Was the ghost of a dead girl seeking revenge?
Teen romances with a photo cover were a staple throughout the 1980s: we have variously looked at Wildfire, Sweet Dreams, First Love and Caprice’s versions of this YA staple on a regular basis. Occasionally publishers would get creative, and try out a new format, like the he said/she said Two By Two series, or the Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired Follow Your Heart books.
At some point a reader recommended Scholastic’s Windswept imprint, which billed itself as “A Mystery Romance”…
…But first things first, what do you think? Is that a young Meg Ryan on the cover? At this point in her career, she was appearing on the daytime soap As The World Turns, so it doesn’t seem out of the question that she would be taking some book modeling or stock photography gigs. YA covers are how Courtney Cox and Amanda Seyfried got their starts!
Windswept books featured a number of Scholastic house writers; York was last featured here with the forgettable Nothing Ever Happens Here, a teen-girl coming-of-age story that abruptly throws in a contract killing in the last few pages. I was not expecting much from this one.
The Plot: So, I was surprised and delighted to find The Secret was a spooky gothic mystery that downplays the romance aspect and instead maintains the chilly mood as it slowly reveals the source of cousins Elizabeth and Carrie’s guilt over an incident that transpired the previous Christmas.
16-year-old Elizabeth has mixed feelings about going to visit her Aunt Lorna and cousin Carrie in the quaint town of Rowenville for the summer. Recently widowed, Lorna and Carrie had left New York City the previous fall and moved into the large farmhouse on the outskirts of town, where they live alone with only an elderly handyman to take care of the property and a maid who comes once a week. Carrie had been excited to have her cousin come visit at Christmas, especially since she had finally outgrown her awkward phase and recently started dating the handsome senior Tom Abbott. But something had gone wrong over the course of Elizabeth’s first visit, as she now recalls:
“We’ll never tell anyone,” my cousin Carrie said, as we stood by the car that cold December day and watched Bonnie Vayle go into the local coffee shop called the Minuette.
“Our secret,” I agreed.
I didn’t want to visit Aunt Lorna. I never wanted to go to that house or town again.
Leading up to Elizabeth and her mother leaving for Rowenville, she hints that something terrible had happened the previous winter, eventually revealing:
Bonnie Vayle wasn’t ever going to flirt with Tom Abbott again. Or with any boy.
Bonnie Vayle was dead.
When Elizabeth arrives at her cousin’s house, Carrie confides in her that there have been strange and tragic things afoot since her last visit: Joseph, the gardener-handyman has died after falling into a ravine in a remote part of the property, and since then, Carrie has had some spooky encounters in the house, including an incident in which a chair flew through the air at her. Are they being haunted? By Joseph? By Bonnie Vayle? (who is always referred to by both her names).
Carrie is still dating Tom Abbott, who is now off at college. Aunt Lorna has hired a new gardener-handyman, a younger local man named Max. He gives the girls the creeps.
And Elizabeth starts experiencing the same kind of ghostly happenings as Carrie has: a doll appears in Elizabeth’s room, along with a torn photo of the two girls; Elizabeth is pushed down the stairs by unseen forces, and sees the same chair mysteriously thrown (not fallen) down the stairs.
Moping around town, feeling guilty for their as-yet unexplained part in Bonnie Vayle’s death and troubled by the “haunting” that they can’t get any adults to believe is actually happening, Elizabeth and Carrie feel like everyone is behaving strangely: Max (obvs); Tom; Greg, the handsome college student who works at the hardware store and takes an interest in Elizabeth, claiming to remember her from last winter; and Janette, the waitress at the local coffee shop who Elizabeth and Carrie learn was Bonnie Vayle’s best friend.
The events of the previous winter are slowly teased, as Elizabeth recalls Aunt Lorna showing them around town, including taking them to local skating pond, abandoned since the town put in a municipal rink; and Elizabeth and Carrie’s Christmas shopping expedition to find the perfect gift for Tom.
Elizabeth finally reveals the source of their guilty consciences, remembering the post-Christmas shopping trip they made into town while the adults went on a day trip, with plans to meet up with Tom at the coffee shop for a late lunch and ride home.
However, the popular and flirtatious Bonnie Vayle shows up, makes implications about Carrie’s weight (“What is it going to be, the dessert or the diet?”) and somehow weasels a ride home from “Tommy”. Desperate to save face, Elizabeth and Carrie lie and say they can get a ride from their parents and stubbornly walk home the two miles in the freezing snow.
Elizabeth puts together that both Greg and Janette were in the coffee shop and witnessed the events of the following day, when Carrie discovered that after all that she had also accidentally left one of her shopping bags behind. Arriving at a slow time to retrieve it, the cousins have an idea to get back at Bonnie Vayle for flirting with Tom: they write a note from a “secret admirer”, asking her to meet him at the abandoned skating pond, and leave it at the counter where Janette will be sure to find it and pass it on to her.
Coming out of the grocery store later that afternoon, the girls see Bonnie Vayle rushing out of the coffee shop and jumping into her car, seeming excited to get somewhere. Their plan, to send Bonnie on a wild goose chase, causing her nothing but cold and embarrassment, backfires spectacularly when they learn the next morning that she has died in a car crash.
The adults in town suspected nothing, clucking that she had a reputation as a reckless driver, and it wasn’t the first car that she had wrecked. But Carrie and Elizabeth spend the next six months haunted by guilt, vowing to never let anyone know their part in Bonnie’s death.
But it becomes increasingly clear that someone does know. Greg? Janette? Max? The girls desperately try to remember who might have witnessed them leaving the note for Bonnie.
Elizabeth starts piecing together that mysterious things hadn’t started happening until after Joseph died and Max started working for Aunt Lorna, and begins asking around about his connections to Bonnie.
Elizabeth oversleeps one morning and awakens to find Carrie has gone into town without her. She takes the opportunity to go to the coffee shop and ask Janette about Bonnie and Max- and Janette spills that Bonnie had no interest in Max, who was obsessed with her. In fact, Bonnie didn’t have any real interest in Tom or Greg or any of the other boys in school, she was seriously dating the older manager at the Blue Moon Inn. In fact, that is where she was headed the day she crashed her car and died- after ripping up a note that she assumed was from that pesty Max.
Overwhelmed by these revelations, Elizabeth rushes out of the coffee shop to look for Carrie- and immediately finds her, as Max pulls up with her in his car, holding a gun on her, and ordering Elizabeth into the back seat.
The conclusion doesn’t quite sustain the drama of the rest of the book, and we get a more conventional ending, as Max drives Elizabeth and Carrie out to the skating pond, reveals all (he was also in the coffee shop last winter when they left the fake secret admirer note for Bonnie Vayle, and blames them for her death; he also murdered Joseph so he could get the job with Aunt Lorna and enact revenge). He announces that he is going to kill Elizabeth and Carrie, when Greg, alerted by Janette, heroically shows up, pretends his gas mileage log is Bonnie’s diary, psyches him out and gets him to flee in a panic and rescues Elizabeth and Carrie, who later learn that he was picked up 80 miles away by the police and is going to be sent to a hospital for the criminally insane.
Somebody remembered that this was supposed to be a romance, so we end with Elizabeth and Greg holding hands and Elizabeth looking forward to the remaining weeks of her visit to Rowenville:
…Greg’s hand holding mine was the beginning of new and happier times. I was glad to be there, again.
I am definitely going to keep my eye out for more Windswept titles and will happily give York another chance: this was a genuinely atmospheric mystery in which romance definitely plays second fiddle.
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: 1939-1989 