The Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  “Yes, when we moved here from Colorado, we left my sweet grandma there. Then my mother opened the Newboro Art Studio, but she often went back to visit her mother. They were in a car wreck and died together. I decided to stay here since my life is bound to the water.”

  Jake squinted. “Sofie, you lived in Marsh Cove, not Colorado.”

  She blinked. Of course Jake knew that . . . of course. How could she alter the story? Her heart pounded; her head ached; her hands clenched into fists under the table. “Yes, before Colorado.”

  “Oh,” he said. “And your mom painted here, too?”

  “My mother didn’t paint. She only owned the art studio.”

  “We have a painting of hers. . . .” Jake leaned back in his chair, twisted his mug in circles on the table. “I’m confused.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my mom—it’s too hard,” she said. “Can we change the subject?” She’d said this line so frequently that she was able to say it now with a sad smile on her face.

  “Okay,” he said, paused. “Then tell me about your work at the research center.”

  Panic ebbed like a receding tide. She had said the correct words in the correct order—she was out of danger now. “What do you want to know?”

  “More about your research with the dolphins. I think it’s fascinating.”

  “Well, I gather data to help determine when, how and why the dolphins get captured in commercial fishing nets so we can find ways to make sure they don’t. Did you know about three hundred thousand dolphins die that way every year? Not everyone knows that.”

  “No, that’s a new one for me,” he said. “A sad fact.”

  “But privately, on my own, I am studying their . . . language.”

  “You mean, how they talk to each other?”

  She nodded. “Some experts say that their language conveys more emotion than information. Others say that dolphins can communicate very precisely. Some say they know how to use syntax, and others that we can understand the evolution of our own use of language by better understanding theirs. . . .” She took a sustaining breath and sat back in the chair, as if she’d just run a race at full sprint.

  “So,” he said, and laid his palms flat on the table, “do they talk to each other?”

  “Oh, yes. They use certain clicks and squeals to identify each other—names if you will. Or at least I think so. And they can send warnings and tell each other where food is.” She leaned across the table and added in a whisper, “I think they have names for us, too.” Words were coming out of her mouth so fast she couldn’t stop them. What was she doing?

  “Well, I guess that makes sense. If they call each other, wouldn’t they want to call to us, too?”

  She straightened in her seat. “Exactly. Exactly.” She glanced around the shop, realized she was speaking loudly. “Want to meet some of them?” She had no idea why she was doing this—stepping freely and willingly into a danger zone.

  “I’d love it. Am I allowed in the research center?”

  “With me you are. Come on.”

  Jake stood, and Sofie glanced out the window at the people passing by, at the customers in line. Marty Thompson waved at her. She waved back. What was she thinking? By noon, Bedford would call wanting to know who she had been talking to at the Full Cup when she was supposed to be at work.

  Jake followed her in his car, and in five minutes they pulled into the parking lot of the Marine Research Center. She felt about this glass-and-metal structure the same way others felt about their cedar shake homes or their cottages on the dunes. Her condominium was only a place to sleep, a reminder of her mother’s absence. Bedford’s place wasn’t hers either, and she was still a visitor there, despite the years they’d been together. She’d been working or volunteering in this building since she had been fifteen years old; it was home.

  Jake stood beside her as she swiped her card and the door buzzed. She walked with him down the brightly lit hall and tried to see the place through his eyes. Posters of dolphins and sea turtles lined the concrete-block walls until they came to the stairs. “The offices are upstairs. Down here are the research center and injured-animal tanks. There are dolphins, turtles, other sick marine animals.”

  She opened a large door and Jake followed her down metal stairs, their feet clanging. When they reached the bottom floor, a diffuse light wavered across the tanks. It was quiet this morning; feeding time was over and the staff would be upstairs now. One veterinary assistant—Marshall—sat on a stool at the far end of the room.

  “Hey, Marshall,” Sofie called out. “Just showing someone around.”

  Sofie gave Jake the tour, explaining the kinds of sickness and injury a turtle or dolphin was apt to sustain, how research could be done on them before they were released.

  Jake leaned against a water tank, crossed one leg over the other and stared at her. “Do you do all your research in here? Because if I were a dolphin, the only thing I’d be saying is, ‘Get me out, get me out, get me out.’ ”

  “Maybe that is what they’re saying.” She tapped the tank. “But these dolphins need a bit more care until they can go. I do most of my research out on the water from boats, or while diving.”

  “How do you hear them?” Jake said.

  “Recording devices . . . and dolphins come up for air, you know. They cry out and call when they’re above water, too.”

  Jake took a step toward her, and instinctively she backed up. “What do they call you?”

  “What?” She lifted her hand to her face, where she felt a flush rise.

  “The dolphins. What is their name for you?”

  She shivered. How many times had she asked herself this same question? She wanted to know her name: her real name and what they called her when she arrived on the seawall, when she dove into the cold water and reached her hand across their bellies. She wanted to know what they called after her when she left them.

  She turned away from Jake, because this was the one question she wanted to answer and couldn’t.

