This page features snippets written during January 2022 for the second chance at CWE#1 at Jix. The thirty-one snippets form one complete story (which started on the previous page).

Please note that none of these have been edited.

Back to Selections from the Vault index page.

The Thirty-one Secrets (continued)

Day 16: Word prompt — Zenith

“I did often play the fool,” Mart mused, “and my jokes were not always funny. So, perhaps it’s fitting that I was compared to a less-than-competent comedic bear.”

Dan grinned. “Just so long as you’re not planning a stand-up comedy career.”

Mart nodded. “I would certainly get heckled. Which is what I expect to happen when I share my next secret.”

“We wouldn’t heckle you, Mart.” Honey cast an appealing look around the room. “Would we?”

Trixie eyed her brother. “That depends what he’s about to say.”

“I don’t think I have a good feeling about this one,” Di added. “Though, I don’t think I’d actually heckle anyone.”

“How about if you start telling us, Mart, and we’ll try to restrain ourselves?” Jim suggested.

“Very well.” Mart gazed off, as if into the distance. “I had, on this particular occasion, planned a romantic evening–”

“Hold on,” Trixie interrupted. “I thought we’d agreed not to share romantic secrets.”

Mart waved a hand in her direction. “See? The heckling has arrived, right on cue.”

Brian shook his head. “That’s not heckling. It’s a legitimate question.”

“As it happens, this is not a romantic secret,” Mart explained. “And, as you will soon see, it did not turn out to be an especially romantic evening. I will leave the young lady’s identity to your imaginations.”

Trixie frowned a little. “I’m still not sure this counts, but okay.”

He settled himself more comfortably and cleared his throat. “As I was saying, I had planned a romantic evening of star-gazing. I had a picnic blanket, a selection of snacks, and a flask of hot cocoa, in case it got chilly. I collected the aforementioned female companion and proceeded to the location I had chosen. Unfortunately, someone else had gotten there first and claimed it for another kind of activity. One look at the couple in question and we beat a hasty retreat.”

“You’re not supposed to be spilling other people’s romantic secrets, either,” Trixie pointed out.

“I don’t even know who they were,” Mart argued. “And their presence in my narrative exists only to explain why it was that I suggested that we try the bluffs.”

“You got lost, didn’t you?” Dan shook his head. “You probably took her through poison ivy and tripped over tree roots and meet up with wild animals. And the girl probably dumped you.”

“Is this your story, or mine?” Mart asked. “No. We did not get lost. We did not trip over any skunks. And I’ve already promised not to reveal who was with me, so I cannot comment on the last part. However, you are correct in surmising that we never reached the bluffs. We got distracted along the way and instead spent the evening talking to old Brom, feeding him our snacks and cocoa, and listening to his stories about the smuggling his father used to do and the treasure that still lies hidden in the Preserve, waiting for someone to find it.”

“We would have loved a treasure hunt, wouldn’t we, Trixie?” Honey commented. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

But Trixie met Mart’s eyes and the two shared a silent look.

“You and I and Di were away that weekend,” Trixie told Honey. “And, by the next time we were at home and Mart was there, too, well…” She turned to Mart. “You were probably the last people to talk to him before he died.”

Mart nodded. “I’ve always thought so. Mr. Maypenny waved to him the next day, but they didn’t speak. I wasn’t the last to see him, but it was the last conversation he ever had.”

Day 17: Poetry prompt — From Dreams by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow

“That was right before your little incident, wasn’t it?” Trixie asked.

Mart frowned impressively, to no effect on his sister.

“Oh, you mean the time he fractured both his radius and his ulna, while descending at speed from a ladder?” Brian asked. “I never did quite understand how that happened.”

“It was the part when I stopped at the ground that did it,” Mart answered.

Brian shook his head. “I meant the part where you fell off, not the natural consequences of falling.”

“Maybe Mart will share that secret later.” Trixie glanced at her brother’s face. “Or, maybe not. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the actual incident. I was thinking about afterwards, while he had to wear a cast on his arm.”

Mart groaned. “While all of you were swimming in the lake, I was hot and miserable and unassuageably itchy.”

Dan frowned. “Is that even a word?”

