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It will only occur to her much later, when it’s much too late, that today was different than those other days.
Today her heart is broken.
She picks up the phone. The dial spins beneath her finger and she listens as it clicks and connects. It is very late, but that won’t matter. Not to him. Not tonight. And not when she made a promise.
If the worst comes to pass, you come to me.
Five hundred miles away, in a grand home in Egg Harbor, Roland Day looks up from his reading at the sound of the ringing phone. His body is stooped, his hair bright white and nearly gone, but these are merely the trappings of age. The qualities that made him the man he is, fierce and feared and fearsome, are qualities not dulled by the passage of time: He is still the same man who made his fortune against the law and under cover of darkness, who was known in low places and high society alike as someone you’d be wise not to cross. He is still the man who built and then rebuilt the finest damn house in Bar Harbor, raising it up like a phoenix from the ashes while softer, richer men slunk off with their tails between their legs.
He is still the man who put a bullet between the eyes of the double-crossing son of a bitch who was fixing to squeal on them to the Prohibition men back in 1928, who stuffed the body in a bag weighted with stones and pitched it overboard thirty miles off the coast.
And he is still the father of a daughter he loves with everything he has. A daughter he held in his arms on the wild night when she first came into the world, when he looked into her face and knew that he would kill any person who ever harmed her. Her pain is his pain; her heartbreak is his rage.
Miriam knows this. She fights back a sob.
“Tell me what’s happened, my girl,” her father says, and then for a long time, he says nothing else.
23.
2015
January
When I was in first grade, I learned a rhyme about secrets. We’d sit at our little desks and chant it in unison, clapping on the first and third beat like cheerleaders.
Secrets, secrets, are no fun!
Secrets, secrets, hurt someone!
I always thought it was funny, because the secrets of your average six-year-old are nothing special. Usually they’re not even secrets. When your best friend cups a hand to your ear and whispers that Marybeth Bell’s new haircut looks like a porcupine butt, it’s not like she’s telling you something you don’t know. It’s not secrecy but intimacy that makes it magic—the way your friend’s breath tickles your ear, the way you laugh together afterward until someone asks what’s so funny, and you both say, “Nothing,” and then start laughing even harder. The sharing of whispered confidences that sets you apart from the rest ofthe world. Being inside that circle of trust was glorious, and being outside was a cold and lonely hell, and that was the lesson we were supposed to learn: not to tell secrets, or at least not in front of other people, because it hurt to be excluded.
But as I looked from my mother to Jack Dyer and back, as the wordsHe’s my brotherhung in the air, I felt that stupid rhyme echoing in my head. Only I knew now that what really tore people apart wasn’t telling secrets.
It was keeping them.
Jack went home then, declining the offer of both a fresh shirt and any part in the conversation to come. I felt him watching me warily as he left, as if I might throw something else at him. I thought that I ought to apologize, but thinking was as far as I got. The embarrassment and confusion were paralyzing. I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to. And what would I say?Sorry for hitting you in the face with a coffee, but I thought you were a thief and a murderer—for which I am also, incidentally, sorry, except that I’m still pretty sure you’re guilty of something, even if it’s just being a general creep. Instead, I stared at my shoes, studiously not looking at Jack and my mother as they said goodbye. Now that I knew the truth, the vibe between them couldn’t have been more obviously nonsexual. I couldn’t believe I’d let Richard convince me that she might be dating him, let alone plotting with him.
My mother couldn’t believe it, either. As Jack’s truck pulled away outside, she settled next to me on the couch, sighed, and gave me a bewildered look. “Dear lord, Delphine,” she said. “Did you really think I was seeing him? Romantically? How in the world?”
I kept my eyes on my feet, my cheeks burning. “I don’t know. It’s not like you’d tell me if you were, right?”
She looked thoughtful. “All right,” she said slowly. “Maybe I’ve been a little closemouthed about that part of my life. I decided early on that I wouldn’t introduce you to anyone unless it got serious enoughthat I was thinking about marriage again, which none of them ever did. So . . .” She trailed off and winced. “Look, Jack’s not a bad man. But for god’s sake, I’ve never been that desperate.”
I laughed a little, and so did she, and the tension in the room lifted by half a degree.
“And that would be true even if we weren’t related,” she added.
“Are you going to tell me about that?”
“Yes, I’m going to tell you everything.”
It was Mimi who had triggered my mother’s suspicions, on the day she’d come back to the Whispers.That’s Shelly’s room, she’d said, but it wasn’t all she said; when Mom helped Mimi into the bed that day, in the moment before she fell asleep, she’d suddenly gone wide-eyed and grabbed her by the arm.
“He was hiding inside the wall,” she’d said, her voice low and urgent. “I should have known. I should have known, because the baby was screaming.”
If it had been me, I would have dismissed this as spooky but meaningless, just like the old songs Mimi sometimes sang under her breath. Like her trip to the moon or the man with the brown teeth: just a scrap of flotsam briefly surfacing from the depths of her memory, maybe a snippet of some scary old story she’d once read about a haunted house. But my mother knew better because she’d been there. She was the screaming baby, waking to the sound of her father’s footsteps as he sneaked past her nursery and down the stairs.
“I’d always suspected that things weren’t wonderful between them when my father died,” my mother said. “She’d had such a difficult pregnancy, and I wasn’t an easy baby—it puts a lot of stress on a marriage. But once I realized that my father had an affair with Shelly, I realized there was also a good chance he was the father of her child. It’s why I hid those photos.”
