Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding Page A

buying her trinkets during their marriage when he found them inevitably consigned to the back of her dresser drawer. It just wasn’t her style, she’d explained. She always felt like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s things.
    Her mother, she thought, realizing that the woman juror had moved on. How could she have considered, even for an instant, that the woman looked anything like her mother? This woman was approximately five feet five inches tall and 140 pounds; in comparison, her mother had been almost four inches taller and ten pounds heavier. Not to mention the differences in the color of their eyes and hair, or in the amount of makeup they wore, Jess thought, confident that her mother would never have worn lipstick that pink or blush that obviously applied. Unlike her mother, the woman was clearly skittish and insecure, her heavy makeup a mask against time. No, there was nothing similar about the two women at all.
    The woman juror stopped in front of another shop, and Jess found herself staring at an ugly assortment of leather bags and cases. Was the woman going to go inside the store? Buy herself a little treat? A reward for a job well done? Well, why not? Jess thought, turning her head discreetly away as the woman pushed open the door and headed for the center of the store.
    Should she follow her inside? Jess wondered, thinking she could use a new briefcase. Hers was very old; Don had bought it for her when she graduated from law school, and unlike his jewelry purchases, he certainly couldn’t complain about that gift’s lack of use. The once shiny black leather had grown scratched and smudged, its stitching frayed, the zipper forever catching on some wayward threads. Maybe it was time to give it up, buy a new one. Sever her ties with the past once and for all.
    The woman emerged from the store with only the brown handbag she’d been carrying when she went in. Shegathered the collar of her dark green coat around her chin and stuffed her gloved hands inside her pockets. Jess found herself mimicking the woman’s actions, following several paces behind.
    They crossed the Chicago River, the Wrigley Building looming high on one side of the wide street, the Tribune Tower on the other. Downtown Chicago was a wealth of architectural splendors, boasting skyscrapers by the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Helmut Jahn, and Bruce Graham. Jess had often contemplated taking a lecture cruise along Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. Somehow she’d never gotten around to it.
    The woman continued for several more paces, then stopped abruptly, spinning around. “Why are you following me?” she demanded angrily, tapping impatient fingers against the sleeve of her coat, like a schoolteacher questioning an errant pupil.
    Jess felt herself reduced in stature to that of a small child, terrified of getting her knuckles rapped. “I’m sorry,” she stammered, wondering again what she was doing. “I didn’t mean to …”
    “I saw you on the bus, but I didn’t think anything of it,” the woman said, clearly flustered. “Then I saw you by the jewelry store, but I thought, well, everybody has the right to look in the same window, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. But when you were still there when I came out of that leather goods store, I knew you had to be following me. Why? What do you want?”
    “I don’t want anything. Really, I wasn’t following you.”
    The woman’s eyes narrowed, challenged Jess’s.
    “I … I’m not sure why I was following you,” Jess admittedafter a pause. She couldn’t remember a time she’d felt more foolish.
    “It wasn’t you, you know,” the woman began, relaxing slightly. “If that’s what you wanted to know. It wasn’t anything you said or did.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “We thought you were wonderful,” she continued. “The jury … we thought what you said about a lack of common sense not excusing a lack of common decency, well, we thought that was wonderful.