“Yes!” Mart snapped.

“Anyway,” Trixie continued, “while Mart was suffering the effects of his own actions–”

“Hey!” Mart interrupted. “I’ll have you know–”

“Yes, yes,” Trixie interrupted in turn. “You were really uncomfortable. And you didn’t let us forget it. Anyway, Mart was suffering and Moms and Dad and Brian were out and Dad had made Mart promise he wouldn’t try to drive, so when Mart really, desperately wanted some ice cream and there wasn’t any in the freezer – because he’d already eaten it all – I volunteered to go out and get some more.”

Di giggled. “Look at Mart’s face.”

“What’s wrong, Mart?” Honey wondered. “You look like you’re afraid of what she’s going to say next.”

Jim nodded. “I think you’ve nailed it, Honey. So, Trixie, what does happen next in this story?”

She grinned. “Mart gave me extremely specific instructions on what kind of ice cream it had to be. And I mean extremely specific. They went on for about ten minutes.”

“They did not!”

“Sorry. It was only nine minutes.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I went down to Lytell’s store and looked at his ice cream selection and he didn’t have any that met Mart’s criteria. But I didn’t want to go anywhere else.”

“What did you do to my ice cream, Trixie?” Mart demanded.

“This happened over twenty years ago,” she pointed out. “And you said at the time that it was exactly what you wanted.”

“What did you do?”

“I bought the low-fat version. And I took it home and kind of popped it out of the tub and put it in the old tub – which had already been washed out; luckily they were exactly the same size – and I hid the new tub until I could smuggle it out of the house. And Mart never knew – at least, until now he didn’t.”

Mart only groaned.

Day 18: Dialogue prompt — “Stop lying to me!”

“In that case, perhaps, I should come clean about something that I did to you,” Mart told Trixie, at last.

Her grin froze. “What did you do?”

“Nothing that you didn’t already know was done,” he explained. “You just didn’t know that I was the one who did it.”

“Now, that sounds kind of complicated,” Honey commented.

Brian cast her a look. “You think that sounds complicated? Honey, if you’d made a statement like that as a teenager, we’d have thought you were getting more coherent!”

Di laughed. “Honey would have said something like, ‘I know that you knew that it had been done, but you didn’t know that I knew that you didn’t know that I had done it.’ You know?”

Dan groaned. “Yes, we know!”

“But that doesn’t answer the question of what Mart did,” Jim pointed out.

Mart turned to his sister. “It involves your first-born daughter, that delicate, sweet, incongruously feminine little girl, when she was at the tender age of two, or thereabouts.”

“I only have one daughter, Mart.”

“I know.” He watched his sister a little longer. “And she was beautifully innocent, back then.”

“What did you do?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “One day, you left me minding her while the plumber made emergency repairs in your house. And when you came home, she repeated to you – in a lovely, loud, clear voice – a rather strong expletive. And you blamed the plumber for teaching it to her.” He paused. “It wasn’t the plumber.”

“Mart!” Trixie could hardly talk for laughing. “You were the one who blamed the plumber.”

“I may have hinted that it was him,” he admitted. “In my defence, his language was rather salty. She might have also heard him say it. And I only said the word once, after I jammed my thumb in a door. It’s not my fault your daughter was a little parrot!”

Day 19: Picture prompt

Dan’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Honey. “What are you thinking about?”

She jolted. “Me?”

“You’ve thought of a secret to share, haven’t you?”

“Maybe.” She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “Okay, yes, I’ve thought of one. But I’m not sure whether I should share it or not, because it’s to do with that time that my cousin Ben stayed at Manor House – not those times he stayed when we were teenagers, I mean, but that other time, when he was about twenty-five and all those things had gone wrong in his life.”

“Is it Ben’s secret?” Brian asked.

Honey shook her head. “It’s a secret that I kept from Ben. And it’s a bit like Trixie’s ice cream one. Ben never knew the thing that I did… and, if it’s all right with all of you, I think I’d like to keep it that way.”

“I’m not going to lie to him, if he straight out asks,” Jim answered, “but I think I can agree in principle.”

The others nodded.

