Little Secrets Read online

  Ginny laughed and let out a low, groaning ghost noise.

  “Stop it, Ginny.”

  “Where’s my golden arrrrrrm?” Ginny moaned, bringing back the old ghost story that always ended with screams. “Where’s my—”

  “You’re a jerk!”

  Still laughing, Ginny squeezed the lighter’s trigger and headed for the fuse box. Inside, a flash of orange showed her exactly which switch had been tripped. She clicked it over to the right position.

  Three things happened at the same time.

  One, the furnace kicked on with a whoosh and a flash of blue light. Two, a hulking figure loomed up from around the wall at the bottom of the stairs. And three, Ginny dropped the lighter and plunged them into blackness.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Peg shrieked; Ginny did too, more in response to her sister’s scream than her own fear. In the dark, something shuffled in front of them. The shadows shifted. Ginny reacted instantly, hands fisting, then pistoning out as the dark shape got within reach.

  She connected with something soft and felt the familiar skid of corduroy against her hand, but too late—her other fist was striking like she thought she was some sort of Muhammad Ali. Only the sting like a bee part, though, no floating like a butterfly. She’d punched her husband in the face, and he went down to the concrete floor with a muffled shout.

  She knew it was Sean because of the jacket and the sound of his muffled grunt, and because, who else would have come down the stairs to find her? With Peg still hollering and Sean letting out a few choice words of his own, Ginny tried to think about how far she was from the dangling light cord and if she dared risk trying to find it.

  “Shut up, everyone!” she shouted. “Peg, it’s Sean. Sean, honey, are you okay?”

  “You busted me in the eye!”

  “I’m sorry.” She bit back a laugh, her hands still out, still blind, though now she could make out things a little better in the faint blue light from the furnace pilot light. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

  Sean got to his feet, more of a felt presence than seen. “What happened to the light?”

  “I dropped it. Can you find the cord?” Ginny didn’t dare move.

  Peg had stopped screaming but her breath was shuddery and she was clutching Ginny’s arm so hard she was going to leave a bruise. Peg was lucky Ginny hadn’t punched her in the face with that roundhouse strike, and the thought of it made Ginny laugh all the harder. It was terrible, and her laughter definitely had a sobbing edge to it, but there it was.

  “Hold on. Don’t move,” Sean said.

  In the next minute, the light from the bare bulb blinded them. Ginny winced. Peg let out a mutter of gratitude. Sean put his hands on his hips and glared at them both.

  “The fuck were you doing down here?”

  “The circuit breaker popped again,” Ginny said.

  “You should’ve waited for me to fix it.”

  “Uh…look, I really need to get going,” Peg said.

  Silence. Ginny’s sister hugged her and patted Sean’s shoulder. She gave Ginny a sympathetic look but ducked away, up the stairs, leaving her alone. Ginny couldn’t blame her, really. The temperature in the basement had dropped by about fifty degrees at Sean’s statement, and it had nothing to do with the furnace.

  He waited until the sound of Peg’s footsteps upstairs went out the front door. “You can’t be coming down here in the dark, Ginny.”

  “What was I supposed to do, sit and wait for you to get home? I thought you had class tonight anyway.”

  “It was cancelled.”

  She made a face. “And…you told me that? I was supposed to just somehow intuit it? I should’ve just waited upstairs in the dark and the cold for you to get home?”

  “You could’ve sent Peg down here—”

  Ginny pushed past him, heading for the stairs. “It’s my house, not hers. I wasn’t going to ask my sister to fix my circuit breaker. Besides, it’s not like I’m stupid.”

  “I never said you were stupid,” he told her in the kitchen when he caught up to her. “Hey. Stop. Look at me.”

  She did, glaring.

  “I was worried when I got home and you weren’t here. That’s all. I worry.”

  She softened a little toward him. Just a little. “I was fine. If you hadn’t come down just then, it would’ve been even better.”

  His smile quirked. “I really scared the shit out of Peg, huh?”

  “No kidding. I’m surprised she didn’t pee herself.” Ginny smiled too.

  “Why didn’t you use a flashlight, at least?”

  “Why didn’t you?” she pointed out and waited for him to get it.

  “I didn’t have… Ah.”

  Ginny lifted a brow and made a show of peering around the arched doorway into the dining room. “Yeah. We have one, huh? Right?”

  “I think so.” Sean sighed. “You want me to unpack those boxes.”

  “It would be nice. C’mon, we can do it together. You can lift all the heavy things. I’ll tell you where they go.” She smiled again, watching his face work as he tried to think of a way to get out of the task.

  “Fine.” He sighed again. “Fine, fine, fine.”

  But though they unpacked four or five boxes and even managed to shift the furniture around at least sort of the way she wanted it to stay permanently, they found no flashlights. She did convince Sean he needed to run the vacuum cleaner, though, to get up all the bits and pieces of packing paper and dust that had been inevitably kicked up.

  “It’s way too strenuous,” she told him with a very wicked grin as she plopped onto the couch with a book in her hand. “You really should do it.”

  Grumbling, Sean looked like he meant to argue, but wisely thought better of it. He plugged in the vacuum, a pricey model he’d given her as a gift one year for her birthday—her birthday, for the love of all things holy! Which she’d never really let him live down.

  The instant he toed the On switch, the lights went out.

  “Shit,” Sean said.

  In the dark, Ginny laughed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Let me go first. You’re gonna love it, I know it. Happy anniversary.” Sean pressed a square package into Ginny’s hands and stepped back with a grin. “Go on. Open it.”

  She studied the wrapping carefully. She loved surprises. Loved getting presents. And though they’d both agreed that this year they wouldn’t spend any money on each other for their anniversary since they’d just moved into the house, she’d been unable to help herself from buying him something she knew, absolutely knew he wanted. This package in her hands was just the right size for an iPad, which she’d been none too subtly hinting she wanted since her last birthday, when he’d presented her with a vacuum cleaner instead.

  Ginny smoothed her fingers over the paper, enjoying the anticipation but feigning concern. “I thought we said we weren’t going to do anything for each other.”

  “I know, I know, but I saw this and knew you had to have it. Go on,” Sean said. “Open it up. Let’s see.”

  So she did, sliding her fingers beneath the tape and pretending she meant to fold back the paper in one piece, the way she knew drove him crazy, because Sean liked to tear into gifts and leave the wrapping strewn all over in shreds. She laughed when he danced forward to take it from her, holding it back and away.

  “Mine,” she told him, and ripped the paper while holding her breath with excitement.

  She had to stare at what was inside for a full minute before she remembered to let out the breath. Then another, her eyes not quite connecting with her brain. The paper slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers and drifted to the floor where Sean crunched it under his feet as he shifted to lean over her shoulder.

  “See? You plug it in and it charges up automatically. You can set it to act like a night-light