Sound of Secrets (4 page)

"I said the rooms are freshly painted and carpeted, and that's the truth. The hotel was completely gutted and then remodeled about a year ago, but the chandelier’s a leftover."

"A leftover?"

The clerk nodded, clearly enjoying the fact that she had Cara's full attention. "The Hotel Edison is built on the site of a hotel which served Secret Sound for fifty years. The lobby was so beautiful that the new owners couldn't bear to annihilate it with the rest of the building. So they saved what they could and reproduced it."

"Do you mean this lobby looks like the lobby of the old hotel?"

"That's exactly what I mean."

Cara closed her eyes briefly, trying to think. She had attempted to dismiss her eerie feeling of deja vu because the hotel was new. But, sometime in the past, the lobby had looked exactly as it did now. And, sometime in the past, a young child had dashed headlong in front of a car.

"Do you know where Sam Peckenbush's service station is?" Cara asked abruptly, forgetting about her reluctance to delve deeper into the mystery.

The woman extended to her full height, appearing to be taken aback by the change of subject. She nodded slowly and started to give Cara directions, but Cara waved her off impatiently.
 

"Do you know anything about the little boy who was struck by a car in front of it?"

"Why, yes I do." The woman furrowed her brow while she remembered. "But that was a long time ago. It happened the year I graduated from high school, and that was a while back. Thirty years, in fact."

"Can you tell me about it?" Cara asked and watched curiosity bloom in the other woman's eyes. She was clearly puzzled as to why a stranger to town would ask about an incident that was long past. Especially, Cara thought wryly as she caught her reflection in a mirror behind the registration desk, one who looked as disheveled as she did.

Her brown hair was still caught at the nape of her neck with a barrette, but much of it had come loose. Her cotton shirt and shorts were hopelessly wrinkled, and the minimal amount of makeup she had put on that morning had long since dissipated. Her face was white, as though she had seen a ghost.

Cara wouldn't blame the clerk if she refused to answer, but nobody else was in the lobby and the clerk apparently liked to talk.

"There's not much I can tell you, really. All I know for sure is that the little Rhett boy ran out on the street in front of a car and died."

"He died," Cara repeated.

Sam Peckenbush had stopped talking after telling her about the long-ago accident, so she hadn’t known the boy’s fate until that moment. If he had been involved in the collision she saw, however, there was no way he could have lived. Cara blinked back sudden, hot tears.

"Yes, he died," the clerk repeated. "It was a tragedy, it was. Especially with him being Reginald Rhett's son."

"Reginald Rhett?"

"That was the little boy's name, but it also belongs to the publisher of the Secret Sound Sun. That's the newspaper in town, and we're lucky to have it. It's a fine paper for so small a town. You should pick one up and judge for yourself."

Cara was so focused on what the woman had revealed that she barely heard her prattle about the newspaper. "Was there anything," she stopped and searched for a word, "
odd
about the incident?"

"Funny you should ask," the clerk said, furrowing her brow, "because I remember this quite clearly. There was a rumor after little Reginald died that he was all alone. Not a grown-up in sight."

Alone. The word reached out to Cara with creepy fingers that encircled her neck and made it difficult to breathe.

"But like I said, I don't remember too much about it." The clerk's voice intruded into her thoughts. With difficulty, Cara again focused on the middle-aged woman and heard the clinking crystals of the chandelier. They seemed to be mocking her for considering, even for an instant, that only hours before she had witnessed an event that had taken place a quarter of a century ago. "Now, can I ask you a question?"

Cara nodded, realizing what was coming. The clerk narrowed her eyes. "Why are you asking all these questions?"

"Curiosity," Cara said quickly, knowing her answer was inadequate. "Somebody mentioned the accident when I was at Sam Peckenbush's gas station earlier today, and I wondered what had happened."

"Why didn't you ask him then?"

"Him?"

"Sam Peckenbush. Nobody knows what happened better than he does. He was driving the car that hit the child."

