Keep No Secrets Read online

  "She wouldn't tell me anything at first.

  Not where she'd been all this time, nothing. She wanted to go somewhere right then, but I said no. I told her I needed to get home." Claire grunts, an editorial. Jack's not sure if it's directed at him or Jenny. "But . . ." He breathes in deep. The next statement will be the hardest for her to hear, even though she's already expecting it. "I told her I'd meet with her today, and I did." Her shoulders fall.

  Everything. He needs to tell her every detail. That's what she asked.

  "I picked her up this morning from a motel in St. Charles. That's where she's been staying, I guess, I don't know how long, and we drove up to Hannibal. We sat in a café up there and talked."

  She lifts hand to her face. She still has her back to him, but he knows what she's doing. She tugs at the sheet, pulling it up.

  He reaches over to his nightstand and grabs a tissue, holds it out for her. They were on his side of the bed because he was the last one to have a cold. Claire, it seems, never gets sick. "The mother doesn't have time to be sick," she always says.

  She takes the tissue.

  He's not sure what to do. He hears the question in her head— "What did you talk about?" —but he's not sure whether to answer, since she hasn't asked it. But she said she wouldn't, didn't she? She said she wouldn't ask any questions. And he does trust her. Implicitly.

  He decides to keep talking until she tells him to stop.

  "She said someone's threatening her, that she needed my help."

  Claire whips her head around. Her eyes are narrowed. She's so angry that he leans back slightly. He hasn't been slapped, but he might as well have been.

  "God!" She's yelling, but it's under the breath so she doesn't wake the boys. Even in her anger, even in her apparent disappointment in him, she thinks of the kids. "Have you learned nothing?"

  "Yes," he says quickly. He jumps ahead so she understands he has. He really has.

  "I didn't agree to help her. I told her I'd think about it." Another grunt. "Claire, I told her that because I wasn't about to do anything without telling you, without talking to you first." She's quiet, so he adds, "That's why I'm telling you all this, don't you understand?"

  He rises and slips into the boxers he left on the floor earlier when he undressed. He moves to sit beside her.

  Surprisingly, she lets him take her hand.

  "Don't you understand?"

  She looks him straight in the eye.

  "Don't you understand? Why didn't you tell her to go to hell the minute she pounced on you?" He finds himself thinking: how interesting, Claire's choice of word, because "pounce" is almost exactly what Jenny did last night. It's the perfect description. "Why didn't you tell her to go fuck herself?"

  "Because—"

  "Don't even answer, Jack! I already know the answer, okay?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "She's like a drug to you. I know that. I get that. I thought you got it, too. I thought you understood that the only way you'd stay clean was to stay away from her."

  He looks away, shaking his head.

  "You know how I know for sure?" she asks.

  He turns to her, waiting for the

  indictment.

  "Because otherwise, you wouldn't be telling me this now, after you'd already met with her. You could have told me last night, when you got home. But you didn't, because you were afraid then you wouldn't be able to see her again."

  She sounds like a lawyer. She hasn't sounded like one in a long, long time. She was a good lawyer. She hated practicing, but she was good. She was smart, is smart, and she also has a psychological grasp of people that gave her an edge. But now he feels as if she's badgering the witness. He feels as if he came as close to telling Jenny to go to hell as was possible.

  "Look." He doesn't want to argue. He tries to remember the point of all this, of the decision to tell her. He wanted to do the right thing. He didn't want to give her any reason not to trust him. "I should have said something last night. I shouldn't have waited until after I met with her today. But you're wrong about her being a . . ." He can't even say the word drug.

  "It's over."

  Claire stares into her lap. All the fight has left her. She wants to believe him.

  He drops to one knee in front of her, almost as if he's about to propose again.

  "Claire?" She raises her eyes. "I swear to you, it's over. It has been for a very long time. I wouldn't be telling you all this if it wasn't."

  She nods slowly, and the tears let loose.

  He doesn't question if they're crocodile tears, as he did when Jenny cried. He knows they're not.

  "Okay, okay," she whispers through quiet sobs. "Okay, Jack."

  He takes her in his arms. He holds tight, eyes closed. He questions his judgment. He tries to think of what he might have done differently. What he could have done to prevent her pain.

  Because he promised himself he'd never hurt her like this again.

  He's angry, but he's not sure why, or at whom. He just feels this boiling anger inside.

  Suddenly, he knows. Suddenly it occurs to him: no matter what he did—tell Claire, not tell Claire, help Jenny, not help Jenny—he was fucked.

  And Jenny knew it, too.

  He holds her late into the night. After a while, she stops crying and simply lies against him in the dark. He thinks she might ask for the rest of the story. He thinks she'll want to know more about why Jenny feels she's being threatened, how she expects him to help. Instead, she clings to him quietly. It's as if they're both wondering what lies ahead.

  Finally, she falls asleep, but he doesn't.

  He can't.

  When he thinks she's sleeping deeply enough, he crawls from the bed, pulls on a T-shirt and heads downstairs for a drink of water. He tells himself this, but he could have cupped his hands and drank from the bathroom faucet. It'll be colder downstairs, so he stops near the landing and pulls a fleece blanket from the linen closet. It's one of Jamie's and is festooned with a repeating Spiderman pattern.

