Carol was fond of keeping secrets. But the day she decided to keep her daughter's father a secret from the world, -was the beginning of her undoing.
For five long years she managed to evade questions about who Suzi's father was. But finally when she discovered that her mother was going to die shortly, she thought she might as well tell her to clear the air between them.
The day she told her mother that Dave was Suzi's father, her mother begged her to give him the news. They argued as Carol disagreed with her and told her that she did not want Dave to have anything to do with the child.
Later, although her mother could barely manage to get out of bed, let alone walk into the hallway where there was a telephone, she painfully made her way there and tried to call Dave. She called twice but only got through to the answering machine. Then after thinking the matter through she made a third phone call. This time she left a detailed message for Dave, giving him all the details she knew about Suzie and also about what Carol had told her.
Unfortunately, an electrician that also happened to be a ventriloquist, was working at Dave's house at the time. This meant that he heard the message. So as he was a dishonest man that preyed on other people's vulnerabilities, especially any secrets he discovered about them, he removed the tape from the machine and replaced it with a spare one. This meant that Dave never got to hear the message.
Two year passed before the ventriloquist thought he recognized Carol in the library one day. He had been busy running scams on other people in the meanwhile, but now as he was a little low on cash, he decided to act on the information he knew about Carol and her secret love child..
As a ventriloquist he enjoyed using animals in his scams to scare people into paying him money to keep their secrets intact.. So as he was presently looking after his mother's cat and he had discovered that Carol lived nearby, he decided to use the cat to scare her. He watched from over the wall to see if Carol was in the garden and when he spotted her sitting reading a book, he quickly fetched the cat. The cat, of course, was not terribly co-operative to begin with, but later he sat on the wall quite close to where Carol was sitting.
This was the opportunity that Joe Smyth had been waiting for. So standing on tiptoe he looked over the wall again, and then he threw his voice from the cat towards Carol and said, -"I now your secret Carol."
What follows from here onwards are some further revelations he tells Carol about through the cat. Information that almost causes poor Carol to lose her mind...
.