Honey took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll probably all remember that that was the year that I kind of house-sat for Mother and Daddy and that when Ben needed somewhere to stay, I let him stay with me. But he wasn’t in a very good place, at the time – emotionally, or professionally, or personally – and he was rather difficult to live with.”

“The way I remember it, he was practically impossible to live with.” Di shook her head. “I never knew how you did it.”

“You were really patient with him,” Trixie commented. “I would have thrown him out into the street.”

“He’d already been thrown out in the street,” Jim pointed out, “which is why he needed somewhere to stay.”

“And Honey’s saint-like patience was the only thing stopping him from living under a bridge somewhere.” Mart stroked his chin. “But methinks Honey is about to reveal that there was a limit to said patience.”

“Well, of course there was,” Honey answered. “And I’m not proud of it, but I was so frustrated with him that I tricked him into get drunk right before I was expecting his father to visit.”

“What do you mean, tricked him?” Jim asked, with a deep frown.

“Well, before that, I’d found where Ben hid the empty bottles from Dad’s whiskey, which I’d specifically told him not to drink, so I just went and bought a couple of bottles of cheaper whiskey and filled the old bottles a half- or two-thirds-full with those.”

Jim frowned some more. “But surely he’d know that he’d already drunk them?”

“I put these ones in a different room,” Honey explained. “And I sort of accidentally let Ben see them and see where I hid the key. But on purpose, of course – he only thought it was an accident. And, of course, Ben started drinking as soon as my back was turned and, when his father came, he saw Ben’s behaviour when he was drunk and took him away and got him some help. And Ben was angry with his father, but not with me, when it was actually my actions which led to everything that came after that.”

“But Ben got his life straightened out because of that.” Dan looked Honey in the eye. “Maybe it wasn’t exactly a Bob-White thing to do, but it got him what he needed. He knows, Honey. And he doesn’t hold it against you. He told me he’s grateful that you did it, because he would have only gotten worse if you hadn’t.”

And Honey breathed a sigh of relief.

Day 20: Word prompt — Torn

“We probably all have things we’ve done, which weren’t exactly a Bob-White thing to do,” Di mused.

Jim nodded. “In fact, I’m thinking of one of those right now. I guess I should have admitted it at the time, but the opportunity didn’t arise. And after a while it felt like it was too late.”

“But now is a great time to share the secret.” Dan smiled. “I’d like to know what perfect-boy-scout-Jim did that wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up.”

Trixie’s eyes narrowed at Dan. “Are you sure it’s not just so that you don’t have to share a secret yourself?”

“He can go next,” Honey suggested. “Go on, Jim. What did you do?”

“I was collecting the mail one day – I must have been home from college at the time, I guess – and I flicked through the things there and found an unsealed envelope and, inside it, an invitation.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t for me.”

“Who was it for?” Brian wondered. “And didn’t it have a name on the outside of the envelope?”

Jim shook his head. “The envelope was blank, which is why I looked inside. And it was for Honey.”

“Me? What kind of invitation?”

“The kind that you’d send out for a kid’s birthday – the pre-printed kind, where you fill in the blanks. But instead of something innocent… well, I forget the wording, but it suggested something a lot more adult in nature.”

Honey shook her head. “Who would send me something like that? And why didn’t I ever see it?”

Her brother shrugged. “You didn’t see it because it made me angry enough that I ripped it to shreds.”

Trixie looked around the room. “I think some people knew this secret already. Mart and Dan are awfully quiet. And they don’t look surprised, or curious – even though Dan was the one who encouraged the telling of this secret in the first place.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be this secret,” Dan argued. “And any involvement I may or may not have had would be a new secret, right?”

“Indubitably,” Mart agreed. “Good secret, Jim. Glad we’ve cleared that up. Who’s next?”

Day 21: Music prompt — Something Pretty by Patrick Park
I was a dumb punk kid with nothing to lose

“Oh, no you don’t!” Trixie snapped at her middle brother. “You’re not getting out of this, now.”

“Getting out of what?” he replied. “I don’t see what Jim’s last secret has to do with me.”

Trixie shook her head, dismissing his objection. “What did the three of you do?”

