Secrets in the Attic (Secrets 1)

She started to nod her head slowly and glared at me. "So, you're going to betray me, too."

"I didn't say that. I'm just . . . how can we do this much longer, Karen?"

"After I confided in you and told you about all the disgusting things that were happening to me and you came up with the plan, you do this now?"

"I didn't come up with the plan to kill him."

She looked as if I had slapped her across the face. Again, she nodded, but this time, she said nothing She rose and went to her own clothes hidden behind the big cushion chair. She dropped my robe from her body. I was surprised to see she was naked. She kept her back to me as she started to dress.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"What am I doing? Well, it's pretty obvious you don't want me around anymore, so I'm going to leave."

"Where are you going to go? Are you going to the police?"

"And do what, go to prison? With Darlene not supporting me, I'll be convicted of some terrible crime. It's all right. I had no one before; I have no one now."

"Stop it. I didn't say you had to leave immediately. I'm just saying it's going to get harder and harder to keep you secretly up here."

"It hasn't been too hard until now, has it? I've been quieter than a butterfly."

"But how long can we do this?"

"As long as we have to. We came up with the New York idea, didn't we? It will keep them from looking too hard for me around here."

Again, we. It had been her idea entirely to record the message and have me pretend to be her and call her mother.

"Things will calm down, and we'll come up with another plan, a bigger one," she said. "We're pretty good at it, aren't we? We're a team, birds of a feather. At least, we were," she said, and returned to her clothes. "Bird Oath," she muttered under her breath.

"All right," I said. "Maybe you're right. I'm sorry. We'll keep going."

She smiled. "I knew you would stand by me. You know I would stand by you."

I looked at her and then down at my brother's notebook.

"You shouldn't have taken this, Karen."

"Don't make a big thing of it, Zipporah. We'll put it back where it was, and no one will be the worse for it.

But," she said, "there are some very interesting things in there about you, too."

I looked up at her. "Me?"

"I think you'll be pleased with what you read. Toward the end of what he's written so far, there are some interesting things about me as well. Maybe you should know about that. I felt myself blushing as I read it, in fact, and it takes a lot to make me blush, as you know."

I stood there, thinking and looking at my brother's secret journal. I imagined this must have been the way Eve felt in the Garden of Eden, so tempted to do something so forbidden. I shook my head.

"You know," she continued, "if it was the other way around, he finding your diary, he wouldn't hesitate to read it. Boys are like that, and then they love to tease their sisters afterward."

"How do you know that? You don't have a brother."

"I know. I've heard some of the other girls at school complaining about their brothers, younger and older, doing just that or something similar."

I sat on the sofa. She reached down, picked up my robe, and put it on again.

"Jesse wouldn't do that," I insisted.

"Oh, boy. When you read the journal, you'll have a more informed opinion."