The Art of Keeping Secrets (3 page)

Once they’d piled out of the boat and settled onto the dock for fresh crab, the familiar motions, words and feelings of friendship surrounded Annabelle. Shawn stepped up behind her. “I’m glad you came. For a while there I thought you’d never come back out on the boat.”

“Me, too,” Annabelle said, touched Shawn’s arm. She spent the rest of the evening grateful for what remained constant: her love for her friends and her children.

 
Spring had settled quietly into the Lowcountry, bringing soft breezes and a green haze. A shower had passed through earlier that morning, but now sunlight sifted between the leaves and fell onto a lawn sparkling with raindrops, onto pavement varnished by rainwater. From the front porch of Annabelle’s home—her and Knox’s home—on Main Street, Marsh Cove, South Carolina, she could see across the street to the park that bordered Marsh Cove Bay, running wild and full as the tide rushed in.

A large magnolia tree stood in the side yard, its thick roots pushing up the earth in all directions and sprouting offshoots that had long since merged with the original tree. Annabelle suspected that by now the smaller trees actually supported the main, ancient trunk, that without them the entire tree would topple.

Annabelle’s son, Jake, who loved myths and legends, had once told her about Tristan and Isolde, ill-fated Irish lovers from whose graves, side by side, there rose two willows that over the years grew together as one. The story made Annabelle think of her own family, her and Knox, their son, Jake, and their daughter, Keeley, all entwined. When the tree expert came and told her that the main tree was being strangled and would need to be cut down, Belle told him to take his chainsaw and his expert advice and climb right back into his dented truck and go home. She knew the magnolia tree and its offshoots would support each other until they all fell together.

Even now, with Knox gone, Annabelle still believed that.

She balanced her laptop on her knees, her feet propped up on the wicker ottoman. She fingered the keys, lifted her face to a shaft of sunlight and closed her eyes, allowing the warmth to wash over her. She needed to find an answer to the bridesmaid question in her advice column, “Southern Belle Says.”

 
Annabelle wanted to tell Confused in Corinth that it really didn’t matter who was in the wedding—all that mattered was whom she was marrying and if she loved him. But that wasn’t what old Mrs. Thurgood, the
Marsh Cove Gazette
publisher, wanted for this column—no, Annabelle needed to give the precisely correct etiquette.

The Emily Post book lay on the wicker table at her side, but Annabelle liked to answer the question before comparing it to her ultimate source. In the past year or so, her advice hadn’t differed once.

 
Dear Confused in Corinth,

 
Click, click,
her tongue went on the top of her mouth while she thought. She watched the leftover rain clouds move from left to right, clearing the way for a long-distance view of a sailboat headed south, only its sail visible against the pale blue sky. She smiled at the memory of the previous night and her swim with old friends.

A movement at the corner of the house caught Annabelle’s eye, and she turned to see a man standing near the bottom step of the porch. His hands were in his pockets, and he leaned back on his heels, watching her. She stood so quickly she almost dropped her laptop, but she grabbed it in time, snapped it shut, placed it on the side table.

“May I help you?” she asked. Often tourists thought her home was on the historical tour, and she had to tell them it was a private residence. Then she smiled: the man was Wade Gunther, the local sheriff. Just as abruptly her smile faded with a razor-edged thought,
Not Jake . . .

“Hey, Annabelle,” he said, took one step onto the stairs.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, digging around in her mind for a reason, any reason, why Wade would visit her. Nausea rose as she attempted with no success to force down the memory of the last time she had said those words to a man in uniform.

He cleared his throat. “I need to talk to you, and I thought it would be best in person.” He pinched his lips together, and Annabelle knew this was not a facial expression one made when delivering good news. He continued. “Some mountain climbers in western Colorado were lost for a few days . . . freak snowstorm. Anyway, they were experienced outdoorsmen and survived just fine. . . .”

Thank God it had nothing to do with Jake, but Annabelle couldn’t wrap her mind around any other cause; Keeley was in the house doing her homework. . . . “And?”

“They stumbled across the wreckage of a plane . . . a small plane that had been consumed by fire. . . .”

Annabelle’s knees gave way beneath her, and she sat in a childlike cross-legged pose on the white-painted floorboards, looked up at Wade and attempted to speak. Nothing came out.

He took three steps up onto the porch and squatted next to her. “The FAA—the Federal Aviation Administration— contacted me and asked me to come talk to you. I know this must be a shock. I’m sorry to tell you so bluntly. I just never know how else to say it.”

“It’s him,” Annabelle said. “Knox, right?” And some seed of hope she hadn’t known existed sprouted anew; maybe, just maybe he was alive. Maybe.

“Yes, we found his body . . . and whomever he was traveling with,” Wade said.

“Oh, oh, then it’s not him.” Annabelle stood and Wade rose with her. “He was traveling alone to go hunting.”

Wade looked up at the porch ceiling, as if the sight could help him. “There was . . . another person inside the burned-out plane. As you’d guess, there’s not much left after a gutting fire and two years in the woods. But it is Knox’s plane.”

Her question rose of its own accord, like a shoot of grass through a cracked sidewalk. “Man or woman?” she asked, believing she knew the answer before it came.

“A woman.” He paced the porch. “The FAA is hoping you can tell them who it is. . . .”

A tempest of warring emotions battled inside Annabelle, and stunning to her, embarrassment won. Not grief or anger, but shame. Her dead husband caught with another woman. For the briefest moment she imagined she could hear the gossip and speculation.

Annabelle bit her lower lip and spoke in a stuttered sentence. “I don’t know.” Simple words. “I thought he was alone.” Embarrassing words.

Wade turned away.

Annabelle sat down on a wicker divan and pointed to the chair across from her. “Please, sit. I don’t want us to go inside—I don’t want Keeley to hear any of this.”

