Secrets to the Grave

anything.

She wondered if it would have looked like something to Marissa.

“Ms. Fordham is deceased.”

Murdered.

Oh my God.

A car door slammed in the driveway, making her jump. She pressed her bleeding hand to her heart and glanced at her watch. Must be car pool. Wendy coming home. Time to pull herself together. She forced a smile as she turned. It froze and cracked as her husband came into the garage.

“Oh. I thought you were Wendy. You’re early.”

“I heard some bad news,” he said. “About Marissa Fordham.”

“Where did you hear it?” she asked stupidly, as if no one else would know by now. As if it were somehow her terrible secret to keep.

“Detective Mendez told me you were there, at her house.”

“Marissa and I were supposed to work this morning. I got there and ... he told me.”

“Are you all right?”

“No. Of course not. Are you?”

Steve had known Marissa. As part of his volunteer work for the center he had helped with setting up the copyright on the poster so the proceeds of sales would go directly to the Thomas Center.

She had wondered if that was all her husband had done with Marissa. The curse of the woman scorned: to look at every woman her husband had contact with and wonder if he was sleeping with her too. Marissa was beautiful, headstrong, sexy—a description people had used for Sara what seemed an awfully long time ago ... How strange that was, she thought now, remembering that she and Marissa were close to the same age.

Her husband shook his head, hands on his hips. He was standing not three feet away from her. There had been a time when they both would have closed that distance and she would have been in his arms.

“No,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

“What’s going to happen to Haley?”

“I don’t know.”

She went to push a chunk of hair out of her eyes and smeared blood across her cheek.

“You’re bleeding,” Steve said.

Once he would have taken her hand and kissed her wounded finger.

“I cut myself.”

“Why don’t you wear gloves when you’re working on this thing?” he asked, more annoyed than concerned.

Suffering for your art? Mendez had asked her.

She wondered what either of them would think if she told them the physical pain was a relief.

Another car door slammed out on the street, and the opportunity was lost—not that she ever would have taken it. Her daughter was home. Time to put on a happier face.

17

Wendy went to her room as soon as dinner was over and the kitchen was cleaned up. She tended not to hang around downstairs when both her mom and dad were home because they weren’t happy and everyone was tense and it sucked. And it was her fault, which sucked even worse.

Her parents stayed together because of her, because that was what she wanted. Only it wasn’t. She wanted them to go back in time and be happy the way they used to be—that was what she wanted. If she could have time-traveled like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, she would have gone back and changed so many things.

She would have gone back and made sure that whatever had happened to make her parents fall out of love never happened. She would have gone back to that day last October and made sure she and Tommy didn’t take the shortcut through Oakwoods Park, and they never would have found that dead body, and none of what had happened would have happened.

But she couldn’t travel back in time. She couldn’t fix what was wrong between her mom and dad. And she was too afraid of losing what family life she had to tell them not to try anymore.

Restless and depressed, she wandered around her sunny yellow bedroom with its white wicker furniture and her stuffed animals on the bed. Her Barbies lived in their own little cul-de-sac in the corner in the pink Barbie dream house with the pink Barbie Corvette parked beside it.

Wendy felt like she was in somebody else’s room. The room of a stupid happy child who didn’t know the things Wendy knew.

She turned her radio on and sat down on the bed. Her newest favorite song was playing—“True Colors,” by Cyndi Lauper. She had been crazy for the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” She would always sing along and dance and be ridiculous when the song came on the radio. Her mom had joined in with her sometimes. Tommy had always blushed and practically died of embarrassment when she did it.

Tommy wasn’t allowed to listen to popular music because his mother was a bitch. Wendy wasn’t actually allowed to use that word, but she used it all the time in her head—and out of earshot of adults. Janet Crane was an evil bitch. She had always been a bitch to Tommy, and then she took him and left, and nobody knew where they were.

Wendy kept hoping she would hear from him, that he would send her a postcard or a letter or something just to let her know he was all right and that he was thinking about her. They had been best friends since the third grade. But more than a year had passed with no word. In her darker moments Wendy wondered if the Evil Bitch might have killed him, just like Tommy’s father had killed all those women.

The world was such a dark place. So many bad things happened. It made her feel stupid to have a sunny yellow bedroom.

After everything that had happened with the murders, and Tommy’s dad attacking Miss Navarre, and Tommy disappearing, Miss Navarre had tried to get their fifth-grade class interested in something good, something positive.

They had begun to follow the space shuttle program and learn about the astronauts and the scientific experiments they would perform on the next mission. It had been especially fun because one of the astronauts— Christa McAuliffe—was a schoolteacher. They had all been so excited to watch the launch on the twenty-eighth of January. But seventy-three seconds into the flight the space shuttle Challenger had exploded, killing everyone on board right before their very eyes.

Weeks later the navy had found the crew compartment in the ocean with the bodies of all seven astronauts still inside. Wendy had had nightmares for weeks about looking inside the capsule and seeing the rotting corpses.

And not long after that a nuclear power plant had a meltdown in the Soviet Union, and killed and poisoned thousands of people and animals and the environment, and now there would be freaks and mutants there like something out of a horror movie—only it was real.

It just seemed like everything in the world was bad and wrong.

Now her mother’s friend Marissa was dead. Wendy had known Marissa too, and Marissa’s daughter, Haley, was so cute and sweet. Wendy had begged and begged to babysit for Haley, but her mom thought she was too young and wouldn’t let her babysit until she was at least thirteen. Two whole years away.

And her parents wouldn’t say exactly what had happened to Marissa, but Wendy knew she had been murdered, because she had heard part of the story on the news.

She didn’t know why people did these things. Why had Tommy’s father killed those women? Why would anyone kill Marissa? No adult had given her a real answer. They didn’t know. Did people just wake up one day and decide they wanted to kill? Did they just get so angry they couldn’t stop themselves?

She had especially wondered about that because of Dennis Farman. Dennis was just a kid, like she was a kid,