Little Secrets by Megan Hart Page A

the bottle of cleanser close by, she scraped the first pile of bones toward her. She had to stand on her tiptoes to get to the last set. Again, she wished for rubber gloves when her fingertips touched the plastic, and she half expected it to stick to the shelf, but the bags slid without resistance. Hamsters, she thought with a glance inside. Orange and white fur.
    She put everything in the garbage bag and went back to the bathroom to scrub her hands. Then she took the garbage bag outside and stuffed it in the can. Back upstairs, she finished cleaning the shelf until the entire length of it, every section, gleamed with the cleanser and the closet smelled of nothing but vinegar.

Chapter Ten
    Ginny told Sean about the case, though not about the bones or the dead mouse, or falling off the step stool. She did tell him about the light bulb, since he was sure to notice the one missing in their closet, though all she said was that it had burned out, not that it had broken. She tempered her disclosure over a full dinner of roast beef she’d done in the Crock-Pot with some onion-soup mix and a little red wine, baked potatoes, a nice salad decorated with dried cranberries and almonds and a sprinkling of bleu cheese. Plus, she waited until his mouth was full before she told him she’d found something while cleaning, so by the time he’d chewed and swallowed she could focus the conversation on the discovery and not her actions during it.
    â€œIt was there for a long time,” she told him, picking at her own salad. It had seemed like a good idea to make it with all the extras, but she’d become so sensitive to smells and flavors that everything was jumbling together in a sensory overload. “It’s a girl’s case, though. So I don’t think it belonged to the owner or his son.”
    â€œHow do you know it belonged to a girl?” Sean speared another fork of meat. He sighed as he chewed, closing his eyes briefly in an almost-sexual expression of delight.
    It amused her, that expression. She knew him so well, after all this time, it felt almost unfair to be so manipulative at keeping his attention directed on something else. But only almost.
    â€œBecause,” she said with a point of her fork toward him, “it just is. Boys don’t use train cases. The kind with a liner and a mirror and stuff inside.”
    He drank slowly from his glass of wine, savoring it with another of those sighs. Despite an occasional craving, Ginny wasn’t a big wine drinker, but he made it seem so delicious her mouth watered in envy. Of course that was her way, wanting what she couldn’t have, even though she knew she wouldn’t like it if she got it.
    â€œThey could,” he said.
    She laughed a little, though it faded quickly when she thought of the tiny skeletons, corpses that had been kept in baggies. That seemed more like a boy thing, if you were going to go by stereotypes. Puppy-dog tails and all that. “I guess so. But I doubt it. It’s a girl’s case, I know it.”
    â€œWhat’s in it?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Sean paused with a crescent roll halfway to his mouth. Both brows lifted. “Why not? You find this grand, secret treasure and you don’t open it?”
    â€œI don’t know; it didn’t seem right.” Ginny shrugged and reached for the bread basket. The crescent rolls, at least, seemed appealing, which made sense since of all the food she’d made, they were the only thing she hadn’t made from scratch. Full of preservatives, she thought and buttered one anyway, before tucking it into her mouth. Just as she’d thought, delicious.
    â€œAfter dinner.”
    â€œNo.” She shook her head. “I told you, it doesn’t seem right. It’s not ours.”
    â€œEverything in this house is ours. Bought and paid for.” Sean gestured with his fork, looking around the dining room, where Ginny had set up a card table