No Secrets Better Kept: An Anthology of Hidden Truths

NO SECRETS BETTER KEPT

AN ANTHOLOGY OF HIDDEN TRUTHS

EDITED BY

DAYLE A. DERMATIS

CONTENTS

About This Book

Introduction

Client Privileges

Dory Crowe

Don’t Get Caught

Juliet Nordeen

Statuesque

Lisa Silverthorne

The Freedom of Metal

Stephannie Tallent

Walking Nonexistent

Rob Vagle

The Mystical Life of Cake

C.J. Mattison

The Bargain

Leah R. Cutter

Stranger to a Little Girl

Patrick Mammay

Machiavelli’s Pearl

Michèle Laframboise

The Wall

Annie Reed

Untrustworthy

Robert Jeschonek

The Agincourt Saint

C.H. Hung

The Good Path

Phillip McCollum

Across the Ocean, Far From Home

Dayle A. Dermatis

About the Authors

About the Editor

Also by Dayle A. Dermatis

Be the First to Know!

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Secrets can be good (a surprise party) or bad (an affair). Secrets can be big (international spycraft) or small (I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus). Secrets can be shared between two people or spiral out of control with a whisper campaign.

 But no matter what, secrets forever alter the people involved.

 Writer and editor Dayle A. Dermatis assembles a compelling mix of stories that run the gamut from crime to fantasy to romance, from happy to sad to thrilling. They all share one thing: incredible voices of some of today’s top fiction writers.

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE A SECRET…

When I came up with the idea for this anthology, I had a fear. Even though I was expecting stories from some of the top writers I know—some of the top writers in the business today—I knew that a theme like this could invite what some of us call low-hanging fruit.

In other words, stories that don’t go anywhere new. Such as, a spouse thinks the other is cheating when in reality they’re planning a surprise.

I even said in the guidelines, I want you to surprise me.

And to my great glee, they did. So much so that I could’ve filled two anthologies with stories. However, the contract I had with the publisher was firm on the word count, and there were wonderful stories I had to reluctantly let go. I’m sure they found good homes.

I also said, Make me laugh, make me cry, make me turn the pages. And boy oh boy, did that ever happen, too.

Secrets can be good (a surprise party) or bad (an affair). Secrets can be big (international spy craft) or small (I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus). Secrets can be shared between two people or spiral out of control with a whisper campaign.

But no matter what, secrets forever alter the people involved.

Herein you’ll find a heart-wrenching story from Robert Jeschonek that involves secrets upon secrets upon secrets. A short, sharp, creepy-as-all-get-out story from Patrick Mammay.

Heartwarming stories from Lisa Silverthorne and Annie Reed, and thoughtful stories from Dory Crowe and C.J. Mattison.

No anthology about secrets would be complete without a spy story, and Juliet Nordeen gave me a nail-biter. Michèle LaFramboise and C.H. Hung gave me completely different and completely wonderful historic fantasies, and Stephannie Tallent gave me a tense otherworld fantasy in a world I hope she’ll revisit.

Phillip McCollum made me giggle-snort, and Leah R. Cutter made me (as she always does) stop and think about life choices. Rob Vagle presented me with another of his unclassifiable but always amazing looks at life.

We can’t live our lives without secrets, no matter how open and honest we try to be. The best thing we can do is keep our secrets to ourselves, because, as Benjamin Franklin said, Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

But never mind that. Let me tell you a secret…

You’re in for a great read.

—Dayle A. Dermatis

June 2022

West Linn, Oregon

CLIENT PRIVILEGES

DORY CROWE

The autumn I turned ten, Dad’s dad—The Old Man or Pop to Dad, Mypa to us kids—came to live with us in Manly Manor. He brought Theesta, his housekeeper, with him.

Our old Victorian house—built higgledy-piggledy from the inside out with cubbyholes and towers and not one iota of concern for any exterior design—hardly qualified as a modern home. If our name had started with a C, Mom would have called it Castle C—. It would still have been as rambling and drafty with plumbing as unreliable and heating out of the Dark Ages.

It faced the Park Avenue of our middle-class suburban New Jersey town. There was no park and not much of an avenue, but the house sat far enough back from the concrete-paved roadway, narrow grass median, and root-heaved slate sidewalk to accommodate neighborhood Wiffle ball tournaments on our front lawn. Every spring Dad reseeded the grass. Every summer we re-wore the base paths and pitcher’s mound to bare dirt.

Dad’s law office—two large rooms with a private entrance off the side of our wraparound porch—filled what was once a library and music room. Sometimes he used the dining room for conferences.

