Secrets of a Small Town

“He’ll be with you shortly,” said Betty Treehorne, his longtime secretary.

Sabrina settled herself on to one of the burgundy leather sofas. Less than five minutes later she was ushered into his office.

“Have a seat, my dear,” Leland said. He stood—a tall man with dark hair turning gray and friendly blue eyes—until she was seated in one of the chairs flanking his desk. Only then did he sit, too. “How are you holding up?”

Sabrina shrugged. “Okay.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s doing all right. Aunt Irene is going to stay for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s good. The next months are going to be hard for you both.”

His kind face was almost Sabrina’s undoing. But she fought the tears that hovered and managed to subvert them.

“Well…” He seemed at a loss. “You’re probably wondering why I asked you to come to the office.”

Sabrina waited.

He opened a file that lay on his desk and removed an envelope. “Your father left this letter in my safe-keeping. He asked me to give it to you should anything happen to him.”

Sabrina’s hands shook as she reached for the letter. Her heart felt as if it might burst. Her father had written her a farewell. It was so like him to know how much she would need to know he had been thinking about her and wanting to ease her grief.

She didn’t open the letter in Leland’s office. Instead, she headed for the park, thinking that would be a fitting place to read her father’s final message to her. Even after arriving and settling on their favorite bench next to the rose garden, she didn’t open the envelope.

She looked at the seal, looked at her father’s hand-writing—the bold letters and black ink. She traced the letters with her finger, then held the envelope close to her heart for a long moment.

Then, with a tremulous smile, she put her index finger under the sealed flap and slit it open.

Chapter Two

The letter was dated November, two years earlier.

Dearest Sabrina, she read.

Her father went on to say how much he loved her and how sorry he was to cause her pain, but there was something important she needed to know.

This is hard for me to write, and I know it will be painful for you to read. There’s no easy way to say it, so I’ll just say it. Six years ago I fell in love with a woman I met while conducting a tour in Italy.

I couldn’t seem to help myself. I knew she would never keep seeing me if she knew I was married, so I pretended I wasn’t. I told her I had been, but I was divorced. I told her my name was Ben Arthur. She had no idea I owned the tour company. I told her I was a consultant who worked for a dozen different companies, both in the U.S. and abroad.

After we’d been seeing each other for almost a year and she began to press for a permanent commitment, I tried, but I couldn’t give her up, so we were married in Las Vegas and honeymooned in Italy.

Sabrina gasped.

Married!

He couldn’t mean that. Her father was already married to her mother. How could he marry someone else?

She and I have had two children together. Sabrina, I know how this must shock and hurt you, but please believe me when I say that what I feel for Glynnis and our children takes nothing away from what I feel for you. You are my first and will always be the beloved child of my heart. But I love little Michael and Olivia, too, and I know you will love them as much as I do after you get to know them. As I write this, Michael is three and a half, and Olivia is just a month old.

If you are reading this, I am dead, and there will be no one else to take care of some things that must be taken care of. I could have asked Leland to do them for me, but it’s going to be painful enough for Glynnis to discover not only that she’s a widow but the truth about our marriage, so I was hoping you could find it in your heart to go and see her and tell her everything in person.

Sabrina read the letter three times before it really sank in. Her father was a bigamist. The man she’d admired and respected and thought so honest and upright and loyal and straight was a liar. He had betrayed her mother and her and everyone they knew.

How had he gotten away with this for so long? How had he managed to keep each family a secret from each other as well as everyone else? In this day and age, with cell phones and e-mail and the Internet, how had he continued to keep his two lives separate?

She stared into space for a long time. It was only when a squirrel scampered across the path, startling the pigeons that were scavenging for food, that she was jerked out of her painful thoughts and she once more picked up the letter to finish reading it.

The letter ended with contact information for both Glynnis and her twin brother Gregg. Sabrina was startled to see that they lived only a couple of hours away, just north of Columbus. Somehow she’d envisioned her father’s second life as taking place far from Rockwell.

Maybe you would prefer going to Gregg and telling him the truth and letting him break the news to Glynnis. Yes, this might be the best way.

Sabrina, please tell your mother that I am sorry about the scandal this will cause. I know how much her position in the town and her social circle matters to her.

Dear heaven, Sabrina thought. Even worse than confronting her father’s other family would be breaking this news to her mother, for Sabrina had no illusions about Isabel’s reaction. Her mother might not have loved her father the way Sabrina did, but she cared very much about her reputation. In fact, her standing in the town was probably the most important thing in her life. She would be devastated.

I am so sorry for the hurt I know you are feeling. Hurting you is the last thing I ever wanted to happen.

Although all Sabrina wanted to do was tear up the letter and put the whole nasty business out of her mind, she knew she couldn’t do that. Those two small children—her half brother and half sister—were blameless in this affair. And now that she was over the initial shock, she had to admit, she was curious. What kind of woman was this Glynnis? Young and sexy, Sabrina imagined in disgust. Probably a curvy blonde with a Marilyn Monroe voice.

Daddy, how could you do this to us?

The pain she’d tried to quell hit her then, so swift and hard it was like a kick in the stomach. Her father said he loved her, but if he’d really loved her, he could not have done this awful thing. Marrying this, this Glynnis person, was a betrayal of everything he’d stood for.

Blindly she shoved the envelope into her handbag and stood. As she started on the path leading to the parking lot and her car, clouds moved across the sun, plunging the afternoon into darkness.

A darkness that was echoed in her heart.

Sabrina drove straight back to Leland Fox’s office. She could see by the expression on his face that he had known the contents of the letter.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

“About six months.”

Sabrina couldn’t imagine why he had kept her father’s secret. Leland and Isabel had grown up together. He had always been more her friend than Ben’s. You’d think he’d have felt more loyalty toward her. She glared at him. But as quickly as her anger had come, it disappeared. None of this was Leland’s fault.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. His eyes were kind.

“I guess I have no choice. I’ll have to go see this woman and tell her about Dad’s death.”

He nodded sympathetically. “When you return, I’ll help you break the news to your mother.”

“You think I should wait before telling her?”

“There’s no hurry, is there?”

Sabrina looked down at her lap. Leland was right. There was no hurry. Nothing would change whether she told her mother today or two weeks from now. In fact, it would be easier to wait until her mother was feeling stronger and over the shock of her father’s death. She looked up, meeting Leland’s eyes. “No, there’s no hurry. And I’d be grateful for your help when I tell my mother.”