The Deepest Secret

  Out.

  He closes the door behind him. He doesn’t look over at Holly’s house. It could be on fire and he wouldn’t know.

  A light shines around Sophie’s kitchen window. Is she taking a break from gaming to get a snack? He crosses her patio. There’s a sliver of space between the windowsill and the edges of the blinds, and that’s where he looks, pressing the side of his face against the stone wall and peering in with one eye. At first he doesn’t see anything, only the gleaming surfaces of the counter, the refrigerator, the cabinets, and then she moves into range. She’s got her back to him. He can see all of her, not just her head and shoulders. Her tight black dress is really short, and her shiny black boots go all the way up her legs. She’s holding something down by her side, tapping it against her thigh as she paces. It looks like what Melissa uses for riding, only it’s much longer. A whip? Then she turns and goes down the hallway. He waits, wanting her to come back so he can see what she looks like from the front, but minutes go by and she doesn’t reappear.

  Dr. Cipriano’s house is full-on dark, not a glimmer of light anywhere. Tyler walks all around the house to be sure, then pushes himself in between the stiff tree branches that scratch at his sleeves. He kneels by the narrow window and holds up his new flashlight to play the beam of light around the room below. Pale linoleum floor, cement walls, and there—that huge cage. He looks close, but all he can see is gold-colored straw heaped inside the wire cage. There’s nothing there. He’s disappointed, but relieved, too. What if he’d seen a person in there?

  It’s weird, though. There’s a bright blue plastic kiddie pool in one corner, like the one he used to have when he was little. He holds the beam of light steady, trying to understand what it is he’s looking at. Then the straw slides apart, and something pale brown lifts out. Long and tapered, with two diamond eyes. He blinks. It’s a snake. It’s a huge snake. He stands up suddenly, smacks his head against a branch, and nearly cries out.

  What’s Dr. Cipriano doing with something like that? The dude’s always seemed pretty boring before. Tyler’s never seen a real snake, not even the little green snakes that his mom says are everywhere. He bets his followers would be interested in seeing this. They’re always after him about The Beast. Is it Bigfoot, someone from Montana wants to know. Probably just a cat, a girl in Utah says. Maybe this will hold them off until he can get a picture of the real Beast.

  Rubbing his head, he eyes the shadows around the basement window. He doesn’t think snakes can slither up walls and punch through glass, but maybe this one can. He tells himself it’s in a cage. He hopes Dr. Cipriano knows how to make cages.

  He takes a dozen flash pictures. He’s probably pissed the thing off now, so he backs out quickly and brushes the dirt from the knees of his jeans. That’s the kind of thing his mom will notice and wonder about.

  The bushes grow thick around Albert’s house, reaching halfway up the first-floor windows. Rosemary wouldn’t have liked that. She told Tyler that burglars could hide there and jump out at a person as they were going inside. Tyler’s mom lets the bushes grow high around their house. She says it gives him an extra layer of protection.

  Albert’s in his La-Z-Boy in the family room, with his white cat, Sugar, in his lap. He’s got that big old family photo album opened across his knees, and he’s patting his eyes with a white tissue. Tyler’s looked through that album plenty of times with Rosemary and laughed at Albert’s plaid pants and little vests. Rosemary’s pretty in those old photographs, with dark wavy hair. Tyler had only known her when her hair was white. There’s one of her holding her baby, a boy named Bruce Wayne. Don’t you know that’s Batman? he’d asked Rosemary, and she’d shaken her head ruefully. Bruce Wayne had grown up to be a man called Wayne.

  The Farnhams’ brick house has its porch lights on and all the patio lights. It looks like an alien ship about to lift off. All the lights are off at Charlotte’s house across the street. It hunkers down in the darkness like it’s trying to hide.

  There’s something lying on the sidewalk, something small. He stops, waits for it to run away, but it doesn’t move. He switches on his flashlight and sees the black fur and white splotch. It’s a skunk lying on its side. Sleeping? No, this is its feeding time. This skunk is dead.

