When Secrets Die (11 page)

The girl had the look of her mother—but she was shorter and more petite, and while Emma exuded
presence
, the girl's energy, undeniably strong, smoldered beneath the surface. The mother would always be noticed. The daughter had learned to tone down the essence and to blend.

Franklin looked up in time to catch the look the kid threw him on her way through the doorway. Keen, intelligent, suspicious. Emma gave Franklin a sharp look, and he was jolted by the defensive and protective air she suddenly acquired. There was nothing friendly or amused in that look, and Franklin realized that if he didn't get along with the daughter, he was dead meat.

“Blaine, put Wally in the bedroom,” she said.

“Not on my account,” Franklin said quickly.

Emma grinned at him over her shoulder as she fixed two large glasses of peach iced tea and put one in front of his place and one in front of her daughter's. “If we don't put Wally up, she'll sit by your side and beg.”

“I grew up with dogs,” he said.

“Liar.”

“What do you know about it?” he asked.

Jodina Calhoun looked to the heavens. “She knows everything. If you don't believe me, ask her.”

The splash of water was noisy from the bathroom, which was evidently right off the living room. The door slammed shut suddenly, then a toilet flushed, and the door opened again.

“Wash your hands,”
Emma said.

“Mom.”
The tone, mortified.

Franklin sympathized. The kid looked old and smart enough to take care of her bathroom habits privately without any input from her mom.

SYD

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

Syd sometimes had to reassure herself that everything her husband, Dr. Theodore Tundridge, was doing was completely legal. She was the one who had urged Ted to turn the videotape of the Marsden woman over to the police, and now she was questioning the decision. She had not expected the tape to make the six o'clock news. How had the media gotten hold of it?

Ted, however, was very sure. Sure that he was right about the Marsden woman and the death of her child. Sure that he was right about the research. He had no tolerance for anyone questioning him. The Marsden woman had objected to the pathology lab, and Ted was furious. Syd lay awake at night, wondering if Ted was accusing the woman because she had the nerve to challenge his right to use tissue samples for research. Ted did not like his authority challenged. He was one of those tiresome people who were always right.

He had assured Syd, in a drawn-out and huffy conversation, that there was solid evidence the Marsden woman might have had something to do with her son's illness. Might have. From what Syd could gather, the only evidence was staff suspicion.

The videotape that had so strangely and suspiciously been mailed to the clinic had ended any sympathy Syd had for Emma Marsden. That kind of behavior, on her child's birthday—it was weird. It made Syd squirm.

But if she was honest, the path lab made her squirm too.

She wondered how far she could push her objections. There was no question she had the upper hand in the marriage.

Syd was usually careful to keep her opinions to herself. Theodore took this silence as approval, and Syd's approval, though he rarely realized it, was integral to his happiness.

Syd did not like her husband. She hid her opinion of him from everyone but herself. She never spoke negatively about him in front of the children. (Girlfriends were a tempting indulgence she was not always able to resist.) Theodore was completely unaware of how she felt. This she also knew. She was not having affairs, not that she didn't have offers. She was fairly attractive, though her husband was not aware of her on a physical level and never had been—there was very little that could penetrate his self-obsession. She had not put him through medical school, so she had no debts for him to repay—financial or emotional. She was not wealthy, not until she became Mrs. Theodore Tundridge, but she did not have a single thread of avarice in her soul. She simply admired his work, and did not wish to disrupt the lives of their four children—all adopted, siblings left orphaned after an automobile accident killed their parents. Syd had adopted the two oldest initially, twelve- and ten-year-old boys. They violently opposed being separated from the others, and it was clear from the outset that the children needed to be together. Syd had planned all along to adopt all four of them, but it had taken time, patience, and a certain manipulation. Being a doctor's wife had many advantages. Eventually Syd managed to convince the family and Child Protective Services to allow her to adopt the two youngest—a little girl of five and a toddler of one and a half, another boy. That had been five years ago, and her children were now seventeen, fifteen, ten, and six. She loved them with all her heart, and felt they were meant to be in her life. She was perfectly able to conceive, and she and Ted had something of a sex life now and then, but she was obsessively and phobically afraid of childbirth. Someone had shown her a Lamaze class film at an early age, and it had made an eternal impression. (Syd thought showing such things to women
after
they got pregnant was the height of cruelty.)

