Her Little Secret

“Wait for me, Mommy. You know I’m ’posed to help.”

“It wouldn’t taste the same without you.”

Cassie broke eggs into a bowl. Hope whisked them all over the kitchen counter and the sink, and Cassie mixed up chocolate milk. They toasted each other while a golden pat of butter sizzled in the iron skillet Cassie had taken from her childhood home.

“That man doesn’t know where we live?”

Cassie shook her head. “And the police won’t let him out, anyway.”

Hope set her glass on the counter and then wrapped her arms around Cassie’s thighs. Cassie leaned down and hugged her tight. And that seemed to be the end of it all.

“I’ll get that peach stuff Mrs. Kleiber made me.” Hope hurried to the fridge for a jar of preserves their neighbor made for her every year.

Cassie dropped bread into the toaster slots, grateful for Hope’s resilience. “How hungry are we after such a long day?”

The phone cut into Hope’s answer. As Cassie lifted the receiver, she saw that their machine had recorded eleven messages. Without bothering to look at the caller ID, she said hello.

“Cassie?”

That voice. Low, more uncertain than she’d ever heard it, but rich and familiar as his touch had once been. She shivered as memories of his hands on her body made her ache, arms and legs, heart and soul.

In a night of shocks, this one made her grab the edge of the counter.

“Van?” She’d read in romances that a man could make a woman light-headed enough to faint. But those women had been bound in Jane Austen finery. She was still sporting splinter-laden jeans and a Tecumseh PD T-shirt. “Van.”

She’d loved him. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t, but she’d had to leave him because he couldn’t love her after she’d been raped.

CHAPTER TWO

“MOMMY?”

She shook her head at Hope, urging the girl she loved more than her own life to keep quiet.

“What’s wrong?” Cassie couldn’t control the huskiness in her voice. Hope stared. Cassie cleared her throat. Van shouldn’t matter this much after five years. “How did you get my number?”

“From your father.”

Her heart tap-danced. Something must be horribly wrong. “Why are you calling?”

“It’s your dad,” he said. “The cops and paramedics found him on the Mecklin Road Bridge. He didn’t recognize them. He called for your mother.” He waited, as if to let it sink in.

It did with a thud. “He didn’t know she was dead?”

“Eventually he remembered.” Maybe Van kept stopping because he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to say. Of all the scenarios she’d imagined drawing her home, this was the one she really hadn’t wanted to face. “I’m sorry,” Van said.

“How bad is he?” Her grandmother had died after battling Alzheimer’s disease. Her father had deeply feared a similar fate. “Is this a one-night problem, or could it be my grandmother’s illness?”

“I don’t know.” Van’s weariness scared her more than his words.

“Mommy?”

“Everything’s all right.” Straightening, she yanked the frying pan off the burner and spoke firmly, to comfort her child and to keep Van from guessing she was talking to a little one.

Hope, who’d been through too much, misunderstood and ran to her room. Cassie followed her into the hall. She couldn’t explain Van to Hope or her to him.

“I have to come home.” She’d been raised by a loving mother and a responsible father who’d taught her to think of others. Rarely had she been selfish in her life—not because she was noble, but because her parents had never accepted such behavior. But—home?

She’d dreaded this day for five years, had felt it threatening like a bag of bricks hanging over her head.

She pulled herself together. “I’m coming.”

“I can take care of him.” Van stopped again.

“How?” she asked. “You’re not his next of kin. You’re not even family anymore.”

His breathing deepened. How could she possibly hurt him after all this time?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, you’re right. It was crazy to offer. Not long after you left, he also told me to stay away. But I thought maybe that was an excuse I was happy to take.”

“I don’t want to know—” It was too late to catch up on what had happened after she’d left. The time they’d shared had belonged to someone else. It didn’t feel like hers any longer. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I can get a flight.”

“Wait, Cassie. Let me pick you up at the airport.”

So she could explain Hope at baggage claim? Not a chance. “I’ll be fine.”

His silence ran thick, full of words unsaid. Their relationship had ended unnaturally when she’d walked away, but she hadn’t been willing to wait for the usual recriminations and anger. The rape had humiliated Van and her father. She’d hated them both until she realized she’d never love Hope while she nourished bitterness.

