The Secret Sin
“You could have another dizzy spell if you don’t eat,” Annie said. “You don’t want to go back to the doctor, do you?”
Lindsey’s blue eyes flashed. “At least Dr. Whitmore was nice to me. If I came to visit his father, he wouldn’t make me go back to Pittsburgh.”
Her words were like blows. Annie had tried to forget about the daughter she’d given up, but now that she’d met Lindsey she realized how miserably she’d failed. The clawing need to know the girl was as fierce as the unconditional love that nearly overwhelmed her. She couldn’t give in to that love without risking that somebody would figure out Lindsey was her birth daughter. If only the girl knew how desperately Annie wanted to keep her around. Annie swallowed, pushing words past the lump in her throat. “It’s for your own good.”
“Annie Sublinski,” a deep male voice announced from behind them. “What brings you off the river?”
Annie swiveled on her stool to see Michael Donahue moving toward them, his tall frame dressed in jeans and a work shirt, his thick, dark hair slightly sweaty. Since moving back to Indigo Springs earlier in the summer, he’d gone into business with the Pollocks, who owned a local construction company.
She’d always felt a certain kinship toward Michael because he’d been another of the outcasts of Indigo Springs High. An incident at this very snack counter had landed him in juvenile detention. Fathers, including hers, had warned their daughters to stay away from him.
He’d since redeemed himself in dramatic fashion, although very few people knew he was the hero who’d rescued a child from drowning during an Indigo River Rafters trip earlier that summer. “Hey, Michael,” Annie said, then turned to Lindsey, preparing to introduce her.
“Wait a minute. Don’t tell me why you’re here. Let me guess.” Michael placed three fingers on his forehead and closed his eyes before snapping them open. “It has something to do with a young brunette.”
Lindsey giggled at Michael’s antics, but Annie’s breath caught. Did he know about the child she’d given up for adoption? Could he? Surely there’d been talk when Annie had abruptly left town before her senior year of high school. Had somebody figured out that the real reason she’d moved in with her ailing grandparents was because she was pregnant?
“I’m Michael Donahue.” He jumped in with an introduction before Annie could untie her tongue. “And you are?”
“Lindsey Thompson,” she supplied. “I came to visit my uncle Frank, but he’s in Poland.”
“I heard something about that,” Michael said. “You took over your dad’s business, right, Annie?”
His question stopped Annie from denying her father’s relationship to Lindsey. “Actually, I didn’t. I’m just filling in while he’s gone.”
“My bad. Some people in this town like to talk even when they don’t know what they’re talking about.” He spoke from experience, Annie thought. At one point town gossip about him had been rampant. He winked at Lindsey. “Pretty soon they’ll be spreading stories about you.”
Annie willed her heartbeat to slow down. It had been an innocent remark.
She and Lindsey didn’t share a strong resemblance, and Annie was barely old enough to be the mother of a teenager.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” She forced her voice to sound normal. “Lindsey’s a family friend.”
Michael pulled open the glass door of the refrigerated unit beside the counter, then paused. “I thought she was your Dad’s niece.”
“We’re not really related,” Lindsey interjected before Annie could panic. “I just call him uncle.”
Michael nodded, accepting the answer. Some of the pressure inside Annie’s chest eased as he removed four bottles of water from the refrigerator.
“We’re finishing up a remodel job down the street and the crew is getting thirsty,” he explained. “Good seeing you, Annie. And a pleasure meeting you, Miss Lindsey.”
“He was nice,” Lindsey said as he walked away.
“Most people in Indigo Springs are,” Annie said.
Lindsey looked unhappy. “Then why can’t I stay here?”
So far three people who’d known Annie as a sixteen-year-old had seen her with Lindsey and none of them had put the pieces together. In all probability, nobody would, ensuring that Lindsey wouldn’t have her world inadvertently turned upside down.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Annie said slowly. “Maybe you don’t have to go back just yet.”
“You mean I can stay?” Lindsey asked excitedly.
The thought of letting the girl go without spending at least a little time with her was like a dagger through Annie’s heart. Staying in Indigo Springs was clearly what Lindsey wanted, too. Annie simply wasn’t strong enough to fight fate and what she so desperately wanted anyway.
