Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

She burst into racking tears.

Kathryn Dance sat next to Jon Boling and her son in the third row, her parents nearby, watching the procession of performers in Mrs Bendix’s Sixth Grade Class’s Got Talent! .

‘How you doing there?’ Dance whispered to Boling. It was astonishing how many forgotten lines, missed dance steps and off-tone notes could be crammed into one hour.

‘Better than any reality show on TV,’ Boling responded.

True, Dance conceded. He’d managed, yet again, to bring a new perspective.

There’d been several scenes from plays, featuring three or four students together (the class numbered thirty-six), which cut the show’s running time down considerably. And solo performances were hardly full-length Rachmaninoff piano concerti. They tended to be Suzuki pieces or abbreviated Katy Perry hits.

‘The Cup Song’ had been performed six times.

It was close to eight thirty before Maggie’s turn came. Mrs Bendix announced her and, in her shimmering dress, she walked confidently from the wings.

Dance took a deep breath. She found her hand gripping Boling’s, the bandaged one. Hard. He adjusted it.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

He kissed her hair.

At the microphone, she looked over the audience. ‘I’m Maggie and I’m going to sing “Let It Go” from Frozen , which is a super movie, in my opinion better than The Lego Movie and most of the Barbie ones. And if anybody here hasn’t seen it I think you should. Like, right away. I mean, right away.’

A glance at Mom, acknowledging the slip of lazy preposition.

Dance smiled and nodded.

Then Maggie grew quiet and lowered her head. She remembered: ‘Oh, and I want to thank Mrs Gallard for accompanying me.’

She nodded to her music teacher.

The piano began, the haunting minor-key intro to the beautiful song. Then the piano went quiet, a pause... and right on the beat, Maggie filled the silence with the first words of the lyrics. She sang slow and soft at first, just as in the movie, then growing in volume, her timbre firm, singing from her chest. Dance snuck a peek. Most of the audience was captivated, heads bobbing in time to the tune. And nearly every child was mouthing, if not singing, along.

When it came to the bridge, bordering on operatic recitative, Maggie nailed it perfectly. Then back to the final verse and the brilliant offhand dismissal about the cold never bothering her anyway.

The applause began, loud and genuine. Dance knew the audience was considering a standing ovation, but since there’d been none earlier, there could be none now. Not that it mattered, Dance could see that Maggie was ecstatic. She beamed and curtseyed, a maneuver she’d practiced almost as much as the song.

Dance blew her daughter a kiss. She set her head against Boling as he hugged her.

Wes said, ‘Wow. Jackie Evancho.’

Not quite. But Dance decided definitely to add voice to the violin lessons this year. She exhaled a laugh.

‘What?’ Edie Dance asked her daughter.

‘Just she did a good job.’

‘She did.’

Dance didn’t tell her mother that the laugh wasn’t prompted by Maggie’s performance but from the discussion in the green room a half-hour earlier.

‘ Honey? ’

‘ It’s terrible. ’

When the tears had stopped, Dance had told Maggie, ‘I know what’s going on, Mags. About the club.’

‘Club?’

Dance had explained she knew about the Secrets Club and their extortion.

Maggie had looked at her as if her mother had just said that Monterey Bay was filled with chocolate milk. ‘Mom, like, no. Bethany’s neat, no, she wouldn’t do anything like that. I mean, sometimes she’s all, I’m the leader, blah, blah, and everything. But that’s okay. We voted her president.’

‘What did she say when she called this morning? You were upset.’

She’d hesitated.

‘Tell me, Mags.’

‘I’d told her you said I didn’t have to sing but she said she’d talked to everybody in the club and they really, really wanted me to. I mean, everybody.’

‘Sing “Let It Go”?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, I mean, they were saying I was sort of the star of the club. They thought I was so good. They don’t have a lot of things they can do, most of the girls. I mean, Leigh does batons. But Bethany and Carrie? You saw them try to do that scene from Kung Fu Panda ?’

‘It was pretty bad.’

‘Uh-huh. I’m the only musical one. And they said nobody wants to hear a stupid violin thing. And they were like the club would look really bad if one of us didn’t do something awesome at the show.’

‘So they weren’t going to expose your secret or anything?’

‘They wouldn’t do that.’

‘Can you tell me yours?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Please. I won’t tell a soul.’

There’d been a moment’s pause. Maggie’d looked around. ‘I guess. You won’t tell anybody?’

‘Promise.’

Whispering: ‘I don’t like Justin Bieber. He’s not cute and I don’t like what he does onstage.’

Dance had waited. Then: ‘That’s it? That’s your secret?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then why don’t you want to sing, honey?’

Her eyes had clouded with tears again. ‘Because I’m afraid this terrible thing’s going to happen. It’ll be, you know, the worst. I’ll be up there in front of everybody.’

‘What?’

‘You know you were telling me about our bodies and when you get older things happen?’

My God, she was worried she’d get her period onstage. Dance was about to bring up the subject when Maggie said, ‘Billy Truesdale.’

‘Billy. He’s in your class, right?’

A nod. ‘He’s my age.’

Dance recalled their birthdays were about the same time of year. She took out a tissue and dried her daughter’s eyes.

‘What about him?’

‘Okay,’ Maggie had said, sniffling. ‘He was singing last month, in assembly. He was really good and he was singing the national anthem. But then... but then when he sang a high note, something happened, and his voice got all weird and it like cracked. And he couldn’t sing any more. Everybody laughed at him. He ran out of the auditorium, crying. And afterward I heard somebody say it was because of his age. His voice was changing.’ She choked. ‘I’m like the same age. It’s going to happen to me. I know it. I’ll go out onstage — and you know that note in the song, the high note? I know it’ll happen!’

Dance had clamped her teeth together and inhaled hard through her nose to keep the smile from blossoming on her face. And she’d reflected on one of the basic aspects of parenting: you think you’ve figured out every possible permutation and plan accordingly and you still get slammed from out of the blue.

Dance had wiped Maggie’s tears once again, then hugged her daughter. ‘Mags, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

Dance awoke early and surveyed the aftermath of the Secrets Club pajama party, which she’d hosted after the show.

The living room was not bad for a gaggle of ten- and eleven-year-old girls. Pizza crusts on most of the tables, popcorn on the floor, glitter from who knew what makeup experiment, some nail polish where it shouldn’t be, clothes scattered everywhere from an impromptu fashion show.

Could’ve been a lot worse.

Arriving at the house last night, Maggie had been pure celeb, red-carpet celeb. Whatever other clubs were part of the social structure of Pacific Hills, the Secrets Sisters ruled.

And, Dance had been pleased to learn (one of the reasons for the pizza and pajama party at her place), the girls were all quite nice. Yes, Bethany would probably someday be an inside-the-Beltway force whom no one would want to argue with from across the aisle. Heaven help Leigh’s husband. And Carrie could write code that impressed even Jon Boling. But the girls were uniformly polite, generous, funny.