Little Secrets Read online

  This time, a dead mouse hit her in the face.

  She knew what it was at once, the desiccated corpse with its remnants of fur and dried worm of a tail. She was already crying out in revulsion, not fear, as it bounced off her mouth—oh God, her mouth!—and hit the floor without a noise. Ginny flailed and clutched first at the shelf for support, but the section she grabbed shifted and moved, tipping under the sudden weight of her fist. Something deeper toward the back moved and shifted too, but she lost sight of it as the section slid off its supports and cracked against the light fixture, first blotting the light into shadow and then distinguishing it entirely when the filaments in the bulb broke.

  She fell.

  Ginny braced herself for the pain of hitting the floor with her ass but managed to save herself, just a little, by stepping backwards and landing on one foot. Her ankle twisted, and she’d have gone all the way down except that the closet was too narrow to allow her the space. She hit the wall with her shoulder instead and left a small dent in the plaster.

  With another shuddering cry of disgust, Ginny pushed backwards out of the closet. Panting, she spat the taste, real or imagined, of dead mouse and didn’t dare lick her lips or scrub at her mouth with her bare hands. She got to her feet and went to the hall bathroom, where she washed her hands several times under the hottest water she could stand, then scrubbed her mouth.

  Mouth dripping, face still twisted from the gross-out, Ginny caught sight of her reflection. Her throat worked—she wasn’t sure if she meant to cry again until a deep, low and grinding clutch of laughter pushed past her lips.

  Oh God. Oh gross.

  Now she was even more happy Barb hadn’t come over to help, because if she’d come across a dead mouse in any form, especially one that had touched her face, she’d have gone catatonic and had to be sedated. As it was, Ginny half thought she might puke, but a few sips of water settled her. So did some breathing.

  It wasn’t the mouse itself, since it was harmless and sad, a caricature of a rodent that had been squashed flat by some chasing tomcat’s mallet. It must’ve died in the closet and dehydrated or mummified. No, it was the fact it had landed on her mouth, her lips… Ginny shuddered and washed her face again.

  Of all the gross things that had ever happened to her, including the dead squirrel, she thought this might be the worst. And as far as unexpected contact with deceased rodents went, Ginny’d had her lifetime allotment. Still, the trauma was fading by the time she finished in the bathroom and went back to the baby’s room to gather up the poor thing and dispose of it along with all the dirty paper towels.

  That task finished, it would’ve been easy enough for her to abandon the rest of the closet cleaning for another day. Her ankle hurt, though it didn’t seem to be swelling, and her heart was still beating a little too fast. Her head felt a little spinny. But if she didn’t finish now, she wasn’t sure who would.

  Plus…something had moved when the shelf shifted. A box, she thought. Or a suitcase. Something solid, definitely not any kind of dead thing. At least she hoped not.

  The light bulb in the fixture hadn’t shattered, thank God, so she didn’t have to clean up or explain broken glass. But she had no idea where to get another one in the mess of boxes downstairs. She’d have to take one from another fixture, though they too were burned out, she discovered when she pulled the chain in the other two bedroom closets, wondering what might be lurking on their shelves. Finally, she took the one from her bedroom closet, mentally adding light bulbs to the list that never seemed to get any shorter.

  Finally, light bulb replaced, stool settled firmly on the floor so it wouldn’t tip, Ginny climbed up again to look at what was on the shelf. It was a suitcase, what her gran had called a “train case.” Her mom had used one as a makeup case when Ginny was small. Hers had a mirror inside and a removable shelf to separate the top from the bottom. It was blue and bore the initials of some dead aunt.

  This case was of a similar size. Olive green, though the dust on it meant the color might indeed be brighter. Ginny pulled it gingerly toward her, careful not to tip this section of shelf in case it was as unsecured as its neighbor had been. The bulb she’d replaced was brighter than its predecessor, bright enough to chase away all the shadows even in the farthest depths of the closet. Even so, she was so focused on the case that she didn’t notice the bones until she’d taken it by the handle and was half-turned to step down from the stool.

  Tiny piles of bones, at least three, with some random bones scattered in between. Tiny skulls with long teeth. Beside the piles, tucked a little farther back on the shelf and on the opposite side of where she’d found the mouse, the light glinted off several plastic sandwich bags with misshapen forms inside them. Fur, bones, the spread of what must’ve once been the goo of blood and other fluids but which time had dried.

  The smell, she thought, must’ve been atrocious.

  Carefully, she got down to set the case in the middle of the bedroom. Then, armed with the garbage bag and paper towels, the bottle of cleanser close by, she scraped the first pile of bones toward her. She had to stand on her tiptoes to get to the last set. Again, she wished for rubber gloves when her fingertips touched the plastic, and she half expected it to stick to the shelf, but the bags slid without resistance. Hamsters, she thought with a glance inside. Orange and white fur.

  She put everything in the garbage bag and went back to the bathroom to scrub her hands. Then she took the garbage bag outside and stuffed it in the can. Back upstairs, she finished cleaning the shelf until the entire length of it, every section, gleamed with the cleanser and the closet smelled of nothing but vinegar.

  Chapter Ten

  Ginny told Sean about the case, though not about the bones or the dead mouse, or falling off the step stool. She did tell him about the light bulb, since he was sure to notice the one missing in their closet, though all she said was that it had burned out, not that it had broken. She tempered her disclosure over a full dinner of roast beef she’d done in the Crock-Pot with some onion-soup mix and a little red wine, baked potatoes, a nice salad decorated with dried cranberries and almonds and a sprinkling of bleu cheese. Plus, she waited until his mouth was full before she told him she’d found something while cleaning, so by the time he’d chewed and swallowed she could focus the conversation on the discovery and not her actions during it.

  “It was there for a long time,” she told him, picking at her own salad. It had seemed like a good idea to make it with all the extras, but she’d become so sensitive to smells and flavors that everything was jumbling together in a sensory overload. “It’s a girl’s case, though. So I don’t think it belonged to the owner or his son.”

  “How do you know it belonged to a girl?” Sean speared another fork of meat. He sighed as he chewed, closing his eyes briefly in an almost-sexual expression of delight.

  It amused her, that expression. She knew him so well, after all this time, it felt almost unfair to be so manipulative at keeping his attention directed on something else. But only almost.

  “Because,” she said with a point of her fork toward him, “it just is. Boys don’t use train cases. The kind with a liner and a mirror and stuff inside.”

  He drank slowly from his glass of wine, savoring it with another of those sighs. Despite an occasional craving, Ginny wasn’t a big wine drinker, but he made it seem so delicious her mouth watered in envy. Of course that was her way, wanting what she couldn’t have, even though she knew she wouldn’t like it if she got it.

  “They could,” he said.

  She laughed a little, though it faded quickly when she thought of the tiny skeletons, corpses that had been kept in baggies. That seemed more like a boy thing, if you were going to go by stereotypes. Puppy-dog tails and all that. “I guess so. But I doubt it. It’s a girl’s case, I know it.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know.”