Mart let out an entirely artificial sigh. “I seem to be having to share more than my fair share of secrets tonight. But since Jim has already let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, I suppose that I can tell the next part. Dan and I came across Jim in a state of agitation and, being the good friends that we were, we convinced him to share the cause of said state.”

“So far, so good,” Honey commented. “But that isn’t exactly a new secret, now, is it?”

“You’re right, Honey. In which case, someone else can have a turn. Who’s next?”

Again, Trixie shook her head. “You already tried that one.”

“Just tell us, please.” Di looked from him to Dan. “One or other of you.”

Dan shrugged and waved to his friend. “You got us into this.”

Mart then turned to Jim, who said, “The last thing I knew about it was when I handed all the little pieces over to you two and made you promise not to do anything that I would regret.”

“Which we did not. End of story.” Mart nodded in satisfaction. “Next!”

“Still not working.” Trixie glared at him. “Now, spill.”

“Fine!” He scowled back for a moment. “We spent half an hour carefully piecing the invitation back together so that we could get the address and the name of the person who supposedly sent it – which Jim had neglected to remember. And that was when we started smelling something fishy. Because the name and the address didn’t match. The party was supposedly being held by a boy, but we knew, somehow, that the family who lived there only had daughters. So, the two of us went down there a little before the time given and scoped the place out.”

“What did you find?” Trixie wanted to know.

“The daughter who was the same age as you was having a sleepover and her guests were already there.” Mart frowned. “I forget the names of the two guys. There was a tall one with messy, brown hair and a shorter, fairer one. Jokers. They were sitting on the front porch of the house next door, sniggering. We immediately concluded that they were involved, somehow, and were there to see the fun. We also decided to spoil any such fun.”

“And did you?” Di wondered.

Mart shook his head. “No one turned up who shouldn’t have. It was a bust. Now, wasn’t that a pathetic secret? Don’t you wish you’d asked someone else?”

“I, for one, want to hear the rest of it,” Brian answered. “Because I don’t believe for a minute that the two of you just went away without doing anything else.”

“I’m with Brian,” Jim added.

Mart closed his eyes. “We snuck up on them in the dark. They were a bit annoyed that their plan hadn’t worked and they were talking about doing something else to ruin the girl from next door’s night. And we were looking for a way to stop them when a police cruiser pulled up outside and shone a light on us. And, of course, we were the ones in the wrong. And did we get a talking to, while those two idiots laughed their heads off.”

“They weren’t laughing half an hour later, when the same police cruiser came back and caught them egging the neighbour’s house,” Dan added. “But overall, it wasn’t a good night for us.”

Day 22: Dialogue prompt — “I haven’t been home yet.”

“You know,” Brian mused, “I think I might remember something about that incident. I must have still been at college when it happened, but when I arrived the next day something was a bit off about Mart.”

“Why does it always have to be about me?” Mart wondered.

His sister grinned. “You’re just so much fun to tease.”

“On that occasion, the thing that caught my attention was that I mentioned a spider,” Brian told him, “and your immediate response was not to think either of a soda with ice cream in it, or about an arachnid, but instead to jump to the conclusion that I meant Spider Webster. But I was glad that you were distracted because I was trying to conceal from you the fact that I’d arrived home wearing someone else’s shirt.”

“Now, this is interesting,” Dan noted.

Di frowned. “I’m not so sure it’s going to be. Brian, why were you wearing someone else’s shirt, when you presumably had a suitcase full of your own shirts in the back of the car?”

“I did,” Brian admitted. “But every last one of them was wet, on account of the incident I didn’t want Mart to know about. Just as I was leaving for the break, I met a casual acquaintance and his girlfriend. His car had broken down and they had no other transport to where they were going, so I gave them a ride to somewhere they could get a train.”

“That sounds like a good thing to do. So, what went wrong?” Jim asked.

“Well, we’d looked up the trains and found the best place to drop them,” Brian continued. “It was about an hour into my journey. We pulled up at the station and I went to help them get their bags – which was when we discovered that something in the girlfriend’s bag had leaked. I opened the trunk and got hit by a strong, flowery smell.”

Mart sat forward. “So that’s where that smell came from! You told me it was carpet-cleaner from trying to clean up a spill.”