With five bedrooms on the second floor, if my sister and I went back to sharing a room, there was plenty of space for two more, if Mypa had still been able to climb stairs without danger of falling. Theesta, every bit as old and creaky, moved into the servants’ quarters on the third floor.

Mom moved the television out of, and Mypa into, the second-best parlor. He took over the downstairs office bathroom next to the butler’s pantry. Miss Nancy, Dad’s secretary, complained about the musty old man smell from the day Mypa arrived. I heard Miss Nancy’s shrill voice loud and clear through the wrought iron heating grate. It created a speaking tube between my bedroom and Dad’s inner office.

I could hear everything down there, if I slid the register open and lay with my ear next to the vent. At ten, I knew about breaching attorney-client privilege. It could get Dad in big trouble and not just because he’d kill me if he knew I was eavesdropping. I was too scared to breathe a word I overheard, but not scared enough to stop listening.

I’d learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut at school when kids repeated the lies their parents told them; lies like where Lucy Perkins’ older sister really went to lose weight or how come Sammy Jones’ father didn’t live with them anymore.

When I was in second grade, Dad almost caught on to my secret.

I tried to set Joanie Wilkes straight about why, in the middle of the school year, Miss Cervelli replaced Mr. Grayson as the fifth-grade teacher.

The school said Mr. Grayson had to move away for family reasons.

Everybody had a guess what that meant.

Tall, dark-haired, with a perfect white smile and wicked twinkle in eyes as blue as a summer sky, Mr. Grayson was young, friendly, and as handsome as Lt. Rip Masters on Rin Tin Tin. All of us girls had a crush on Mr. Grayson. He wasn’t married, had no kids of his own. Family meant parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Joanie Wilkes’ parents told her Mr. Grayson had to move back home because his father had died suddenly and his mother needed him.

I knew better.

Shouting through the heating grate told me what really happened.

That secret opened my private window on Dad’s legal world.

I was quarantined at home until just before Christmas while I got over the chicken pox. Past the fever and the worst of the itch, I felt fine, but Miss Nancy had never had the chicken pox. Mom made me stay upstairs in my room during office hours.

That day an arctic wind howled so hard it rattled my windows. I had the heating register open wide. I was building Fort Apache on the bare oak floor with my nine-year-old brother, Kenny’s, Lincoln Logs, when the shouting started.

Dad never raised his voice around us. A low, disapproving tone; a stern look over the tops of his tortoiseshell glasses and an I’m disappointed in you was more than enough. I barely recognized his voice; it was so loud and angry. I did recognize Mr. Grayson’s voice. He shouted plenty during games at recess.

Their words made little sense to me then. Only after Miss Cervelli showed up in Mr. Grayson’s classroom after Christmas vacation did I understand that keeping the boys after school for special education got Mr. Grayson fired. I didn’t understand what special education meant until high school. Nobody talked to little kids about sexual predators back during the Eisenhower Administration, not in the safe suburbs. We knew not to take candy from strangers or get into their cars. Our parents thought that was enough.

Joanie Wilkes’ dad told the school board chairman the rumor Joanie had heard about Mr. Grayson—the rumor she’d heard from me.

Dad almost lost the school board, his best client.

I was nibbling the crust off a Swiss cheese sandwich and slurping my way through a bowl of Campbell’s cream of tomato soup when the pocket doors between Dad’s office and the dining room slid open. His deep-set eyes behind his round, tortoiseshell glasses were slitted to half their normal size. His finger crooked in our direction.

Kenny, sitting across the dining room table from me, gulped and pointed to himself.

Dad shook his head.

Suzie.

Dad’s finger uncurled and crooked again.

I almost choked on a spoonful of soup going down the wrong way.

Me? I croaked.

Dad nodded and headed back into his office.

Kenny snickered.

You’re gonna get it.

I kicked him in the shin.

Hey. He grabbed his leg and rubbed. What was that for?

As if he didn’t know. Brothers!

I dragged the toes of my Keds on my way toward Dad’s office, leaving brighter hued furrows in the cream-colored broadloom carpet. We kids never ventured into Dad’s inner sanctum uninvited. Most invitations meant trouble. At seven, I’d already been inside more times than I cared to remember.

Miss Nancy sat in her corner, behind her square wooden desk with the central typewriter well open and her steno pad tented on one of the pull-out writing boards. She didn’t look at me, much less say her usual hi. Her eyes—behind rhinestone-studded, cat’s-eye glasses—remained on the steno pad. Her fingers pushed the typewriter keys. They struck the platen in a rhythmic clackity-clack.