“Only if your parents say yes,” Annie said.
“They’ll say yes.” Lindsey smiled and took a big bite of her sandwich, unaware she’d agreed to a visit with her birth mother.
That was exactly the way Annie intended to keep it.
M AYBE SHE’D messed up in coming to Indigo Springs, Lindsey thought.
Uncle Frank had made it sound really cool, but the downtown was nothing but a bunch of old buildings. Once she and Annie had gotten back in her truck and headed out of town, all she’d seen was trees.
The parking lot they’d pulled into wasn’t even paved, and the building they were approaching looked like a grungy warehouse. A couple of dozen sturdy-looking bikes were parked in neat rows off to one side. On the other were nine or ten faded picnic tables.
Lindsey read the sign over the door: Indigo River Rafters.
“ This is your father’s business?” she asked Annie.
“This is it,” Annie said.
Lindsey slowed down but didn’t dare stop. If she did, the gnats that were flying around her hair might attack her eyes. She supposed the setting was okay, although there weren’t a lot of trees close to this part of the river and the grass around the shop was trampled down dirt. The water was maybe fifty yards away, with a flatbed trailer blocking part of the view.
“All our trips end here at base camp. That spot over by the flatbed trailer is the take-out point,” Annie said. “We load the boats so we can transport them to the put-in for the next trip.”
“Boats?” Lindsey asked.
“Rafts, kayaks, tubes.” She pointed to a pair of yellow school buses so old you couldn’t pay Lindsey to get in them. “We shuttle the customers in those.”
Annie acted like it was really important to her that Lindsey like it here, which was totally different from her attitude at the train station. Earlier, Annie’s main goal had been sending Lindsey home.
“Can’t you just drag a raft down to the river and go?” Lindsey asked, although there was no way she’d do that. The bugs wouldn’t be as bad out on the river, but she shuddered just thinking about the mud and the cold water.
“You could,” Annie said, “except the river’s like a one-way street. It only flows in a single direction.”
Whatever, Lindsey thought. That hadn’t been what sounded so cool when she’d heard about the business. “Uncle Frank said there was a store.”
“It’s more like a gift shop,” Annie said. “We sell T-shirts, waterproof sandals, sunglasses—that kind of thing. It supplements the income from the river trips and the mountain-bike rentals.”
Great, Lindsey thought with a sinking heart. Just great.
“Where does your dad live?” Lindsey asked.
Annie pointed to a tiny building behind the shop. “Back there. That’s where we’re going.”
Lindsey stopped walking. “Are you serious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Lindsey thought of the big, five-bedroom, two-story house she’d woken up in that morning. “I guess I just expected something different when Uncle Frank talked about all this.”
Lindsey made a face when she spotted the rocking chairs on the wooden porch, but the inside of the house turned out to be not so bad. A decent-sized room with a really old TV opened into a kitchen. The furniture was simple—a navy blue sofa and wood chairs. Beyond the kitchen was a smaller space with a washer and dryer.
Annie indicated the left side of the house. “There are two bedrooms with separate baths over here. You can sleep in my dad’s room.”
“Cool,” Lindsey said. She could stay here, she decided, which was a good thing because she had nowhere else to go.
“I need to finish up a couple of things at the shop,” Annie said. “Will you be okay for an hour or so?”
“Yeah, sure,” Lindsey said, but she ran out of things to do after putting her clothes in an empty drawer and checking her e-mail on the computer with an ancient modem.
She was flipping through a magazine from a nearby rack when Annie showed up. No way was she going to read Field and Stream, Outdoor Life and Backpacker.
“Don’t you have anything good?” Lindsey asked. “Like Vogue or Elle ?”
“Afraid not,” Annie said.
Lindsey held up an issue of something called Outdoor Women . On the cover was a picture of three women with fishing poles standing in river water up to their thighs, with mountains rising behind them.
“Who reads this lame stuff?” Lindsey wrinkled her nose.
“Enough people to keep me employed,” Annie said. Lindsey must have looked puzzled, because Annie added, “I wrote the cover story.”
“Get out!” Lindsey eagerly turned the glossy pages until she found the article. It was about something called heli-fishing, where helicopters flew fishermen to remote areas that couldn’t be reached any other way. “Oh, my gosh. Your name’s on this story. That’s really awesome.”
