Secrets - A Novel - Book 1: Secrets, #1

By Jo Ann Lordahl

"Secrets: A Novel" by Jo Ann Lordahl is the first book in the Secrets Trilogy. This novel tells the captivating story of three strong and independent women, Rachel, Ahanna, and Maria, as they navigate their lives filled with secrets, challenges, and personal growth. Through their interconnected journeys, the book explores themes of love, friendship, self-discovery, and the power of forgiveness.

 

The story begins with Rachel, a successful and ambitious journalist who uncovers a long-held family secret that changes her perception of her own identity and prompts her to seek answers about her true heritage. As she digs deeper into her family history, Rachel's journey leads her to Ahanna, a compassionate and wise African woman living in Zimbabwe, who holds the key to unlocking the secrets of Rachel's past.

 

Ahanna's story is one of resilience and strength, as she faces numerous hardships in her life, including the loss of her parents, political turmoil, and the oppressive nature of society. Despite these challenges, Ahanna maintains her faith and demonstrates unwavering commitment to her community. The bond formed between

Rachel and Ahanna serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of friendship and the shared experiences that connect us all.

 

The third woman, Maria, is a successful lawyer who, on the surface, appears to have it all. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Maria is haunted by a secret she has kept buried deep within. Through her journey of self-discovery and healing, Maria learns the transformative power of opening up and embracing vulnerability.

 

Throughout the book, the author skillfully weaves together the stories of these three women, intertwining their lives and experiences to create a rich tapestry of love, resilience, and personal growth. Secrets from the past are gradually revealed, and the characters are forced to confront the pain, trauma, and emotional baggage they have carried with them.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jo Ann Lordahl
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224050758

Book preview

Dedication

I’m incredibly grateful to many marvelous women (and men), who read, encouraged, critiqued this manuscript in loving detail and forgave my defensiveness knowing I couldn’t help it. The story was so close and personal. And yet my writer’s mind always had plans: I wanted to learn to write. To make myself into a writer and this novel did that more than anything I’ve ever written. I also aimed (as in all my nonfiction) to take my pain and to make something useful of it - jewels from garbage.

Particular thanks go to James Jones (From Here to Eternity). At a highly critical point in my writing career (if publishing a gothic-romance can be called a writing career) I was privileged to step behind the scenes with a ‘real’ writer. Catlin is my creation modeled on James Jones and mine alone. Like all fiction, it is truth, truthful lies, and truth bent to get the desired effects. I tried to be entertaining and educational. Take what is useful, and don’t worry about the rest.

The following have been wonderfully generous over the years and while I didn’t always listen, I feel a big debt of gratitude to Diane Moore, Vickie Sullivan, Joanna Cruse, Kathleen Olive, Jo Curtis, Virginia Cooper, Janet Burroway, Linnea Pearson, Pam Strother, Bobbie Smith, Ruthie Lewis, Reginia Lynn McRee.

Prologue

If a violent man does not come

To a violent Death,

I shall choose him to teach me. The Way of Life, Leo Tzu

Is this the time I die? she wondered. The day of the dream brought it all back. Her personal hell. She was eleven years old and back on the farm where she grew up. It was cold, a moist, biting southern winter-time that crawled in your skin, made you cold from the inside out.

Fireplaces heated the wooden farmhouse; fire and fear of fire were everyday facts of life. One of Antonia’s jobs was bringing in the firewood. She chopped the stove wood like a tomboy, putting the foot-high logs on a chopping block and splitting them with an ax.

The family sat around the fireplace in the evening. A young Antonia watched the fire dreaming of other times, seeing the shimmering flames with flicks of scarlet, orange streaks, blue jets, and glowing coals that beckoned with beauty yet burned with closeness. At intervals family members turned themselves as on a spit roasting in front, freezing in the back.

The family was harsh, the mother and father inextricably caught in the vortex of their own volatile characters. He: idealistic, wealthy background with a weak and addictive personality. She: a martyr playing a role, poor background, with survival instincts. Together the parents spent most of their energy on each other. She and her sister were not the orphan children of lovers, but they were orphans all the same. There was no love in this family and no beauty in this winter except for what Antonia found in the fires.

