Sound of Secrets (8 page)

"It's a hard thing for an old man to admit, but I don't remember much about the case," Bergie said finally. "The memory gets a little foggy after you've been on this planet for as many years as I have."

Cara considered whipping out the old newspaper stories with his byline that proved he was privy to information about the tragedy. But neither of those articles had contained any more information than he claimed to remember. She shoved her desperation aside and settled on a less antagonistic approach.

"I thought you might have written stories about the accident."

"I probably did, but I don't remember the details. Seems like he might have been alone. I can't be sure, though."

Bergie paused, and tears welled in his eyes. Cara looked more closely and saw grief. Not the faded grief that lingers years after a tragedy, but the raw pain of fresh grief. She shifted in her seat, uncomfortable in the presence of such blinding pain.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know you had a relationship with Skippy."

"He didn't," Gray said shortly, throwing Cara into confusion. She knew she hadn't imagined the pain.

"Don't be sorry." Bergie wiped at the tears with the back of a big, weathered hand. "I should be sorry. I was thinking of my Maggie. She died a few weeks before Skippy. I loved her like the flowers love the sunshine, and she loved me. Me and Gray. Funny how somebody surrounded by that much love could have a bad heart."

"I'm sorry," Cara said, even as she realized that she was offering condolences for a loss that had happened going on thirty years ago. But Bergie talked of his lost love as though she had died yesterday, as though he loved her still.

In answer, Bergie sniffled. Gray made a show of checking his watch. "Dad, didn't you say you had to be back at the office at eight? It's almost that now."

"It is?" Bergie made a concerted effort to gain control of himself. The bluster, however, was gone from his voice. "Then I'll be late again, darn it. I was thinking about writing a column about doing away with clocks, but I'm not sure anybody besides me would see the logic in it. Imagine showing up whenever you wanted to instead of making appointments. Such freedom that would give us."

Cara sat back in her seat, still awash in the tide of grief that had engulfed the table, knowing that now wasn't the time to ask any more questions about Skippy Rhett.

She was lying.

Gray was sure of it, but he wasn't sure what she had to lie about. Yesterday, at the service station, she had clearly been on her way to somewhere else when she'd been waylaid by the broken water pump. The next thing he'd known, she was at the Secret Sound Sun saying she had business with his father.

From her reaction when he'd told her his father was the nationally syndicated columnist, he would have sworn that the news had come as a surprise. But, at dinner, she'd claimed to be questioning him about the Rhett family precisely because of who he was.

None of it added up. Especially when he threw in her screams of yesterday, the beach gear he’d glimpsed in her trunk and the odd spell she'd had at dinner when her face had gone as white as a mime’s.

She sat silently beside him in the car, looking as serene as the Mona Lisa. Her hands were folded on her lap, and her eyes focused on the road.

She hadn't said more than a few words since his father's tears had cut off her insistent line of questioning about Skippy Rhett. Neither, for that matter, had his father.

The old man, full of old-world graciousness, had insisted on sitting in the back seat so Cara could take the front even though they had driven his car to the restaurant. Then he'd lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence.

Gray was sure his father was lost in a past where the woman he had loved and lost still lived. A past he'd never been able to let go. A loss that had plowed through his heart with such devastating power that it had never been whole again.

Anger rose in him that Cara had so easily plummeted his father back into the vat of grief, and he had to forcibly remind himself she couldn’t have known the damage she was doing.

He pulled the Lincoln Town Car up to the front doors of the Secret Sound Sun, twenty minutes past his father's appointment time. The old man cracked open the door, flooding the interior of the car with harsh light, and Gray again noted the ravages that love had left on his face. His features were pinched and sorrowful, and the deep lines that radiated across his face were a roadmap of suffering.

His mother had made his father happy in the brief time they had been together, but no amount of happiness was worth this corresponding pain. Gray tried to make his voice light.

"Here you are, Dad.” He wondered how many times over the years he had tried to jolly his father out of his suffering. "One of these days, one of those people you're interviewing is going to get tired of waiting and go home."