“I did use carpet-cleaner. And it did have a discernible smell.” Brian waved the point away. “But the main issue was that both my bag and hers were drenched in some kind of scented product. My friend’s hadn’t fitted in there and so it was in the back seat. So, when we found that I’d gotten the stuff on my shirt while trying to deal with the bags, he offered me one of his. And I took it, because I couldn’t cope with too much of that flowery smell. I never did get it out of the car, or my suitcase, though thankfully it came out of my clothes in the wash.”

Day 23: Word prompt — Soul

“Break-up stories aren’t romantic, right?” Di asked. “It doesn’t involve anyone present.”

Trixie looked around the group and saw agreement. “I guess that would work.”

“By all means,” Brian invited.

Di pressed her hands together in front on her face for a moment, then took a deep breath. “I told you all that I broke up with a certain person because our belief systems were incompatible and that we had mutually decided to go our separate ways. Actually, I dumped him – and he was extremely upset with me for doing it. And the reason that I did it was because he criticised part of my music collection.”

“You dumped a guy because he didn’t like your music.” Dan looked confused.

“It’s not that he didn’t like it. It’s that he said it was nothing but a product of my thinly-veiled feminist agenda and a sign that I had bought into the lie that men are the enemy and need to be put in their place.” Di made an angry sound. “How dare he say that about Aretha Franklin!”

Day 24: Picture prompt

Trixie’s expression turned thoughtful. “That reminds me of one. It’s not exactly a break-up story, but it was the end of a friendship. I never explained why my college friend April kind of disappeared.”

“I’d forgotten that she ever existed,” Mart answered. “Was she the one with the glasses?”

Honey shook her head. “No, that was Emily. April was the one whose ambition was to be the head of security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Dan frowned. “I don’t think I’d trust her as head of security for the Bob-White clubhouse.”

“That probably should have been a position title, back at the beginning of the club.” Brian shook his head, as they all remembered the various break-ins there. “But, Trixie, why did you break off your friendship with the girl with the strangely specific ambition?”

“It was nothing to do with her career goals.” Trixie glanced at Dan. “Though, you’re right that she would never get that exact job. It all happened on the subway. And, actually, she broke off the friendship with me and not the other way around.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed. “You were really annoyed with her.”

“Yes!” Trixie burst out. “I’m still a bit annoyed with her. She told me I was gullible. And that I was playing into criminals’ hands. And that I’d never get where I wanted to be in life if I kept trying to help other people.”

“I’ve met the head of security at the Met,” Di told her, “and it’s definitely not her, so I think you might have had the last laugh on this one.”

“Yes, yes. But I still don’t understand how this conversation came about,” Mart complained. “You should start at the beginning of the story.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “I already told you the important bits. If you really need it spelled out, the subway was crowded, but by some miracle I got a seat. April started out standing next to me, but she got pushed along. A man standing next to me was trying to put his wallet back in his pocket when someone bumped him and it fell in my lap. I handed it back. And then April launched in on her lecture – in full hearing of the guy she’s basically accusing of being a criminal. I told her to be quiet. She never spoke to me again.”

Day 25: Poetry prompt — From Saddest Poem, by Pablo Naruda
“The night is full of stars, and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”

“I have one that’s a little different.” Jim looked away, apparently into the past. “It wasn’t something that happened, or a piece of tangible information that I kept from you all. It was more like a slow, dawning realisation.”

Dan shook his head. “Isn’t that a fancy way of saying you learned something about yourself?”

Jim’s eyes snapped to his friend. “Not exactly about me. About all of us.”

“What did you learn about us, Jim?” his sister asked softly.

He shrugged. “It’s about nights like this one – where we’re together and we’re having fun and laughing together. Over the years, it’s become clear to me that we’re like an ensemble cast.”

“And this is our sitcom?” Mart added. He glanced around the room. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Not a drama?” Trixie questioned. “Considering all our adventures…”

“The adventures were fun,” Jim admitted. “But when I started thinking of us as kind of like a sitcom, it made me feel warm. It’s like coming in from the cold and dark and finding that you’re not alone.”

Day 26: Dialogue prompt — “Can you reach it?”

