Public Secrets by Nora Roberts
“Emma.” It was Brian now, standing in the tiny kitchen alcove, Johnno at his side. “What is it, baby? Are you sick?”
“No.” It was Da, she thought. Da would make it all go away. “No, it’s Darren. I heard Darren crying.”
“Oh Christ.” He took her shoulders and shook. “Emma, look at me.”
“What?” Her head snapped up. The glaze seemed to melt away from her eyes into tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I ran away.”
“It’s all right.” He gathered her close. His eyes, anguished, met Johnno’s over her head. “We should get her out of here.”
“In her bedroom,” Johnno suggested, then casually began to clear a path. He slid the frosted-glass doors closed behind them, muffling the sounds of the party.
“Let’s lie down, Emma.” Brian kept his voice soothing as he set her on the bed. “I’ll stay right here.”
“I’m okay.” Her worlds had separated again. She didn’t know whether to feel grief or embarrassment. “I don’t know what set that off. Something just clicked and I was six years old again. I’m sorry, Da.”
“Ssh.” He pressed his lips to her temple. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It was the music,” Johnno said, then settled beside her. “The music upset you.”
“Yes.” She moistened her dry lips. “Yes, it was the music. It was playing that night. When I woke up and heard Darren. It was playing when I started down the hall. I’d forgotten. I’ve never been able to listen to that cut, but I didn’t know why. Tonight, I guess with the party, it all rushed back.”
“Why don’t I start clearing people out?”
“No.” She took Johnno’s hand before he could rise. “I don’t want to spoil it for Marianne. I’m all right now, really. It was so strange. Almost as if I were there again. I wonder if I’d gotten to the door, if I’d have seen—”
“No.” Brian’s hand clamped down on hers. “It’s over and done with. Behind us. I don’t want you to think about it, Emma.”
She was too weary to argue. “I think I’ll just rest awhile. No one’s going to miss me.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Brian told her.
“No. I’m fine now. I’m just going to sleep. Christmas is only a few weeks away. I’ll come to London, like I promised. We’ll have a whole week.”
“I’ll stay until you sleep,” Brian insisted.
HE WAS GONE when she woke from the nightmare. It had been so real, so horribly clear. Just as the reality had been over twelve years before. Her skin was clammy with sweat as she reached for the light. She needed the light. There was so much that could hide in the dark.
It was quiet now. Five A.M. and calm, quiet. The party was over and she was alone, behind the glass walls of her room. Painfully, like an old woman, she rose out of bed to strip off her clothes and pull on a robe. She slid the door back, hit another light.
The room was a jumble. There were scents—beer going stale, smoke trapped near the ceiling, the lingering breath of perfumes and sweat. She glanced up the stairs to where Marianne slept. She didn’t want to disturb her by tidying up now, though her ingrained neatness rubbed at her. She would wait until sunrise.
There was something else she had to do, and she wanted to do it quickly before cowardice could take over. Sitting by the phone, she dialed information.
“Yes. I’d like the numbers for American, TWA, and Pan Am.”
Chapter Twenty
SHE WASN’T GOING to feel guilty. In fact, at the moment, Emma didn’t want to feel much of anything. She knew if her father discovered she’d flown to California, without her guards, he’d be furious. She could only hope he didn’t find out. With luck, she would have her two days in California, catch the redeye Sunday night and be in New York again, attending class, Monday morning, with no one but Marianne the wiser.
Bless Marianne, Emma thought as the plane touched down. She hadn’t asked any questions once she had seen that the answers would be painful. Instead, she had roused herself barely past dawn, tossed on a blond wig, sunglasses, and Emma’s overcoat and had cabbed it to early mass at Saint Pat’s. With the guards trailing behind her.
That had given Emma enough time to dash to the airport and catch her plane to the Coast. As far as Sweeney and his partner would be concerned, Emma McAvoy would be spending a quiet weekend at home. Marianne would have to do some fast talking if Brian or Johnno called, but then Marianne was nothing if not a fast talker.
In any case, Emma decided while she deplaned, the die was cast. She was here, and she would do what she had come to do.
She had to see the house again. It had been sold all those years ago, so it was doubtful she could wangle her way inside. But she had to see it.
“The Beverly Wilshire,” she told the cab driver.
Exhausted, she let her head fall back, let her eyes close behind her dark glasses. It was too warm for her winter coat now, but she couldn’t find the energy to shrug out of it. She needed to rent a car, she realized, and let out an annoyed breath. She should have taken care of that already. With a shake of her head, she promised herself she would arrange it through the concierge as soon as she had unpacked the few things she’d tossed into her bag.
There were ghosts here, she thought. Along Hollywood Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, on the beaches at Malibu and throughout the hills looking over the L.A. basin. Ghosts of herself as a young girl on her first trip to America, of her young, heroic father hoisting her on his shoulders in Disneyland. Of Bev, smiling, a hand laid protectively over the child she carried in her womb. And always of Darren as he giggled and ran his tractor over the turkey rug.
