Suzanne Mcminn - Secrets Rising

He hadn’t realized till now that he’d been missing anything at all other than work.

“Please sit down,” she said when she finally gave him the glass. “Well, I hate to say it, but this rain is a good thing because we’ve had an awfully dry spring. I’m just so sorry about your car. Some welcome to Haven for you, huh?”

She pulled out a chair when he didn’t. He scooted it around a pile of broken pottery he noticed on the floor as he sat. He placed the glass on the table.

“I was just about to clean that up.” She disappeared for a minute into the next room then came back with a broom and dustpan. She bent down, picked something up, and he saw what he’d missed at first—some sort of small package. It was wrapped in silver foil and he read the label.

“Somebody’s birthday?” There, his contribution to chitchat.

“Mine.”

She glanced up from sweeping the shattered bits of cream and blue pottery. Her eyes looked huge in her slender face, and as he watched, she chewed on her full, unpainted lip. He looked away from her, to the box. Happy Birthday, Baby. She had a gift from somebody who called her Baby.

He carefully returned his gaze to Keely. “It’s your birthday today?” he asked, and told himself he was not going to look or even think about her nibble-on-me lips. Maybe she was married. He didn’t know why he’d assumed she lived way out here in the sticks alone. It didn’t matter to him anyway.

“Tomorrow. The present was inside the cookie jar. It fell down off the shelf.” She waved her hand vaguely toward the ledge over the cabinets. It was full of decorative glass items and various pieces of pottery. “I guess he was hiding it there. My husband, I mean. A branch must have hit the roof. I guess the jar was too close to the edge of the shelf. The house really shook and—” She stood, the pottery bits tidily swept into the dustpan in one hand. “I forgot. I need to get up in the attic and check it out. If rain’s coming in, I’m in real trouble.”

So she was married.

“You’ll be in trouble when your husband finds out you stumbled onto his surprise.” He was feeling suddenly much lighter, more in control.

She propped the broom in the corner of the kitchen and dumped the shards of pottery in the trash before replying. “He’s not going to find out. He’s dead. And he left me plenty of surprises. Most of them weren’t good.”

The look she gave him was flat and emotionless, then a shadow slid across her expression. She looked away quickly, as if afraid he had some kind of laser vision that would see something she didn’t want him to see. Jake felt more uneasy than ever, and he wasn’t certain if it was because she wasn’t married after all or because he wanted to know what her deceased husband had done to hurt her, and he shouldn’t want to know anything about her at all.

The muted patter of raindrops on the roof filled the kitchen. The storm was slowing down. Or at least, the rain was slowing down. Wind gusted against the house, strong as ever. The clapboard farmhouse creaked a bit in the storm.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, I am. I shouldn’t have said that. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” She grabbed the wrapped box off the table and turned away, pulled open a wide kitchen drawer, shoved it inside and slammed the drawer shut.

He heard a noise like thunder and suddenly the house shook so hard, he felt the floor move under his feet. The drawers in the kitchen banged open and Keely stumbled on her feet. Automatically, he shot up, grabbing hold of her upper arms. Glass hit the floor around them from the shelves over the cabinets. He heard pictures fall in the parlor.

“Oh, God, I knew I should have had that maple tree taken down.” She sounded panicked. “It’s too close to the house.”

“I don’t think that was a tree.” He hadn’t heard anything strike the roof.

There was no sound for a long beat, as if even the wind held its breath, and then came a roar. The house seemed to roll under them in waves. Jake fell against the table, still holding Keely, and together they crashed onto the floor. The sting of glass cut into his back. He could feel her breasts against his chest, her quivering belly and thighs, her breaths coming in shocky pants near his cheek. He stroked his hand down her spine, only meaning to soothe. She was soft—

The floor rocked violently beneath them. “We have to get out of the house,” he grunted, pulling her up with him, both of them staggering as if they’d been transported to the deck of a storm-tossed ship. At the same time he realized the roof was coming down over them, the floorboards beneath them ripped apart and all he knew were eerie flashes of blinding red light, then plunging darkness.

Darkness closed in on her with terrifying completeness. Keely heard the boom of her heartbeat, the harsh sound of her breaths, in the sudden, awful quiet. Oh, God, oh, God. She waited for the rest of the kitchen, the rest of her house, to fall down on top of her.

Something shifted overhead, and crashed a foot away. She nearly jumped out of her skin.

Arms she hadn’t realized were holding her tightened, as if ready to shield her from anything. She couldn’t see a thing, not even the man she was clinging to. Fingers reached up, touched her face. She was on top of him, she realized. They’d hit hard, him protecting her with his body.

“Are you all right?” He was little more than a deep, disembodied voice in the terrible blackness.

“I think so.” Her voice wobbled. Was the world still shaking? She bit her lip to keep from hyperventilating.

Jake Malloy grunted in pain, and she scrambled off him, pulling him up with her till they sat on debris. She could feel nothing but debris surrounding them.

“Where are we?” he asked her. “We fell into some kind of basement. Is this a cellar?”

She nodded, swallowed thickly, realizing then he couldn’t see her.

“Yes. It’s the cellar.” Her head reeled. The kitchen ceiling had started coming down and the floor had opened up. The cold dampness of the cellar seeped through her then and she shivered. Shock. Maybe she was in shock. The cellar was low-ceilinged. They’d only dropped maybe seven feet.

And the ceiling boards from the kitchen must have covered the gap in the floor above. She felt as if her heart might pound out of her chest.

“There’s a door, over here.” She pushed to her feet, stumbling slightly on the uneven piles of wreckage she couldn’t see. “The ground slopes down this way and the cellar’s reached by a door below the rear of the house.” In the thick darkness, she felt him reach for her hand. His hold felt strong and warm on hers. Oddly safe. Together, they took baby steps across the debris, guided only by her sense of direction, which was, at the moment, rocky.

She reached out with her hand, feeling her way. Her fingers brushed against the rough, peeling paint of the wooden door to the cellar. She pulled her other hand from his, heart thumping as she grabbed the handle. Debris in the cellar made opening the door nearly impossible.

“Wait.”

She could feel the brush of Jake beside her, hear the sound of broken boards being tossed out of the way.

“Try now,” he said.

The door creaked as she pulled it inward, still scraping across smaller bits of rubble. She pushed around it, reaching forward into the pitch-black. And stopping short at the sensation of rough, jagged material blocking the way.

No, no, no. There had been no light around the door, it hit her suddenly. No light not because it was dark outside but because part of the house must have fallen this way!

And who knew how much weight there was in wreckage blocking them from climbing back up into the kitchen. “We’re trapped,” she whispered in horror.