  He came up beside her. “Guess that’s hard to figure out?”

  She noticed his eye color for the first time. Someone once told her that you never really knew someone, or could claim to have truly listened to them, unless you could tell what color their eyes were. Now she knew this wasn’t true, because she’d been listening to him all along and yet just now dared to stare into his eyes: hazel with brown flecks that seemed to delve far below the surface until the flecks not so much disappeared as became something she couldn’t see.

  “It’s very hard to prove.” She shrugged. “Maybe impossible.”

  He tapped on the tank. “It looks like they’re always smiling.”

  “Everyone assumes that dolphins are always happy—but they only look like that because they don’t have cheeks.”

  He laughed. “Guess we have to be careful what we think we know because of a big old smile.” He gave an overexaggerated grin, showing all his teeth.

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t exactly call that a smile—and I’m not sure what anyone would assume about you if they saw you like that.”

  Jake looked back at the tank. “Well, they do look happy . . . and also as if they really want to tell us something—like they’re about to speak.”

  “I know . . . ,” she said, walked away from him and out the back door to the parking lot.

  He followed her to the seawall, jumped up next to her. She pointed toward a pod of dolphins coming toward them. “That is the Alpha pod,” she said.

  “I bet they don’t know the names you have for them, just like we don’t know the names they have for us,” he said.

  A quiver trembled below her breastbone, as if someone had shaken only that very particular part of her body. “What?”

  “They don’t know what we call them, so I guess it’s only fair that we don’t know what they call us.” He made some loud clicking noises that sounded nothing like a dolphin.

  She held in her laugh with a hand over her mouth
. “They’re probably calling you Dumb Human about now.”

  “That or maybe Big Stud.”

  She sat, swung her legs over the water. “Yeah, prove it.”

  He positioned himself next to her. “Some of the best things in life are impossible to prove.”

  She turned to him, her laughter gone. “Name one.”

  “The existence of God. Real love.” He clapped his hands together. “There’s two right there.”

  She ran her finger along the stone wall. “Well, whether dolphins talk to each other or not ought to be something we can prove empirically.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” Just when she thought the danger had passed, his next words sent a shock wave through her body. “Can you tell me who was on the plane?”

  She stood. “I can’t. . . .” She wrapped her arms around her middle, hugged her body. “I have got to get to work.” Yet when she looked at his face, she wanted to relieve some of his pain. Her hands fluttered in front of her, as if she meant to take his hand or touch him, and then she dropped them to her side.

  He nodded. “Of course.” He held his hand out for her. “Please stay another minute.”

  “Jake, I have to go to work.”

  “Do you remember the day you found out your mom had died in a car crash?”

  She closed her eyes. “Of course.”

  “Well, it’s like that for us all over again. Just when we thought maybe, just maybe, there was life beyond the void of his death, the emptiness returned. It’s like he died yesterday or an hour ago all over again. All the questions. Don’t you remember how desperately you wanted to know the answer to all the questions?”

  His face was contorted in a sad, beautiful way as he continued. “Don’t you? Why did they crash? What happened? Was it the engine? Was it the weather? All those questions that will never be answered. Now, here my family is with new questions. Who was on the plane and why? And it seems you’re the only one with the answers.”

  Sofie shut her eyes against the growing sadness. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does.” His voice was deeper, and she opened her eyes to look at him.

  Her heart ached for Jake, like a bruise under her ribs. A crack opened inside her, where she kept all her secrets, and she said the words before she understood their implication. “It was my mother. My mother was on the plane.” She covered her mouth with her hand to stop the words already released.

  Jake stumbled backward. “I think I already knew this.”

  “They weren’t running off together or anything like that. He was taking my mom to visit her mom—my grandma, who was sick.” Sofie’s words came rushed, tumbling over one another in her need to explain. “I’m sorry. Please . . . you can’t tell anyone else.”

  “Why? My mother has to know. The FAA will find out. . . . The truth will come out anyway. What are you hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding . . .” Panic faded and flowed in her chest, the word “truth” sounding like a foreign language.

  “You don’t think you can trust me.”

  “It’s much more complicated than that, Jake.”

  “We both lost a parent that day,” he said, moved toward her.

  “Listen, Jake, I don’t want you to think . . . that he was my father or anything weird like that. He wasn’t. I wished he were sometimes, but no, he wasn’t.”

  Jake looked away. “I don’t think I thought that . . . or maybe I did. I don’t know. I can’t even absorb all this yet. . . .” He faced her and then did something she was completely unprepared for, yet somehow hoping for. He drew her into his arms, held her against his chest. For a brief moment, until a car screeched to a stop in front of the seawall, they were one, fused in grief. Why else would she have told him this secret but for this brief moment of respite?

  “What in the living hell is this?” Bedford’s voice echoed across the parking lot. Sofie broke away from Jake so abruptly that he almost fell.

  Bedford stalked toward them; Sofie had never seen him so angry and she stepped in front of Jake. “Stop,” she said in a voice she hadn’t used with Bedford before.