“Miss?”
Emma blinked and focused on the uniformed doorman who stood waiting to help her from the cab.
“Checking in?”
“Yes, thank you.” Mechanically, she paid off the driver, walked into the lobby to registration. She took her key, forgetting for the moment that this was the first time she had stayed alone.
In her room she opened the discreet Gucci carry-on, by habit neatly folding her lingerie, hanging her clothes, setting out her toiletries. Once done, she picked up the phone.
“This is Miss McAvoy in 312. I’d like to arrange for a rental car. Two days. Yes, as soon as possible. That’ll be fine. I’ll be down.”
There was something else that had to be done, though she was afraid. Picking up the phone book, she opened it, skimmed through to the Ks. Kesselring, L.
Emma noted down the address in her neat hand. He was still here.
“ARE YOU GOING to eat all morning, Michael, or are you going to cut the lawn?”
Michael grinned at his father and shoveled in more pancakes. “It’s a big lawn. I need my strength. Right, Mom?”
“The boy doesn’t eat right since he moved out.” Pleased to have both men at her table, Marge filled the coffee cups. “You’re skin and bones, Michael. I’ve got the best part of a nice ham I cooked earlier in the week. You take it home with you.”
“Don’t give this deadbeat my ham,” Lou objected.
Michael lifted a brow, then doused the remaining pancakes with Aunt Jemima. “Who you calling a deadbeat?”
“You lost the bet, but I don’t see my grass getting mowed.”
“I’ll get to it,” Michael grumbled and snatched another sausage. “I think that game was fixed.”
“The Orioles won, fair and square. And they won over a month ago. Pay up.”
Michael gestured with the sausage. It was a conversation they’d had every weekend since the World Series, and one they would undoubtedly continue to have until the first of the year when the bet would be paid in full.
“As a police captain you should be aware that gambling’s illegal.”
“As a rookie, assigned to my precinct, you should have better sense than to make a sucker bet. Mower’s in the shed.”
“I know where it is.” He rose, swung an arm over his mother’s shoulder. “How do you live with this guy?”
“It is
She watched him go out, slamming the screen door as he had always done. For a moment she wished he could be ten again, but that feeling passed quickly, leaving a quiet pride. “We did a good job, Lou.”
“Yeah.” He took both his and Michael’s dishes to the sink. He’d aged well, putting on less than ten pounds over the last twenty years. His hair was fully gray now, but he’d kept most of it. Though he occasionally realized he was uncomfortably close to sixty, he felt better than he had in his life. Due, he thought as he put his arm around Marge, to his wife’s diligent watch on things like cholesterol and sugar.
As for herself, Marge had settled contentedly into middle age. She was as trim as she’d been the day they’d been married. Nothing kept her from her twice-weekly aerobic classes. Her hair was colored a flattering ash-brown.
Five years before, she’d gotten what Lou had thought was a bee in her bonnet about starting her own business. He’d considered himself indulgent when he’d stood back and let his “little woman” open a small bookstore. He’d been kind and considerate, like an adult patting a child on the head. Then she had astonished him by showing a keen and often ruthless head for business. Her little shop had expanded. Now she had three doing brisk business in Hollywood, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills.
Life was full of surprises, he thought as he heard the mower gun. His wife, who had seemed content for years dusting furniture and baking pies was a businesswoman with her own accountant. His son, who had breezed carelessly through college, then had spent nearly eighteen months drifting, had enrolled in the police academy, without saying a word. As for himself, Lou was giving serious thought to something that had always seemed years off. Retirement.
It was a good life, Lou thought, drawing in scents of sausage and roses. On impulse, he spun his wife around and planted a long hard kiss on her mouth.
“The kid’s going to be busy for at least an hour,” he murmured as he cupped her breasts. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Marge tilted her head back, then grinned.
Michael turned the mower, enjoying the physical release and the light sweat that was working over his skin. Not that he liked losing the bet, he thought. He hated to lose anything.
But he missed a lawn, the look of it, the smell of it. His apartment suited him with its postage-stamp pool and noisy neighbors. But the suburbs, he mused, with their big, leafy trees and tidy yards, their backyard barbecues and station wagons, were home. You always felt like a kid again there. Saturday-morning bike rides. Ricky Jones down the street trying out his skateboard. Pretty girls walking by in thin cotton dresses while you traded baseball cards on the curb and pretended not to notice.
The old neighborhood hadn’t changed much since his youth. It was still a place where paperboys rode bikes on delivery and tossed today’s news into bushes. Neighbors still competed with each other over the best lawn, the best garden. They borrowed tools and forgot to return them.
Being there gave him a sense of continuity. Something he hadn’t known he wanted until he’d moved away from it.