  He walks over and looks down. There’s no smell. He nudges it with his toe. There’s no blood, either. It looks peaceful, its eyes closed. When squirrels die, their mates hang around nearby and cry. He shines his flashlight around in a big circle. Trees leap out at him, blank-faced. He turns back to the dead skunk. It looks so helpless. He turns off his flashlight and slides it into his pocket.

  “Tyler, is that you?”

  It’s Holly, coming up the sidewalk toward him. She’s been waiting for him. He turns and crosses the street. He doesn’t want to talk to her.

  “Hold on.” She’s trying to catch up to him.

  He just walks faster. She’ll see he means it and give up.

  “I have something to tell you.” Her voice is farther away.

  He doesn’t care what she has to tell him. He’ll never babysit for her again. She can beg him and beg him, and he’ll still say no.

  “The police have a new suspect. I thought you’d want to know.”

  He stops and turns around. Holly stands in the middle of the street. Her hair’s in a ponytail. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless shirt. Her bare shoulders gleam in the moonlight, but he can’t see her features. “Who?”

  She walks toward him, taking her time. And when she gets right up to him, he still can’t see her face, only the shadows slanting across her eyes and chin. “I can’t tell you anything more.”

  He clenches his hands into fists. “How come?”

  “It’s an ongoing police investigation. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I know Amy was your friend. All I can tell you is they’ve got new information.”

  “I don’t believe you.” The police must have seen the picture of Melissa on Facebook. But how would they have known to look?

  She folds her arms like she’s cold. “It’s true. They’ve been working on getting a description of the car. From Amy’s injuries, they can tell it was a big car.”

  “How big?”

  “Probably an SUV.”

  “So? Lots of people have SUVs.” There are two of them sitting in his garage right now.

  “Yep. But not all of them were on the road that night. They’re cross-checking traffic cameras, security tapes. You’d be amazed at how many cameras there are.”

  He knows this. Melissa will have driven past a traffic camera. She would have sailed down the road and been tagged by a million unseeing eyes. “That still doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, of course they’re looking for other evidence. Damage to the car, for one thing.”

  He’d know if his dad’s car had been damaged, wouldn’t he?

  “What else?”

  “Blood and tissue left behind.”

  He can’t think of Amy this way. “It was raining really hard.”

  “I know, but stuff can still get trapped in the grille.”

  “What if they washed the car, used soap?”

  “I don’t think soap would do it. They’d have to use bleach. But even so, we’re talking microscopic particles. They wouldn’t be able to get them all.”

  He breathes deep, thinking about this. “What if they get a new fender?”

  “You mean, like take the car to a body shop?” She shrugs. “The police would check repair records; they’d find the original fender and examine it.”

  He knows this. But it’s different when it’s a stupid television show. It feels completely different in real life. “But it was an accident.”

  “Oh, Tyler. That doesn’t matter. It’s still murder.”

  He looks at her, light gleaming on her hair like a halo. She’s smiling.

  In the middle of the night, he pings Yoshi on Skype, but she doesn’t answer.

  EVE

  Charlotte’s mi
ssing. She said she just needed some fresh air, Gloria told Eve, sounding frantic. But it’s been hours. Everyone’s out looking, but it’s Eve who turns the corner and spots her friend in the distance. “Charlotte?” she calls out, and Charlotte turns, puts a hand to her eyes. She’s gripping a piece of paper in her other hand. The trash bag by her feet flutters in the breeze. She’s been taking down the flyers.

  “Charlotte, you shouldn’t be doing this by yourself.”

  “It’s okay. I just couldn’t bear it anymore.” Charlotte’s head is a skull, her eyes sunken, her skin stretched tight.

  Of course not. “Let me help.”

  Eve reaches for a corner of the paper. It seems important to remove the flyer intact, so she picks at the tape with her fingers. The photograph has faded, but the words are large and bold. Amy Marie Nolan. Missing. Reward. These are the things Charlotte wanted to emphasize. Eve tries to work the paper free from the tape, but it rips, peeling Amy’s jaw away and leaving her merry laughing eyes behind.

  “Amy’s been released,” Charlotte says.

