Page 52 of Deadly Little Scandals
No clarification was forthcoming.
“Take your partner’s secret, and fold it in half.”
I did as I was instructed, and so did Lily. This time, Hope was the one who came around to gather the cards. “Some secrets,” she said wickedly, “are explosive. Sometimes, all a White Glove needs is to bide her time, and then…”
The two White Gloves who’d lit the torches earlier dipped them toward the ground now. I realized, belatedly, that while we’d been writing, they’d been assembling brush and debris.
Flammablewas an understatement, enough so that I wondered if there had been gasoline or another accelerant involved. Flames flickered through the air, the sound and smell and heat reaching me in waves. I’d spent a few weeks in childhood fascinated with flint and trying to bang various stones together to make fire.
I hadn’t realized, until now, how many more colors there were in a flame than orange and red.
One by one, the White Gloves took turns tossing secrets into the bonfire. They never opened them. They didn’t read them.
They burned them.
And then they invited us to sit. Even without the heat of the bonfire, the summer air would have been sticky and warm. With it, I felt like we were all under some kind of blanket—or inside a pressure cooker, vents closed.
“One to bury,” Victoria said. “One to burn. One for all.” I waited for her to tell us to pass our cards in, or instruct us, one by one, to read them out loud. But what she did was produce a card of her own. “Three years from now, those of you who become White Gloves will come back to this island and do some digging. That’s the thing about buried secrets—they don’t stay buried forever.” She looked down at the card she was holding. “Three years from now, it will be your turn to choose a new location for this ceremony. You’ll gather your Candidates to bury and burn their secrets. And before you ask them to share the third with everyone present, each of you will share the one you buried years before.”
I was used to them putting us through our paces. But this? The current White Gloves giving us something in return for what was being asked?
That was new.
“I’ll go first,” Victoria said. She paused, for a second, if that. “I’m not in my father’s will.” She looked down at her card after she said the words, as if to check that she’d said them correctly. “That’s all I wrote. Next?”
Hope held her card in both hands. “The cancer came back.” She didn’t say whose cancer.
No one asked.
Nessa stared at Hope for a moment, shaken, and then read her own secret aloud. “I’m a replacement.”
For what? Or who?Again, there was no explanation, no clarification.
A fourth girl whose name I couldn’t remember offered only three words: “I said no.”
One by one, the other White Gloves read their secrets. Most of them had kept things brief. Some of the secrets were hard to understand without context. Some were pretty damn clear.
You’re not here because you’re powerful,we’d been told.You’re here because you know what it’s like to feel powerless.
Once they finished, it was our turn. The first Candidate followed their example. She read her card—no context, no explanation. One by one, the others did the same. I barely registered what they were saying, because I was waiting for my turn—and my friends’.
The four of us went last.
“I have a half-sibling I’ve never met.” Campbell had a way of tossing out words like they didn’t matter and including just enough of a challenge in her tone to dare anyone to tell her that they did. After a second’s silence, she broke the mold the others had set and elaborated. “Though to be fair, I suppose it’s entirely possible that Ihavemet this person and just didn’t know we were related.”
That was an angle I hadn’t considered—though maybe I should have, given that I’d gotten the distinct impression from Campbell’s grandfather that he’d had a plan for the baby, once upon a time.
“My turn?” Sadie-Grace had a habit of turning statements into questions. “I…ummm…” She was seated, but I would have bet big money that her feet were going crazy. “Okay? Here it goes?” She took a deep breath. “My mama was pregnant when she died.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me. I wasn’t sure if that meant that Lily hadn’t known what Sadie-Grace had just told everyone, or if she was taken aback to hear her best friend actually say the words.
Suddenly, Sadie-Grace’s reluctance to tell her father the truth about Greer’s “baby” made so much more sense. When Sadie-Grace had discovered the pregnancy was fake, she’d been so sad. I couldn’t remember everything she’d said when she’d gotten drunk at our casino-themed Debutante party, but I was pretty sure the wordsNo sisters for Sadie-Gracehad been included.
I’d known that Sadie-Grace’s father had lost his first wife when Sadie-Grace was young. I hadn’t realized he’d also lost a child. Knowing that and knowing what Greer was doing to him now made my stomach turn.
No wonder Sadie-Grace can’t bring herself to tell him the baby isn’t real.
I was next in line to read my secret, but before I could, Lily jumped in to take the attention off of Sadie-Grace. “My turn.” She waited a moment, then spoke, enunciating every word. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”