“Thank you for calling,” she said, “and for helping my father. I’ll take over as soon as I get there, and you can go back to your own life.”

“I’m trying to warn you he isn’t the same.” He didn’t seem to hear anything she said, as if he had an agenda and was checking off the items. “I don’t think he’s been eating, and I don’t know when he last took a shower.”

“That’s not my dad.” An image of him burned in her mind. “They’ll keep him in the hospital until I get there?”

“I doubt they’d let him out. When should I expect you?”

“As soon as I can make a reservation. Your number must be on my phone. I’ll call you back.”

“Let me give it to you to make sure.”

She wrote it down. “Thank you,” she said.

“Cassie?”

She bit her lip. Hard. Her arms and legs felt heavy, strange. As if she were channeling someone else’s feelings. If only Van would stop saying her name. “What?”

“Are you all right?”

He’d always cared. That had never been the problem, but his concern left her empty now. “Fine.”

A few seconds went by. She should hang up, cut off the thick voice that had haunted her dreams a lot longer than the monster’s who’d broken into their bathroom. The monster’s voice only terrified her.

Van’s made her lonely, reminded her how it felt to be intimate. Not sex, but trust and talk and safety.

“Should I get you a room at the hotel?” he asked.

She wasn’t about to put Hope on display for the kind, but too-quick-to-pity citizens of Honesty. “I’ll stay at Dad’s house.”

“Maybe you’d like to try Beth’s fishing lodge? She had some trouble last year, but the place is up and running again. She got married last summer and she and her husband renovated—”

Running on wasn’t like him. “I’ll stay at home.” She’d had to give up Beth’s unstinting friendship, and it was too late to start over or explain.

“Okay.” His tone tightened. “Don’t forget to let me know when you’ll be here.”

For the first time since high school, he didn’t say I love you as he hung up. Even the last time—months after she’d left, while Hope had kicked lazily in her belly and Van had begged for another chance, and she’d asked him to stop calling, he’d said it.

She clicked the off button, sliding her palms over her face as if to wipe away memories of Van that flew at her. Always laughing—as she ran her hands through his silky dark blond hair. As he took her mouth with his. Laughter dying as he moved his body above hers.

She flinched and grabbed the wall. “Hope?” After a deep breath, she hurried to her daughter’s room. “I have to tell you some things.”

“No, Mommy. I’m mad. You talked mean to me.”

“I’m sorry, honey.” She was so careful. She tried never to raise her voice, never to let Hope see a hint of brutality anywhere. Her stomach lurched as she remembered the softness of the intruder’s body this afternoon. The human body was so fragile.

And the psyche more so.

“Who was on the phone?” Hope asked, with eyes only for her doll.

“A man I used to know—a friend of my father’s.”

“Huh?” Hope’s eyes rounded and she dropped the doll on her pink-flowered comforter. “You have a daddy?”

Cassie tilted her head back. She’d never even mentioned him? “I have a father,” she said. “He’s sick and he needs me to look after him.”

“Like when I’m sick?” Hope grabbed her hand. “Ooh, will we make him glasses of ice water and toast?”

“We can make anything that will help him feel better. Let’s talk about it over our eggs. Help me warm them up?”

“VAN, TAKE THESE KEYS.” Frail in his hospital gown, Leo Warne covered them with his hand, like a spy passing off a top secret microfiche. “They’re not safe here. Someone will steal them and break into the house and clean me out.” Leo’s eyes darted toward the door and back.

Van suppressed a shudder. He’d loved the man like a father. How could he have abandoned him? “Don’t worry. Cassie’s going to stay at the house. Your stuff will be safe.”

“Stop looking at me like I’m a stranger. I’m not sick.” He nodded toward the ceiling as if someone were watching them from above. “I’m just a smart old man. Something no one in this town likes. I know how they treated Cassie. They made her leave, looking down on her after that man…” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple as big as an egg in his too-thin throat. “Like the rape was her fault. No one took care of her.” He skewered Van with blue eyes that were so much like Cassie’s. “Not even you.”

Van gripped the edge of Leo’s rolling tray. “The rape repulsed me. Cassie never did. I should have protected her, but I couldn’t even make her see I still loved her.”