  Eve has the dizzying notion that Amy’s back, that this has all been a freakish nightmare. Of course she’s not thinking straight. What Charlotte means is that they can now plan the funeral. They walk to the next telephone pole.

  “We’ve been going through photographs,” Charlotte says. “Nikki wants to put together a montage for the funeral.”

  Only eleven years. There won’t be any pictures of Amy in braces, or a prom dress, or self-consciously wearing her first bikini. Amy had always begged for someone to take her picture. There are so many of Nikki, she’d wailed. And practically none of me.

  “Remember our first block party?” Charlotte says.

  Eve knows which photograph she’s talking about, taken of Charlotte and Owen, Eve and David as they stood in front of the blow-up castle teetering on Rosemary and Albert’s front yard, smiling awkwardly. They’d been caught in mid-conversation, Owen turning from whatever he’d been saying to David so that his face was a little blurry. Charlotte had her head tilted toward Eve, and the curve of her pregnant belly is evident. Their friendship had still been new then, and shy.

  Eve has studied the space between Owen and Charlotte, as Owen leaned away. Maybe he had been the first to leave their marriage, and Charlotte had been the first to act. Eve and David stand close, David with his arm around her waist. Melissa would have been playing somewhere in the background and Tyler would have been sleeping up in his room, waiting for his turn to join the party. She remembers feeling anxious about that, about being outside enjoying herself while her son was inside, trapped within four walls. The result had been that she hadn’t enjoyed herself at all. She’d kept glancing toward Tyler’s bedroom windows and checking her watch.

  “Scott fell out of the castle,” Eve reminds her, “and broke his leg.”

  “Larry Farnham kept insisting Scott had fallen on Albert’s yard and not his. Just in case we wanted to sue.” Charlotte pushes the paper into the trash bag and they set off down the narrow sidewalk to the next streetlight. “Mom wants to use Amy’s birth announcement, but I don’t know. It’s not the most flattering.”

  Two-day-old Amy with her puffy, squeezed-shut eyes and the red mark on her forehead from the forceps. She’d been dragged into the world, reluctant and blinking, to suit the obstetrician’s vacation schedule. Charlotte always said that was why Amy was so stubborn, to punish Charlotte for not letting Amy decide when she was ready to be born.

  “We should definitely use the one from her baptism,” Charlotte decides.

  Amy lying on her back in her long white gown, her arms extended on either side of her as if bracing herself. Those slippery pearl buttons on the back of the dress had drawn the fabric tight, too tight, so Eve and Charlotte decided to leave the top two buttons unfastened. It had been Nikki’s baptism dress, but Nikki had been a smaller baby. Amy just barely squeezed in. Her feet peeped out from beneath the hem of the lacy dress, clad in tiny white patent leather booties that kept falling off.

  “Remember how we looked everywhere for that shoe?” Eve asks. They’d crawled on their hands and knees and searched beneath every pew.

  “Her right shoe, just like Melissa.”

  They had laughed, saying their daughters were twins separated at birth.

  Charlotte had warned that Amy would howl the moment the priest dripped water across her forehead, but Amy had lain peacefully in Eve’s arms, her brown eyes calm and thoughtful. Afterward, Eve had kissed her. Good girl, she’d murmured. She’d give anything, now, to go back to that perfect moment.

  “Remember when Owen hid Amy’s Easter basket in the dryer, and I didn’t know and turned it on? The jelly beans melted over everything.” Amy had gnawed at a sugarcoated towel to try to pry the candy loose. “I don’t know why Owen’s doing this,” Charlotte says, and Eve knows she’s not talking about Easter anymore.

  “It’s okay. The police won’t find anything.”

  Robbie’s explained that yes, he took the ravine road from his restaurant to Charlotte’s house because there’s a good place to pick up Chinese food along the way, and he’s explained that he did give Amy the shamrock-embossed shot glass found in her bedroom trashcan because he often gave her small things from his restaurant. The text he’d sent Amy—shape up or else—was meant as a joke, not a threat.

