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Secrets She Knew (A Secrets and Lies Suspense Novel)

By D.L. Wood

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Danielle Lake was fifteen years old the first time she saw a dead body.


July of 1995 in Skye, Alabama, was a brutal summer, full of locusts and blazing heat, withering everything—people, animals and foliage alike. It was the kind of heat that somehow made Dani feel crispy, even though at seventy percent humidity she could pretty much drink the air as much as breathe it.


Wish I had my stupid driver’s license already, she yearned for the millionth time that week. Then she could drive to Green’s Drugs to meet Sasha and Peter instead of riding there on the bicycle she had owned since she was eleven, like some kind of middle-schooler. Dani’s gut curdled at the thought of parking her bike in the rack in front of Green’s on Main Street for all to see. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Her birthday was still six months off.


A thick bead of sweat trickled down her brow, and she lifted a hand from the handlebars to brush it away. Her tires ground against the pavement as she steered, thinking of the treats awaiting her at Green’s, which, in addition to being a pharmacy and sundries shop, still operated a 1950s-style soda counter serving up root beer floats and malted milkshakes to the small town. The image of a creamy vanilla scoop melting in cold, fizzy soda flashed in her mind, and she pedaled harder.


If only I was old enough to drive.


But for now she was stuck on the little yellow bicycle, with its faded, lime-green pea pod decal on the seat and “Sweet Pea” printed in matching glossy finish down the center bar. Dani leaned her weight to the left, turning off her neighborhood street onto the private driveway of one of the homes, then down onto the grass of its side yard, her legs pumping harder on the uneven ground to keep her momentum going. She cut between the house and its neighbor all the way to the rear boundary of their backyards, maneuvering through a thin tree line until finally shooting out onto a wide dirt path.


The earth was dusty from the lack of rain, and a faint cloud of red kicked up in Dani’s wake as she traveled the path which made a perpendicular cut across the back of Dr. Beecher’s antebellum estate, leading to the river and then to a gravel road that would eventually drop her out two blocks from Green’s on the town square.

Going this way, cutting through yards and back paths and along the river, was not the shortest route to Green’s. Or the easiest—the gravel road was never fun, especially if a wheel happened to catch a rock and kick it up into her leg. She could have gone the whole way on real roads—ridden down her street to the next and the next and then turned right toward downtown—all smooth and rock-free and a shorter distance. But the one advantage of the back way trumped every one of those other things. The back way was unpaved and shaded, which meant it was cooler, and at ninety-seven degrees at eleven o’clock in the morning, cooler beat faster any day of the week.


The dirt path was sandwiched between Dr. Beecher’s fenced-in horse pasture on the left and a field of four-foot-high cornstalks on the right. Dani rolled along, the white wooden pasture fence scrolling by, the sticky breeze fanning her skin, until reaching the path’s end where it met the gravel road. She jammed on the brakes and stopped, straddling the bike. It only took a few seconds of being stationary for an opportunistic mosquito to land on her cheek, and she slapped at it, her skin stinging from the strike.


In the pasture, an aged aluminum trough half-full of water rested beneath a massive oak tree ancient enough to have likely witnessed the Civil War. Its wide expanse of branches and deep green leaves provided the only shade in the field, and that and the water were why Smith and Wesson, Dr. Beecher’s two horses, stood beneath it. Smith, dapple grey and at least sixteen hands high, and Wesson, smaller, with his shiny, deep auburn coat, looked up at her from their grazing. She clicked her tongue, but when that didn’t elicit a response, she called them by name. Unlike most days, when they would amble over to the fence for a pet and possibly a sugar cube, they looked at her, but made no effort to cross the twenty feet to where she stood. The blistering heat had sapped them too.


If it was cooler, she might see if Dr. Beecher was home, see if he would let her take one of the horses for a ride. Dr. Beecher was nice like that. Always had been, ever since he had happened upon her feeding the horses sugar cubes one day when she was ten. They had been friends ever since. He let her ride the horses and taught her how to brush them down. Sometimes he took her fishing with his daughter, even though the girl was much younger than Dani. He was the only one who could help her with her advanced algebra homework the few times she had struggled—and he loaned her books too, big fat ones with fancy leather trim and gold print on the covers. He was a bookworm like her, and, when she had confessed what an oddball she felt like, he had promised her that though it might not feel like it now, being smart would pay off in the long run. It had for him, and he assured her it would for her too. He had even let her do some filing in his office a few times, so she could earn some spending money, and get a feel for what it was like to be a doctor, a career she was considering. So far, she had saved every penny of that extra cash for the car she hoped to buy.


