No Perfect Secret Read Online Free Page B

much to tell, Anna wondered, then decided—all of it. “We’ve been trying for years. We’ve both been to doctors and we’re both fine. There’s no physical reason for me not getting pregnant.”
    “Maybe you and Kevin need a vacation —like a second honeymoon. You’ve never let me pay for anything all these years, so—well... If you and Kevin would agree, I’d like to treat you to a second honeymoon.”
    Anna looked at the empty teacup before Clara-Alice, then up to her mother-in-law’s face. There was no malice, no deception, no sly smirk. She could barely keep her jaw from hanging open.
    “That’s a really nice thought. Let’s talk to Kevin about it when he gets home.”
    “I’ll convince him. You know he always minds me. I got pregnant with him on my honeymoon, you know.”
    “I didn’t know,” Anna said.
    “You’ve never seen his baby books, have you?”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    “Maybe we could get those out of storage. I don’t remember where we put everything after—after it happened.”
    Anna smiled at Clara-Alice. A genuine smile, not one she had to paste on to hide dismay or irritation. “Kevin put all of your things in the basement. We can look for them this weekend.”
    “Oh. Let’s put a bug bomb down there first. I hate spiders.”
    “Ew, me, too,” said Anna.
    Later, as she lay in bed, each time she closed her eyes, thinking of Kevin, another face rose up to plague Anna. An angular face in which dark gray eyes tracked her every move, mocking her, piercing her brain, so that all her secrets were laid bare for inspection.
    She turned on the lamp, propping herself up on a pair of pillows, forc ed Caburn’s image from her mind and devised ways to reclaim the rapture in her marriage. Kevin was coming home. Frank Caburn had said so. For some unfathomable reason she believed him.
     

 
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Every tree limb , bush, wire and car was coated with a thick layer of ice. The sun was barely up, casting no warmth, but the faint rays activated gleaming prisms of green and blue and purple, a still-life kaleidoscope. Anna offered a mental blessing for those New York feminists who years ago had balked at skirts and began wearing pantsuits in the work place. She was clad in her favorite—lined tweed slacks with a jacket fitted at the waist, beneath which she wore a green cashmere sweater. She had a matching knit cap on her head, pulled low and wore a pair of black leather ankle boots with sensible heels.
    She had awakened energized, made swift work of breakfast—coffee and buttered toast, a three minute shower, and dressed in five minutes flat. She had made up her mind that whatever the issues with Kevin—they would work them out. Moreover, to her utter astonishment, Clara-Alice had perked the coffee, tuned the kitchen radio to an Appalachian station putting out slow talk and merry-mood fiddle music. Clara-Alice seemed perky .
    The Saab’s remote had unlocked the car doors but the damned things were frozen shut, the windshields coated in ice, and the scraper was on the passenger seat.
    “Hey! Anna. Girl, you should’ve put one of those NASA space age blankets over your car last night. Didn’t you listen to the weather report?”
    Lila Hammond came barreling across the yard, wearing rubber camouflage boots, her dead husband’s greatcoat over her flannel nightgown, and a fedora plopped on her grey-white hair. Lila looked like a thousand-year-old mummy, claimed to be a hundred-fifty, but was really almost ninety. She had the energy of a teenager. Lila had been in the WACs until 1978, served as a nurse in Philippines during the Japanese invasion, and eventually married Lt. Col. Charles Hammond, a survivor of the Bataan March. “Any man who got through that was tough enough for me,” she claimed. “Of course, I had to fatten him up before I got him into bed. When I fell for him, he was only about two inches wide, but after he filled out some—yum, yum—he was man to the