The Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  An older woman with a knot of white hair on top of her head, and a wide smile, which made her look younger than the color of her hair suggested, glanced up. “May I help you?”

  “Yes,” Annabelle said, nervous as the other women stared at her. “I’m looking for Jo-Beth.”

  “Guilty,” the woman said, and stood.

  “May I talk to you in private for a moment?”

  “Sure thing.” Jo-Beth walked toward Annabelle, her long peasant skirt swishing, her hand-knitted shawl flowing behind her as Annabelle imagined her hair would if it were released from the knot.

  She followed the other woman to the other side of the store. “I’m so sorry to bother you while you’re teaching . . . but I want to ask about an old friend.”

  “You want to ask about Liddy,” Jo-Beth said.

  “How’d you know?”

  Jo-Beth shrugged. “A good-looking fellow came in here asking about her earlier today, and I figured this was just a follow-up.” Jo-Beth leaned against the counter, picked up a pair of knitting needles looped with brilliant red yarn. Jo-Beth’s hands worked even as she looked directly at Annabelle; the needles seemed to be an extension of her hands. “So shoot. Whatcha need?”

  “A man was looking for her?”

  Jo-Beth picked up her glasses, which were hanging off a beaded chain on her neck, put them on. “You’re not with him?”

  “Not unless he was a very young man—twenty or so.”

  “No, this was an older man looking after Liddy because he thinks she knew something about some famous artist named Ariadne or something like that. I told him the same thing I’ll tell you. Liddy owned the Newboro Art Studio, but she never, ever told me who Ariadne was. She herself didn’t even paint.”

  Annabelle shook her head. “Yes, Liddy did paint.”

  Jo-Beth set her knitting down on the counter. “No, really, she didn’t. She took photographs, did some knitting and even wrote poetry, but she didn’t paint.”

  “I’m telling you I knew her when she lived in Marsh Cove, and she painted. Beautifully, actually.”

  “We must not be talking about the same woman. Liddy was from Colorado and didn’t paint.”

  Annabelle reached behind her for a chair, but met empty air. Jo-Beth leaned forward, touched Annabelle’s elbow. “Are you okay?”

  “This Liddy you knew—did she have a boyfriend? A husband?”

  “Oh, Liddy always had a man.” Jo-Beth pulled two stools from behind the counter. “Here, you look like you need to sit a spell.”

  Annabelle sat and leaned over, her elbows on her knees. “Did she ever tell you the names of her . . . men?”

  “Well, I knew the ones here, but I don’t think I could tell you any more than that.”

  Annabelle’s lip quivered, and she tried to cover it up by lifting a hand to her mouth. “I really am sorry to bother you. It seems as though you have been pestered enough, but I’m not sure how to tell you how important this information is to me, to my family. It is more important than you can imagine.” Annabelle took in a deep breath. “Did she ever marry?”

  “No. Liddy was not one to talk about her past. The only thing she told me was that they were from Colorado and that Sofie’s father was dead. That’s it. I don’t know how much help I can be. As I told the other gentleman, we all loved Liddy, but she was very private. She showed up ten years ago with her daughter, opened a much-needed art studio in town and became one of us until we lost her two years ago. Even if I could tell you more, I wouldn’t. I don’t know you and we all loved her and I want to honor her desire for privacy. She was . . . beautiful in her own eccentric and heartbreaking way.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Jo-Beth looked up at the ceiling, then over her glasses into Annabelle’s eyes. “I can tell that you’re desperate for something I can’t give you. Liddy lived in some combination of real and imagined romance, constantly searching for a peace within herself that she never found. She loved deeply and impulsively, from one moment to the next, from one person to the next. Sofie is the one who can give you names if you need them. Liddy never once mentioned any names from her past. I respected her and never probed, although our friendship was deep and lasting. I’m sorry I can’t help you any more than that.”

  Annabelle touched the woman’s knee, as if this might release more information. “I know I sound desperate—I am. Did she have someone, a man, who came to see her from her old hometown?”