Just because Cara was waiting outside the doors of the aged brick structure that housed the county library when it opened the next morning didn’t mean she was going to let her curiosity stamp out her common sense.

She just had a few hours to kill before her car would be ready for her to drive it out of town, that was all.

If she wanted to spend the time sitting in front of a microfiche scrolling through thirty-year-old back issues of the Secret Sound Sun, who could blame her? The official account of the little Rhett boy’s death might give her insight into why she had seen him die again the day before.

Cara smoothed the hair back from her forehead with a trembling hand, telling herself she was shaky because she’d plied herself with caffeine to counteract the effects of a restless night. It didn’t work.

Her mother had suffered from Alzheimer's during the last fifteen years of her life. Cara wondered now whether her strange experiences in Secret Sound were an indicator that her brain cells were also degenerating. Her mother had frequently complained of ghouls lurking in the closets and ghostly presences standing in front of her bed. Wasn't what Cara had seen in front of the service station just as absurd?

Cara pressed her lips together, composing herself. She had read reams of material on Alzheimer's. The onset was rare before age sixty, which was twenty-five years off. Her mother's horrors had been imagined. Cara's were real.

She took a deep breath before advancing the microfilm, listening to the soft whir as the tiny newsprint appeared on the screen.

Almost two hours later, Cara rubbed at her weary eyes and wondered if the hotel clerk had mixed up her dates. She should have asked her to be more specific or at least inquired about which month the tragedy had occurred.

She was so busy mentally remonstrating herself that she scrolled past the item. Then the headline belatedly registered, and she slowly turned the knob that rewound the tape. The headline was in the bottom right-hand corner of the second section front, but this time it jumped out at her: "Child dies after traffic accident."

Cara read the story so quickly she had to reread it to be sure she processed the information. The item was only six paragraphs long and disappointingly sketchy, identifying the site of the accident but not the name of the child and providing almost no details.

Leaning closer to the microfiche, Cara quickly advanced the film to the following day's edition. This time the story was on the front page, identifying the dead child as five-year-old Reginald Rhett III, the son of the newspaper publisher. The driver of the car was listed as Samuel Peckenbush, who had been thirty-one at the time.

Although this story was rather lengthy, the lack of meaty details about the fatal incident was puzzling. No mention was made of who had been with the child when he died or what he had been doing at a service station on the edge of town. The bulk of the story dealt with the little boy's lineage and details of the impending visitation and burial. The only other pertinent fact was that no charges had been filed against Peckenbush. The paper hadn’t even printed a photo of the child.

Cara deposited a coin in the microfiche and pressed the "print" button, extracting a copy of the news story a moment

later. Then she scrolled through the rest of the December newspapers, which amounted to twenty more editions. When she was through, Cara pressed the rewind button on the machine and leaned back in her seat.

 
The only other reference to Reginald Rhett III was a brief item about his funeral, which struck her as highly odd. It seemed that the death of the son of one of the town's most prominent citizens should have warranted more attention, especially in the newspaper owned by that prominent citizen. Had there been a police investigation? If so, why wasn't it mentioned in the paper?

"Something's not right," Cara said aloud.

Since her next stop was Sam Peckenbush's service station, a few questions wouldn’t be out of line.

Only then, after she had some answers, would she leave Secret Sound behind for good.

Cara watched the taxicab pulling away from the service station and wanted to call it back. The sun was directly overhead, casting a bright glow over the pavement that the cab had just traveled. She had seen little Reginald Rhett die again at that exact spot yesterday, but today she saw nothing. She felt something, though, something frigid and sorrowful.

When Cara looked away from the street, Sam Peckenbush was standing at the entrance to the garage. His eyes were riveted on her, making the tiny hairs on her arms stand up. Cars passed by the station at regular intervals, but none stopped. She said a little prayer that she’d have the strength to get through the next fifteen minutes and took a few tentative steps forward.

"Good afternoon." She didn’t expect a reply, and she didn’t receive one. Peckenbush stood among the partially disassembled cars and tarnished tools, his jowly face impassive. "Is my car ready?"