“Didn’t you just say the magazine was lame?”
“Well, yeah. But getting your name in a magazine is cool.” Lindsey rethought her lukewarm opinion of Annie. “Maybe one day you can write about something better.”
Annie looked doubtful. “The outdoors is pretty much my thing.”
“Not mine.” Lindsey rolled her eyes. “I’d take a mall over a river any day.”
Annie perched on the edge of the sofa near where Lindsey sat on the floor. “Then why did you come to visit my father? There aren’t any malls in Indigo Springs.”
Lindsey stuffed the magazines back in the rack. “I didn’t know that. I thought there were malls everywhere.”
“Is something wrong at home?” Annie seemed to be deciding what to say. “You can tell me if you don’t feel…safe.”
Lindsey had sat through films in health class about the different types of abuse. She knew what Annie was really asking. Wow. Was she way off!
“There’s nothing like that going on,” Lindsey said.
Annie seemed to relax. “Something must have happened to make you leave home. Your parents will be calling back soon. It would help if I knew what it was.”
Lindsey stood up. “I just needed to get away, that’s all.”
“Away from what?” Annie asked.
Lindsey waved a hand. “Away from everything.”
Now that Annie was on board, Lindsey wasn’t going to say anything that would get her sent back to Pittsburgh. She was staying put if she could help it.
Anywhere was better than home.
CHAPTER THREE
W ELL , that hadn’t gone well.
Annie watched helplessly as Lindsey retreated into the bedroom she was using. The girl had changed out of her jeans into a pair of gray jersey knit shorts with Princess printed across the bottom.
Princess. Yeah, Annie was way out of her league when it came to Lindsey.
She’d half feared that Lindsey would change her mind about staying and say she wanted to go home, but the girl had surprised her. Not that the visit would be a done deal until she talked to Lindsey’s parents.
Annie had left a second message for them and could barely concentrate while she waited for the phone to ring. Sometime between inviting Lindsey to stay and now, Annie had allowed herself to hope for time to get to know the girl.
No. Not hope. That was too mild a word.
She craved more time with Lindsey—and she was desperately afraid she wouldn’t get it.
The phone rang, making Annie jump. She hurried into the kitchen and picked up the receiver of the wall-mounted phone. “Hello.”
“Annie, it’s Ryan.”
Annie’s brain froze, her throat closed up and her legs almost gave out. She could only think of one reason for him to call.
He knew.
She put a hand on the counter to steady herself. Her heart pounded like a jackhammer. She braced herself, struggling to decide whether she would admit the truth.
“I’m calling to see how Lindsey’s feeling,” Ryan said.
How Lindsey was feeling? His words didn’t compute. She’d expected him to say he’d guessed Lindsey was the baby they’d given up for adoption.
“Annie? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she choked out, feeling overwhelming relief. “I’m here.”
Her voice sounded raspy and unfamiliar with none of the maturity she’d strived so hard to develop over the years.
“How is Lindsey?” he asked.
A few more seconds passed. She closed her eyes briefly. She was handling the call poorly, arousing suspicion where there might not be any. She fought to regain her equilibrium. “Fine. She’s fine.”
“Good to hear. Just make sure she doesn’t skip meals and she shouldn’t have the problem again.”
“Okay. Sure.” She still sounded unsophisticated and unsure of herself, which was unacceptable. Especially with Ryan Whitmore on the other end of the line. Get off the phone, her brain screamed. The less you talk to him, the better. “Thanks for calling.”
“Wait!” Ryan’s appeal was loud enough that she heard him even though she was just about to hang up. She reluctantly held the phone back up to her ear.
“You’re guiding the ten o’clock white-water trip tomorrow morning, right?” he asked.
“I’m planning to,” she said slowly, afraid of what he would say next.
“Good, because I’m thinking about taking it.”
She grimaced at the prospect of Ryan coming along on one of the trips, invading her world. How could she do her job with him in one of the rafts, reminding her of a past she didn’t want to think about?
A beep sounded, signaling an incoming call. Annie normally considered it rude to place one person on hold to talk to another. Rarely, if ever, did she use call waiting. She didn’t intend to now, either.