  “The only thing she ever told me about her past and old town was that she had one true love and one sad affair—neither of which worked out.”

  Annabelle gathered a deeper strength to ask, “Do you know if the man she deeply loved and the man she had the affair with were the same person?”

  Jo-Beth smiled. “No. I asked her—once—and she stared off toward the water for so long, silent tears pouring, that I thought I had broken something in her that could never be fixed. She didn’t answer and I never asked again. You have to understand that even though she is gone, her memory is very dear to me and I have no wish to betray her. I don’t know what your family situation is, or why you need the information, but please respect that I have told you all I can.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Annabelle stood, and walked to the front of the store. Hushed voices from the women in the knitting group followed her, and she longed to join them, to sit down, pick up a ball of clean white yarn and make something with these women whom she didn’t know: to fashion something soft and new with her hands.

  She pushed the door open and gulped fresh air.

  One true love.

  One sad affair.

  Annabelle said these words out loud, yet found them empty of meaning. She leaned against a brick wall and attempted to right this world, which spun out of her control.

  Annabelle didn’t eat for the rest of the day as the sun moved high and brutal in the sky. A quick, warm wind came without warning around corners, off the harbor and into her face. She walked out onto a pier that extended far over the water and counted the moored sailboats she passed—twenty-seven.

  When Jake called on her cell phone, she knew it was not good news. After her son quietly told her that Liddy Parker was the woman on the plane, that Knox was taking Liddy to see her own mother, Annabelle sat at the end of the dock and attempted to stay her weeping. The love of her life, her husband, Knox Murphy, had flown to this town to be with Liddy Parker, and then he’d died with her. What Sofie had described as a mission of mercy no longer seemed so simple, or so innocent.

  How was she to absorb this truth? She wanted to run back to the stone church where she’d first seen Sofie, burst inside and beg the preacher to give her back her faith in her life, in her husband, in her marriage.

  Such faith was now wavering. She rode on a rapid river, toward another shore of doubt and grief. Her past beliefs could no longer anchor her amidst this tumult.

  The day seeped away as Annabelle wandered the streets of Newboro and tried to find a trace of her husband, wondering if he could have been here or there with Liddy Parker. She even stopped by the art studio, but it was closed.

  For the second time in her life, Annabelle didn’t have a way of navigating the waters of her life. It was as if the world she knew had been swept away. Questions that had never before come to mind now wandered through it freely and openly, as if they’d always been there and she had just not acknowledged them.

  The sun sank on the far side of the harbor, casting shadows across the water, over the sailboats. How had an entire day gone by while she merely thought? She’d remembered days and years she’d spent with Knox, things he’d said, motions he’d made, places he’d gone. She just wanted to find one moment, one single moment when she could say, “Aha, that is when he was with her. That’s it, right there.”

  Had she edited her memories like some people edited their family history for their Christmas letter? Let me tell you about all the wonderful things our family did—I’ll leave out how Johnny was suspended
and Janie came home with a police escort. Had she done the same thing? Once, she’d actually written an advice column on this subject. She’d told her readers that they didn’t need to brag in their Christmas letters. No one liked to hear how perfect your family was when their own family was fighting over something as silly as which brother-in-law would cut the Christmas turkey.

  Through the years, had she done the “Christmas Letter” to her life memories with Knox, leaving out the spaces in which he could have loved another woman? If finding his plane two years after his death with another woman inside was possible, then anything was possible.

  She hadn’t even kissed anyone else but Knox—except that one brief and impulsive kiss with Shawn. Oh, and in fourth grade, Mitchell Lawson had caught her behind the long slide, pinned her against the metal bar and smashed his mouth against hers. She’d had a big crush on him, and the other boys had dared him. She didn’t have a crush on him after that—he’d tasted like ravioli from the lunch-room, and the kiss had made her nauseous. So much for experience. She’d started dating Knox at fourteen, and that was that. No more ravioli kisses for her.