In the long winter evenings Antonia watched the fires and read the old Biblical Testament. She found pleasure and a sense of stable rightness in its black and white stories of violence and sin, heaven and hell. Cain killed Abel and was punished. Lot’s wife disobediently looked back and became a pillar of salt. The world was cut into geometrical pieces; evil was always punished.

All day and all night in the very short coldest stretches of winter the fires burned. They were carefully banked at night, while the family slept, to keep coals hot until morning when a new fire rose from the old.

Two new fires flared that day of the dream. The first burned in the fields. All afternoon Antonia helped her father and a black man who lived on the farm work to create a new field. The men chopped the trees, strained at stumps with a tractor, and piled wood and debris in layers around recalcitrant stumps the machinery couldn’t budge.

She gathered lighter branches of pine and oak and stubbornly dragged limbs too heavy to carry. The sky turned gray as they toiled, the pale sun was hidden. Land, sky, people: their contained world was bleak. All the world was bleak. A chill twilight drifted near as they finished the field. Her father, silent all afternoon, suddenly became jubilant, showing off for the huge, impassive black man. Earlier her father had disappeared for long minutes and now his coat dragged, distorted by a flat bottle.

Here, Antonia. You take the matches. You start the fires. You’re small and can twist inside the stacks. Light each woodpile as near the center as you can. Then the bonfires will burn evenly.

She took the matches, watching him with slow big eyes. She had learned to react quickly and cautiously to this unpredictable man who might disappear for a week tomorrow. Or, for that matter, not notice her existence for another month, except to tell her to go away.

As twilight deepened, she crawled about solemnly, gravely lighting one bonfire after another. She ignited the huge piles of wood using newspaper her father had given her. This was an appointed mission something for her she performed, lighting the fires, doing

father. Unlike Lot’s wife, who looked and became a pillar of salt, Antonia didn’t look back.

Jagged bare limbs loomed over her head as she squirmed her way inward. Spiky taproots vainly searching for cover rose high in the last tangled circle of debris to be lighted. The dried roots and tree limbs circled a gigantic oak stump, the fallen patriarch of the field struck by lightning a hundred times over the long years of its reign, rotten to the core, now come to its death. One last powerful autumn storm had felled half of the oak tree; her father and the black man had toiled arduous days on the rest.

She picked her way through the spaces and came close to the ancient oak trunk to light her final fire. Crackling noises from the burning field drifted over her shoulder along with the tantalizing smell of rosin and pine straw. Her father and the black man, somewhere behind her in the field, pushed fallen limbs closer to the blazing centers, feeding the fires.

Deep inside the twisted circle of wood, Antonia thrust a burning newspaper at a dried pine limb. A stinging cloud of smoke enveloped her. Without warning, the wind changed direction and blew hard into her face. Bright orange flames flew along the trunks of the small pine trees growing in the oaks’ shadow, now racing each other for the privilege of destroying their old indifferent ruler. Then the wind eddied back the other way and left her eyes free to see the flames bouncing about her fingertips and those tumbling and rolling over her head. Fire boiled around her moving faster than her eyes could follow, or her mind understand. One second darkness; the next brilliant flames leaping to the heavens.

In the field behind her an animal screamed; some small creature caught by fire. Her left hand held the last of the newspaper. As the flames rose higher she woke from her hypnotized spell, thrust the paper forward. The encircling roots and limbs became a prison. Terror and danger gained instant meaning as the wind rolled a new cloud of piercing smoke into her nostrils and smarting eyes. She blindly scrambled for freedom fighting the roots, breaking them when she could, bouncing herself along their lengths with frantic fingers, ignoring the pain, not feeling it.

She crouched alone in the world; fire and smoke filled her universe. Fire crackled behind her, and fire raced ahead. Terror blazed in her heart. She would die in these flames, roasted like a baby rabbit. Her mouth opened wide to announce its terror. All was chaos.