"Never happen," his father said. Gray noticed he was straining to regain his public face before he went back into the office. "Everybody knows I won't be on time so they just show up late. Even so, I better be on my way.

"Thanks for dinner, son. And, Cara, where did you say you were from again?"

"I don’t think I did, but I’m from South Carolina. Sumter, to be specific."

"Ah, Sumter. I’ll have to get there some day. Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Cara. Good luck with the article.”

“Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Mr. DeBerg,” Cara said.

"Bergie. Everybody calls me Bergie," he corrected before bidding Gray goodbye and shutting the door, leaving them alone in the car. Cara, so quiet before, seemed eager to break the silence.

"I parked in the next block." She gripped the door handle. "I can get out here and walk."

"Have a drink with me instead." Gray had made up his mind that she wasn’t going anywhere until he got some answers. "Secret Sound can be a lonely place when you don't know anybody."

"Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not much of a drinker."

Gray's ego would have suffered if he hadn't suspected her eagerness to get away from him was because she had something to hide.

"Then we'll take a walk on the beach. I’m sure my father won’t mind if we borrow his car for an hour or so."

He put the car into drive, pulling away from the newspaper office and the car she had intended to use for a quick getaway.

"Wait a minute," she protested, raising her voice. "I didn't say I'd come with you."

"You didn't say you wouldn't, either."

"You didn't give me a chance to refuse. I don't make a habit of going to a dark beach with a stranger in the middle of the night.”

"Since the moon is full, it won't be dark," he pointed out. "Besides, how can you call me a stranger? You've spent the last two hours with me and my dad. Besides, didn’t you say I seemed familiar?”

“But you’re not.” He heard the panic in her voice and knew he’d put it there. He bit back a curse, annoyed at the way he'd handled the situation. But what alternative did he have? Other men would have tried charm. His was too rusty to be of much use.

A streetlight shone red, and he pulled the big navy-blue car to a stop in front of it. He turned to her, hoping she wouldn't unlock the door and jump out before he could explain. Her face was bathed in the red glow of the stop light.

"Listen, Cara. All I want to do is walk. Nothing more. You'll be perfectly safe with me." He gave her a wry smile. "I’m the police chief, remember? I can't have you going around town telling people I abducted you."

"Then next time," she said succinctly, "make sure that I want to come with you before you step on the gas."

The light turned green. He didn't attempt to proceed even though he was holding up traffic. One of the other drivers honked his horn.

"It's a beautiful night. Would you accompany me for a walk on the beach?"

Behind them, a second car horn joined the first. Cara looked over her shoulder at the cars behind them.

"Those people want to go," she said. "The light's green."

"Ah, but we can't go yet. You haven't answered me."

More horns sounded, creating a discordant chorus of blares and beeps.

"Yes." She nearly shouted to be heard above the cacophony of horns. "Yes, I'll come."

In response, Gray put the car into drive and pressed on the accelerator. He wondered if she realized what she had committed to. He wouldn't hurt her. He could never do that. But he would find out why she was lying to him.

Cool ocean water rushed over their bare feet, soaking the bottom of Cara's pale yellow slacks and Gray's rolled-up blue jeans.

Instead of retreating to the water's edge, Cara gazed up at the full moon. The day had been clear so there were no clouds to obscure it, and the moon looked close enough to touch.

Her apprehension vanished like the tiny, scurrying crabs that burrowed into the soft, wet sand

As long as she was with Gray, nothing and no one in Secret Sound would hurt her. She knew that as clearly as she knew that the moon was glowing overhead. She just wasn’t sure how she knew.

"I love the beach at night." The sentiment was strong enough that she couldn't keep the words bottled inside her. They tumbled forward, like seaweed on an onrushing wave. "I love it any time, really. Maybe that’s because I’ve only seen it a handful of times in my entire life."

"You don’t take your vacations at the beach?"

"I don’t take vacations. Period. My parents both died a few months ago, but they were sick for years before that. Since I’m an only child, it was up to me to care for them. That didn’t leave much time for frolicking in the surf."

