Tell Me No Secrets (48 page)

He smiled, obviously caught up in the memory. “She was so relieved. Really, she looked like the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders. She thanked me. She even kissed me. Said that, of course, she’d never had any objections to me personally, but that, well, you know …”

“So you offered to drive her to the doctor’s.”

“I
insisted
on driving her to the doctor’s,” Don elaborated. “In fact, I said it was such a lovely day, why didn’t we go for
a nice drive first. She thought that was a lovely idea.” His smile grew wider. “We drove to Union Pier.”

“What?”

“I had everything worked out. Once she got in the car, it was easy, really. I said that I wanted her opinion on some renovations I’d been thinking about for the cottage. She was happy to help, even flattered, I think. We walked around the house, she told me what she thought would look nice, then we went out back, stood looking at the bluffs.”

“Oh God.”

“She never saw it coming, Jess. One clean shot to the back of the head. And it was all over.”

Jess swayed, almost lost her balance, grasped the floor with her toes, managed to hang on. “You killed her,” she whispered.

“She was a dying woman, Jess. In all likelihood, she’d have been dead of cancer within five years. Think of the pain I saved her, the years of agony for everyone concerned. Instead, she died on a beautiful sunny day, looking out over the bluffs, not worrying about her daughter for the first time in months. I know this must be hard for you to understand, Jess, but she was happy. Can’t you see? She died happy.”

Jess opened her mouth to speak, but it was several seconds before any sounds emerged. “What did you do … afterward?”

“I gave her a proper burial,” he said. “Out by the bluffs. You were looking at her grave a few weeks ago.”

Jess pictured herself standing by the back window of Don’s cottage, staring through the swirling snow toward the bluffs beyond.

“I thought of telling you the truth then,” he continued. “To finally put your mind at rest to let you know that you bad nothing to feel guilty about anymore, that your fight with your mother had nothing to do with her death, that her death was a foregone conclusion from the moment she tried to interfere with our plans. But I knew the timing wasn’t right.”

Jess recalled the feel of Don’s arms around her, the touch of his lips on hers as they’d made love before the fireplace, the false comfort he’d provided. That he’d always provided. Had some deep part of her self-conscious always suspected as much? Surely that was what her anxiety attacks had been trying for years to tell her.

“What about my father? He was against our marriage too.”

“Your father was a pussycat. I knew once your mother was out of the picture, there’d be no problem with your dad.”

“And the gun?” Jess asked. “What did you do with the gun?”

Again Don smiled, a smile more terrifying than Rick Ferguson’s had ever been. “I gave it to you as a present after you left.”

Jess clutched at her stomach. She stared down at the small revolver in Rick Ferguson’s outstretched hand, the gun Don had insisted she take to protect herself after their divorce, the same weapon he had used to end her mother’s life.

“I liked the irony of it,” Don was saying, as if he were commenting on a point of law, not confessing to her mother’s murder. When had his obsessiveness crossed the boundary into madness? How had she failed to recognize it for so long?

She had slept with her mother’s killer, for God’s sake.

Was he the crazy one or was she? She felt dizzy, her head lolling backward, as if she might faint.

“Now you understand how much I love you,” he said, “how all I’ve ever wanted was to take care of you.”

Jess’s head swayed from side to side, her eyes unable to focus. Was he going to kill her too? “And now what?” she asked.

“And now we’ll call the police and tell them what happened. That Rick was waiting for you inside your apartment, that he tried to kill you, that I got here just in time, that I had to shoot him in order to save you.”

Jess’s eyes rolled back in her head, her head snapping over her right shoulder.

“And then it’ll all be over,” Don continued, reassuringly. “And you’ll come home with me. Back where you belong. Where you’ve always belonged. And we can be together. Like we were meant to be.”