She was perfectly aware that her husband did important work. His research into pediatric liver disease was groundbreaking and lifesaving, and he not only served the usual middle-class and wealthy patients but also devoted a significant part of his clinic to the children of those who could not afford medical care, which, these days, could be almost anyone.

It was a good life, in Syd's estimation, not the least because it was a life she had chosen. She was happy to be able to stay home with her four children, who had needed her so desperately when their beloved mother and father had died on I-75 coming home from a University of Louisville basketball game. She did sometimes miss passion—not the Hollywood version, which, in her opinion, had little to do with any reality she'd ever seen. Those kinds of ideals wreaked havoc with people's general expectations so that they constantly bypassed love for the occasional spark of infatuated lust. She knew what she was giving up, and sometimes it bothered her, but not very often. There had been someone, once, after she'd gotten married, and she often thought that the two of them could have been blissfully happy. But he, too, had been married, and though his spouse had been cold, critical, and controlling, he had after all made his choice and been happy with it before he knew Syd. When it came to having affairs and breaking up marriages, she was the last woman standing. It just wasn't in her.

Syd and her children had a lovely life together, with Ted as a distant, distracted father who spent most of his time working. She took the kids bowling every Friday night. They went to soccer games on the weekends, soccer practice during the week. There were dance classes at Diana Evans School of Dance for the Sugar Babe (officially Renee, but she had always been Sugar Babe to Syd and the boys). Syd allowed no television during meals (except on weekends; then it was a free-for-all) and took them all to Second Presbyterian Church every Sunday, no matter how much they complained and begged to sleep in. Involvement in the youth group, however, remained a matter of choice.

Syd did the tax work for her husband's clinic, as well as keeping an overview of the books, because, in addition to her skill as a mother, nurturer, and homemaker, she had graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in accounting and a degree in tax law from Emory University. She'd hung both diplomas over the washing machine and dryer. She was not supermom, but she did have a sense of humor. Her weaknesses were romance novels, the thick ones you could really get into as well as the slender quick reads; Pecan Sandies shortbread cookies; and chess, which she played online, no one in her family coming close to being able to give her a good game.

She raised her children in a four-thousand-square-foot house in Heartland subdivision, and because she loved a clean house and hated cleaning, she had a maid come in once a week. She and the maid had become very good friends; she was probably closer to Ginny than to any of her other girlfriends. They exchanged advice on children and husbands. Ginny had one child, and her husband was disabled. They were very much in love and spent a lot of time traveling in their RV now that their son was grown and out of the house. Ginny was fond of Syd's children, and Lucy and Ethel, the two golden retrievers that Syd and the kids had adopted from Golden Retriever Rescue, had cured her of a fear of big dogs. The household included a foul-tempered iguana named Earl, an odoriferous mouse named Casper, and a cat, Mr. Bo Jangles, who had shown up on the back porch one unseasonably cold morning during the kids' Thanksgiving holiday three years ago. Once freed of matted hair and parasites, Mr. Bo Jangles had turned into a sleek beauty who never again bothered to venture outside, preferring to spend most of his time peering down at the dogs from the top of the television set.

Syd knew the doorbell was going to ring before the chimes began bonging. The dogs had jumped from their upside-down paws-in-the-air rub-my-tummy positions and were now circling her legs, preventing her from answering the door in their enthusiasm to let her know there was someone out front and wouldn't it be a great idea if they all went together to bark and take a look? Sadly, the dogs did not seem to respect Syd as pack leader, but held the attitude that she was a member of the gang, albeit an important one. She was, after all, in charge of rides in the RAV4.

