Sound of Secrets (32 page)

"Including you."

Curtis leveled him with an unfriendly stare. "Like I said, the next time you want to ask me a question, do it through my lawyer."

The steel in his voice convinced Gray that, this time, Curtis meant what he said.

Gray leaped into the air and shot the basketball. It careened off the backboard and went bouncing harmlessly across the court.

Lord, he was off his game today. Considering everything on his mind, it would be a miracle if he scored a point.

"Give it up, old man,” Tyler called from the sideline. Although the cut on his arm from his run-in with Stoney Gillick was keeping him out of the game, he was in fine heckling form.

"If you call me old man one more time, Ty, I’m gonna break your neck."

Tyler grinned and let out a belly laugh. He’d been laughing a lot lately, ever since he’d learned the love of his life loved him back. If possible, Tyler had been even more cheerful than usual.

He’d already told everyone within earshot that Karen Rhett loved him. His quarrel with Gray forgotten, Tyler had wrapped Gray in a bear hug and refused to let him go until he elicited his promise to be best man at his wedding. Despite Gray’s suspicion that Karen hadn’t yet agreed to marry him, he didn’t doubt she would. Eventually. A stronger-willed person than Tyler didn’t exist.

If it hadn’t been for Gray’s uneasy premonition that something terrible was about to happen, he would have been overjoyed at his friend’s happiness.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Cara and Curtis Rhett. He couldn’t stop seeing his former father-in-law’s stricken expression as they stood on the street in front of the newspaper. He couldn’t stop wondering if he were on the wrong track.

He tried to drag his mind back to the game. The sidelines looked more inviting. Since they had more than enough players to fill the rosters of two teams, they’d taken turns rotating in and out of the game. Gray gave up and motioned to his teammate, a skinny kid of about sixteen, to take his place.

He sat down on the grass across the court from where Tyler laughed and joked with a new kid. The burly teenager next to Gray looked eager to get back in the thick of the action. Gray wasn’t. His lungs burned, and he cursed himself for surrendering to the impulse to pick his cigarettes back up. Now he'd have to go through the hell of quitting all over again.

About ten minutes later, Danny Peckenbush took the other teen’s place on the sidelines. Gray forced his problems from his mind and concentrated on the teen.

"Hey, Danny, that was a nice shot you floated over the defense," Gray said. "Me, I couldn’t hit the side of a house today. Never mind about bad days. I’m having a bad week.”

Danny flipped his long hair out of his eyes and peered beyond the court at the pile of construction materials that would one day becoming a community center if Gray and Tyler could come up with the money.

"I bet a place like you’re trying to build costs a lot," he murmured.

"Yeah, it does." Gray nodded, thinking it was a strange thing for him to say. In his experience, teenagers didn’t think much about how something came to be. They were more concerned about what use it held for them once it did. "We’ve got some people helping us out with that."

"Do you?" Danny looked at him sharply. "I thought you were having trouble, that the money wasn’t getting to you."

Gray licked his lips while he regarded the teenager. He’d kept the business of the missing donations as quiet as he could, and he knew without asking that Tyler wouldn’t talk about their financial trouble with one of the teens.

"How did you know that?” Gray asked.

Danny stared at the ground. Gray was about to press him for an answer but thought better of it. Long moments passed, the only sounds coming from the basketball game.

"My dad bought a new boat last week.” Danny finally spoke, his words so soft Gray could barely hear him. “She’s a beauty. A thirty-foot cabin cruiser. Business hasn’t been any better at the gas station than usual so I wondered where he got the money."

"Where do you think he got the money?" Gray asked quietly.

Danny’s eyes turned to his. They were troubled.

"I overheard him talking to your dad on the phone a couple days ago. He mentioned the donations." His eyes dipped again. "I think my dad’s blackmailing your dad."

Cara’s rounded eyes raised from the eagle that had haunted her dreams to the stricken face of the man above it.

"It was you," she whispered. "You kidnapped us."

He didn’t need to confirm it. The truth was written on his face. So, too, was something deeper than regret. It drew his brows together, deepening the numerous lines on his face. Cara thought it was remorse.