  In all the years that she’d been faithful, had Knox been kissing someone else? Had he done more?

  She stopped; her mind was going in random and lopsided circles. She lifted her cell phone to call Jake. She needed food and wanted to eat it with him—a touchstone of family. He answered on the second ring. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Back at the hotel.”

  “Want to meet for dinner?”

  “Sure, but . . .” His voice trailed off and Annabelle slumped forward. Of course he didn’t want to meet his mother for dinner.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “Mom, I’d love to, but I really think Sofie trusts me, and I want to talk to her some more.”

  “Jake, if you can’t meet me for dinner, I need you to tell me what else she said.” Annabelle shivered in the warm air.

  “Not much, really. We talked about her work, and, Mom . . . this is really hard to say, because it is such a terrible thought, but she did tell me that Dad is not her dad—you know what I mean?”

  “God, Jake, I hadn’t even gone there.”

  “I know, I don’t think I had either, but she told me anyway. There are things, something she’s not telling me . . . and I think she will.”

  “Maybe,” Annabelle said, “it’s best if we don’t know. Maybe we should let this go. I need to get home to Keeley . . . and . . .”

  “Mom, maybe you should go home. I can stay here and try to get some more information out of her.”

  “No, Jake, this situation is bizarre and ridiculous. Let’s just go home and get on with our lives. We’re never going to prove anything.”

  “Everyone wants proof, don’t they?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Okay.” Annabelle hung up. She stood, walked down the dock and counted all twenty-seven sailboats again. Some things were provable, countable, stable and sure. She once thought their lives were, too.

  FIFTEEN

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  Annabelle huddled in the far corner of the restaurant bar and sipped a cup of hot tea. Everything in her hurt: her heart, her bones, her head. She stood to get a table when a conversation with the bartender caught her ear.

  A man who stood four stools over, leaning across the sleek bar, had uttered “Liddy.” Annabelle inched closer, tried to look away as she eavesdropped. He was asking about Liddy Parker, if she had painted or just owned the Newboro Art Studio. Annabelle stared at him, weighed her choices. This had to be the art historian who was looking for Liddy, the one Jo-Beth and the woman at Sofie’s building had mentioned.

  He looked about Annabelle’s age, or slightly older, with dark, wavy hair that fell just past his ears and a goatee of dark hair mixed with gray. To Annabelle he looked more like he should be in a band playing guitar than doing research as an historian. He turned from the bartender and caught Annabelle staring at him. He wore glasses with round silver wire frames. The overhead lights lit the outside of his glasses, and she couldn’t see his eyes.

  She tilted her face away. She’d wanted to hear what he was saying, but not get caught. She felt a movement, and pulled her purse closer to her body. “Excuse me,” a deep voice said.

  Annabelle met his gaze. “Yes.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No,” she said, shook her head, and then stood to walk away. When she reached the end of the bar, she stopped. What if this man knew more about Liddy Parker than she did? What if he could tell her something, anything? The need, the clawing and consuming need to know the answers to her questions, overcame her. She turned back and saw that he had moved to the other side of the bar to talk to another patron. Someone with that much tenacity could most definitely help her find out what the hell Liddy Parker was doing in a plane with her husband.

  The dim lighting and weary sense of unknowable secrets weighed upon Annabelle as she approached the man. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing that you’re looking for Liddy Milstead, and I thought maybe . . . well, maybe we could help each other.” Annabelle felt as though her moving lips did not match the words she said; she felt disoriented, disconnected from reality.

  He smiled. “Did you know her?”

  “Yes. Though not well.” Annabelle sat on a bar stool and gazed at the bottles of gin, vodka and whiskey reflecting the bar lights. She wanted to be rational, to speak with care yet all she felt was a reckless need to know mixed with righteous anger. She dug her nails into her palms in an attempt to fight the madness welling up inside her like a living thing.