“Because you didn’t. I know. I know it all. I walk around this town in the night. No one sees me. I’m invisible.”

Van stared, his own good sense returning. “You’re tired and sick and you need to be cared for.” Van dared to stroke Leo’s thin hair as he would have touched his own father—or his child, if he and Cassie had been so lucky. “You’ll get better and you’ll start remembering.”

“I remember everything. People laughed at her and they said she deserved it. They said she should have been more careful. She was asking for it.”

“Those are your own fears talking. It never happened.”

“It was worse. You don’t even know. She won’t come home now.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow. She’s planning to stay at your house.”

The house. With his heart breaking for his broken friend, he felt anxious. What would Cassie walk into in her childhood home? If Leo hadn’t washed himself in weeks, he certainly hadn’t cleaned the house.

Cassie had enough to face. No one had understood why she’d run away from Honesty. Her former neighbors would flood her with casseroles. They’d sympathize with her about Leo’s illness and they’d fish for answers about why she’d stayed away so long.

They’d tried often enough to extract the truth from Van, but no one seemed to realize she hadn’t been content to cut the town out of her life. She’d had no more room for her father or her ex-husband, either.

“Leo, I’m heading over to your house for a while. Just to make sure everything’s ready for Cassie.”

“I’ll give you a buck and a half to mow the lawn.” Leo dug for a nonexistent pocket. “It’s not worth that much, but I know you. You’ll just spend it on a Coca-Cola with Cassie, and you shouldn’t be paying for her treats.”

Van felt as if he’d run face first into a wall, but Leo didn’t seem to realize it was December. “Pay me later.” Van wondered which lawn guy had flirted with Cassie. Van hadn’t noticed her as more than a cute kid until after he’d been working in the bank for almost a year and she’d started college.

He pushed his fist against his chest. They’d been a family once, the three of them. He kissed his former father-in-law’s head and hurried out.

At the nurses’ station, he backed up and asked them to call if Leo’s condition changed. Despite all signs to the contrary, he hoped Leo might improve before Cassie arrived. Good food, warmth and attentive care had to give him a chance.

The Warnes lived across the lake from Beth’s fishing lodge. Van pulled up to Leo’s place to find Trey Lockwood, one of last night’s EMTs, banging away at the front porch with a hammer. Trey stopped and brushed back his ball cap with a weary sigh. He pulled a couple of nails from between his lips.

“I didn’t expect to find anyone else here,” Van said. “What’s wrong with the porch?”

Trey stepped on a board and it squeaked. “Ann and I didn’t realize we should have checked on him.”

“Has he been acting odd for long?”

“He definitely changed after Cassie…” He didn’t say the words and Van was just as glad. “We thought you probably knew, but you weren’t welcome here, either.”

“I’d have forced my way in.” He took in the paint peeling off the siding. Why hadn’t he driven past once in a while? The answer would keep him from facing himself in a mirror for a while. He’d been a coward. Pretending Leo and Cassie didn’t matter anymore had been easier than fighting them for a few pathetic minutes of their time.

“You look gutted,” Trey said. “People think everyone knows what goes on in small towns. But the doors shut here, just like anywhere else, and some things you can’t know.”

Trey was a smart guy. “The door didn’t shut on this.” Van pulled Leo’s keys out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll see how things look inside.”

“Yeah. Good luck. Let me know if I can help.”

“Thanks.” Van trod the rickety boards with care. He dreaded opening the door. “Cassie’s due back tomorrow.”

“You don’t want her to see what’s been going on with her dad.”

“I can’t protect her from what’s happened to her father, but I’d like to clean this place a little.”

“She shouldn’t have left.” Even after five years, Van turned to defend Cassie, but Trey tested the next step, looking regretful. He’d been Cassie’s friend, too. He yanked and the plank gave way with a scream. “None of us asked her to go. None of us wanted her to.”

“It was my fault,” Van said, surprising himself. “Not hers.” A floorboard groaned as he eased across it. A strong wind could send the porch across the lake to Beth’s yard. “It’s too late to talk about the past,” he said.

“You gotta talk to someone.” Trey held a nail against the board and hammered. “Sometime.” He added another nail. “Or it’ll drive you crazy.”