Syd looked through the peephole and saw that Amaryllis Burton was on the doorstep, wearing a white lab coat with her name tag and the clinic name stenciled on it in pink cursive. Syd hesitated. Unfortunately, the glass panels on either side of the double door, frosted though they might be, made it clear that someone was there inside.

Syd swung the front door open and tried to smile. Amaryllis, medium height and plump, fair-skinned but plagued by an outrageous number of large brown moles, gave her a big smile beneath eyes brimming with hostility.

“Taking it easy today?” Amaryllis said, showing all of her teeth. She looked Syd up and down, taking in the sweatpants, the sweatshirt that read “The Only Bad Coffee Cup Is an Empty Coffee Cup,” the chestnut hair expensively streaked with blond highlights piled carelessly up and held by a comb, and the face clear of makeup. Even in grubbies, Syd knew she outclassed the woman on the doorstep, whose overstretched tan sweater and A-line brown skirt had been worn to the nub. She knew Amaryllis resented that Syd's nails were recently manicured. French tips, though, short and squared-off. Syd refused to consider herself spoiled or frou-frou. Amaryllis could get her nails done if she wanted to, it just wasn't her style. She treated looking dowdy as if it were part of a healthier lifestyle, like buying organic fruit.

Amaryllis glanced down at the novel Syd held splayed against her thigh; the front cover showed a woman stepping into a carriage. Syd was a sucker for Regency romance and collected first edition Georgette Heyers.

“Am I interrupting something?” Amaryllis said, pursing her lips at Syd's book.

“I was just getting ready to walk out the door.”

Since she was barefoot, the lie was blatant, but Syd rarely felt it necessary to be polite to a woman who so often and so clumsily put the moves on her husband. Ted was convinced that Amaryllis was in love with him, although Syd thought Amaryllis, to her credit, was mainly interested in his prestige and bank account, in that order. Ted often thought women were in love with him because he was a doctor, and considered it part of the job. Usually he was wrong.

Syd had told him long and often that she would not tolerate affairs and there would be no second chances, but that if he had the bad sense to fool around with Amaryllis Burton she would kill him just for having bad taste. Syd didn't like Amaryllis, but Amaryllis
hated
Syd. Syd had everything that Amaryllis wanted—a prominent doctor for a husband, a house full of children, and what looked, from the outside at least, like a lot of money.

“I won't ask to come in,” Amaryllis said, glancing over Syd's shoulder into the house. She offered Syd a thick file. “I thought I'd better drop this by.”

Syd took the file, which meant she had to open the screen door, which meant, by the rules of good manners, that she had to ask Amaryllis in.

“You sure you don't want to step inside?” Syd asked.

Amaryllis eyed the dogs. For a moment Syd held out hope, but Amaryllis inclined her head and stepped through the open door, squealing in what was meant to pass for pain—and in all fairness might actually be pain—when Ethel jumped up and pushed both paws against her stomach.

“Bad dog,” Syd said halfheartedly. They
were
bad dogs, both of them, and every attempt she made to train them was undone by her bevy of outrageous children, who thought dogs were put on the earth to be spoiled.

Syd led Amaryllis into the living room and saw the raised eyebrow of disapproval. The truth was, Ginny had spent the last two weeks on the road in her RV, and the house was much the worse for wear. The open bag of cookies that Syd was having as a late brunch was set up high on the mahogany and marble antique table so that the dogs couldn't get to them without a lot of effort. The dogs circled Amaryllis, who made shoving motions with her hands that interested them momentarily, but the smell of the cookies was more to their taste, and they settled side by side beneath the table, long strings of drool coming from their maws in anticipation of what those Keebler elves could do. Syd gave them both a cookie, then remembered to offer one to Amaryllis.

“Just one, I guess, I'm starved. We're about run off our feet at the clinic today, so I thought I'd better bring these over on my lunch hour.”

Syd flicked the open file: the monthly list of clinic expenses. That was odd. The information was confidential, and one thing Ted was a bear about was keeping the financial end to himself, as in to herself, since she kept track of most of it. She and Mr. French.