A movement caught his eye, and he glanced up in time to see the shade of his parents’ bedroom window go down. He stopped, openmouthed, the grip of the mower vibrating under his hands. He might not have had his gold shield, but it didn’t take a detective to figure out what was going on behind the shade. At nine o’clock in the morning. He continued to stare a moment, unsure if he should be amused, embarrassed, or delighted. He decided it was best not to think about it at all. There was something spooky about imagining your parents having sex.
He steered the mower one-handed, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. Christmas lights might have been strung along the eaves of the houses, but it would be eighty degrees before noon. Michael sent a casual wave to Mrs. Baxter who had come out to weed her gladiolas. She merely frowned at him, so he went back to singing along with the Bruce Springsteen number that played through his headphone. He’d sent a long fly ball through Mrs. Baxter’s picture window more than ten years before, and she had yet to forgive him.
He had the backyard trimmed, and half of the front when he began to wonder why his father had never invested in a riding mower. A trim Mercedes convertible pulled up at the curb. Michael wouldn’t have given it more than a glance, except there was a blonde behind the wheel. He had a weakness for blondes. She merely sat, dark glasses hiding her eyes, as a minute stretched into five.
At length she slowly got out of the car. She was as trim and sleek as the Mercedes, long, elegant legs beneath a thin cotton skin. He noticed her hands as well, delicate, tea-serving hands that clutched tight on a gray leather purse.
Beautiful, nervous, and from out of town, Michael deduced. Rich, too, he thought. Both her bag and her shoes were leather and expensive. And there was the dull glint of real gold at her wrist and ears. There was the way she moved that whispered of wealth and privilege. Her hands might have given away her nerves, but her movements were smooth as a dancer’s.
She didn’t hesitate on the walk. Obviously she had made up her mind in the car to approach him. He caught her scent, light, quietly seductive, over the fragrance of fresh-cut grass.
When she smiled, his heart nearly stopped. Shutting off the motor with one hand and dragging off his headphones with the other, he stared at her. In the sudden quiet Springsteen and the E Street Band could be heard jamming metallically.
“Hello. I’m sorry to interrupt your work.”
His mouth went dry. It was foolish. It was ridiculous. But he couldn’t stop it. That voice—it had played through his head for years. Sneaking up on him in sleep, in front of the television, in conversations with other women. When he saw her bite her lip, he snapped himself together. Taking off his sunglasses, he smiled at her.
“Hi, Emma. Catch any good waves lately?”
Her lips parted in surprise, then recognition and pleasure curved them. “Michael.” She wanted to throw her arms around him. The idea made color flutter in her cheeks, but she only held out a hand for his. “It’s so good to see you again.”
His hand was hard against hers, hard and damp. He released hers almost immediately to wipe his palm against his worn jeans. “You—never made it back to the beach.”
“No.” She continued to smile, but the dimple faded away from the corner of her mouth. “I never learned to surf. I didn’t know if you’d still be living at home.”
“Actually, I’m not. I lost a bet with my old man, so he gets free gardening service for a few weeks.” He didn’t have a clue what to say to her. She looked so beautiful, so fragile somehow, standing on the freshly shorn grass in her expensive Italian pumps, her pale hair stirring slightly in the light breeze. “How’ve you been?” he managed at last.
“Fine. And you?”
“All right. I’ve seen your picture now and again. Once you were in one of those ski places.”
“Saint Moritz.”
“I guess.” Her eyes were the same, he thought. Big, blue, and haunted. Looking into them made his stomach dance. “Are you —visiting around here?”
“No. Well, yes. Actually—”
“Michael.” He turned at his mother’s voice. She stood in the doorway, neat as a pin. “Aren’t you going to ask your friend in for a cold drink?”
“Sure. Got a few minutes?” he asked Emma.
“Yes. I was hoping to speak to your father.”
He felt his hopes deflate like a used party balloon. Where had he gotten the idea that she had come to see him? “Dad’s inside.” He managed to smile. “Gloating.”
Emma followed him to the door Marge had left open. She had a death grip on her purse now, and no amount of mental effort could relax her fingers.
They had their tree up. Emma glimpsed it, standing full of tinsel and shiny balls near the front window. There were presents under it, neatly wrapped and bowed, and sprigs of pine here and there that s
The furniture was old, not shabby but established. A family had shared these pieces, she thought. Had shared them so long, they hardly saw them now, but settled into the couch or a chair comfortably day after day, evening after evening. Curtains were pulled back to let in the light. A trio of African violets bloomed lavishly on a stand by the east window.
She had taken off her sunglasses and was folding and unfolding the earpieces as she studied the room.
“Want to sit down?”
“Yes, thank you. I won’t stay long. I know I’m disrupting your weekend.”
“Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to cutting the grass all week.” He grinned, relaxed again, and gestured to a chair. “I’ll get my father.”
Before he could, Marge walked in carrying a tray crowded with a