“Yeah?” Van turned the key in the lock, but it took determination, as if Leo hadn’t locked it in five years. He looked over his shoulder at the lake. Leo rented a boathouse down there, hidden by the pines. Three years ago, Van had discovered it open, and he’d locked it to keep it safe from vandals. He’d left a note, telling Leo to get in touch with him for the lock’s combination, but Leo had never called about it.

Trey was watching. “I’ll finish out here. I know a guy who can repaint fast. Cassie’ll feel at home.”

Van nodded. “Thanks for the help and the therapy.”

The EMT grinned. “Free of charge, buddy.”

He went back to work, and Van turned the doorknob and shoved it open. The hinges screamed for oil. A stench of decay and dirt almost knocked him back down the steps.

“God.” He stared at newspapers and canned goods stacked in ranks like soldiers waiting to march down the hall. On each tread of the staircase along the right wall, three packages of paper towels stood side by side.

He pushed the door wide and went searching for the source of the smell. It was easy to trace it to the dining room.

Food. Old, old food, and food as new as last night’s dinner.

He slammed his hand over his mouth like any heroine in one of the old movies his sister loved to watch. Apparently, Leo had thought getting the food to the dining room was enough. There were china plates on the table, but at some point he’d switched to paper and plastic utensils.

And then he’d stopped washing dishes. He’d neatly aligned the plates and the cups and glassware and, eventually, he’d done the same with the throwaway stuff, unless he hadn’t finished his meal. Those plates perched on any surface—and the floor.

Compulsive neatness and haphazard filth. How had it made sense?

The kitchen was even crazier. Completely spotless, except there wasn’t a dish to be found, beyond the paper and plastic in the cabinets where the real stuff used to be stored.

“Dear God, Leo.”

In the back of his mind, Van had blamed Leo for Cassie’s leaving. If her beloved father hadn’t been ashamed, maybe Cassie would have given Van another chance, but Leo’s humiliation had blinded her. She’d taken Van’s revulsion at his inability to help her, for shame like her father’s.

He choked in a breath and grabbed a garbage bag from beneath the sink. He set to work, realizing he’d misread Leo. They’d tried to live with their guilt in different ways.

He’d been unable to touch his wife, and Leo had stopped living in a world that made sense.

“HOW MUCH LONGER, Mommy?” From her car seat in the back of their rental, Hope flipped her cloth doll, Penny, in circles until the arms coiled like springs. “Where is my grampa, anyway?”

“In a hospital, honey.” Squinting into the fading evening sun, Cassie passed another highway sign that assured her she was on her way to Honesty, Virginia. She didn’t need the sign. She knew each bump and dip of the road like the corners of her childhood bedroom.

“Will he like me?”

“You’re funny. How could anyone not love you?” It was what Cassie feared. It was the reason she’d told no one back home that she’d had Hope. The reason she’d never returned.

“He didn’t come see me. We never visited him in his neighborgood.”

They’d recently started looking for a new house in a “neighborhood with a great school.” Hope couldn’t get the hang of the word.

“He’s an older man.”

“Mrs. Bonney is a older lady.” She usually babysat when Cassie had to work late. She made cookies and crocheted afghans and loved Hope almost as much as Cassie did. “She wants to see me all the time.”

“But she lives right next door.”

“She goes away. She goes to see her little girls.”

Mrs. Bonney called her granddaughters her little girls.

Cassie searched for answers. She’d told her father to stay away. She couldn’t explain why. “Mrs. Bonney isn’t sick.”

“Is my grampa a nice man?”

A simple yes stuck in her throat. He’d blamed her for the rape. And he hadn’t loved her since.

Van, too. Van, who’d been so much her other half that excising him had left gaps in her soul. Maybe he was worse than her father, because he’d vowed to be her husband. Better or worse had broken him.

“I’m talking to you, Mommy.”

“I told you all this last night, sweetie, but you might not get to see him, since he’s in the hospital.”

“I thought we were gonna get him out of there.”

“It’s not a bad place.” Another hint she should look at her current work situation. So many of the women at the shelter went to the hospital, and their husbands were kept from seeing them. From phone calls Hope had overheard, and frankness about work that Cassie and her partners should have forgone, she might have gotten the wrong idea.

