Keep No Secrets

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KEEP NO SECRETS

Julie Compton

Fresh Fork Publishing

Longwood, Florida

For my girls

EARLY WINTER

CHAPTER ONE

JACK WAKES TO the slam of the front door. It's Michael, home from a party down the street. For a moment, he's perturbed at his older son for the noise, for not considering anyone else in the house. It's the type of thing Claire shrugs off as typical teenage behavior, but still, it irks Jack.

He glances at the digital clock on the nightstand. It's Saturday night for one more minute; at least Michael got Celeste home and made his curfew. He must have realized the noise he made, because afterwards, the dark house falls silent once again. Jack rolls closer to a sleeping Claire and drifts back to sleep.

The second time, he doesn't look at the clock right away because he's so focused on listening for what woke him again.

Voices. Not one, but two distinct voices.

Michael's, and Celeste's—Celeste, who shouldn't be there. It's the whispers and giggles that did it. Had they carried on at a normal volume, Jack probably would have slept right through it. But somehow, the fact that they're trying
not
to be heard has guaranteed that they will be.

He grabs his robe and at the top of the stairs, stops to listen. They're in the family room, that much is clear. It's also clear from the sway in their speech that they're drunk. Even as he starts to fume about that, he's grateful that at least Michael had the common sense not to drive Celeste home. And even as he prepares to

interrupt them and read them the riot act, he's already thinking about the logistics of the rest of the night—whether to wake Claire or do this alone, whether to call Celeste's dad now and have him pick her up, or whether to drive her home himself and talk to her dad once he gets there.

He starts down, but stops when he hears Celeste, "Shh, shh, I think I hear someone." Michael doesn't respond, at least not loud enough to hear. "Mike, stop!" she says, and giggles. "I mean it. I think someone's coming."

"I hope so," his sixteen year old son mumbles, and Jack's about to freak.

Suddenly the drinking seems like the least of his concerns. His next footstep is purposely a loud one, and now they're scrambling, repositioning themselves and grasping for discarded clothes. It's all Jack can do not to go down right away. But he has no idea what state of undress they're in, and though he'd love to embarrass Michael—he deserves it and so much more right now—he doesn't want to do that to Celeste.

All he can think is,
what the hell are you
thinking, Michael?
He thought his son was smarter than this. He really believed Michael would make it to adulthood without doing something too stupid.

Now he realizes how naïve he was, how easily anything could happen on his watch. He's ready to lock Michael in the house until he's eighteen. Or twenty-one would be even better. Yet even as he has these thoughts, he can hear Claire: "This is the age
most
people do the stupid stuff."

She'd leave the rest unsaid.

"Are you decent?" he calls down, voice level. Michael responds with a cold,

"Yeah."

In the family room, Jack flips on a light and takes in the scene. Celeste's long hair looks as if she just stepped out of bed and her blouse is buttoned wrong. Michael's T-shirt covers the waist of his jeans but Jack is pretty sure they're unzipped.

Celeste's dark eyes are wide with fear. As much trouble as Michael's in at this moment, her Catholic dad is ten times stricter than Jack and Claire. She's not so worried about what Jack will say or do; she's already thinking about what will happen when she gets home.

Jack glares at Michael, and Michael glares back, making Jack even angrier.

He turns to Celeste. "Go in the bathroom and put yourself together, and then I'm taking you home." She nods apologetically and jumps up. When she does, an earring falls to the floor. She sheepishly bends down for it and then takes off, staggering, for the half-bath in the front hall. To Michael, Jack says,

"Don't you move. I'll be back in a minute and then we're having a little talk. You got it?"

Michael regards him without

answering, still defiant.

"Did you hear me?" Louder this time.

Slowly, Michael nods, and Jack leaves the room to put on some real clothes and find his keys.

"I'm sorry, Mr. H," Celeste says as soon as she stumbles into the car. Jack picks up the smoky scent of burning oak, smells liquor on her breath. Whiskey, he thinks, and this floors him even more because he assumed they would have drunk only beer.

He doesn't answer her, for fear of what he'll say. Even though she's come to feel like family, he's not sure it's his place to scold her. He's not sure what's safe to say and what might cross a line that only her dad is entitled to cross.

So for now, as he waits for the heater to warm the car, he simply asks, "Do you have everything? All your stuff?"

She nods.

He puts the car into reverse.

Jack glances over at Celeste as he pulls out of the neighborhood. He remembers the day Michael first brought her home, how he and Claire were left speechless when the two of them came into the house from the door to the garage, dumping their backpacks on top of the clothes dryer. Only a few weeks into the current school year, it was Claire's fortieth birthday. Jack had left the DA's office early to get home in time to make dinner and help his younger son bake the cake—just one of many things he did differently since Claire had allowed him back into their home.

When Michael and Celeste stepped

into the kitchen, Jack almost dropped the cake that Jamie had just finished decorating.

The resemblance to Jenny Dodson was remarkable. The long, straight black hair.

The dark, smoky eyes. The copper skin.

The perfectly contoured face. Much younger, of course. But still, Michael had to have known. And as much as Jack understood Michael's desire to stick it to his father, he simply couldn't believe he'd do this to his mother—on her birthday, no less.