In that instant she was touched to the core. Choices were clear. Light or dark. Life and death. Her wild heartbeat settled. And the old slow childhood rhythm of time changed. A fierce yearning for freedom, for life itself, gave raw power to her actions. She fought forward. A cool breeze wiped her eyes and nose. She fell free on her face in the dirt. She panted against the earth, disbelieving, freedom not yet real, horror still racing in her blood.

On weakened hands and knees she struggled forward. Stones and sticks and sharp broken wood gouged her palms and legs, and the fire behind her boiled hot. She could feel its panting hot breath as the changing wind brought the smoke low over her prone body.

Twilight had deepened its hold on the earth and the low clouds hung lower until the leaden sky and dark land merged and blended together in the horizon, blue smoky land and hard grey clouds intertwined, inseparable. The shifting wind blew cool cleansing drafts of air. Antonia gulped her lungs full, taking the air like food, an unthinking creature operating by instinct from primeval survival of a race bred into her from the lost beginnings of time.

She scrambled to her feet and faced the fire, a silhouetted inferno. Flames leaped higher outlined against the dark earth, biting hunks from the cold clouds. She stepped back mindlessly, her eyes wrapped in the fires suddenly shimmering with beauty. Catching her breath in an exaltation of living, she took in the glory of the field on fire, acres of flames.

The fires belonged. Eerily, they were right and these flames necessary to the land and the sky, to complete them, to make them one. For before her was hell - the burning inferno. This was how God punished sinners. He roasted the bodies in these flames, seared sinners skins for eternity and no black sheep ever crawled free from the red-hot coals.

A question came clear and hard. What was sin? Children couldn’t sin. The shouting Baptist preacher kept quoting the Old Testament saying the Bible said until twelve a child was a child. But after twelve? She was almost twelve.

Fear vanished slowly leaving only the exaltation. Caught by beauty and sin and the strangeness of the burning night she forgot herself in the flames. Like a pyromaniac she gloated over the burning field of wood. Antonia had created this terrible beauty, brought it into life with her hands. Scratches and gouges vanished as she lost herself in she knew not what, perhaps the discovery of beauty where no beauty lay.

Her father, jubilantly oblivious to any change in his small daughter, sent her home. Her entrapment in the roots and her escape had missed his notice as did the drying bloody scratches on her arms and legs. Antonia brought nothing to his attention, being well trained not to bring her personal problems to anyone’s attention. She knew, as matter-of-factly as she accepted the weather, that her problems - and she - interested no one.

At home again, she first chopped the stove wood, her every evening chore, and carried it into the warm kitchen to receive no particular greeting from her mother or baby sister. She didn’t expect greetings or other niceties. The family lived in a state of siege. This perhaps was one of the frequent times when her mother didn’t speak to her father. That would explain his jubilation and his attention to her, that and the moonshine bottle that had glinted fiery gold in his coat pocket.

She washed her cuts and painted them with iodine, squinting her eyes with the sharp pain but, as usual, made no negative sounds. Complaining got her nothing but more trouble.

That night of the dream the second set of her Alabama fires already burned. A single fire this time. Central heating in the form of a square, brown coal-burning stove had come to the farm. The stove reposed on a protecting square of metal with a bucket of coal always at hand to feed its flames. It had two doors for protection and the regulation of heat. The outside door was solid iron, the inside one of glass, crisscrossed by brown metal. The stove squatted in the hall of the house directly across from her room. This fire received special attention at night, banked by a final enveloping bucket of coal, the damper wedged closed and the outside door firmly shut.

Deep in the night she found herself in hell. First she dreamed and then the dream became reality. In her beginning nightmare she trod on red-hot coals for her sins. Red-horned devils with tails held buckets of flames to pour on her head. God had found her out, and he punished her. Being a child didn’t save her. The Baptist preacher’s Old Testament lied. God didn’t like children, even before twelve, who hated their parents, who wished them dead, who wished their little sister dead. Who wished themselves dead. She would burn for eternity.