"I said it would be when you called this morning."Instead of expanding on his statement, Peckenbush walked away from her into the cramped convenience store that doubled as his office. Cara told herself not to let him intimidate her and followed, watching while Peckenbush sat down heavily at a desk behind his cash register. He took out a pad and scribbled numbers on it.

Cara suspected there wouldn't be a good time to reintroduce the topic of Reginald Rhett's death, so she didn't wait for one. She cleared her throat.

"Do you remember yesterday when I asked you about Reginald Rhett, the boy who was killed in front of your station?"

His eyes briefly met hers before they swung down to his pad. The malice she thought she glimpsed in them made Cara want to turn around and never come back. She fought the feeling and forced herself to ask another question.

"Why didn't you tell me you were driving the car that hit him?"

"It’s not any of your damn business, that's why." Sam's voice was gruff, dismissive. He tore the sheet of paper off the pad and extended it to her. "I don't take credit or out-of-town checks."

Cara glanced at the bill, noting that he'd charged her about a third more than the job should cost. She squashed the impulse was to point it out to him. The knowledge she was after was worth far more than a few dollars. She extracted her wallet from her small pocketbook, keeping her gaze on Peckenbush.

"I have a reason for asking.” Cara wouldn’t get Peckenbush to talk unless she had one. She frantically searched her brain and had an inspiration. "I'm a freelance writer, and I'm working on an article about small-town newspapers."

There. That, at least, made a modicum of sense. A perk of her job at the magazine was that she sometimes struck up conversations with real writers in the elevator. Sometimes, they even told her about the stories they were working on. She’d paid close enough attention that she thought she knew what kind of questions to ask to put a story together. She plunged ahead. "Part of the Secret Sound Sun’s story is the premature death of the son of the publisher."

"I thought you were a tourist just passing through." Peckenbush narrowed his eyes even more than their natural state. "You didn't say nothin' yesterday about being no writer."

"It didn't come up.” Cara’s stomach rolled and her heart beat too fast. "Since I was stranded here in Secret Sound, I decided to do some work. I'd been researching an article about small-town newspapers anyway."

"Who you write for?"

"I’ve sold stories to a few national magazines.” She surreptitiously wiped her damp palms on her slacks as she embellished her lie. " I think there's a market for this one in newspaper trade journals and mainstream regional publications."

There, Cara thought, that sounded suitably impressive.

"I don't put much stock in nothin’ anybody writes." Peckenbush extended his hand to Cara for the money she'd taken from her wallet. He opened the cash register and placed the cash inside, not bothering to give her the few dollars in change she had coming. Cara decided to ignore that, too.

"Other people do." She swallowed. Now came the hard part. "If you don't tell me your version of what happened, I'll get the information somewhere else. I'm sure you don't want people to read that Sam Peckenbush ran over a little boy without an explanation as to how it happened."

 
Peckenbush rose, and he seemed a menacing presence although he wasn't much taller than she was. His breathing was uneven, as though he'd been exerting himself when he wasn't used to it. Cara wanted desperately to back up a step — heck, she wanted to flee out the door — but she didn’t move.

"I'm gonna tell you this only once, lady, so you better listen real good. I was coming back to my station because I couldn't remember if I'd locked up. It was dark, almost pitch black. I wasn't going fast because I was getting ready to turn. That little boy came out of nowhere. I tried to stop, but it was too late."

"Was he alone?" Cara desperately wanted to hear the answer. Peckenbush stared back at her with a closed expression.

"You wait here,” he said. “My mechanic went home early, and I need to check over what he did on your car."

Frustration built in Cara as he left the building, because he wasn't telling her everything. She supposed she should be glad he’d told her anything at all. But the morsel of information only whetted her desire to know more.

Belatedly, something he said sunk into her brain. Why did he need to check his mechanic's work after she already paid him? She glanced out the window and saw that the spaces by the gas pumps were empty. Ten minutes had passed since she arrived, and there were still no other people around.