“You, yourself, have added elements of comedy to our lives, as well as adventure,” Mart pointed out to his sister. “I recall one particular incident where I found you and your co-conspirator over there –” (he pointed to Honey) “– engaged in a rather dangerous activity.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “That describes practically my entire teenage existence.”

Mart smiled. “In this case, there were no criminals involved. Instead, there was a ladder.”

“Is there a secret in this story, Mart, or is it just an amusing tangent?” Brian wondered.

“Do you mean, we’re not at thirty-one yet?” Di let out a groan. “I was thinking we must be finished by now.”

Jim checked his tally. “We still need six more secrets.”

“And I can’t think of another single one,” Honey put in.

“A certain other person has only shared two.” Jim glanced at Dan. “I thought you said you had about ten secrets?”

Dan shrugged. “They wouldn’t be secrets if I shared them. And anyway, I thought we were hearing from Mart.”

“Yes, we were.” Mart scowled around the room. “If I am allowed to talk, I will share the secret of the day when I found my sister dangling from the top of a ladder, while Honey urged her on from below.”

“That doesn’t sound familiar,” Trixie objected. “Are you sure this actually happened?”

“Yes!” He looked anywhere but at his sister as he continued. “This happened when we were all past the age of twenty, so it was not a part of Trixie’s teenage existence. Christmas was approaching and, for reasons I cannot recall, Trixie and Honey had been put in charge of decorating the clubhouse for our annual gathering.”

Honey gasped. “This is about the missing mistletoe, isn’t it?”

Mart nodded. “I arrived at the clubhouse to find Trixie in the aforementioned position, in imminent danger of falling from the ladder on which she was attempting to hang decorations from various high places.”

“I was not!”

“Hanging decorations?” he asked.

Trixie shook her head. “In danger of falling! I was fine.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then shook his head. “Whether you were falling or not, you were distracted. And while you weren’t looking, I saw the mistletoe you intended to hang and… removed it. Because there was a certain couple among us that I did not want to see kissing. Instead, I got to watch the pair of you searching high and low for mistletoe which you never found.”

Brian narrowed his eyes. “But you still had to see the kissing anyway. A lack of mistletoe was not going to solve that problem.”

Mart waved the matter away. “Seeing them fruitlessly searching made up for it.”

Day 27: Music prompt — 1, 2, 3, 4 by Plain White T’s
“Piece me back together when I fall apart”

Diana’s expression changed. “I have one that’s kind of the opposite of that one. I didn’t make something disappear, I made it kind of reappear.” She shot a guilty glance at Mart. “You’re not going to like this.”

“Considering what Mart just admitted, he probably deserves it,” Brian observed with a smile.

“It’s to do with Mart’s cake.” She smiled at the memory. “You remember? The one he was so proud of making?”

“Could we ever forget?” Trixie asked. “He talked about that cake for years. He still talks about it sometimes.”

While his sister’s face showed amusement, Mart’s had paled. “What about my delectable, glorious cake, over which I slaved for hours and whose pinnacle of perfection I have never managed to recreate?”

Di closed her eyes for a moment. “Well, you see, when it was nearly time to serve it, I took a peek at it and discovered that something had gone a bit wrong.”

Mart’s brows pulled together into a frown. “What do you mean, ‘a bit wrong’?”

“The layers weren’t exactly even and the fillings were slippery and – well, I think you can guess–”

“What did you do to my cake?” Mart demanded, as his frown deepened into a scowl.

“How about if you calm it down a little,” Dan suggested. “It was just a cake.”

“Just a cake? Just a cake! I’ll have you know–”

“Yes, Mart, we know,” Brian interrupted. “It was a really good cake, but it was still just a cake.”

“Can Di continue now?” asked Honey. “Or do you need a moment?”

Mart just waved her on.

“So, I found a wooden skewer and cut it to the height of the cake, then I kind of slid all the layers back into place and skewered them through the middle to keep them there, then I tidied it all up and covered over the little hole where the skewer had gone.” Di glanced at him to see how he was taking the news, then hurried on with her account. “And I tried to make it look just like it must have when you’d first done it, but I hadn’t seen it then, so I wasn’t sure if I’d got it right. But you didn’t seem to notice, so I thought it must have been okay. And, of course, when it was cut, I kept an eye out for the skewer and took it away before you saw it.”