She opened her eyes to find her nightmare was reality. Terror struck to her soul and shriveled there. Flames danced at her head. In front of her, fire reached thin red fingers higher and closer. Endure was all she could do and endure was what she did as she lay in the grip of an icy freezing of all emotion. She waited for the unnameable to strike.

An eternity passed while she waited. But nothing changed. Very, very gradually she moved her eyes and an arm twitched, then a leg and she was separate once more, free of the nightmare. The dream within a dream faded into reality. Leaping flames from the new stove reflected on her metal bed. Flames that came through the inside glass door one of her parents had forgotten to cover with the solid iron door. This wasn’t hell. Not by that name. Hell was in her future. And heaven of a sort.

CHAPTER 1

Another ghastly dream waked her in the middle of a strange night that strove to be ordinary. Antonia, years later, in her borrowed bed in Miami, Florida was again that long ago child in a cold southern winter in hell. She felt tenderness for her lost self and admired her courage. That kid, one way or another and from god knew where, had plenty of intestinal fortitude. She killed snakes, cut off heads of chickens she'd raised, cleaned them, fried them for the family and ate the chickens herself. She had her chores and she did them, took pride in doing them well: cleaning the kitchen, doing the family laundry, picking and canning tomatoes and butter beans, picking cotton, milking cows, all the farm work. And when work was over she played, leaping from a hay loft or swinging from the highest sycamore.

Once with fear she’d jumped from a high oak limb that she and a neighbor boy had dared each other to climb. He’d had to be helped down by irritated parents. And she was the one her father let down on a rope into the narrow dark creepy well to fish into a slippery bucket with her bare toes a dead rabbit that polluted the farm drinking water.

She did everything that was meaningful alone: read, sit on the tiptop of a grapevine-hung tree by herself, slip out of her window and walk in the orchard at night while the unsuspecting family slept. And she single-handedly devised how to stop her mother’s penchant for sending her off to school with crisscross welts up and down her legs from peach tree switches.

Antonia would receive orders to cut five switches for whatever sinful indiscretion she’d committed. For worse sins it was ten or more. With a look on her face the child couldn’t read - pain, pleasure, duty - her mother would select the most supple switches, the thin ones that wrapped around and hurt the worst, and whip until Antonia cried. Or some inside demon of her mother was temporarily satisfied. After a time she watched her mother’s face before and during the whippings for as long as she could. As a child she was ashamed of the whippings and the talking that came before. She grew ashamed of herself for crying. Crying was giving in to her mother, giving the woman what she wanted, for Antonia began seeing pleasure on her mother’s face. To whip Antonia pleased her. With disdainful horror the child sensed that her tears brought her mother a perverse joy. Antonia thought out the situation and made her plans.

Slender peach limb after peach limb shredded itself against her legs biting deep and cruel. Welts raised that were crisscrossed and then crossed again with blood. Nine switches wore themselves out before her mother’s arm got too tired to swing the peach tree weapons. Or shame hit the mother or futility. She stopped the whippings never to start again.

Antonia’s Indian face had held no traces of tears. Not a hint of moisture touched her cold eyes. She’d found an inside switch that had lasted until now. Over the years when heavy pain and hurt came, she took herself some place else and watched what happened to her body from a far corner.

As a child she knew the single-minded contest of wills that said, I will die before I give in. From then on in extreme necessity, Antonia found that people gave in when she flipped on her switch. Except now, when she needed it most, her switches weren’t working. Forgetting Catlin and her love for him was a concrete wall she couldn’t break through.

Antonia had no experience with problems that had no solutions. That laughed in your face. That waved challenges of evil and insanity. Or forced you to break out of a safe cocoon that kept you safely denying life in a safe world.

What do you do, Antonia sat up in bed, turned on the light and wrote in her grey journal, when you rage against death? What is it that happens? You come against the impossible, the edge of the world. There it is. Death is the end. There is no way to balance it out, to change it, to get around it, to weasel out, to make deals, to compromise, to do any damn thing in the world except look on the face of death. Either you grow through the grief to become a fuller human. Or you hide and distort reality. For reality will not change. Death walks with us every step and can come at any time. Some few things we do can bring it closer. Or hold back that particular way of