“I’ve got to take this call,” she said. “It could be Lindsey’s parents.”
“Of course,” he said. “I don’t mind hold—?”
“Goodbye,” she interrupted, pretending not to hear him. She disconnected, then answered the other call. She was right. The caller was Gretchel Thompson, Lindsey’s stepmother.
Out of the fire and into the inferno, Annie thought.
“Thanks for calling,” she said. “I’m Annie Sublinski, Frank Sublinski’s daughter.”
“Oh, yes,” Gretchel said. “Your father’s visited us a bunch of times, usually with Lindsey’s grandfather. He’s a great guy.”
Gretchel seemed to have no idea that Annie was Lindsey’s birth mother. Had her husband failed to tell Gretchel about the adoption arrangement? Was it possible he didn’t know about it, either?
Annie realized she had something in her hand. It was a piece of paper she’d crumpled into a ball from the pad she kept by the phone. She set it down and explained how Lindsey had ended up in Indigo Springs.
“I’m so sorry,” Gretchel said. “I’ll have a return ticket waiting tomorrow morning at the train station.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that.” Annie prayed she wouldn’t sound too eager. “Since Lindsey’s already here, why not let her stay a while?”
“You want her to stay?” The woman sounded incredulous.
Lindsey wandered into the kitchen and stood against a wall, watching Annie with hooded eyes.
“It’ll give me a chance to see why my father is so fond of her.” Annie took a breath, trying to figure out how to persuade Lindsey’s stepmother to agree to the visit. “I promise to take good care of her.”
“Since you’re Frank’s daughter, I’m sure you would,” Gretchel said. “Could I talk to Lindsey, please? I’d like to hear what she has to say.”
“Sure.” Annie kept her excitement in check, reminding herself Gretchel hadn’t agreed to anything yet. She held the phone out to Lindsey. “She wants to talk to you.”
Lindsey moved toward Annie as though she were walking the plank. She took the receiver and listened, no doubt to a scolding, in silence. Her face seemed to run the gamut of expressions, from annoyance to acceptance and finally to what Annie hoped was pleasure.
“Yes,” Lindsey said. “I want to stay.”
The weight that felt as though it had been pressing on Annie’s heart lifted. She took the phone from Lindsey, one question paramount in her mind.
“How long can she stay?” Annie asked.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Gretchel said. “To be honest, it might be better if Lindsey’s out of the house for a while. She’s a good girl, but as you’ll find out she can be sullen and unhappy. Lately we’ve had some…friction.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“Nothing important,” Gretchel said. “Just teenage stuff.”
Annie was painfully aware it wasn’t her place to ask for the details even if the girl hadn’t been listening in on the conversation.
“It’s settled, right?” Lindsey asked after Annie hung up. “I can stay?”
“You can stay,” Annie confirmed.
Lindsey clapped her hands and smiled. Annie smiled back, enjoying the moment but realizing trouble might lie ahead. Now that she’d cleared one hurdle, a bigger problem remained.
What was she going to do about Ryan?
R YAN had expected Annie to avoid him when he showed up for the Saturday morning white-water trip. He hadn’t anticipated she’d be a no-show.
In his experience, the person in charge tended to at least be on-site during the busiest times of the week. Unless, of course, there was a good reason for her to stay away.
Like a man she clearly wished would leave her alone.
Letting Annie dodge him, however, was the one thing his conscience would no longer allow him to do.
He waited until the few dozen rafters who were taking the morning trip had boarded the bus and he was the only one left in the shop before approaching the long-haired kid at the counter.
“When’s the next white-water trip?” Ryan asked.
“Two o’clock.” The kid didn’t bother to point out that Ryan had arrived in plenty of time to take the first one.
Ryan stuck out a hand. “Ryan Whitmore.”
Looking suspicious of a customer who introduced himself, the kid took a few moments before he shook Ryan’s hand. “Jason Garrity.”
“You been working here long, Jason?” Ryan asked.
One of the fans behind the cash register blew a lock of Jason’s hair into his eyes. He tucked it behind his ear, his fingers brushing against his gold stud earring. “About a month. You want me to sign you up for the afternoon trip?”
