The interesting thing about Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mysteries, to me, is that everyone has so many secrets.

Don’t get me wrong, all mysteries rely on secrets: what people know but are not saying. In Christie’s Crooked House, almost everyone in the family seems to know or suspect who the murderer is: they want it to be someone else, they don’t want it to be who it is, and so they say nothing. But they know.

But secrets creep through Rinehart’s mysteries like the murderers themselves, touching every house, getting in through locked doors and barred windows, darting from shadow to shadow. Her pivotal scenes often take place in the dark, the main character playing cat and mouse with the bad guy through shadowy corridors and on unlit lanes. Secrets proliferate in the dark and are revealed to the hero in the daylight. The main character is often left in the dark, or is charged with protecting someone else’s secrets – or what she or he believes to be someone else’s secrets – until the murderer is finally revealed. And then the main character realizes that their participation in secret-keeping only prolonged the mystery.

The Album takes place in a very small gated community – just five or six grand houses – that once lay, surrounded by countryside and woods, an exclusive distance outside of town. Now the suburbs have grown up around it and this one street is all that remains of wealth in this neighborhood. The houses are palatial Victorians and Queen Anne’s kept spotless by squadrons of servants, the yards wide and kept to a manicured finish. The homes were built by the families who live in them, perhaps by their parents now long gone. The families themselves move in three circles: the elderly, the middle-aged, and the young.

Three of the houses are dominated by the elderly: a woman obsessed with keeping every door within her house locked and her dependent sister-in-law; a man and his wife who took to her bed decades ago to be cared for; and the main character’s mother, also a widow. This generation keeps one set of secrets, often speaking cryptically of events that happened 20-30-40 years ago, reminding each other with a glance or a firm prim of the lips, holding the secrets tight to their chests, hording them in the attics, refusing to share with the other generations.

The middle-aged generation is represented at the younger end by the two daughters of the bedridden woman, who serve as her caregivers and dream of a life where they do not; and, at the older, by a married couple who refuse to speak to each other and have, it seems, for years. “Will you tell my wife –” the husband requests a neighbor at a gathering. And “Will you tell my husband -” she replies, as if he is not there to hear. Why are they so mad at each other – still – that they will not speak? What do the sisters know? Are the rumors of the older sister’s lost love true? Where does the younger sister go, on her rare afternoons off?

The youngest generation is represented by the main character, Louisa, who has no secrets of her own beyond a longing to live somewhere outside the circle; Jim, with whom she had once had a brief, chaste, affair which her mother put a stop to; Jim’s wife, a flapper, who says of Jim that she loves him but he’s the kind of guy who forgets to order the booze until the bootleggers have all put their tuxedos on and gone to the opera; and the son of the woman with all the keys.

When someone commits a Lizzie Borden on the bedridden woman, suspicions fly: Did one of the daughters do it, for love or for escape? Did Jim, who has been acting as a pair of hands for the old lady, withdrawing her substantial savings from the bank in bags of gold which she hordes in a locked chest under her bed? Or did someone else find out about the gold? Someone who is able to find their way into every house locked tight against them, and commit mayhem?

Rinehart’s books are creepy. Not with the macabre like Carr/Dickson – the main character is certain the murderer is human, not supernatural – but there is a tinge of uncertainty. How is this person able to penetrate their defenses? And it always turns out to be someone within the charmed circle, someone that the main character never suspected, although if they had been able to reveal one of the secrets just a little earlier…

We all keep secrets, often things that don’t square up with how we want to present ourselves to the world. At work, to my family, I am the one who clears up chaos, making it possible to get things done. I take complex things and make them simple. But I secretly struggle with personal tasks that feel like they should be simpler: completing a health insurance form, for example. And that leaves me feeling stupid.* So I don’t tell people when I need help. That’s my secret because it doesn’t reflect my role as fixer, as the woman who arranges things. So I keep it firmly in that hidden quadrant of my Johari window.

This window, as you may know, consists of four panes:

Open That which you and others both see.	Blind That which others see but you don’t.
Facade That which you know but others don’t.	The Unknown: that neither you nor others recognize.

We are, of course, most comfortable with what we know. Growth, they say, comes from accessing The Unknown. But how do you access The Unknown? By seeking to learn what others see that you don’t. And by seeking to reveal what you know that others don’t. And by trying new things, so you can discover the unknown.

The latest crop of “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up” books insists that trying new things is the way that you find your path. Not by having a 5-year plan, or navel-gazing until your purpose reveals itself, or by setting arbitrary goals. But by doing little experiments: trying things on through volunteering and talking to people who are already doing them, by taking classes, and dabbling and doing a little gig work.

By fumbling around in the dark until the secrets reveal themselves.

And the mystery is solved.

---

^{*And wondering if my current insurance company does this on purpose so they don’t have to pay out claims. United Healthcare – for all it’s other problems right now – did not do this when they were my insurer. It was easy for me to submit an out-of-network claim. But my current insurance company makes it impossible.}