A skinny, bald-headed man I didn’t know sat in one of two cushioned wooden arm chairs tucked inside the bay window in the opposite corner of the room, on either side of a small table piled high with magazines. His long legs, crossed at the knee, revealed, under the cuffs of his grey suit trousers, an ankle clad in yellow, black, and red Argyll socks. Their pattern matched his tie. A grey fedora rested on his knee.

He wasn’t smiling.

A winter-cool noon-day sun shone through the windows. It glinted off the dark, polished wood-paneled walls and Dad’s framed diplomas, making them impossible to read, even for someone who could read Latin.

Dad stood beside the pocket doors. As soon as I crossed the threshold onto the bare oak floor of this outer office, he slid the doors shut behind me.

This is Mr. MacLeod, Chairman of the School Board, Dad said. He’s going to ask you some questions.

I swallowed hard against the tomato soup still stinging the back of my throat and resisted the overwhelming urge to cough.

Dad’s palm in the center of my back urged me forward.

I took two small steps and stopped.

Go ahead, Ian, Dad said.

Slowly, Mr. MacLeod picked up his fedora and placed it on top of the camel hair coat draped over the second armchair. He uncrossed his legs and unfolded himself from the chair.

He was taller than Dad, much taller. He was the tallest man I’d ever seen. He ducked his head around the brass chandelier hanging by a chain from a plaster rosette in the middle of the ceiling. He stopped in front of me with the toes of his polished black oxfords only inches from the toes of my much-scuffed Keds. His head tilted down like a buzzard surveying its prey.

You’re Suzie, he said.

I gulped and nodded.

He stuffed his long fingers inside the pockets of his suit jacket. His elbows bent out like wings.

I understand you talked to Joanie Wilkes about Mr. Grayson.

I peered up over my shoulder at Dad.

He gave me the kind of half-hearted smile that made me wince.

Go ahead, Suzie. Tell Mr. MacLeod the truth.

I nodded and shifted my gaze up into that hawk-nosed face.

What did you tell Joanie? Mr. MacLeod asked.

The truth, I said.

Mr. MacLeod squinted down at me. Which was…?

That Mr. Grayson got fired because of the special education.

Miss Nancy stopped typing.

Dad gasped.

Mr. MacLeod’s lips squeezed tight together. He stared over my head at Dad. His eyes shifted back to me.

Who told you that?

They were shouting, I whispered.

Who?

Dad and Mr. Grayson.

Dad’s hands clasped my shoulders. He turned me to face him.

Where were you?

I couldn’t look at him. I hung my head.

Home with the chicken pox. Upstairs. I fought back tears. I didn’t mean to hear.

I looked up.

Dad’s face had gone red.

You were shouting, I whispered again.

It appears, Mr. MacLeod said behind me, that we have an innocent misunderstanding here. The board will reassure the Wilkeses. I’m sure you will address this matter with your children, Ken, and we won’t have any further problems.

No. I mean, yes. I mean, I’ll talk to the kids. He sighed. Thank you, Ian.

Dad spun me back around and held me against his legs.

You can tell the rest of the board this will never happen again.

Mr. MacLeod nodded at Dad. He smiled down at me.

Pleasure to meet you, Suzie Manly.

He picked his hat off his coat, placed it on his head, and threw his coat over his arm. Without another word, he ducked out the door.

Dad called me and Kenny and my five-year-old sister, Tammy, into his bookcase-lined inner office. He placed all of us in a row in the middle of the room. Backed against the large wooden table he used as a desk, arms locked straight at the elbows, hands gripping the front edge, he read us the riot act.

And you will not, I say again not, repeat one word of anything you might overhear in this house. Ever.

But, Dad— I blurted, already thinking of all the things we heard that had nothing to do with Dad or his clients or anything worth calling a secret. I was born parsing my parents’ words.

No buts about it. Not from you— he pointed at Tammy —or you— he pointed at Kenny —and especially not from you, Miss Nosy Parker.

He pointed at me and stared over his glasses.

I puffed out my cheeks and stared back.

Dad pulled his glasses down his nose until I could see the steel glinting in his eyes.

I blinked. My cheeks deflated like a punctured balloon.

Dad shifted his gaze to Kenny. Understood, son?

Kenny nodded.

I can’t hear you.

Kenny continued nodding and muttered, Yes.

Yes, what?

Kenny’s head stopped bobbing. He threw his shoulders back. Looking directly up at Dad, he answered like one of the soldiers who’d followed Captain Kenneth Manly, Jr., from the bloody beaches of Normandy to bombed-out Berlin. Yes, sir.