"I’m sorry," Gray said, and somehow she knew he was referring both to the loss of her parents and the loss of her freedom.

"Thank you." She took a deep breath. The pain of the loss was still so great that it felt as though she’d inhaled a jagged lightning bolt.

"How about when you were a kid?" he asked, and she was grateful that he didn’t dwell on the deaths of her parents. "Did your parents take you to the beach then?"

"They weren't much for vacations," Cara said, shaking her head. She had a vague memory of her parents wading in the surf, but no recollection of them being young. Their movements had been slow, their hair already graying. "I think I was at the beach with them once, but it must have been when I was very young. I can remember my mother wearing a black bathing suit with the kind of short skirt that flared at the hips."

"I remember my mother wearing a suit like that, too.” Gray absently kicked at the water as though battling an invisible demon. The droplets formed an arc against the night sky, and they looked like shimmering diamonds on a backdrop of black velvet.

"How did she die?" Cara asked softly. He didn't answer for so long she thought the roar of the waves had drowned out her question.

"The disease is called cardiomyopathy," he said finally, his eyes on the empty stretch of beach ahead of them. "It's a cruel sickness that strikes without warning, destroying the muscles of the heart. They get so flabby they're not strong enough to pump blood around the body. The lungs and other organs fill up with fluid, making each breath a struggle. There's no cure."

She heard the pain lace his voice, felt it as though it were her own. "How about a heart transplant? This would have been the early 1980s, right? Wasn’t the first one done in the 1960s?”

"It was 1967. A South African doctor named Christiaan Barnard," Gray said, as though he'd long ago memorized the knowledge. "Even though the patient only lived for nine days, Barnard considered the operation a success. The next year, there were a bunch of heart transplants worldwide. But all the patients died, and all but a few doctors stopped performing them."

"Isn't there some kind of drug that prevents patients from rejecting the new hearts?"

"Cyclosporine," Gray answered, his voice detached. "But it wasn’t until the late 1980s that doctors started to have wide success with heart transplants, and that was too late for my mother.”

The rush of the waves filled the sudden silence, and Cara’s heart went out to Gray and his family. She wondered how losing his mother in such traumatic fashion had affected the boy he'd been and the man he'd become.

With a fierceness that startled her, she wanted him to confide in her the memories that were buried deep within his heart. She wanted him to confirm her suspicion that the intensely protective way he treated his father was because, for so long, it had been the two of them against the world.

Mostly, she wanted him to trust her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Then you won’t ask my father any more questions about that little Rhett boy."

The harsh statement seemed to spew forth from the blackest part of the night, popping Cara's silly longing for his trust as effectively as a child burst a bubble. She made her voice deliberately light."Why's that?"

"You saw him tonight. You shouldn't have to ask."

"If you're talking about your mother, one doesn't have anything to do with the other."

"That's where you're wrong. My father's never gotten over her death. I don't think he ever will. Talk of Skippy Rhett brings back that time for him. It's a time I don't want him to relive any more than he already does every day of his life."

Cara stared at Gray while a suspicion formed. She had witnessed the change in Bergie when he'd spoken of his lost love, but she had thought the son, and not the father, was the more reluctant to speak of Skippy Rhett. Now, as then, she couldn't figure out why.

She took a deep breath, determined not to let him intimidate her, even though her dinner churned in her stomach. Be brave, Cara, she told herself, and almost laughed aloud. Aside from the episode with Sam Peckenbush’s dog, which was surely an aberration, she’d never been brave in her life.

"I suppose I don't need your father to tell me about Skippy," she said deliberately, and again the name felt oddly familiar on her lips. "I'm sure I can find plenty of other people to talk to about him."

"Why don’t you drop the subject,” he said harshly, making her flinch. It didn’t sound like a request. It sounded like a demand, one that went a long way toward proving Cara's hunch. She was more sure than ever that Gray didn't want her to delve into the mystery of Skippy's death.