Claire recovered first. She greeted Celeste warmly, and even invited her to stay for dinner. To Jack's relief and, he suspected, Claire's too, she politely declined.

But in the weeks that followed, Celeste quickly ingratiated herself into the Hilliard household. Jack could do nothing about it, and Michael knew it. On the days he didn't have basketball practice and she had neither volleyball nor ballet, they came to the house right after school to do homework together. Michael

insisted that they needed his computer, which was in his bedroom. Claire made them keep the door open and though Michael complained, she held her ground.

On Friday nights, Celeste sat with Jack, Claire and Jamie at Michael's games.

Then, without fail, she'd come back to the house afterwards for pizza. At first Jack was uncomfortable at how she clung to his family as if it was her own. And he'd be lying, too, if he didn't admit his fear that other parents at the school might also see the resemblance and wonder. No one ever brought up what had happened four years ago, how he'd betrayed Claire and his family, how he'd betrayed St.

Louis, even, the city that had only just elected him, but he knew it was a shadow that followed him wherever he went.

But Celeste proved easy to have

around. She adored eight-year-old Jamie.

If he became restless during the games, she'd take him from the stands and play with him in the hallway outside the gym.

Michael rolled his eyes the first time she offered to babysit for real, but he eventually gave in. Now Jack understands why. Michael obviously realized the benefits before Jack and Claire realized the risks: after putting Jamie to bed, he and Celeste would effectively be alone in the house. It never occurred to Jack or Claire not to trust him. They'd come home from a restaurant or the movies to find Jamie sleeping soundly, the toys put away and the dishes washed and drying in a rack next to the sink. He wonders now how long they've been carrying on.

"Mr. H?" At a stop sign closer to her home than Jack's, Celeste's soft voice breaks his thoughts. "I'm really, really sorry. We haven't done anything like that before, I swear." She tries to keep her voice even, tries to sound sober. She's only partly successful.

Until this moment Jack has directed most of his anger at Michael, but in the face of this bold lie he starts to see her as a temptress who's seducing his vulnerable son. Does she think Jack's an idiot? He didn't hear much at the top of the stairs, but what he did hear certainly wasn't the conversation of two teenagers

experimenting with sex for the first time.

"Celeste," he begins, trying to pay attention to the curves in the road as he crafts a response that won't accuse her of lying but won't let her off the hook, either. It's dark here, on the way to her house. When they moved from Florida to St. Louis over the summer, her dad rejected the typical suburban choices and instead chose a home on several wooded acres far west of the city near Rockwoods Reservation. "I heard enough to know better. If you're going to engage in adult behavior, then—"

"Can we pull over?" she asks suddenly.

"Why?"

"Just . . ." In the glow of the dashboard lights he sees she's started to tear up.

"Please? I think I'm going to be sick."

He sighs. Against his better judgment, he pulls into one of the small parking lots for the conservation area. The gravel crunches under the tires as he circles the car around to face the road. He puts the car in Park but leaves the headlights on and the engine running. She opens her door and swings her legs out. Leaning over, she spits a bit, but Jack's certain she's not vomiting. She's stalling.

"Are you done?" He tries to check his impatience, but he's supposed to be in bed sleeping right now, not out on some dark road with a sixteen-year-old girl he doesn't entirely trust anymore and who bears too much of a resemblance to another female he doesn't entirely trust anymore either. Whom he doesn't trust at all, really.

She nods and closes herself back in.

She sets her hands in her lap and plays with a loose button of her long sweater coat. His eyes are drawn to her left pinky, which ends in a stub just after the last joint. He's never noticed it before, but the nails on her other fingers have been bitten to the quick. "I can't go home yet.

He'll know I'm wasted."

Jack knows she means her father, even though she never says "my dad" or even uses his first name. It's always "he" or

"him." It's impossible to handle the types of cases he's handled, first as an assistant prosecutor, now as DA, and not suspect a psychological reason for a habit like that.

Jack once asked Michael about it. Michael looked at him as if he was crazy, but when Jack finally met the man, he had an inkling. At a minimum—and he hoped there wasn't more—the guy kept an unusually tight rein on his only daughter that guaranteed her close physical proximity but also, Jack thought, ensured rebellion in one form or another.

"He needs to know, Celeste. Even if he doesn't figure it out on his own, I plan to tell him."

"You can't," she pleads. "Please! I knew I'd be in trouble for breaking curfew, so I texted him and told him Mike had car trouble and I’d be late. He's okay with that. But if he finds out I was drinking—"

Jack can't believe she's made the situation worse. "It's not just the drinking I need to tell him about."

"Oh, God!" She starts breathing rapidly as if she's having a panic attack.

"Please don't tell him. We really didn't do anything, Mr. H. We were just fooling around. He likes Mike so much. If you tell him, he won't let me see Mike anymore.

He won't let me come over to your house." Jack might put the brakes on that, anyway, but he doesn't say this. "The only reason he even let me date Mike in the first place is because of you."

"What are you talking about?"

She shrugs bashfully and keeps tucking her hair nervously behind her ears. She combed it when he sent her to the bathroom, and looking at it now, he still can't get over how it hangs the same way as Jenny's. Heavy and sleek.