Nausea swept across Jess’s body like a giant wave. It rolled over her, knocking her feet out from under her, sending her crashing to her knees, carrying her out to sea, threatening to drown her. She reached out instinctively for something to grab onto, something to save her, to keep her from being swept away, from going under. Her fingers found a branch, grabbed hold, tightened their grip. The gun, she understood, curling her fingers around its handle, using it to pull herself back to safety, straightening her shoulders as she fought her way free of the deadly current. In one quick and fluid motion, Jess brought the gun up, pointed it directly at her ex-husband’s heart, and pulled the trigger.

Don stared at her in surprise as the bullet ripped through his chest. Then he crumpled forward and fell to the floor.

Jess rose slowly to her feet and walked to his side. “Bull’s-eye,” she said calmly.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, staring down at her ex-husband, the gun pointed at his head, ready to shoot again if he so much as twitched. She wasn’t sure when she became aware of other sounds, of traffic outside her window, of laughter echoing down the street, of her phone ringing.

She looked over at the clock. Ten o’clock. It would be Adam, calling to check on how she was, to find out how her day bad gone, to wish her a good night’s sleep.

She almost laughed. She wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, that much was sure. She’d have to deal with the police, contact her family. Tell them about Rick Ferguson, about Don, the truth about what had happened here tonight, the truth about what had happened eight years ago. The whole truth. Would they believe any of it?

Did she?

Jess walked to the phone and picked up the receiver. “Adam?” she asked.

“I love you,” he answered.

“Could you come home?” Her voice was soft but in control, surprisingly anxiety-free. “I think I’m going to need a good lawyer.”

I would like to thank the following people for the help they gave me in the writing of this book: Neil Cohen, who provided me with a crash course in the law and generously gave of his time and expertise—he is not only a lawyer, but a poet as well; Dean Morask, Chief of the Criminal Prosecutions Bureau for Cook County, who took time from his busy schedule to grant me a prolonged interview and answer some pretty far-out questions; the Honorable Judge Earl Strayhorn, who allowed me into his courtroom and showed me how justice is best served.

I would also like to thank Julie Rickerd for knowing just the right things to say just when I needed to hear them.

My deepest gratitude and appreciation to all of you.

I’ve always loved writing and found that it came relatively easily to me. I sent my first story off to a magazine when I was eight years old. The magazine was
Jack and Jill
, and the story was rejected. I also wrote plays that were performed by me and a group of friends for our captive parents during summer vacation at the cottage. This became a yearly ritual and only stopped when I was about twelve and started going to camp instead. At twelve, I wrote my first television script, the story of a twelve-year-old girl who murders her parents. Like my story to
Jack and Jill
, it too, was rejected. Still, just the thought of it caused my parents many a sleepless night. I continued writing all through my teen years—I was always the kid being asked to read her compositions out loud in English class. In my last year of high school, my English teacher announced to the class that I was going to be a writer, something I hadn’t really decided myself.

However, by the time I graduated, I had decided that this was what I was going to be. As soon as I got to university, however, I changed my mind, deciding I wanted to be an actress instead. To that end, I acted in about twenty campus productions (at the University of Toronto) and starred in the student movie,
Winter Kept Us Warm
, a fixture on the art house circuit even today.

After I graduated in 1966, with a BA in English literature, I went into acting full-time, eventually moving to Los Angeles, where I acted in an episode of
Gunsmoke
and, on a more personal note, got to kiss Elvis Presley. I also worked in a lot of banks and once again dabbled in writing—this time a novel.

Eventually, I returned to Toronto and went back to writing, always my first love. I continued to act, mostly in TV commercials, until the writing won out.

I love writing because it’s the only time in my life when I feel I have complete control. Nobody does or says anything I don’t tell them to—although even this amount of control is illusory because there comes a point where the characters take over and tell you what they think they should say and do. As a child, I played with cut-out dolls until I was fourteen years old, long past the age when my friends still played with them. I made up elaborate stories with my paper dolls, letting my imagination run wild. That’s really all I’m doing today—still playing with my dolls and letting my imagination run loose. Everyone should be so lucky in their chosen profession.

