Little Secrets Read online

  Ginny shook her head. “Nothing bad. I don’t want you to think that. They’ve been playing in the yard, but—”

  “Carson James Wood! Kelly Madison Wood! What did I tell you about that?”

  In his high-chair prison, Carter let out a longer, louder wail and pounded his fists until Kendra scooped him out with a sigh. Plunked on her hip, the baby stopped crying out loud, though the silent tears of outrage still coursed down his fat little cheeks. His mother kept her attention on the other two.

  “But, Mama…”

  “Don’t you ‘but Mama’ me. I told you both to stay in our yard… Oh God.” She turned to Ginny. “Were they down by the creek? They were down by the creek, weren’t they?”

  “I don’t…know,” Ginny hedged, annoyed as she’d been by their repeated trespassing, but not willing to send the kids down the river, so to speak. Yet she also felt something like a mother’s kinship with Kendra, like there was some sort of code she’d be breaking if she didn’t take the mother’s side. “And really, it’s okay. I know the leaves can be tempting. And honestly, if my husband actually put them in bags instead of just raking them into piles, they probably wouldn’t even be tempted to come over and jump in them. Right, guys?”

  Kelly’s eyes had gone wide, her lower lip atremble. She shook her head. “We were looking for the little girl. We were leaving her snacks because she’s—”

  Carson elbowed her. “Shhh!”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Kendra clapped a hand to her forehead. Behind her, the kettle started to whistle. “Both of you. To your rooms. I don’t want to hear it,” she said before either of them could protest. “Go. Now!”

  She turned off the burner with one hand, twisting her body expertly to keep the baby away from the heat. She took a couple of mugs from the cupboard and put them in front of Ginny, then a small box of loose tea bags. Finally, the kettle, which she also kept far away from the baby. She put the kettle on a trivet and took the seat across from Ginny.

  “I’d pour,” she said, “but this guy here has grabby hands.”

  “I can get it,” Ginny assured her. “What would you like?”

  Kendra shook her head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  An awkward silence fell as Ginny prepared the tea, but only for a couple seconds because Kendra snagged a cookie and bit into it. “Oh wow. Fantastic! No, baby boy, not for you.” She grinned at Ginny. “He’s nursing, doesn’t even have a tooth yet, but he keeps trying to get at our food. Monkey see, monkey do. I guess that’s how it is for the youngest.”

  “I guess so.” Ginny dunked a tea bag and let it steep, then took a cookie. The dinner she hadn’t eaten seemed delicious now.

  “How many do you have? I mean, is this your first?”

  “Ah…” Ginny paused, caught off guard though she knew she shouldn’t be. It was a complicated question with a simple answer. “Yes. Our first. But my sister has six, so I’ve got my auntie card.”

  “Not the same as having your own, let me tell you that.” Kendra blew out a breath and looked tired again. “When you can’t give ’em back…”

  Another few seconds of strained silence. Ginny sipped her tea. Kendra bounced Carter on her knee.

  “I am sorry about Kelly and Carson,” she said finally. “I’ve told them to stay out of your yard. I don’t want them down by the creek. I know it’s not deep or anything, but kids can drown in just a few inches of water, you know? And besides, they shouldn’t be in your yard. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, really.” Hearing Kendra apologize over and over made it harder for Ginny to be irritated by the kids coming through the hedge. “Really, they mostly just jump in the leaves.”

  She thought about mentioning the stones they’d tossed at the house, the noise of their shrieking, the offerings they left in the window well, but in the end decided that would just get them into trouble and make her sound like exactly the sort of cranky neighbor she didn’t want to become known as. Besides, she reasoned, someday not so far in the future she might have the kid who ran into the neighbors’ yards and did naughty things.

  “Still. I’m sorry. It’s just that they’re sort of obsessed with it.”

  Ginny’s brow furrowed. “The house?”

  “Yeah. Your house. My husband, Clark…” Kendra sighed and shook her head. “Men. They can be such idiots, right?”

  “Umm…sure. Right.”

  Kendra laughed a little. “Yeah. Anyway, Clark was trying to get them into bed one night when I was out with some of my girlfriends for ladies’ movie night… Oh hey, you should totally come! Stacy from down the street, that blue Colonial on the corner? They fixed up their basement pretty nice, big-screen TV and stuff, and her husband likes to have the guys over for poker and beer and sports or whatever, so she told him if he was going to do that, she was having chick-flick-and-wine nights, and it’s been great. Maybe your husband would be interested?”

  “In…chick flicks and wine?” It took her a second, but she laughed once she caught up to Kendra’s train of thought. “Oh. Sports and poker. He might be. I don’t know. He’s pretty busy.”

  “Oh. Travels a lot? I thought I saw that he was gone a lot. Not,” Kendra said, “that I’m a Sneaky Pete or anything, just that, you know, you guys being the new neighbors and all, in that house, we just all wondered what sort of people you were.”

  This pricked at Ginny’s ears. “That house? What do you mean?”

  “Oh…just that most of these places in the neighborhood have sold two, three, four times over in the past few years. I mean, we’ve been in here…five? Yeah, five years. And we’re old-timers. But Mr. Miller from next door, he built that house before he got married. It was one of the first in the development. And he was the only owner. Until now, you guys. That’s all I mean.” Kendra looked vaguely guilty. “I mean, it’s not like someone died in the house or anything.”

  Something in the way Kendra said it sent up a flare. Ginny leaned forward. “They told us he died in the hospital.”

  “Oh, he did, he did, totally,” Kendra assured her. From upstairs came the sneaky, sly sliding of feet. “You’d better be in your rooms!”

  The noises stopped. Carter giggled suddenly, as though pleased by his siblings’ punishment. Kendra chucked him under the chin.

  Ginny’s head spun a little from trying to keep track of Kendra’s conversation, but then she was used to Sean’s mom, who was the queen of non sequiturs. “So…your husband?”

  “Is an idiot? What?” Kendra laughed again, looking confused.

  “He was trying to get them to go to bed…?”

  “Oh, right, right. Yeah, so he was trying to get them into bed, and he told them that if they didn’t go to sleep, he was going to tell the ghost next door about them, and she’d come over and get them.” Kendra’s mouth twisted, her smile rueful. “Like I said, he’s an idiot. Those kids didn’t sleep for a week.”

  Noises in the walls.

  Cold spots.

  “A girl…with dark hair…like yours when you were small.”

  “The…ghost?”

  Kendra laughed again. “Oh, he just made that up. It’s not true at all. I mean…” she looked suddenly doubtful. “It’s just that Mr. Miller’s daughter, Caroline. Well. You know about her, right?”

  “I don’t.” Ginny sipped more tea and took another cookie, suddenly ravenous.

  “Oh. Well, she went missing when she was about fourteen or so. They never found her, so far as I know.” Kendra’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Her expression suggested she was both disturbed and solemn with the responsibility of being the one to share this story, but her gaze told a different, gleeful truth. “Mr. Miller had an older son, Brendan. He’d be the one who sold you the house, right?”

  “Right. Yes.”

  “You know he built it himself? Old Mr. Miller?”

  “I did