But today was too hot for riding horses.Giving up on them, Dani started to turn left onto the gravel driveway which would carry her down one side of the estate, parallel to the river for a few hundred yards before ending at Main Street. But as she raised her right foot, preparing to shove all her weight on the pedal to get the bike rolling, she spotted something out of the corner of her eye, way off to the right, set back close to the riverbank.


She put her foot back down.
Honeysuckle. A vibrant green vine, tucked away under a grove of pines at the river’s edge, with fat yellow and white flowers just twenty or so yards away, begging for someone to pull out the sweet stems and sample the nectar inside.


I’ve got time, she considered. Sasha and Peter won’t be at Green’s for another half hour.


Swiveling her handlebars to the right, she started pedaling, crossing over the gravel drive that crunched beneath her wheels until dropping onto the grass beyond. Her bones jarred with every rock and hole the tires met, the bicycle bouncing so much that she had to keep her teeth clamped together, or risk chipping a tooth. A chipped tooth would not only mean pain, but a trip to the dentist, something her parents would not have appreciated, given that they had been living paycheck to paycheck since early May, when her father had blown out his knee playing softball. The doctors said it would be another two months before he could return to work as a mechanic at the auto garage. For now, money was in extra short supply and if she spent any of it by hurting herself while biking off-road to pick honeysuckle, it would be a long time before she would hear the end of it.


Years later, looking back on the whole thing, Dani wouldn’t be able to say why the honeysuckle had been so appealing in that moment. It was just honeysuckle, after all. But it was summer and it was something to do and so she did it.

She would spend the rest of her life wishing she hadn’t.


The yellow, white, and green leafy curtain ran at least two dozen feet down the barbed wire fence that separated Dr. Beecher’s property from the town-owned riverbank. The vines were interwoven and thick, all the way from the burgeoning top, down to the dirt where they piled in mounds. With about ten yards to go, Dani finally hopped off and pushed the bicycle the rest of the way, the handlebars jerking in her hands as she crossed the rough ground. Near the bush, she kicked out the bike stand, propped the bicycle up, and began plucking the bright, sweet flowers.


Bumblebees bud-hopped alongside Dani, but she didn’t mind. There were plenty of blooms to go around and the bees didn’t seem to notice her. She pulled stems and sampled nectar, one flower after the other, the sweetness dancing on her tongue. When the bees finally ventured a little too close, she stepped around to the right side of the bush to put some distance between them, and that’s when she saw them: a partially obscured pair of bright white Skechers, shoved about six inches under the edge of the clumpy vine.


What a waste.


Dani had been wearing her old pair of Skechers sneakers for over two years, and they were soiled beyond cleaning. She was itching for another pair, and even planned on asking for one for her birthday. The ones abandoned here were bright white and the platform version, even. They were exactly what she wanted.


I’d kill for those. I can’t believe someone just dumped them here like that.


She was just wondering whether they might be at all close to her size, when it registered that the shoes weren’t lying flat, but were, quite disturbingly, very, very vertical. Heels down, toes up.


As if someone was still wearing them.


Dani squatted down and pulled the vine away from the fence to get a better look. A wave of lightheadedness rippled through her as she sucked in a trembling breath.


Jennifer Cartwright lay impossibly still underneath the honeysuckle bush, the entire length of her body pressed up against the barbed wire fence so that her head, her blond hair spilled about it, was furthest in, her feet out. From the front of the bush, she had been completely hidden by the vines, but now, standing at the side with the vines pulled back, Dani could see into the less dense undergrowth and the space that held Jennifer. Her eyes raked over the girl’s denim shorts and white top, both streaked with dirt, and…something else. Something the color of rust. Her skin, especially her face, bore an unnatural blue cast, as if she were cold—hypothermia-level cold—an impossibility in that unrelenting, sweltering heat.


Dani began to shake.


She knew those blue eyes well. Had seen them sparkle at school every day since they started kindergarten together. Jennifer Cartwright was vibrant, funny and kind, the sort of person who even reached out to the oddballs like Dani, despite being the most popular girl in the tenth grade at Skye High. She was beloved and lit up every room she walked into. But those eyes weren’t sparkling now. All the light that had ever been in them had gone out.

From somewhere high above, a crack sounded, followed by a branch plummeting to the earth, landing with a thump nearby. Dani’s heart jumped, slamming against her rib cage and solidly yanking her out of her shock-induced daze as she jumped back and screamed. Ripping her gaze away from Jennifer, Dani stumbled the few steps to her bicycle. Grasping it by the handlebars, she clumsily kicked up the stand and ran hard for several yards before finally hopping on and pedaling away as fast as her scrawny legs would allow.


It was the first time she had ever seen a dead body.
 Unfortunately, it would not be the last.


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