“I understand,” he said, and sat.

“Now,” she said, “what will you need from me?”

“We have to discuss where to send his remains. . . . The FAA will need to know.” His voice droned on and Annabelle pretended to listen, but her mind spun. She pictured her thoughts like cotton candy whirling around inside the machine, waiting to be gathered around a single cardboard cone.

She remembered the day they’d come to tell her about the crash—how even then they’d known there was no chance of survival. That time after Knox’s death rushed in again all the way to her core; the places she had thought healed after years of therapy and grieving were now open. She remembered how she couldn’t feel things, as if the world had lost all sensory meaning in the weeks and even months after the news. Now, as she stared at Wade, she saw her spirit broken, grief coming again in a way she’d hoped it never would.

And she understood: you can never completely heal. You can ignore, cover up, scar over, but never heal, because if she had been cured of this grief, it wouldn’t return now with its grappling need to take her to that dark place again, that space where she wanted to disappear into the horizon and meet Knox.

She often imagined that the horizon was the last thing he saw on that plane. She saw him trying to restrain the fuselage, wrestling with the knobs and buttons, fighting to right the nose, then losing control.

Now her imaginings of his last minutes changed completely, from solo to two. Not a huge difference, but one that was as wide and deep as infinity—a number too large to count.

“Belle?” Wade said, leaned forward.

“Yes?” Annabelle asked.

“Did you hear any of what I just said?”

“I think so,” she answered, trying to focus on his face, on the lines around his mouth, on the blue of his eyes, anything but his words.

“Well . . .” He stood, looked down at her. “I am very sorry for your loss. We’ll be in touch about . . . the remains, and if you . . .”

Annabelle squinted up at him. “If I what?”

“If you know who was on the plane, call me. For now, they will just have to search the missing-person files, and eventually try to match dental records and DNA. So, if you have any more information about who it was, it would help tremendously.”

Annabelle felt the familiar blanket of hopelessness spread over her as it had when they’d asked her a million questions after the initial accident. She smiled up at him. “Well, I’ll certainly ask around to see if anyone knows whom my husband might have snuck away with on that particular weekend.”

He stared at her, and then looked away. “Thank you.”

Then he was gone down the stairs. Annabelle watched him until he rounded the corner to the public parking lot next to Marsh Cove Bay. She sat down.

Wade couldn’t have been on her porch for more than ten minutes. Fifteen at the most. And yet everything, absolutely everything had been altered. The air shifted, lifted the hanging ferns and swirled leaves across the bottom porch steps. She understood that at that moment she couldn’t comprehend or absorb all that was different.

A thought came in a dull throb like a headache:
Isn’t that curious? A woman in Knox’s plane.

Annabelle had never wanted to contemplate the facts of Knox’s plane crash again. She had spent too many nights going over and over every
What if?
, searching for the impossible: a way to change the end of the story.

Now her mind raced through the details one more time: he had filed a flight plan to stop in Newboro, North Carolina, refueled and flown straight toward Durango, Colorado. Fifty miles from Durango he called in a mayday message that his engine was on fire. An explosion was heard on the radio. The story made national news for a full twenty-four hours as they searched for the plane and its sole occupant, Knox Murphy, the lawyer from South Carolina who often traveled to do pro bono work for underprivileged clients in small Carolina towns. Annabelle had watched the news with the detachment of a numb observer. And then the story had disappeared from the national news. But not from their lives.

People from the U.S. Air Force Rescue Coordination Center explained that there were well over 150 missing planes in that remote and inaccessible area of the country. They often found planes years later while searching for something or someone else. They kept a registry of wreck sites and would add Knox’s. But the plane hadn’t been found . . . until now.

She’d answered so many questions at that time. Did he help a client in Newboro? No, she’d told them. He always told her when he was doing work on the way to another location. Had he taken any explosives with him? No, only his guns, which he never brought loaded inside a plane.

Annabelle stood on the porch and dropped her forehead onto the closed screen door. “Oh, Knox. No, please, no.” She wasn’t sure what she was begging for, but she understood, the same way she had understood she was pregnant before the test showed positive, that something new had just been born with this discovery brought to her on a quiet afternoon.

She stepped back, knocked her hip against the Emily Post book, lifted it and tossed it onto the chair. What was the proper etiquette here? What would Emily Post say now? Maybe in that book of perfect behavior, there were answers to cheating husbands, but what did one do when the culprits were found together long after the fact—dead and gone? Irrational laughter at the situation—that she made a profession of giving advice and now had none for herself—began low in her belly and died before it reached her mouth. She dropped into the chair.

Nothing, at that moment and for a long time afterward, seemed as important as finding out who this woman was and why she was with Knox Murphy when he died.

TWO

ANNABELLE MURPHY

Annabelle paced the porch. A list, she needed to make a list of the things to do next, and then next, and then next. If she was going to keep this life intact, keep her world from spinning completely and utterly out of orbit, she needed to pull her mind together. There were so many people to tell about the discovery of the plane and . . . the woman. The need for action in the face of numbing grief was a nightmare returned. She’d once made numerous calls about Knox and his death: to her mother, his parents in Florida, Aunt Barbara, the cousins . . . and now she would have to do it again. Thank God her father, who had passed away years ago, had never had to hear about Knox’s death.

The overwhelming need to hide returned to Annabelle as it had two years ago. Back then, she’d drawn on the strength of her family, on her love for Knox and his for her. What did she have to draw on now?

Names came to mind, one by one.

Keeley.

She was inside doing a school science project with Laura—Annabelle would have to wait until Laura left to talk to Keeley.

Jake.

Annabelle grabbed her cell phone from the side table, and punched in her son’s phone number. The double beep let her know he was on the other line.

Shawn.

He answered on the first ring. “Hey, Belle.”