So much for small talk. “That depends on who’s guiding the trip.”
“It’ll probably be Annie,” Jason said. “She usually does the morning run but she switched off today.”
“When did she do that?” Ryan leaned one of his forearms on the counter as though he was only casually interested in the answer.
“Last night, I think,” Jason said. It had probably been right after Ryan had mentioned his interest in the trip. “Jill—she’s one of our other guides—showed up here pretty early to take her place.”
Ryan glanced at the wooden wall clock, which was shaped like a fish. At shortly past ten, it wasn’t early anymore, but the little house behind the shop where Annie lived had looked suspiciously quiet. Lindsey might still be asleep but it didn’t make sense that Annie would be. “Do you know where Annie is?”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “She took a mountain bike out on the trail.”
“Which trail?”
“The one with the view of the river, out past where the cars are parked,” he said.
“Any idea when she’ll be back?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know.” Jason frowned at him. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”
“I guess I do,” Ryan acknowledged and left it at that. He slapped the counter once with the palm of his hand and headed out the door. “Thanks.”
He sat down at one of the outdoor tables outside the shop that were set up for rafters waiting for the trips to leave. He situated himself so he had a view of the bike trail, stretched out his legs and crossed his arms over his chest.
Annie might have avoided having him along on one of her white-water trips, but she couldn’t evade him forever. Sooner or later, she’d ride her bike back to the river rafters.
When she did, he’d be waiting.
A NNIE leaned over the handlebars of her mountain bike and pumped her legs, trying to concentrate on climbing the hill.
Unfortunately all she could think about was Ryan.
She’d timed her ride so she wouldn’t be back at Indigo River Rafters until after the ten o’clock group left for the river. That way she’d miss Ryan entirely.
Perhaps she was a coward for not facing him, but there was no point in complicating things. Gretchel Thompson hadn’t set a date for Lindsey’s return, but school started two weeks from Monday. That was sixteen days from now.
Annie was determined to keep the circumstances of Lindsey’s birth a secret so the girl’s life could return to normal at her visit’s end. She already knew hers never would.
Not when the baby she’d given up had grown into a young girl with a face and a name and a penchant for sleeping late.
Annie’s lungs strained for air and her breaths came in short gasps as she approached the crest of the hill. Her mind whirled as much as the bike wheels while she tried to come to terms with her decision not to tell Ryan about Lindsey.
She was rotten at keeping secrets and always had been. Her father maintained that she was the most straightforward person he knew.
Her father.
He’d phoned minutes after she’d awakened, full of apologies for keeping the truth about Lindsey’s adoption from her all these years.
His excuse was that he couldn’t bear to lose all contact with his granddaughter.
As though it had been his decision to make.
It seemed her father wasn’t the only one who’d kept secrets. He reported that the late Helene Nowak had had so much trouble persuading her husband, Ted, to agree to adopt that she hadn’t told him she knew the birth family. Lindsey had been told she was adopted but given no further details.
All of which put Annie in the uncomfortable, uncharacteristic position of hiding the truth.
She crested the hill, the burning sensation in her thighs finally easing. The tough part of the ride was over. The rest of the way was downhill, with the dirt trail cutting a path through a thicket of trees and emerging near the field Indigo River Rafters used for a parking lot.
Air whooshed over her face, cooling her skin and blowing through her hair as the bike jostled over the slightly uneven ground.
She glimpsed base camp in the distance, her signal to ease up. Intending to coast the rest of the way, she stood up, resting her weight on the pedals.
The left pedal snapped off with an audible click.
Annie’s foot touched air and then the sole of her shoe scraped along the dirt of the path.
The bicycle skidded sideways, sliding out from under her. She pitched forward, her upper body going airborne. The ground rushed up to meet her.
Desperately fighting the impulse to tense up, she let herself fall. The right side of her body smacked the ground, with her rear end absorbing the brunt of the impact.
Then she was half sliding, half rolling down the hill.
“Annie!” Someone was calling her name. She was too stunned by the fall to figure out who it was.
She smelled grass and saw stars. She blinked a few times and her vision cleared enough for her to realize she was sprawled in a soft patch of grass to the side of the trail.
“Annie!”
She heard the same voice, closer this time and jarringly familiar.