Secrets Read online

  That thought made her wake up! She checked on the man on the couch, and he seemed to look sleepy. He’d made a trip to the bathroom, but other than that, he hadn’t moved, so maybe he’d fall asleep and Cassie…She didn’t know if she’d push out the taped window she’d used to get in, or run for the front door.

  Her leg was going to sleep, so she quietly changed her position and pushed the sleeve of a flannel shirt out of her face. When she moved her foot, the heel of her shoe scraped across a board that protruded from the floor of the wardrobe. Smiling, Cassie remembered the time she and Brent had been excited about seeing the armoire used in Althea’s movie about the detective. The Twenty-sixth of December , she thought. The all-important journal had been hidden under the boards.

  More to keep herself awake than because she thought something would be there, Cassie squashed herself into a corner and pulled at the loose board. She got a splinter in her fingertip when she tried to lift it, but she kept pulling.

  When it came up, she smiled in accomplishment, then started to put it back, but on impulse, she cautiously put her hand into the dark hole. She was ready to snatch it back out if she felt anything slimy or moving.

  But the hole was just a big empty space and seemed to have nothing in it. She was about to give up when her hand touched something. It felt like stiff paper. It wasn’t easy to maneuver herself so she could get hold of it, but she did. She pulled it out and knew what it was as soon as she had her hand fully around it. It was a computer CD in a white paper sleeve. It was her guess that someone had once used the hole as a hiding place, but when they’d cleaned it out, this disk had stuck and been left behind. Smiling, and feeling a sense of achievement, she tucked the disk into her bra. Reaching her trouser pocket would entail standing up, and she couldn’t risk the noise.

  Cassie sat back against the wall of the wardrobe and didn’t know whether to be happy or terrified. Of course the disk could just contain some ordinary files, but if so, why hide? She leaned forward to peer in the mirror to see the man. He looked wide awake, fascinated by whatever show was on TV.

  Cassie was so absorbed in looking at the man that when she saw the hand at the window, she almost screamed. It took her several seconds to calm down. She knew the hand well. It was Jeff’s.

  He had cut away the tape the man had put over the window and was trying to get her attention. But how did he know she was in the closet? she wondered, but then she knew. He’d seen the ladder that was still outside, and which he was standing on, then he’d looked inside the cabin and seen that, other than the bathroom, the only place she could hide was inside the wardrobe.

  She desperately wanted to signal to him, but she couldn’t open the door even an inch or the man would see the movement. But if she didn’t signal Jeff she was afraid he’d leave and she’d be caught. And sent to jail. Or worse!

  When the man got up to go to the kitchen to get yet another beer, Cassie nearly burst into tears of happiness. She opened the door a few inches and put her face to it so Jeff could see her, then she closed the door again. She did not want to think about the expression Jeff had been wearing.

  It was less than a minute before she heard a car alarm go off, and then the man jumped up and ran out the door. Cassie was out of the wardrobe and at the window in a split second. Jeff had the window open, and he wasn’t gentle when he pulled her through it. He grabbed the waistline of her trousers and hauled her out, catching her in his arms as he stood her on the ground. The man’s car alarm was still going off so loudly that she knew that if she said anything, she’d have to shout, so she stood in silence as Jeff angrily tore off strips of tape from the roll he held and covered up the hole in the window. If the man looked at it he’d see that this tape had been put on from the outside, but Cassie guessed that as long as wind and mosquitoes didn’t come into the room, the man wouldn’t look behind the curtain.

  When he finished, Jeff picked up the ladder in one hand and grabbed Cassie’s arm in the other, then they took off running toward their cabin.

  13

  “ DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEAwhat you put me through?” Jeff said. He was so angry that veins were standing out on his temples. They were back in their cabin. Cassie was sitting on the couch, Jeff was looming over her, pacing, and telling her in loud detail what he thought of her escapade. “Cassie, I have always thought of you as a sane and sensible person. If I didn’t think you were, I wouldn’t have let you take care of my child.”

  She wanted to remind him of the idiot nannies he’d hired before her, but she thought better of it and kept her mouth closed. Even from her limited experience she knew that angry men recovered more quickly when they were allowed to blow off steam.

  She and Jeff were alone, and she wondered where Brent and Skylar were, and if he’d sent them away.

  “I guessed where you were,” he said. “I remembered that you suggested that I break into that man’s cabin, so it came to my mind that that’s what you’d done. But I thought no, that couldn’t be possible. Not sweet little Cassie. Not the cookie-baking Cassie who everyone depends on. Not the Cassie who takes care of everyone, who is reliable and trustworthy. Not that Cassie breaking and entering into some man’s house, hiding in a wardrobe and spying on him.”

  Cassie put her arms over her chest and she couldn’t help it, as her bottom lip stuck out. He certainly made her sound boring. Cookie-baking? Trustworthy? Reliable? Is that how he saw her? No wonder he was taken in by someone like Skylar. No wonder he’d never made a pass at Cassie.

  “Would you mind telling me what you were doing in there? What did you think you would find? A bundle of jewels from a robbery that happened over twenty years ago?”

  “Leo,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Leo,” she said louder. “I thought Leo was staying there and I thought I could find out something about him. I told you he wasn’t who he seemed to be.”

  Jeff’s face drained of color. “You thought Leo Norton was a person who was…What was it you said? Bad? You thought he was a bad person, yet you went snooping around where you thought he was and searching through his belongings?”

  Jeff seemed to be so overcome with the enormity of it all that he sat down on a chair as though he weighed hundreds of pounds.

  “I told you that Leo said he was leaving at fiveP.M ., so I thought I was safe in searching his cabin,” Cassie said.

  “For your information—which I would have told you if you’d asked—Leo wasn’t staying in any of the cabins. I don’t know where he was staying. He just came in for the day.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought that since you’d told me about the cabin and Leo was here that that’s where he was staying.”

  “And where he was hiding the jewels, I guess.” Jeff wiped his hand across his face. “Cassie, you don’t seem to realize how dangerous what you did was. If I hadn’t found you, what would have happened?”

  “That man was on his seventh or eighth beer, and eventually, he would have fallen asleep and I would have climbed back out the window.” She knew that Jeff was running down. It was funny, she thought, how one person could bawl you out and you’d be terrified, but another person could do it and you’d just have to wait for him to finish. With Jeff, she didn’t have the least bit of fear. But then, Cassie knew she had an advantage over other people: she’d been terrorized by the best. All her life, her mother had told her that whatever she’d done was wrong. In the rare times that Margaret Madden visited her daughter in the country house, there was nothing that escaped the woman’s attention and nothing that she didn’t find fault with.

  And every word out of her mother’s mouth had terrified Cassie. Right now, Cassie realized that the difference between her mother and Jeff was that he wasn’t going to hurt her. Jeff cared. He was a man who loved people very, very hard. He wasn’t a man who punished and ridiculed, as Margaret Madden did.

  Cassie hung her head and let Jeff say what he wanted to, but she wasn’t upset that he was yelling at her. She coul