  “She was with my husband on a private plane. They were supposed to be headed for Durango, but the plane crashed and she died with him. That was two years ago in a remote region of Colorado where rescue helicopters couldn’t find them.”

  “Oh.” He sat on the bar stool next to her and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I’m sorry . . . for your loss. I was told she died in a car wreck visiting her mother. Were you close to her?”

  Annabelle felt the mad laughter rise, then catch in the base of her throat. “Close? No. I hadn’t seen her in ten years. Now, my husband? I guess he was close with her. Everyone here thinks she died in a car wreck—but her daughter, Sofie, said that her mother was the woman in my husband’s plane.” Annabelle leaned forward. “And Liddy Milstead was not from Colorado, as everyone around here seems to think. She was from Marsh Cove, South Carolina, where I live.”

  He squinted and Annabelle saw now that his eyes were gray with an underlying blue, like the water in Marsh Cove Bay on an overcast day. As she averted her gaze, he touched her shoulder. “Where she used to live . . . in Marsh Cove, do you know an artist named Ariadne, or did Liddy? I promise I don’t mean to pry into your personal lives; I just want to finish my research article, find more of this particular artist’s paintings and move on. I won’t interfere. . . .”

  “Interfere?” Annabelle asked. “Interfere?” Her voice rose. He leaned back, glanced around the bar. Annabelle took a breath and smiled at him. “Listen, you’re not interfering. You want information about Liddy, and I want to know why she was on that plane with my husband. That’s all. I thought you might know more about her than I do.”

  He stared at her while Annabelle thought about all the things she truly wanted to know: who Liddy really had been, why she had changed her name when she moved to Newboro and then lied about where she came from, why Liddy had been with Knox, why she had left a daughter alone in this world . . . why the hell Liddy had lived in Marsh Cove and then left.

  The man tapped on the bar. “I don’t know much more about Liddy than you do.”

  Annabelle realized she hadn’t even told him her name. She held out her hand. “By the way, I’m Annabelle Murphy.”

  “Michael Harley. Nice to meet you.” He shook her hand, held it a moment lo
nger than necessary. “Here’s what I do know. I am writing about an artist named Ariadne, and I came to Newboro because her paintings once hung in the local gallery. When I got here everyone told me the former owner, Liddy Milstead, died in a car wreck in Colorado. The new owner knows nothing about who Ariadne was . . . or is. She said that she hasn’t received a new painting from her in over two years, and that Liddy Milstead was the only woman who knew who she was.”

  “Did you ask her daughter, Sofie?”

  “She slammed the door in my face.”

  Annabelle nodded. “Did you go to her place or her boyfriend’s?”

  “She has a boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, a professor named Bedford Whitmore—or at least that’s what her neighbor told me.”

  Michael ran his finger along the edge of the bar, and Annabelle saw the paint under his fingernails.

  “Do you paint?” she asked, touched his hand before she gave any thought to her action.

  He held out his palm, and her finger fell into his open hand when she had only meant to touch the edge of his thumb. Flesh on flesh. She hadn’t felt the potential and imminent need for touch in a long time. She allowed her finger to stay there a moment before she withdrew her hand.

  “Yes, I paint. Not as much as I’d like, but I worked today. The landscape here is breathtaking and a challenge to capture because it changes with every breath. It might be the most fluid environment I’ve ever tried to paint. Quick movements of cloud or wind, a shift in tide, and the entire picture alters.”

  Annabelle laughed. “Where are you from?”

  “Philadelphia. I’m a teacher at the art school there.”

  “Well, that explains it. . . .”

  “Explains what?”

  “Your accent.”

  “I’m not the one with the accent—you are.” He grinned.

  Annabelle gestured with her hand. “I think if you ask every single person in the bar, they’ll tell you that you’re the one with the accent.”

  He laughed loudly and several people turned and stared at them, yet he didn’t seem to notice. “Just because a bunch of people say it’s true doesn’t make it true. You can’t take a vote on everything, you know.”