The Secret Next Door, page 1
Also by Rebecca Taylor
Her Perfect Life
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Taylor
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design © Lisa Amoroso
Cover images © Robert Kirk/Getty Images; Duffy55/Shutterstock
Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taylor, Rebecca, author.
Title: The secret next door : a novel / Rebecca Taylor.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003831 (print) | LCCN
2021003832 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3620.A9653 S43 2021 (print) | LCC PS3620.A9653
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003831
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003832
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
An excerpt from Her Perfect Life
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Matthew, Beth, and Rod
Chapter One
Alyson Tinsdale placed her last orange safety cone in the street in front of her driveway just as her five-year-old son, Andrew, flew past her on his two-wheel bike and directly into the road.
“Andrew!” she shouted, doing her best to run after him in wedge flip-flops while she scanned the street for oncoming cars. “Stop!”
Either not hearing or ignoring her, Andrew pedaled faster. His sandy-colored, shoulder-length hair blew back from his helmet-free head.
“Andrew!” she tried again, watching the front tire of his twelve-inch bike hit the opposite curb head-on. A surge of adrenaline flooded her body; her nervous system knew precisely what would happen next, even if her brain was slow to form the words.
He’s going to crash.
Matched against the six-inch concrete curb, the bike’s small wheel wrecked left. The forward momentum projected Andrew’s little body over the top of his handlebars and onto the sidewalk.
Alyson kept running, waiting for Andrew’s siren cry to start, cursing her husband, Justin, for taking the damn training wheels off. She hadn’t believed how much faster the small bike could go without those two plastic wheels.
Andrew rolled over onto his back and sat up, a bloody graze spread across the right side of his forehead and down his temple. Looking confused, he saw his bike in the gutter, his mom running toward him, and both his skinned palms—then he started to cry.
Alyson knelt beside him and brushed his hair away from the scrape on his head. “Are you okay?”
“My bike!” he wailed. “It’s broken!” Tears streamed down his flushed cheeks.
Alyson scooped him up into her arms, cradling him to her chest as she stood. “It’s fine,” she promised, shifting Andrew’s weight to her hip so she could hold him with her left arm while she reached for the bike’s handlebars with her right. She lugged her crying son and his bike back across the street, past her safety cones, and onto their driveway.
When they reached the garage, Andrew stopped crying and squirmed from her grasp. Unable to hold him and the bike, she let him slide down her leg and released the bike onto the pavement.
Andrew’s face crumpled into a worried frown when he saw the ripped vinyl seat and the chain hanging loose off the sprocket. “It’s broken,” he declared again.
“It’s not broken,” she tried to reassure him. “Just a little banged up.” She touched the bloody wound on his forehead. “So are you. We should go clean this up.” She would wait to launch into a lecture about wearing his helmet, riding in the street, slowing down, once she got him inside and slathered on antibacterial ointment.
Still staring at his bike, his most beloved possession, and not looking like he had any intention of moving into the house, Andrew touched the tear on the seat. “I need to call Dad,” he said.
“He’s at work.”
“Ask Dad if he can fix my bike.”
Alyson hesitated for a few seconds, weighing her annoyance with Andrew for not believing her against her desire to move into the house quickly and get him cleaned up.
Andrew looked up into her eyes. “Can you send him a picture?”
Alyson sighed and nodded as she pulled her phone from her back pocket. The picture she’d like to send Justin was of their son’s face, along with the text: I don’t think taking the training wheels off was such a great idea.
But Justin would likely accuse her, again, of being passive-aggressive.
Alyson pulled up her camera app and aimed her phone at the bike.
She heard the engine before she could see the car. Still at a distance, around the corner her house sat on, a vehicle was speeding up. The roar of acceleration broke the silence of her usually quiet street.
Her body tensed. As the sound grew louder, rage surged through her system that was directly proportional to the pace of the car. It was him, had to be—every day now for a week.
She saw the open-top, electric-blue Jeep round the corner, music blaring, its wheels squealing as it worked to keep hold of the road around the fast turn.