"I prayed you wouldn’t remember. He wiped a hand across his face. "My hair was black back then. And I wore a mask, just a little one so I wouldn’t scare the two of you. I didn’t want you to be able to identify me when I let you go."

"It was the eagle." Cara nodded toward his bolo tie. "That's what I remembered."

"It doesn’t matter how you remembered. Just that you have." Tears squeezed through Bergie's eyes, wetting his cheeks. He came across the room and gripped her arm, his voice desperate. "You can’t tell. I’ll pay you not to tell."

Cara shook her head, staring at him. She had been so positive that Sam Peckenbush had been behind the crime. However, it had been Bergie all along. Except how could that be? How could a man who had devoted his life to helping others have done something so heinous?

"Why?" she asked. "Why did you do it?"

"I thought it was the only way to save my Maggie." Bergie’s grip on her arm constricted. She doubted he was aware he held her too tightly. "She was dying right in front of me, and I couldn’t do anything. I thought if she had the operation, the transplant, the doctors could save her.

"But the insurance company wouldn’t pay. They said our policy didn’t cover experimental surgery. Experimental surgery? Imagine the callousness of that when my Maggie's life hung in the balance."

Cara remembered what Gray had told her on the beach, that doctors didn’t start having good success with heart transplants until the late 1980s. Years earlier, even with an operation, Maggie DeBerg wouldn’t have had much of a chance. Bergie obviously hadn’t believed that then. He wouldn’t believe it now.

"I was desperate to get the money to save her,” Bergie said. “I started to mow lawns on the side. I couldn’t make nearly enough. Then I thought of kidnapping the Rhett children for ransom, and I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. I thought the end would justify the means. I never wanted anyone to get hurt."

"Except you made a mistake," Cara said. "I was in the park that day at the same time as Karen and Skippy, and you took the wrong girl."

He nodded unhappily. "I’d only seen Karen a few times, and you were the same age. Still, I thought the plan would work. I had the little boy, and his father was willing to pay. I knew Curtis Rhett’s house was empty, because I was mowing his lawn. So I hid the two of you in the storage shed until I had the ransom money."

"Then what?" Cara prodded.

He finally let go of her arm and slumped heavily into a chair across from her. Cara rubbed at the spot he’d gripped, certain she’d develop a bruise. She felt no fear. This was a repentant man, a man who had spent his life trying to right a terrible wrong. This wasn’t a man to fear.

"I had the two of you in the back seat of the car, but I couldn't let you go until I made sure all the money was there,” he said. “So I stopped to count it."

"In the parking lot of Sam Peckenbush’s gas station?"

He nodded. "It was closed for the night, and the station was dark. I was so intent on counting the money I didn’t make sure the car doors were locked. Skippy, he got out of the car. And you followed him."

"You chased us," she accused.

"You were little kids," he wailed. "It was dangerous for you to be running around in the dark. Of course I followed you."

He didn’t have to finish the rest of the story. Cara already knew how it ended. Skippy had run into the street at the same time Sam Peckenbush had returned to his gas station.

She had raced away in terror, stumbling across the hotel in which her parents were staying because it was the closest building to the gas station.

The horror of what she’d seen had been so great she’d buried the memories deep in her subconscious. She hadn't understood the root of her anxiety attacks and nightmares until she’d returned to Secret Sound.

Then the memories had come loose, like a battering avalanche.

"If Gray finds out, it’ll kill him." Bergie's eyes shimmered with tears. "He thinks the world of me, Cara. I couldn’t bear it for him to know what I did. Especially because I was too late to save his mother. Too late."

For the first time since she’d realized Bergie was the kidnapper, Cara’s resolve wavered. He was right. Discovering what his father had done would devastate Gray. Could she do that to him?

"I’ll pay you to keep quiet," Bergie continued. "I don’t have a lot of money, but I’ll give you what I have."

"You think I want to blackmail you?"

"You can’t tell anybody." He shook his head, obviously distraught. "If you do, it’ll ruin me. All those stories I wrote, all those people I helped, that won’t matter. All that will matter is the mistake I made."

"Mistake?" Cara thought of Skippy’s anguished eyes as he stood on the shoulder of the road and pleaded with her to run. "It was more than a mistake. You were responsible for the death of a five-year-old child!"

"Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’ve agonized over it? I thought I could make it up to society through my writing. If you tell, what I’ve done won’t mean a thing."

"Why should I help you?" Cara thought about the navy Lincoln Town Car that Bergie drove. It had been sitting in the driveway all along. Never once had she considered that Bergie had been behind the wheel the night she’d nearly been hit. "You tried to run me over with your car."

"I tried to scare you!" he protested. "I never meant to hit you!"

"You hit me when I was looking into that storage shed in Curtis's yard," she said. "How do you explain that?"

"I wanted to scare you enough to leave," he said, shaking his head. "I saw you walking back there. I was going to offer you a ride home, but you were already looking into the shed.

"I knew you were remembering. That’s when I realized he was right. That we had to get you out of town by whatever means possible. So I picked up a two-by-four. I didn’t hit you hard. I didn’t want to hurt you. I only wanted to scare you."

"We?" Cara immediately picked up on the pronoun, the only part of Bergie’s story that didn’t fit. "Wait a minute, what do you mean by we? Is there somebody else involved in this?"

"That would be me," came a gruff voice from under the archway of the kitchen door.

Cara focused first on the long, sleek barrel of a gun before her eyes trailed upward, past the toothpick dangling from his mouth to Sam Peckenbush’s small, mean eyes.

Sam Peckenbush was blackmailing his father.

Gray turned the accusation over in his mind. He couldn’t make sense of it. His father was the next best thing to a saint. Everybody knew that. Sure, he had his faults. He drank a little too much and ate more than he should. Those were minor flaws more than offset by the tremendous good he accomplished through his newspaper column and community service.

Poll any ten people in Secret Sound, and chances are nine would say his father had had a positive impact on their lives. He did so much volunteer work he sometimes had trouble meeting deadlines for his paying job.

"What would Sam have to blackmail my dad about?" Gray asked.

"I don’t know."

Until Danny answered, Gray hadn’t been aware he’d spoken the question aloud. The boy looked miserable. Gray clapped him on the back and gave his shoulder a reassuring shake.

"You did the right thing in telling me, Danny,” Gray said. “Don’t have any doubts about that."

The boy nodded, appearing a little less uncertain as Gray anchored a hand on the grass and pushed himself to his feet. He paused while he considered his next move. Drive straight to Sam’s place and ask where he’d gotten the money to buy a luxury boat. Or talk to his father to figure out whether Danny’s suspicions of blackmail were valid.

Gray took off for his car at a jog. Halfway there, he heard Tyler's shout. "Hey, where you going?"

Gray raised his hand and waved but didn’t stop. Not when the air was heavy with secrets that had been kept for far too long.

Gray got into the car and switched on the ignition, still not sure of his destination.

"What are you doing with that gun, Sam?" Bergie’s voice thickened with emotion and, Cara thought, panic.

"I’m gonna do what you shoulda already done," he growled, the toothpick moving with his lips. "I’m gonna eliminate our problem."

"No!" Bergie protested. Cara looked behind her for a possible escape route. The table butted up against a wall. The only way out was past Peckenbush. "No, this is wrong. I’ve let you blackmail me all these years. I won't let you do this."

"You can’t stop me, old man,” Peckenbush said. “This is your fault. I told you to run her out of town. I told you as soon as I heard her name and realized who she was."

As soon as Peckenbush made his statement, everything clicked into place for Cara. According to Aunt Clarice, her parents had insisted Cara’s name be kept out of the police reports. They’d been afraid the wrong person would see the name, track Cara to South Carolina and eliminate her as a possible witness to a crime.

Now, Cara realized that scenario wasn’t as impossible as it had sounded. Because Bergie was a trusted newspaper employee, he’d had access to the name of the second kidnapped child. Her name. Out of necessity and perhaps fear, he’d passed it on to Peckenbush.

"You knew all along who I was, didn’t you?" Cara addressed her question to Bergie. "You even knew the first night when I came to the paper and we all went to dinner."

In answer, he shook his head and ran a hand over his face. "No. I’m bad at remembering names. I didn’t know who you were until Sam told me."