth. She hadn’t seen it for herself, of course, but not unexpectedly, the place was notorious among her classmates—visited on tacky dares and such—and word about the bush’s demise had gotten out.

  They must have missed some roots, she thought, because now it was back, more massive than before, easily stretching thirty feet down the old, rusty wire fence. It was so wide now that she didn’t need to step as far down to the right to reach it. Now, just ten quick steps and she was there.

  She reached a hand out, almost as if expecting something to jump out and bite her. But it was leafy and soft, the pistils of the flowers and their bulbous tips tickling her palm as she passed her hand over them. A bird somewhere near the river cawed, drawing Dani’s eyes up and over the water. This summer had seen an uncharacteristic amount of rain, and the river was midway up the bank, rushing and gurgling. Dani’s gaze drifted back to the honeysuckle as she gauged her position.

  This isn’t where I found her. She was much farther down to the right.

  The steady vibration in Dani’s body accelerated as she left that spot and drifted closer to where she thought she had first seen Jennifer’s Skec
hers. A buzzing crescendoed in her ears as she stepped nearer and nearer, until—

  This is it. She was somewhere…right about…here.

  An overwhelming sense of standing on holy ground overtook her, something akin to reverence, and she became acutely aware of her heart thumping in her ears. She breathed in deeply through her nose for four counts, held it for four more, then exhaled through her mouth for another four. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.

  Calm. Down.

  Another bird cawed in the growing darkness. She stood there, waiting for…well, she wasn’t sure what. Just…something. But there wasn’t anything, because this was just a place where nothing had happened for a very long time. It was just darkness and space and earth and sky and harmless honeysuckle. Nothing more.

  You are such an idiot.

  Why she was standing there, in the place that had haunted her for thirteen years instead of back home, sitting at their kitchen table, drinking coffee and planning how to sort and clear out all her parents’ belongings so they could finally sell the house? What was she doing chasing ghosts where none existed?

  Maybe, because now, home haunts you more than this place does.

  The instant the words passed through her brain, she rejected them. As usual she was overthinking. She was upset and wasn’t processing well, and somehow, this temporary emotional breakdown or departure from sanity or, whatever, had brought her here. A place she had absolutely no business being. Feeling a clarity she hadn’t possessed since first walking into her parents’ kitchen, she resolutely turned to go—when, somewhere farther down to the right, along the riverbank, a flash of something barely visible in the last vestiges of dusk crossed her view.

  The old shed.

  It had been there for decades, a small structure that couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet deep and wide at most, set against the barbed-wire fence, close to the edge of the riverbank. Though the shed had belonged to Dr. Beecher, it was nearer the caretakers’ field and they had used it to store equipment—a mower, garden tools, tiller, and such—keeping these things conveniently close to the fields and out of the weather.

  Darkness was falling quickly now, and it was difficult to see the structure well from that distance. But Dani recalled that dark rustic wood formed its simple, thin walls, and that the roof had been made of sheets of shiny ribbed aluminum. There was a time in her early childhood, long before finding Jennifer, that Dani had regularly used the shed as a hiding place when playing hide-and-seek with some of the neighborhood kids.

  What was it like now?

  Curiosity, and perhaps a need to connect with a time before it all went so wrong, caused her to abandon her decision to head home. Instead she walked the twenty-five or so yards to the shed. It had not held up well over the years. The weathered, grimy wood slats had rotted in places. The sheets of aluminum, which formed a slight peak at the roof’s center, had suffered significant corrosion, and were now riddled with sporadic holes and sharp rusty edges.

  It still sat on concrete blocks, protecting the interior and its contents from direct contact with the earth and its destructive moisture. Once upon a time, a short wooden ramp had led up to the door, allowing for the wheeled machinery to be rolled inside. But the ramp was gone, leaving a significant gap between the ground and the door’s threshold. Dani grasped the door’s handle and pulled, the heavy, slatted piece creaking and testing the strength of its hinges as it swung outward.

  It was quiet and forbiddingly dark inside, with only the minimal light of the rising moon filtering in through the holes in the wood and metal. Dani took her phone out and opened it, using the light from the screen as a makeshift flashlight. Holding it before her, she hiked one foot up onto the raised floor, then, bracing a hand on the door frame, pulled herself up the rest of the way and stepped inside.

  All the tools and equipment were gone. The only thing stored here now were spiders and, disturbingly, more than one discarded, translucent snake skin. A bird’s nest with grass, twigs and what looked like a strand of colored twine was tucked high into one of the corners where the walls met the aluminum roofline. The wooden plank floor was covered with dust and dirt, animal droppings and tracks, and chipped bark and leaves that had either blown in through one of the holes or had been dragged inside by some critter.