  What Robbie can’t explain is his lack of an alibi. What he can’t defend are the two speeding tickets he’s gotten. Owen’s pressed hard on those two points, and apparently the new detective’s listened. He’s interrogated Charlotte three times in the past few days. She’s afraid he thinks that she and Robbie are mixed up in something bad. How can he? Eve asked. It was an accident. But Charlotte had not been reassured. He thinks there’s something else going on. Eve had been confused. Like what? But Charlotte didn’t know.

  First Charlotte, now Robbie. No one was safe.

  “It’s hard to believe I was ever in love with Owen,” Charlotte says. “I really thought we’d be together forever. What a cliché.”

  “It’s not a cliché. It’s hard. Marriage is hard,” she says, thinking of David’s unhappy face.

  “My parents made it look easy. They stayed in love until my dad died.”

  Charlotte knows not to mention Eve’s parents, though they, too, are still together. They stuff another flyer into the bag and move on.

  “I’m thinking about selling the house,” Charlotte says.

  Charlotte doesn’t think. She does. So what she’s really saying is that she’s moving. Of course she is. How can she stay in the house where Amy vanished, where her life was cut so abruptly short, where every time she goes out that front door she’ll think of the last time Amy had stepped over the threshold? “I’m going to miss you,” Eve says. Terribly, desperately.

  “I won’t move far, just a few miles.”

  Yes, but it won’t be the same, and they both know it.

  “I haven’t touched a thing in Amy’s room,” Charlotte says. “I’ll have to make decisions.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Okay.”

  Charlotte squints into the sun. “There’s something I haven’t told anyone.”

  Here’s a secret, Charlotte’s gift for leaving, her compensation, a promise that would keep them friends, no matter what distance separates them. “It’s okay,” Eve says, not wanting to know.

  “It’s about the polygraph.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter. It matters to me. I lied when I said that I didn’t know how long Amy was missing. I knew exactly how long she’d been gone. I heard her sneak out. I heard the door close. I thought, Good. I thought she’d sit on the porch and cool off, and then we could have a reasonable conversation about the whole thing.”

  “You couldn’t have known she’d go out in the storm.” But Amy was always doing risky things. Climbing that tree in Larry Farnham’s yard. Eating a teaspoon of cinnamon on a dare. Sneaking to the park late at night.


  “I let her sit out there for thirty minutes. When I went to get her, she was gone.”

  “Thirty minutes.” Half an hour. An eternity.

  “I can’t stop playing it over and over. If only I’d stopped her when I heard the door open. If only I’d gone out to see if she was on the porch. It was just one of those decisions, you know? I was mad. I was relieved to have the break.”

  An extra second. That’s all Eve would have needed. A single click of the second hand on the clock, and she and Charlotte wouldn’t be standing here now, everything shattered, as the heat boils down and strips them bare. Eve sways. She thinks she’s going to faint.

  Charlotte sits down on the curb, wraps her arms around her bare, bent knees. “I’d do anything to take it back. Anything.”

  Words. That’s all they are. There’s no rewinding the clock. Eve sits down, and Charlotte leans into her. Her skin is warm, sticky with sweat.

  “Amy died, and I wasn’t with her. I was in my safe, dry house, thinking how great it was to have some peace and quiet.” Charlotte sighs, a puff of air against Eve’s arm. “Did she know she was dying? Did she call out for me?”

  Eve could lift this pain from her friend. But Tyler’s waiting for her. He needs her. She has to get home to him.

  “I can’t cry anymore. All I’ve done is cry. I’ve used up all my tears.”

  Eve had wept for months after Tyler’s diagnosis, inconsolably, out of nowhere. She’d be standing in the grocery store and reach for his little hand and remember he wasn’t there. Everywhere she looked there were small boys out in the daylight, doing ordinary things. She’d emptied herself out, become a shell, and then one day Charlotte had moved in and walked down the street to knock on Eve’s front door.

  The sun sits hard in the sky, uncompromising. It shoots beams of light through the branches, deflects them off passing chrome bumpers and windows, presses them against the thin cotton of her dress. Sweat trickles down her spine. Insects buzz in the grass. Her temples ache with the effort of keeping silent.