“I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t have to.” Cassie’s stomach dropped. Who’d look after Hope while she was with her father? How many people in Honesty would have to see Hope? “We’re not staying here long,” Cassie said.

“But how long?”

“A few days.”

She could hear her old friends.

When did she have that kid?

Why didn’t she tell Van?

Whose kid is that?

Van would wonder why she’d hidden Hope’s existence.

“You don’t have to explain.” Her counselor in Tecumseh had repeated that over and over in the months after Hope was born. “She’s your responsibility. You have to make a good life for her and you. And frankly, to hell with anyone else.”

Cassie’s father, practically a Biblical patriarch in her mind when she was growing up, hadn’t wanted her after she was tainted. He certainly wouldn’t want Hope. When Cassie had needed him most, he’d blamed her for the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

She’d find help for him. She closed her burning eyes tight for a second. She’d provide medical care if he needed it. She owed him nothing more.

“Where’s my gramma, Mommy?”

That question hadn’t come up last night. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have one,” Cassie said, fighting, as always, the soft memory of her mother’s hands on her face, her whispered reassurance that the dark was safe. “My mom died when I was a teenager.”

Hope, who’d been traveling since early morning and missed her nap, looked as if she might cry. “You won’t ever die, will you, Mommy?”

“Not for a long time, Hope.” According to the policeman who’d taken her statement at the shelter, she had every chance of dying pretty soon if she wasn’t more careful about taking on thugs. She’d tried to explain about the advantage of surprise. He hadn’t been impressed, and he was right. He just hadn’t come up with an alternative response, other than everyone hiding—and who could do that all the time?

“Good.” Hope smiled through a soft veil of tears in her eyes. Blessed with a sensitive heart, she’d always cried easily. “But you don’t have a mommy.”

“I’m used to that.” Who ever got used to that?

“It’s a good thing you have me.”

Cassie laughed. “Having you is the best. I love you this much.” She took her hands off the wheel long enough to spread them as far as she could. “And then some.”

“Good.” Hope tucked her baby onto her shoulder. “I’m not sleepy, Mommy.”

“I see that.”

“But I could use some mac and cheese.”

“Just let me know when. We’ll be home before you know it.” Home. She’d said it without thinking, after five years of dreading the sight of Honesty.

“We can make eggs for my grampa.”

The hospital concept proved tricky for her to grasp. Cassie glanced in the rearview, at Hope’s drooping eyelids.

With any luck, she could keep this trip an adventure for her daughter and then escape. No one who’d known Cassie before would see Hope, or ask questions.

HOPE WAS ASLEEP when Cassie parked in front of her father’s home. With her palms sweating on the steering wheel, she stared at the house, low, squat and dingy in moonlight instead of the rich blue of her memory. The ivy her father had tended so lovingly had taken over the porch and the roof, trying to pull the house down.

A woman could almost wish it had.

She glanced at Hope, hating to wake her until she saw what awaited them inside. Van had said her father would still be in the hospital, but when had Leo Wainwright Warne ever paid attention to anyone or anything other than his own sense of right and wrong?

Wallowing in a hospital bed would strike him as the height of wrong.

Cassie climbed out of the car, eased the door shut and started up the cracked driveway. Then she stopped, eyeing the house and a dark band of cloth blocking off the porch. Someone had pinned a Wet Paint sign to it. She leaned down to touch a step. Tacky. And that wasn’t all.

The ivy, cracks in the dirty cement, black tire streaks and bird droppings dotting the graying pavement. Her father hadn’t been out here with his pressure washer in a long time.

Five years couldn’t change anything this much—not unless time and neglect had lived hand in hand. Van had tried to warn her about her father. Like Hope, she just hadn’t got it.

She went around to the kitchen door. Half expecting to find it unlocked, she nonetheless lifted her key.

Only to have the door open in her face and Van come out.

Without thinking, she turned toward the car. He took her arm as if to stop her from running. She looked down at his broad hand, his splayed, capable fingers.

Her body seemed to grow heavier, but she wasn’t confused about her real feelings. She looked up at him and prayed Hope wouldn’t wake, the way children did when a car stopped too long.

“I thought I’d be out of here before you arrived.” Stress tensed his face. His dark green eyes watched her as if she were a stranger.