“Are you okay, Mart?” Jim asked, after a short silence had ensued.

Mart took a deep breath and nodded. “It does explain a few things. Such as why the other time I tried to make that cake, that’s exactly the disaster that befell it. It still tasted delicious, but the presentation was rather lacking.”

Diana bit her lip. “It looks like this is a secret I should never have kept!”

Day 28: Word prompt — Upheaval

“I have one I shouldn’t have kept, too.” Honey glanced around at the male members of the club. “It’s from the time you all went hiking together in the Catskills and didn’t invite us.”

“I don’t think you would have wanted to be there,” Jim answered, with an odd expression on his face. “I really don’t.”

“I know that I didn’t,” Di put in. “Though Trixie and Honey were a bit annoyed about you all telling them they couldn’t go.”

“Trust me when I say, you didn’t want to be there,” Dan added.

Trixie laughed. “I know that now. But at the time… it was infuriating. And it made me want to do something bad, to teach you all a lesson.”

“Yes, but you didn’t do anything bad,” Honey pointed out to her. “You had all sorts of diabolical ideas, but you didn’t put any of them into action.”

The four men exchanged worried looks, but it was Brian who spoke first.

“What did you do, Honey?”

“I loosened the labels on the canned food that you were taking so that they would come off. And one of the cans of fruit, I switched out for baked beans.”

“So, it was you!” Mart cried. “And all these years, they’ve been blaming me!”

“Well, those labels wouldn’t have got mixed up if you hadn’t got them all wet,” Dan argued. “And they wouldn’t have been wet if you hadn’t been goofing around. And Honey isn’t responsible for either of those things, is she?”

Mart eyed Honey for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Yes!” Brian, Jim and Dan chorused.

“Okay, fine. So the fiasco is still a tiny bit my fault,” Mart admitted. “But I didn’t cause the whole problem.”

“I’m sorry, Mart, for letting them blame you.”

“Not as sorry as we were for letting him eat those beans,” Dan quipped.

Day 29: Picture prompt

Mart frowned at Dan. “For that, I think I will share a particular incident which happened that same weekend.”

“You’re looking at me like I should be worried,” Dan answered, “but I don’t think there’s anything I did that I care whether anyone knows.”

Mart spoke just one word: “Precipice.”

The smirk slid off Dan’s face. “Did I ever tell you about the thing with the custard and the toy soldiers and the–”

“We all know that story,” Di broke in. “We want to hear about the precipice.”

Dan glowered at Mart for several moments, then nodded.

“We were hiking along the trail,” Mart explained, “when Dan noticed a small side-track and we decided to see where it went. Dan was in the lead and he was looking over his shoulder to say something to me, when he tripped and lost his footing. He broke through a couple of branches and slid down a slope, barely catching himself before he reached the edge of the aforementioned precipice. He swore creatively and extensively – I was quite impressed; there were words in there that I didn’t know–”

“And there you have Mart’s secret,” Dan interrupted. “You heard him admit it – I knew words that he didn’t. What’s the next secret?”

“That wasn’t the secret I was thinking of.” Mart frowned. “In fact, I’m certain that it was not a secret that other people knew words that I didn’t. Several of you had specialist vocabulary that I did not share.”

“That’s true,” Honey noted. “So, that’s not a secret, so maybe Mart needs to go on.”

“Fine! Tell them what I said!”

Mart shook his head. “I wasn’t actually going to tell that part, because it’s not my secret. I just wanted to stir you up a bit, on account of your last dig at me. My secret was what I thought about, when I saw how close you came to falling to your death – or, at least, serious injury.”

“That you could eat my share of the beans?” Dan suggested.

Again, Mart shook his head. “That if you died, I would miss sharing crabapple jelly with you.”

Dan stared at him for a long moment. “I might have died and all you could think about was food?”

“I thought about sharing my food,” Mart corrected. “Do you have any idea how much that meant, at the time?”

Dan grinned. “Good point.” He turned to the others, who still looked curious about the incident. “But, no, I’m not telling what I said.”

Day 30: Dialogue prompt — “Close the door.”

