Little Secrets Read online

It wasn’t like Kendra was the queen of keeping an eye on her children, Ginny thought uncharitably at the sight of Kendra’s panicked expression. Still, having once misplaced Luke in a department store when she was supposed to be taking him to pick out a birthday present for Peg, Ginny knew the rush of panic. She put a hand on Kendra’s arm.

  “We’ll find them. They have to be in the house somewhere. Right?”

  Kendra nodded, looking doubtful. She pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and pressed a few numbers. “Clark. Are the kids there with you? No, not Carter, I know he’s there. No, well…they didn’t go with you? No,” she snapped. “They’re not missing. They’re just…they’re here somewhere. I just wanted to make sure they hadn’t gone with you before I started hollering for them. Yes, we’ll be home soon. Just put him in the crib, for God’s sakes! Give him a bottle, whatever!”

  She disconnected and gave Ginny an embarrassed shrug. “You’d think he’d never put the kid to bed before.”

  “We’ll find them,” Ginny repeated so she didn’t have to comment on Kendra’s marital discord. God knows, Ginny shouldn’t judge. “Let’s look upstairs.”

  Sean had come back inside the house, his nose and cheeks flushed pink with cold. He smelled of smoke. Ginny pulled her husband aside to explain the situation. He didn’t get it, she saw that clearly enough.

  “I’m going to take Kendra upstairs and check around. Keep an eye out down here.”

  “Carson!” Kendra cried, because at that moment her son ambled out of the dining room with a cookie in each hand and chocolate around his mouth. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Where’s your sister?”

  “Don’t know.” Carson lifted a cookie to his mouth but didn’t bite it. He looked suddenly alarmingly green. “Don’t feel good.”

  Oh hell no, Ginny thought. “Bathroom’s down the hall.”

  God help Kendra if her son puked all over Ginny’s brand-new area rug, she thought, but Kendra at least had this part of parenting down. She hustled Carson down the hall so fast he dropped both cookies before he could toss them. The bathroom door slammed behind them.

  Ginny looked at Sean. “I’ll go look upstairs.”

  He lifted his eyes to the ceiling at the sound of pattering footsteps. “Someone’s up there.”

  Running. Back and forth along the hall and in the baby’s room. Also the library. Ginny and Sean tracked the noises with their eyes for a minute before she gestured at the fallen cookies. “Can you get that? I’ll be back.”

  He looked first surprised, then annoyed, but said nothing as he bent to clean up the crumbled mess. Ginny left him to it, not interested in an argument, though his response had rubbed along her skin like a shark’s scales being stroked the wrong direction. She climbed the stairs with one hand on the railing to help heave her bulk along, and by the time she reached the top she had to stop and catch her breath.

  She flicked the switch on the wall, but the ceiling fixture stayed dark. Colored light from the outside Christmas bulbs came in through the window facing the street, but it was filtered even further by the stained glass. Some other light drifted into the hall from the bathroom night-light, but that was it.

  Shadows moved, whispering and giggling. The patter of feet slapped the floor beyond the railing across from her and slipped around the corner into the nursery. The door shut with a click, cutting off the childish laughter.

  “Kelly?” Ginny put her left hand on the railing, but didn’t move toward the nursery.

  She could go to the left, past the bathroom and her bedroom, to get there, or she could go to the right and pass the library. The door was closed there too. If Kelly came out of the nursery, she could jog either left or right and avoid Ginny altogether, depending which way she ran. Ginny didn’t feel like chasing her, especially not in the dark. As she hesitated, her decision was made for her.

  The door to the library opened, and Kelly tumbled into the hallway on a couple stumbling steps before she stopped with her back to Ginny.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Ginny put out a hand to snag the girl’s dress. “I’m right here.”

  Kelly whirled with a shriek that startled Ginny into echoing it. Her scream scared Kelly into another wail, and the girl ran back into the library. Ginny managed to gather her wits, though, and pursued her. The light in this room worked, though both of them put their hands up against the sudden brightness when she turned it on.

  “Enough,” Ginny snapped, her patience worn thin by the unpleasantly behaved neighbor children. “Kelly, stop it.”

  Kelly’s screams trailed into a whimper. Her terror faded visibly, though at the sight of Ginny’s face, her eyes widened and she looked like she might start to sob instead of scream. “You scareded me!”

  “You scared me too. You shouldn’t be running around up here in the dark, especially alone.”

  “I’m not alone. I’m playing with the little girl.”

  “Which little girl? From the party? What did she look like?”

  Kelly looked evasive. “Umm…she has dark hair.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know her name, I think it’s Carrie.”

  Ginny froze. Her gaze narrowed as her heart set up a quickened, nervous thumping in her wrists and the base of her throat. “It’s not nice to tell stories that aren’t true, Kelly.”

  “I’m not telling stories.” Kelly looked chastened, but unrepentant. She scuffed at the floor with one of her patent-leather shoes. “Carson quit with us because he wanted some more cookies, but she kept playing.”

  “Kelly,” Ginny said warningly. “Don’t make me tell your mom that you were lying to me.”

  “But I’m not! I was playing with the little girl, I was. You can ask her yourself!”

  Ginny looked around the room, half expecting to see a floating ghostly form. “Where is she?”

  Kelly looked shifty-eyed again and shuffled her feet. “She probably ran away.”

  “Where would she go?”

  “I don’t know.” Kelly shrugged.

  “She was in here with you? Playing hide and seek?”

  Kelly nodded, looking a little relieved that Ginny’s tone had gone a little softer. “Yeah, she was hiding in the cubby, and I found her, but she ran through.”

  “In the…” Stunned, Ginny looked toward the small door set into the wall. There was another identical door in the nursery, but she hadn’t known the storage space connected the rooms.

  It made sense, of course, but another surge of irritation rose. The one peek she’d taken had shown her a slanted, narrow space with nails sticking through the roof and a gap in the floorboards under the eaves, stuffed with insulation. Not the place to be running and playing.

  “Where is she now, Kelly?”

  “I don’t know, I told you, she ran through…”

  The girl kept talking for a minute or so, but Ginny was looking past her to the easel and paints she’d set up weeks ago and had been ignoring ever since. The painting on the easel had only been a few strokes, just a couple blobs of color and some light pencil sketching. She hadn’t touched it since then, or even looked at it. But one thing Ginny knew for sure—she most definitely had not been finger-painting.

  Anger, real anger now, instead of just annoyance, bubbled out of her. Stalking past the sniffling child, Ginny looked at the painting. Jaw set, she glared at Kelly.

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t…I mean, me and Carson…and the little girl…”

  “Why would you touch this? What made you think this would be okay, to go into someone else’s house and touch their stuff?” Ginny snapped a hand toward the mess on her canvas.

  Someone had streaked it with color in broad, thick lines. There was a pattern to it, but no shape, no form. It wasn’t a painting that meant