  “What?” He lifted his hands, took another step forward. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No,” Sofie said. “He’s an old friend from where I used to live.”

  “Colorado?” Bedford stepped around Sofie and glared at Jake. “You’re from Colorado?”

  Jake moved to stand directly in front of Bedford. “Maybe.” He turned to stare at Sofie, and she closed her eyes as if to beg him to answer in the affirmative.

  Bedford hollered, “What kind of smart-ass answer is that? You stay away from her—you understand me?”

  “Not sure I do,” Jake said. “You her father?”

  Sofie spoke between them. “Stop it now, both of you.”

  They both turned toward her. Bedford spoke first. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

  “I ran into an old friend—from sixth grade—at the Full Cup. We got to talking, and he wanted to see where I worked, see the dolphins. He’s majoring in Greek mythology and is interested in dolphin history—so I brought him here. He was hugging me goodbye.” Sofie glanced at Jake. She had just given him an excuse for being there, but also revealed how easy it was for her to lie, to make up a story full of half-truths, on the spot.

  She felt dirty, almost obscene, as though she’d betrayed him. She looked away from his pained face and stepped toward Bedford, touched his arm. “He was just going,” she said.

  Jake walked away from both of them, leaving Sofie with a desperate loneliness.

  When Jake’s car pulled from the parking lot, Bedford took Sofie in his arms and became once again the man she knew: soft, caring. “Darling, what was that all about?”

  “I just told you.”

  “You recognized a boy from sixth grade?”

  “No, he recognized me—said he’d heard we lived here from a friend of Grandma’s and had thought my mother still owned the art studio.”

  “And then you decided to show him the research center?”

  “He asked,” she said, feeling as though each half-truth she told destroyed a piece of her soul. But she saw no other way. Her mother had taught her well. Very well.

  “My sweet girl,” he said, stroked her hair.

  “Why are you here?” Sofie took one step away from him. “I thought you were writing today.”

  He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out something blue. “You left your computer’s memory stick at my house the other night. I keep meaning to give it to you.”

  She stared at it in slight wonder. How could she have possibly left her precious work unattended? Hadn’t she put it in her purse? She took it from Bedford, clasped it in her hand, held it tight. She must never let her mind become so preoccupied that she forgot something this important.

  “Sofie,” he said, “I looked at the work on it. You’re writing a book about how dolphins can talk.”

  “Oh,” she said, blood flowing from her face to her toes in a rapid rush.

  “Please tell me you aren’t going to try and publish something about speaking dolphins.”

  “It’s a children’s chapter book,” she said. “And I didn’t want to tell you about it until I had finished it.” She looked sideways at him. “Your opinion means so much to me, and I didn’t want you to see it until I had polished it all up.”

  “A children’s novel?”

  “Just a fantasy story about dolphins. Nothing important.”

  Bedford leaned down and looked into her face. “You believe that dolphins give humans names. We have been through this a hundred times. You cannot prove the un-provable. You just can’t. There is no empirical evidence to support your theory, and jumping off boats and recording sounds is not going to change that, Sofie.”

  The truth of his words blended with her hopelessness, and she turned away from him. He was all she had left in this meager life she lived. His love. His protection. His adoration. And she was about to lose it all.
/>   “You’re blowing things out of proportion, Bedford. Really you are.” She kissed him. “Come on. I’ve got to get to work. We’ll talk at dinner, okay?”

  “I just wanted to let you know your work was safe.” He walked to his car, got in and slammed the door with more force than was necessary.

  Sofie stayed on the seawall after he was gone, stared out at the water and thought of her mother’s painting, of the words below the pale, translucent starfish. One word came clearly to her: “Loss,” written in small, slanted letters beneath the starfish’s middle right arm. She clenched her teeth to keep the tears from rising.

  She was a fool for allowing herself to reveal so much to Jake Murphy. Something had happened between the myth of the dolphin and the reality of her research, and her heart had split wide enough to allow Jake Murphy to enter her world. She would not let it happen again.

  Control was her goal now—force Michael Harley to leave town; hide her research from Bedford; make Jake go away; remove the disapproval from Bedford’s face. If she focused, she could do it all.

  FOURTEEN

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  The Charmed Knits shop was located on a corner lot directly across from the church where Annabelle had run into Sofie just yesterday. Or was that a lifetime ago? A life in which she doled out advice in a newspaper as if she were the queen of knowing, as if she knew exactly what to do in every situation, as if her life were in perfect order.

  Behind a plate-glass window, sweaters, booties and scarves hung from flowered mannequins. Rolls of yarn in candy colors were arranged on a large antique chest, tempting Annabelle, who had no interest in knitting, into thinking she, too, could walk into this store and make a sweater worthy of being worn when the next cold front went through.

  Annabelle pushed open the door; a bell tinkled a hollow sound and an overactive air conditioner blew cold air in her face. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms and then walked to the back of the store, where a group of six women sat in a circle talking in another language—knitting language. Annabelle had no idea what a stockinette or garter stitch was, so she cleared her throat.