  The light under Michael's door is still on.

  He knocks gently. Michael mutters,

  "Come in."

  Michael is in front of his computer, but nothing's on the screen except the Chuck Norris desktop. Jack knows he minimized whatever was up there upon hearing the knock.

  "You still awake?" Stupid question.

  "Yeah." With a snap of his head, Michael flips his hair out of his eyes. Jack stopped trying to get him to cut it about the same time he lost his son's respect.

  Even after what happened on Saturday night, he doesn't think he's earned it back yet; he wonders if he ever will.

  Michael notices Jamie's blanket in Jack's arms. "What are you doing up?"

  Jack glances down at the blanket as if he's forgotten it. "Oh, couldn't sleep and didn't want to wake Mom." Michael stares, waiting for more. He has doubted everything his father says since the day he learned the truth. Jack nods at the computer. "What's up with you?"

  In the same way Jack reacted to

  Michael noticing the blanket, Michael acts as if he forget the computer in front of him. "Just IMing some friends. I'm getting ready to go to bed."

  Jack wishes he looked at the alarm clock, because he has no idea how late it is.

  "How is Celeste? Was everything okay when she got home?"

  Michael stills. Then, "Uh, yeah, I guess."

  "Good." Jack sighs. "Okay, then. See you at breakfast?" Sometimes Michael meets friends for coffee before school.

  Jack finds it odd that teenagers drink so much coffee nowadays, but as Michael proved on Saturday night, there are worse things they could be drinking.

  "Yeah, sure." His leg is shaking now; he's ready to have Jack gone. Someone, Celeste perhaps, waits patiently at the other end of cyberspace for him to return.

  After awkward "good nights" Jack softly closes the door.

  He tosses the blanket onto the couch on his way to the kitchen, still clinging to the fiction that he
came down for a drink.

  Claire waits until Jack leaves the room and then opens her eyes. She hears him talking to Michael. She thinks about what he told her. She thinks about what it means that Jenny has returned.

  When she first learned Jenny had run, she was surprised, but relieved. At the time, she hoped it would douse the fire Jenny stoked in him.

  And it did. For once, she saw Jack starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, Jenny was guilty of Maxine Shepard's murder. Claire saw it in his face during Alex's trial. Even as he confessed to the world he'd spent the night with a woman who wasn't his wife, causing him to become that woman's alibi, he also admitted under oath that he'd slept for a good part of that night and really couldn't be sure she'd been with him the whole time. He wouldn't have ever admitted his growing doubts to anyone—after all, Claire knows his testimony was intended to prove Jenny's innocence (not, as he'd convinced himself, to prove Alex's guilt)

  —but she could tell. Claire always found his effort a bit ironic, because it was so contrary to what he usually did in court.

  Innocent until proven guilty, not vice versa.

  A few months after the trial, after Alex had been sent to death row to wait for his attorneys to make their appeals, she silently watched Jack's nagging suspicion grow to a reluctant acceptance once he discovered the contents of the case file from Jenny's family's murder. Only then was it discovered that Maxine had been her father's mistress. At the time, some speculated that the mob had ordered a hit on Harold Dodson for his failure to pay his debts—debts he'd allegedly incurred to support that mistress. If Jenny had blamed Maxine for the murders of her parents and sister when she was a child, murders that occurred before her very eyes, then it didn't stretch the imagination to believe she would later murder that same woman in retaliation.

  Even after discovering the information about Maxine, Jack posed the issue as

  "maybe Alex isn't guilty" as opposed to

  "maybe Jenny is," but Claire knew. He choked up when he told Claire what he'd learned. He hadn't wanted to tell her, he said, because it might be "pouring salt into your wounds." But he also didn't want her to find out through the press.

  He'd tried to keep his promises by telling her, just as he was trying to do tonight.

  But still she remembers thinking, "Are you upset about what you're doing to me, or for what you think you've done to Alex?" even though she knew it was both.

  And neither.

  Because she knew, above all, he was upset over what he'd finally accepted about Jenny.

  Now, Claire imagines him downstairs in the dark, his dormant desire for Jenny to be innocent given new life. In one stroke, Jenny has managed to re-ignite a fire that Claire thought had been extinguished.

  She believes everything he's told her so far. She wonders what else Jenny said to him, and if she should ask for the rest.

  But she knows herself, too; she knows she interrupted his story for a reason.

  She rises and slips the silk camisole at the end of the bed over her head.

  She also knows what she needs to do.

  "Jack?"

  The sound of Claire's voice pierces the dark. She's coming down the stairs. How long has he been sitting there, he wonders? He pulls the blanket tighter and whispers, "I'm on the couch."

  The blue moonlight shining through the tall Palladium windows illuminates her figure. They both loved those windows when they first bought the house. She's wearing her camisole, the soft pink one that looks so good against her skin. He holds the blanket open to signal her to join him underneath it.

  When she's settled in, he takes her left hand and holds it. He plays with the rings on her finger, the one he presented when he asked her to marry him, and the one he slipped on in front of 150 people. It's cold in the room, so they're loose, and he twists them, around and around. She watches silently. He lifts the hand gently, then, and places it against his lips. He breathes in and inhales the scent of her lotion. It smells like rain.