I get a fair number of letters from readers, most of them very favorable. They love the characters, who they feel they can really relate to. They understand what the women are going through and most identify with them in one way or
another. Probably the most frequent comment I get is that they can’t put the books down, and that once they’ve discovered me, they want to read everything I’ve ever written. Occasionally, I get letters from professional social workers and doctors, telling me that they’ve used or recommended my books to their patients. One man who’d read
Kiss Mommy Goodbye
, and who had recently kidnapped his children away from his ex-wife, wrote to say that he’d felt so bad after reading my book that he returned the children to their mother!

Probably my favorite book to date is
See Jane Run
. I’m not sure why it is so special to me. Maybe because it accomplished everything I wanted it to do. I felt it was an important story, one that existed on many levels, and I was very proud of both the writing itself and the story line. It was the culmination of a theme I’d been pursuing for years—that of a woman’s search for her identity. Also, I had just changed publishing houses, and this book represented quite a risk for me. That it worked out so well makes it a big favorite. Other particular favorites are
Missing Pieces, Whispers and Lies, Grand Avenue
, and
The Wild Zone
.

As to my writing routine, I prefer to write in the mornings, but I’m finding that anytime I have three to four uninterrupted hours is usually okay, even at night, although I’m pretty much shot by ten o’clock.

My main characters are all aspects of my own personality, although their stories are very different from my own. Still, I find that I approach the heroines as if I were a Method actress. I think, how would I react if this were happening to me? What would I say if someone spoke this way to me? Sometimes, I try to take the easy way out by neglecting the characters and concentrating on the plot. This never works
and I have to start again. I have to create a history for the characters, figure out who they are, what their backgrounds are, why they act the way they do. This often necessitates creating a family tree. Once I do that, everything tends to fall into place, because behavior is motivated by character, and the characters have a sense of history, as opposed to having been born into a vacuum as adults. Probably my most satisfying character was Jane Whittaker in
See Jane Run
, although I’m also very fond of Donna Cressy in
Kiss Mommy Goodbye
, Jill Plumley in
The Other Woman
, Joanne Hunter in
The Deep End
, Jess Koster in
Tell Me No Secrets
and Kate Sinclair in
Missing Pieces
.

Probably the question I’m asked most often is, “Where do you get your ideas?” This is not an easy question to answer. For the most part, I think it has to do with the way a writer looks at the world. Everything is a potential scene for a book, everyone is a potential character. I occasionally get snippets of ideas from magazines and newspaper articles, from the headlines. More often, from something at that is happening to someone I know; occasionally to me. I use whatever I can and nothing is sacred. Of course, nothing is exactly the way it is in real life. A writer borrows a bit from here, there and everywhere, and adapts it to her own purpose. I find that the more of me I include, the more successful the book, the more readers can identify with.

My family loves my books, although my younger daughter has to be persuaded to read them. Reading is still not her favorite pastime. My husband actually read
Don’t Cry Now
in one sitting, and thinks I improve with each book. As I said in the acknowledgements to
Missing Pieces
, I want to thank my daughters. I couldn’t have written the book without them.

Generally, it’s about a year from the time I come up with an idea until the book is finished. Of that, the actual writing time is between four to eight months. I start with characters, a theme, a basic idea, then I write an outline. Often, it takes two or three outlines to get it right. Very often, I go way off-track at the beginning. This also applies to the initial draft. I’ve had to write the first halves of many novels many times before I got them right. Such was the case with
Don’t Cry Now
. Once I got the first half right, the second half pretty much wrote itself.

I think I’m popular because men as well as women can identify with the people I’m writing about, although I write from a female perspective and always thought most of my readers would be women much like myself. Even if they’ve never been involved in a particular situation, my readers are familiar with the underlying emotions of the characters. Also, I know how to keep the reader turning the pages, and I think that once they get into the book, they have to keep reading. This appeals greatly to teenagers, and I was surprised to learn how popular I am with this age group. Everyone likes suspense, and I think that I write excellent, realistic dialogue, and know how to keep the action moving. Also, I create real people, and my books have an intelligence that a lot of commercial fiction lacks.