Dad gave him a curt nod.

Before he could turn his attention to Tammy, she squeaked out, Yes, sir, Daddy.

The corners of his mouth quirked upward. They turned down as soon as his gaze fell on me. Suzie?

I couldn’t look at him, much less meet him eye-to-eye.

Yes, sir, I muttered.

Kenny, you can go. Take your sister with you.

Before I could move an inch, Dad’s fingers dug into my shoulder. Not so fast, young lady.

Tammy slipped her hand into Kenny’s.

He turned to go, but not before he shot me a you’re-in-big-trouble-now leer.

And close the door behind you, Dad said.

Dad’s finger lifted, pointing to one of the padded chairs usually reserved for clients.

Sit down. The tone of his voice said, or else.

I climbed onto the chair, inching rearward until my butt hit the slats on the back and my legs stretched out straight in front of me.

Dad hitched one knee onto the edge of his desk. His dangling foot remained motionless.

I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation, Suzie-Q.

I opened my mouth to say I did.

Don’t even start with the back talk, missy.

My mouth clapped shut like a clam closing its shell.

You know why I call you Suzie-Q?

The long pause after his question demanded a serious answer.

Because I ask so many questions. I’m Suzie Questions.

Right. You know why I’m talking to you and not your brother and sister?

Because I have a big mouth?

He almost smiled.

That, too.

The almost-smile faded to a grimace.

Mostly because they lack your curiosity. If I tell them to do something, they don’t ask why. They just do it. You— his finger raised in my direction —on the other hand, never stop until you have an answer that satisfies you.

Once opened, my big mouth couldn’t stay shut.

Isn’t that a good thing?

Not always. And not— he leaned over me like a crow about to peck my eyes out —when it comes to my clients.

Was Mr. Grayson your client?

Dad massaged his chin.

Mr. MacLeod is my client. Mr. Grayson worked for Mr. MacLeod.

And Mr. MacLeod fired him.

He did. With cause. But that’s not something I’m at liberty to explain, nor would you, hopefully, understand if I tried.

Dad stood. He circled the desk and sat in his chair. He rested his elbows on the desk and his chin atop tented fingers. His eyes, squinting behind his glasses, never left my face.

I squinted right back.

Dad let out a deep breath. He pulled his glasses down his nose and peered over them.

Suzie, you know what I do for a living.

You’re a lawyer. I’d known that since before I could remember. I was born knowing my dad was a lawyer.

Do you know what that means?

I had no idea. I shook my head, as astonished as I was embarrassed.

Dad pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned back in his chair. I didn’t think so.

Is that a bad thing?

I’m not sure I understand your question, Suzie. Being a lawyer is not a bad thing. The start of a tired smile crossed his lips and vanished almost before it began. Some people would beg to differ on that, I’m sure. But a good lawyer—and I like to think I’m one of the good ones—helps people. When a person hires a lawyer, they become his client.

Like Mr. MacLeod.

Yes, like Mr. MacLeod. Clients can tell their lawyer anything—even a very bad thing they might have done or seen—because of something called attorney-client privilege.

I nodded as though I understood all those big words. I didn’t.

The client has to have full trust in his lawyer. Which means that no matter what, a client’s lawyer has to keep everything the client tells him a secret.

Dad leaned forward. His glasses slid back down his nose. He peered over them. He jabbed his finger onto the table with each word.

Do. You. Understand?

No matter what? I asked.

Dad took a deep breath. He leaned back. His eyes scanned the volumes of law books filling the built-in bookcases. He raised his face toward the ceiling, as though looking for answers in the plaster rosette over our heads.

I knew better than to say another word.

Finally, he lowered his head and turned squinted eyes back on me.

If you weren’t a female, you’d make one fine lawyer someday. You ask all the hard questions. Again he leaned forward, palms flat on the desk. There are exceptions, but only when the client’s secret means he intends to commit a crime or harm someone in the future. Breaching attorney-client privilege is not something a lawyer does lightly and it is not up to an eavesdropping little girl to make that decision.

Again he jabbed the desktop.

Do. I. Make. Myself. Clear?

As mud. I shook my head.

An exasperated breath rattled his closed lips.

I hesitate to ask what you don’t understand. He rested his forehead in one hand. What don’t you understand?

When is it okay to tell?

He sat up straight. His finger poked toward me.

For you. Never.

But you said—

His hand slapped the desk.

I SAID NEVER.

He shouted at me.

I tried hard