Alyson didn’t hesitate this time.
In three quick strides, she stood at the end of her driveway, raised her phone, and shot a series of photos. She captured the Jeep approaching, zooming right past her safety cones and then accelerating up her street until it took another hard right.
She checked the pictures, scrolling to one in the middle that captured the driver’s profile. Light brown hair, muscled build, oblivious expression on his entitled face—she had a clear shot of George Sloan speeding, again, past her house on his way home from school. She swiped through several more, somewhat blurry pictures until she found one of the back of the Jeep. She spread her fingers, zooming in, and smiled.
The license plate was clear as day.
“Mom?” Andrew said as he tugged at the bottom of her shirt.
She pulled her thoughts away from what she might do next about her George Sloan electric-blue Jeep problem and looked into her son’s scratched-up face.
“I’m hungry.”
She slid her phone back into her pocket and reached for his ha
“Did you send Dad a picture of my bike?”
“Yes,” she lied. “He’s probably driving home and can’t text us back. But I’ll put the chain back on after I make you something to eat.”
Andrew gave her a skeptical look. Alyson imagined him trying to work out in his five-year-old head how his mother, a girl, could possibly know how to do such a thing. As they passed through the garage door and into the mudroom, Alyson closed her eyes and reminded herself that she was pissed off at George Sloan.
And his parents.
Not Andrew, who might have been in the center of that road right as George’s Jeep roared through.
There wasn’t any way he would have been able to stop in time.
Chapter Two
Bonnie Sloan sat behind the wheel of her Porsche and let her head fall back against the headrest. Anxiety clawed at her throat. She tried to breathe past it, swallow it down, but it felt tight, an insistence in her body that wanted to take flight into a full-blown panic.
She closed her eyes and tried to force her mind off the nasty particulars of the city council meeting she had just left and onto something more pleasant, calm—anything relaxing.
She tried to imagine herself on the beach in Maui eight years ago. She and her husband, Bennet, had rented that condo with the wide balcony that directly overlooked Kaanapali Beach, where her two sons had spent endless carefree hours playing in the sand and surf. George had been nine, Elijah only five—Gracie’s birth was still three years into the then distant future. Their lives had been so different then—simpler, really. Bonnie imagined herself on that plush teal-and-white-striped beach towel, the warm sand radiating up through her body and unwinding her every constricted muscle.
But Carl Wayland’s red and angry face swam up into her vision and interrupted her thoughts. “If you think for one second that I’ll allow that monstrosity to be erected in my backyard, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”
A massive wave of anxiety swept away her attempt at remembering happier times at the beach. Bonnie opened her eyes and stared out across the dark and deserted school parking lot she was hiding in. Tonight’s council meeting was the first public opportunity the community had to voice their thoughts about the Extreme Golf center breaking ground just west of The Enclave’s Highlands development, but Carl Wayland and his coalition of dissenters and complainers had been making their thoughts loud and clear all over The Enclave neighborhood’s Facebook page ever since the Extreme Golf land-use proposal had been filed with the city and made public three months ago.
Carl lived in the Highlands part of The Enclave—same as Bonnie. In fact, their multimillion-dollar homes were only one lot apart. Both their yards backed up to the third fairway of the Enclave golf course and enjoyed stunning and unobstructed views of the Rocky Mountains.
Views that would be forever altered as soon as Extreme Golf began erecting their two-hundred-foot steel beams and the netting system designed to catch golf balls flying from their five-story platform. And that was just during the day. At night, their floodlights would be seen for miles, completely obliterating the Highlands’s current serene atmosphere—and it wasn’t going to help the property values, either.
Bonnie understood Carl’s anger; after all, her house was going to be just as impacted as his. But as the elected city council official for Ward Eight, she couldn’t simply use her vote to the benefit of the wealthiest constituents with the largest houses and best views in the city.
Because on the opposite side from Carl were all the residents who really wanted Extreme Golf to move in. For the family-friendly entertainment they would get from launching golf balls from the fifth-floor decks while music blared and drinks were served, yes, but also for the tax revenue that would flow in for the city.