“If I share one, will that be the last?” Brian asked.

Jim shook his head. “Second-last.”

“The penultimate secret.” Mart turned to his brother. “Does it relate, by any chance, to the one I just shared?”

“No, not at all.” Brian glanced at Dan. “All of your secrets are safe with me.”

Dan nodded. “And with Jim. But not safe with Mart, it seems.”

“He didn’t actually tell us your secret,” Trixie pointed out. “But I thought Brian was going to talk.”

“I was.” He paused for a moment. “The secret I’m thinking about is from much later than that weekend. It relates, in fact, to something that never happened. A near-miss, you could say. I promised Dad, at the time, that I wouldn’t tell anyone until we knew for sure, but once the threat passed I don’t think either of us ever said anything about it.”

“Is this a serious sort of secret?” Diana asked, with a slight frown. “Something financial or legal?”

Brian waved his hand back and forth. “It’s kind of legal. But it’s more ridiculous than serious. If there’d been any truth to the allegation it would have complicated things, but… can I just tell it? It would be quicker.”

“Go ahead,” Honey told him, after looking around the room.

“Dad received a letter from a lawyer alleging that I had been switched at birth with their client, who had been instead raised as a circus clown, as part of a conspiracy between the Goat Breeders And Nurturers Association of North America, a sect of Mennonites, and a certain prominent political figure, who shall remain unnamed, with a view to disturbing the world order and preventing the proper transfer of property.”

Trixie stared at him. “Out of all of us, you’re the one who looks the most like Dad.”

“Yes. And neither Dad nor I have the slightest doubt that I’m his natural son,” Brian answered. “We felt confident that we could prove that, but there was still a threat to be dealt with.”

“What did they want?” Jim asked.

“For Dad to hand over the title deed to Crabapple Farm to this other person, who was supposedly the true eldest son.” Brian shook his head. “I don’t remember all of the things they said they would do if he didn’t comply. But the next thing I heard about it, Dad had compared notes with Matt Wheeler, who had also apparently been dealing with someone trying to gain property in the area by force, and his lawyers swept the floor with this one.”

Day 31: Word prompt — Disturb

“We need just one more secret to make our target. So, who’s going to go last?” Jim asked the group.

“Maybe I should, since this started with me supposedly keeping secrets.” Di thought for a moment. “I think I’ve got the perfect one to end on. It happened not long after Dan joined the Bob-Whites.”

“Ending at the start. Yes, that’s a good idea,” Honey agreed. “What’s your secret?”

“Do you remember that time we made the mistake of trying to go to Wimpy’s after a football game? I think it was Sleepyside against Croton.”

Trixie let out a groan. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Those Croton supporters were insane.”

“And I don’t think I’ve forgiven myself, yet, for letting you get separated from the rest of us,” Brian added, while Mart and Jim nodded agreement.

“I had Dan with me,” Di reassured them. “And, it turned out, he was probably the best one for me to be with.”

Mart looked from her to Dan. “I thought you just guided her through the crowd until we could all meet up again?”

Dan shrugged. “That’s what we told you all. It’s most of what happened, but we left a little bit out.”

Mart’s eyes narrowed. “What part?”

“The part that I thought was embarrassing, so I asked Dan not to say,” Di explained. “There was this drunken stranger, and he decided that I was actually called Henrietta and insisted that I was his long-lost sister and needed to go home with him right away. And Dan was in the middle of talking him down when a girl came up and told the drunk guy, ‘I’m not lost, you idiot! And my name isn’t Henrietta!’ And when he turned to talk to her instead, Dan grabbed my hand and we ran away from him.”

“Smooth,” Mart commented, leaning back in his chair. “That was quite the collection of secrets. I wondered for a while in the middle whether we were going to make it, but perhaps there’s still another thirty-one to reveal.”

“Especially since Dan only shared two,” Jim noted, with a glance at his tally. “Mart, I thought you said you didn’t have any secrets. You shared more than anyone else.”

“I think he said that he couldn’t keep secrets,” Trixie corrected. “And he’s proved that pretty well. Whereas, Dan has proved that he can.”

Dan laughed softly. “What can I say? I’m a man of mystery.”

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