  "This is all that matters to me. This. Us.

  I'll do whatever you want me to."

  She's quiet for a long time, as if she didn't hear him. A hoot owl whistles in the backyard; it's taken to hanging out in one of the Maple trees towering over the back deck.

  "I believe you," she says finally. The nerves in his stomach relax ever so slightly. "But there's something else that matters to you, too, I know."

  He leans back to see her face better, to protest, but she shakes her head.

  "No, no, I'm not talking about her, not in the way you're thinking." She brings her legs up, pulling her hand away to tuck her knees under the camisole. "What I mean is, the truth also matters to you.

  About her, and about Alex." She pauses.

  When he doesn't respond, she says, "Am I right?"

  "I don't know." But he does because what she said is true. It does bother him, not knowing if Alex was wrongly

  convicted. And more than anything, it bothers him about Jenny. That he simply doesn't know. That he may never know.

  "Jack?"

  He meets her eye.

  "I won't tell you to stay away from her.

  If you think she's the path to the truth, then you have to follow it."

  Jack doesn't quite believe what he hears. She sees the disbelief on his face.

  "I don't have any choice, do I? What am I going to do? Tell you she's off limits?" She laughs softly, sarcastically.

  "You'll do what you have to do, no matter what I say. If you say you're over her, then I have to trust you. I have to believe that you can find out what you need to know without betraying me again.

  But if you're not, then it doesn't matter what I say, anyway. Because I can't control what you feel."

  "What I feel is angry," he whispers.

  "I've felt angry since the moment I saw her in the tunnel."

  "Good. I hope you continue to feel angry. I hope you remember what she did to us, and whether she's innocent or not, I hope you realize what she's doing to us now, by coming back."

  "I do."

  "I hope you remember what you did to us."

  They sit in the moonlit dark, listening to the owl. He continues to rub her hand but he's barely aware of the action.

  "Let's go to bed," she says finally. She starts to rise; the blanket slips off her shoulder.

  "Claire?" Jack holds tight to her hand to stop her. Her face is wet with tears he didn't even hear her cry. "I do remember.

  I'll never forget, and I'll never forgive myself." She nods and bites her lip. She believes him, and he loves her even more for it. He only hopes she believes the next words out of his mouth, too. "You can trust me."

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MORNING AFTER Jack's

  confession, the mood in the house reminds Claire of how it felt when he first moved back in three and a half years before. She'd gained a sense of power she didn't necessarily want, and his attempts at normalcy made everything more

  awkward. But there's a difference between now and then, she's noticed. The first time, they waited for Jenny's front-and-center presence to go away. This time, she's with them in the house again, but she's lurking in the wings, and both Claire and Jack are left to wonder when she'll step back onstage.

  Jack's secretary, Beverly, peeks her head into his office and says, "Chief Matthews is on the phone."

  "Hey, Chief," Jack says good-naturedly.

  Jack and Chief Gunner Matthews aren't the best of friends—their politics are too different—but they both do a pretty good job of convincing the city that they make a good team.

  "Jack."

  Something in the Chief's voice causes Jack to sit straighter in his chair. Have they discovered that Jenny is back?

  "What's the matter, Gunner?"

  "I'm wondering if you might have time to come over to the station. There's a matter we need to talk to you about in person."

  We? "Sure, Gunner. I always have time for you. When are you thinking?"

  "Now wo
uld be best."

  When the receptionist interrupts Claire's lecture, the worry on the young woman's face makes Claire think something must be wrong with one of the kids. Once Claire steps into the hallway, the receptionist advises her that two police officers want to speak with her. Her gut twists and for an instant, she has to consciously resist losing her lunch.

  A man and a woman, both in uniform, wait for her outside the Dean's office.

  "Are my children—?"

  "Your children are fine, Mrs. Hilliard."

  She shakes their hands as they

  introduce themselves. For reasons she can't explain, she immediately dislikes the man. "Please, let's go to my office to talk."

  As she starts down the hall, she turns back to the receptionist and motions in the direction of her classroom. "You probably should just dismiss them for me."

  At five minutes before the last bell rings, Michael's chemistry teacher taps him on the shoulder and whispers that he should stop by the front office before heading to basketball practice. When he asks why, his teacher shrugs.

  At the station, the Chief greets Jack and leads him in the direction opposite his office. As they enter the corridor that houses all the interrogation rooms, Jack gives the Chief a look, as if to say Why are we going this way? The Chief ignores him and keeps walking. He stops outside one of the rooms and motions Jack in. Three cops are seated inside at a table. The Chief follows Jack in and closes the door.

  "Jack, please, take a seat. Would you like something to drink?"

  Jack eyes the Chief warily. It's the first line they always give to certain types of suspects.

  "No, thank you, I'm fine." He scans the faces of the other officers and tries to read them. To the Chief, he says, "What's going on? What do you need to talk to me about?"

  "Please, take a seat." Gunner grabs a chair for himself and lowers himself into it. Jack is the only one standing now, so he finally complies.