And, of course, Bonnie understood implicitly that many of her less wealthy constituents would derive some pleasure from sticking it to the Sloans and the Waylands of the world. She knew many residents saw Carl as an elitist who felt entitled to his multimillion-dollar unobstructed views, even though he did not personally own the land between his second-floor balcony and the Rocky Mountains. She and Bennet were both counting on Carl Wayland not being able to drum up much sympathy for his fight against Extreme Golf.
But Bonnie also understood that Carl Wayland had influential connections, deep pockets, and, as a retired CEO, nothing but time. Squashing the development of Extreme Golf in his backyard was now his full-time job.
And even though Bonnie would be staring, daily, at the same monstrosity while standing at her kitchen sink, sitting on her back patio, or gazing out her second-story master bedroom window, she could not let Carl Wayland stop this deal. No matter how much she personally would like to allow that to happen.
She had more at stake than a fabulous view and tens of thousands in resale value from her house.
Bennet was counting on her to shepherd the Extreme Golf deal through.
Bonnie checked the time on her phone: eight thirty. She needed to get home and see if the kids had eaten the dinner she left for them and if Bennet was home from work—the news about Carl and tonight’s meeting was going to send him over the edge.
She took a deep breath, started her car back up, and pulled out of the protective nighttime shadows of The Enclave’s K–8 charter school.
Whenever she was feeling overwhelmed and extremely stressed out, like right now, the darkest reaches of the school’s parking lot were where she always came to hide and think. She had discovered it entirely by accident, years ago, when her middle child, Elijah, was in second grade. Back then, she’d been president of the PTA. Often the first to arrive and the last to leave the school during every function.
It had been the October parent-teacher conferences, and she and the rest of the PTA were running the bookfair in the school’s library. Sometime after eight, she had walked out to the parking lot with the last few teachers in the building. By the time she loaded up her trunk, got behind the wheel of her car, and discovered that her battery was dead, everyone else had already pulled out of sight.
The very first emotion that hit her was fear. She was a woman alone, in the dark, in a car that wouldn’t start. Everything about her life up to this moment had trained her to believe she was on the verge of being raped, abducted, or, at the very least, robbed. Never mind that she was in the neighborhood she’d lived in, at the time, for fifteen years. Sitting in her car, doors locked, behind tinted windows so dark no one could see her, especially at night.
Bonnie had sat back in her seat and picked up her phone, ready to call Bennet to come rescue her, when another feeling hit her. An emotion so foreign to her current life, she almost couldn’t name it.
Calm.
Maybe it wasn’t exactly calm, but it was near enough to a sense of well-being, something she hadn’t experienced in over a decade, that it grabbed her attention.
She was a woman, alone in the dark.
And no one could see her.
Bonnie had stopped dialing her husband and put her phone down.
She sat back in her seat, feeling the muscles that normally roped across her shoulder blades release a fraction of an inch, and noticed how the glow of light from the streetlamps in front of the school didn’t reach to the farthest corners of the parking lot. She felt invisible to the outside world, and it felt good. Regularly, eyes followed her everywhere she went.
At five foot eight, with a slender build, C-cup breasts, and a ballet dancer’s ass, Bonnie Sloan knew she was a beautiful woman. She held herself erect, wore the right clothes, drove a luxury car, and occupied the home that, situated off the third fairway on a slight rise, was visible to everyone entering The Enclave from the main entrance. Her home was the crown jewel of the Enclave development.
Eyes, they were on her, always. Even in her own home, between Bennet and her three kids, rarely was there ever a moment or a space to herself.
But not here. In this one dark parking space where no one would ever look for her. Here she could, and had, eaten an entire Big Mac, large fries, and a regular Coke. She slouched, belched, and often even passed gas without giving it any thought at all. No one was watching, ever, as long as she was alone, here in the dark.
So when tonight’s city council meeting was essentially commandeered by Carl Wayland and several of her other neighbors, she knew she’d need to make a stop before heading home and sharing the news with Bennet.