  She turned to face the far left corner. This was the spot where she had hunkered down whenever she used the shed as a hiding place. Back then, a riding mower was parked directly in front of that corner and had served as great cover. Shining the light in that direction, she stepped into that space, almost feeling like her eight-year-old self. She turned again, facing out, then crouched down and imagined the mower there in front of her as she would peek around its side…

  Footprints.

  The gleam from her phone had fallen across the floor planks between her and the door, revealing a number of distinct footprints in the thick dust and dirt. Human footprints. A chill fluttered through her. Some were hers, but others weren’t. They were from larger shoes, man-sized, she thought. And they did not all bear the same pattern. These were from multiple visits. But how long ago? Recently or months or years earlier?

  And why? Why would any adult male come here—more than once?

  Why would you?

  Maybe it was someone like her, tapping into some sentimental memory. But, no, the more obvious explanation was a vagrant—someone who had used the shed as shelter. But then she would expect cans or wrappers or newspapers or something to indicate someone had stayed there. There was none of that. And a vagrant with multiple pairs of shoes?

  Dani traced the footprints with the light. They seemed to congregate around one particular plank a few feet in front of her. This plank was somewhat cleaner than the rest. Covered in much less dirt and dust and, in fact, it appeared the residue had been brushed across its surface, in a swiping motion if she wasn’t mistaken. Possibly in an attempt to clean it, although, the amount left behind suggested that someone might have actually been attempting to replace the debris. To make it appear undisturbed.

  Dani knelt down, bending over the plank. She pressed a hand on one end.

  It moved.

  Though nails still secured it to the crossbeam beneath, there was a lot of give. Movement that suggested the plank was only marginally secured. Easy to remove. She aimed the light into the gap between the floorboards and her breathing stuttered.

  There was something under there.

  Setting down her phone, Dani crammed her fingers against the small gap where the head of the loose plank met the next one. It was narrow, maybe only a quarter-inch wide, but it was enough for her fingernails to get a hold. She ripped upward with more power than was necessary and the board flew up, slamming against the wall. Dani rocked back on her heels as the board dropped to the floor with a bang, then rattled to silence. Leaning forward, Dani peered into the space beneath. There on the dirt floor was a thick, black plastic bag, wrapped in several tight passes around whatever was inside it, tied shut with brown twine.

  Her pulse racing, Dani snatched the bag out of its hiding place, unknotted the twine and unraveled the bag from around its contents. Wary of what might be inside—needles were always a possibility—she dumped the contents onto the floor.

  A single book slid out, hitting the floor with a thunk. It was pastel pink with a rainbow spanning the cover, and beneath it the words “My Diary” printed in glittery, gold letters. Dani reached one hand out, opened the cover to the first page and screamed.

  She had screamed. Definitely screamed, and his insides plunged because he thought he knew what that meant. Then suddenly she flew out of the shed, running like a madwoman being chased, tearing across the gravel road, then back down the dirt path toward the neighborhood street that lay beyond. Though he couldn’t hear anything from this distance, given the way she was shaking and running so awkwardly, he suspected she was crying, or maybe something more violent than that—sobbing—but it was hard to tell. It was so dark and she was running s
o fast.

  He had worried about her finding it the minute he had seen her step inside. Because if anyone was going to find it, she would. She had almost as much of a connection as he did. In fact, on some level, he wanted her to find it. He had watched as the light she was using inside the shed—probably from her phone—pierced the holes in the shed’s walls, cutting into the darkness outside and meeting his gaze where he hid on the riverbank, watching. Then there was banging and rattling and, a minute later, her desperate scream, and he knew with certainty that she had discovered it.

  She had nearly tripped over the door’s threshold in her frantic escape, clumsily dropping the one foot distance to the ground below, carrying the treasure in her arms, clutching it to her chest as if protecting it from any unseen dangers that might threaten to take it from her. Because she knew it was special too. She, of all people, understood its sanctity and what it represented.

  His gaze tracked her until her form disappeared behind the line of pine trees bordering the backyards of the adjacent neighborhood. Then he turned away, his mind spinning as he stole back down the riverbank, planning his next move.

  Flushed and her heart still pounding, Dani sat at her kitchen table, her hands sheathed in her mother’s purple dishwashing gloves, holding the cover of the diary open with one hand, while caressing its inscription with the other. The shock that had seized her upon reading those words on the floor of that dirty old shed still gripped her, leaving her mind fuzzy, her thoughts disjointed. The second she had read that page, time had stopped, and all in the world had fallen away, except this one thing.

  This Diary Belongs To:

  Jennifer Cartwright

  In the moments after finding the diary, she had remained bent over on the shed’s floor, cradling the book in her hands, frantic over what to do. Those uncertain seconds had seemed to last forever, but in reality couldn’t have been more than a minute, as she debated what to do.