This Secret Thing, стр. 44

Polly

She sat in the front room, in a dining table chair she’d pulled over to the window, and watched for her granddaughter to come out of the house across the street. There’d been a moment when Violet had walked back to the house like she was going to come inside, and Polly had breathed a sigh of relief. Crisis avoided. But then the boy had run after her, had caught up to her and said something. Whatever it was had worked, and Violet walked back over to his house and went inside with him, leaving her to wait, to watch, and to wonder what exactly was going on with those two.

That afternoon in the yard, they’d seemed to barely know each other. Now they were chummy. It didn’t make sense. But, of course, they were teenagers. They didn’t always make sense. They ran hot. They ran cold. They were rarely lukewarm. Polly thought about the handsome boy across the street with his disarming grin and sculpted arms. She doubted Violet ran cold when she was around him.

She wondered if she should march across the street and demand that Violet come out of that house, make a scene if she had to, for Violet’s own good. She wondered if that boy was calculating enough to use what was happening with Norah as some sort of emotional bait for her poor, unsuspecting granddaughter. Polly got the sense that Violet wasn’t exactly experienced with boys. She wasn’t aware yet of what she had, of what awaited her. Polly had been the same way at that age.

Polly stared hard at the dark shape of the house across the street, debating what to do. This boy could lure Violet in and take advantage of her. And if that happened on her watch, Norah would never forgive her. Not that Norah had a position to judge anyone right now. But if Polly knew her daughter, Norah would still find a way. She tried to choose which of them to alienate: Violet now or Norah later. She thought about Norah at fifteen, with her anger and her rebellion and her quiet seething regard for Polly. She didn’t want Violet to feel that way about Polly. But she also didn’t want Violet to be taken advantage of, forever changed by some boy who didn’t know what he held in his hands. Polly stood up and went to the bedroom to put on a sweater and shoes. Better to cause a scene more properly attired.

She was slipping her feet into flip-flops when she heard the front door open and close. She tiptoed down the hall and around the corner just in time to see Violet’s skinny ankles disappearing up the stairs, returning to her room. Polly checked the lock on the front door, made sure the alarm code was reset, and went to her own room, climbing back into bed with relief. Barney, thankfully, stayed asleep on the bed and didn’t bark at Violet’s entry as he’d done on her exit, waking Polly to the fact that her granddaughter was up to something, that this sweet, innocent child had secrets and agendas of her own. She supposed that everyone did.

Bess

October 9

She saw the news at the garden center on a TV playing behind the register. It was not one of the big chain garden centers but a small family-owned place. She preferred it, always went there first, resorting to the larger, more impersonal places only when she had to. At this store, they took the time to know her, to remember her.

“Isn’t that near your house?” the clerk asked. He knew where she lived, knew all about her soil and where the sun rose and set on her property.

She watched the words scroll across the screen: “Body Found in Remote Lake.” The footage was of the water’s edge and the standard-issue shoes of officers walking back and forth. She thought of the home invasion that had occurred last year in a nearby neighborhood, the self-defense classes she took, not because she really thought the classes would make a difference, but because she needed to feel like she was doing something to fight back. She tasted the familiar metallic fear, told herself not to panic. But it was a body, a dead person discarded in a lake. Wasn’t that cause for panic? And the clerk was right: the lake was within walking distance of her house.

She forced herself to smile at him as she took her bag of plant food in one arm and her new Monstera plant in the other. “That is near my neighborhood. But it’s not actually in it. Thank goodness!” she heard herself say brightly, as if it were some other person talking, a person who believed that as long as danger was a certain distance away, it could be kept at bay.

She put her purchases in the car and slunk behind the steering wheel, staring at the front of the garden center as she collected herself. She reached for her phone, her secret phone, and pressed Jason’s number into the keypad, hoping he would answer, hoping he was OK. She listened as it rang and rang, with no answer. She huffed and dropped the phone back into her purse. She sat quietly for a moment longer, then headed home, driving the longer way that would take her by the turnoff to the lake where the body was found, as if she might spot something from the road, something that would put her mind at ease.

She spun terrible scenarios about Jason as she drove: He had decided to do drugs again and, high,