Column Teen Horror Time Machine The Gift That Keeps on Taking: Fatal Secrets  Stop giving the traumatized girl late night shifts at the haunted toy shop! By Alissa Burger | Published on December 4, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Holidays are stressful: family drama, trying to find just the right gift for that special someone, a jam-packed social calendar. But in Richie Tankersley Cusick’s Fatal Secrets (1992), Ryan McCauley’s holiday season is next-level terrible. Ryan’s sister Marissa came home from college to spend Thanksgiving with her family and while the sisters were walking together in the woods and gathering pinecones for a garland, Marissa told Ryan that she was afraid she might be in some trouble: she stumbled upon someone’s dark secret, and while she has to get a roll of film developed to know for sure, she thinks she has incriminating evidence. Marissa didn’t want to say more, not until she could be sure, but she never got the chance to find out. When the girls argued and set out in different directions, Marissa fell through the ice on a river and though Ryan did all she could to save her, Marissa drowned and her body was never recovered. Now Christmas is just around the corner–but between Ryan’s guilt and her mother’s grief, no one in the McCauley house is feeling very jolly.  Ryan blames herself for Marissa’s death, telling her best friend Phoebe “If only we hadn’t gone up there … if only she hadn’t gone with me” (11). She projects this self-abasement onto her mother as well, convinced that “when Mom looks at me, she’s seeing Marissa and wishing things were all switched around” (11). Ryan’s mother is incapacitated by her own grief, spending hours sitting in Marissa’s room, barely hearing a word Ryan says to her. Ryan and her mom love one another, but right now, Marissa’s absence is all either of them can see or feel.  Though her mother is incapable of offering comfort, Ryan has a pretty good larger support system: her mom’s boyfriend Steve is understanding and does what he can to comfort both Ryan and her mother, even acting as an intermediary between them when needed. Her best friend Phoebe works to cajole Ryan out of her depression, trying to distract her with caroling and thoughts about who Ryan should invite to the New Year’s dance (though Phoebe is prone to flights of boy-crazy distraction that occasionally keep her from seeing when Ryan is really struggling). Phoebe’s little brother Jinx can be pretty annoying, but is always there for Ryan when she needs him, whether it’s to give her a ride home or chase down a would-be intruder he spotted near the kitchen door. A mysterious and handsome boy named Winchester seems to finally be taking an interest in Ryan, and her boss at the toy shop where she works, a little old man named Mr. Partini, looks out for her and dotes on her.  The McCauleys are struggling heading into the Christmas season and things get even more complicated when a young man named Charles Eastman shows up on their doorstep with a pile of Christmas gifts. He tells Ryan and her mother that he knew Marissa: they had a few classes together, were good friends, and had been dating for awhile. They’d done some Christmas shopping together before Thanksgiving break, and when he found some of the gifts Marissa had bought for her family at his place, he decided to bring them by. Ryan’s mom welcomes Charles warmly into their home, desperate for anyone who can get her a bit closer to her daughter’s final days and offer insight to the life she was living on campus, but Ryan is a bit more uncertain, convinced that when she introduced herself to Charles at the door, he said “You’re the one who let her drown” (38), though this could just be a projection of the guilt she feels. When it turns out that Charles has no family and will be spending the holidays alone, Ryan’s mom invites him to stay with them, giving Charles Ryan’s bedroom and decamping Ryan to stay in Marissa’s room. This feels like a callous and insensitive thing to do, but if he’s staying for a while, he can’t very well sleep on the couch and when Ryan suggests that Charles stay in Marissa’s room, her mother becomes nearly hysterical, telling Ryan “I don’t want some stranger sleeping in there, do you hear me?” (59). Between her all-consuming grief and her desperation to hold onto this small connection with Marissa’s life, it doesn’t seem to occur to Ryan’s mom that it might be traumatic for her living daughter to move into the bedroom of her dead one (however temporarily).  Ryan struggles with whether or not she can trust Charles and what his ulterior motives might be and in the meantime, she encounters increasing horrors. One night when she’s home alone, she hears a car horn from the garage where Marissa’s car is parked and when she goes to investigate, she sees her sister’s corpse behind the wheel: “the human figure slumped forward … the head propped on the steering wheel, its face hidden … The long blond hair streaming over its back” (73). This is terrifying enough, but then the corpse begins to move, the lights in the garage go out, and the door jams, leaving Ryan trapped and pursued by the corpse of her dead sister as Ryan “put her hand out and felt heavy, wet fabric … damp human skin … icy cold …” (75). Ryan passes out from fear and when she comes to, Charles has her pulled outside the garage and is asking her what happened. Later, Ryan and Charles go caroling and to a Christmas party with some of Ryan’s friends. When Ryan gets separated from Charles on the way home, stranded in the snowy wilderness, she sees her sister again, this time as a shadowy shape nearly lost in the snow as Marissa calls out to Ryan, asking “why did you let me drown?” and telling her “I can’t come home for Christmas, Ryan … I’m dead” (98). Ryan almost dies again, passing out in the snow in the middle of nowhere, but Winchester comes to her rescue, finding her and taking her to his family’s cabin, getting her warm and fed, and ferrying her home when the storm is over. When she tells people what she has seen, they refuse to believe her, explaining these potentially supernatural horrors away as Ryan’s grief-stricken and overactive imagination, which is once again underscored with Ryan’s overwhelming feeling of guilt and responsibility.  As if being haunted by her dead sister weren’t terrifying enough, Ryan also sees a guy in a ski mask staring in the window of the toy store at her and late one night when Ryan and Phoebe are stranded downtown after someone has slashed the tires on Jinx’s car (which Phoebe borrowed without asking), a nefarious Santa Claus chases Ryan down the street. Someone tries to break into her house when Ryan is home alone and she finds a box in Marissa’s bedroom, a gift addressed to her, which she opens to discover the necklace that Marissa was wearing when she died. One night, when Ryan is at the toy shop late and alone, waiting for a ride home, the man in the ski mask enters the store and when Ryan tries to get away, the toys seem to come to life around her: “the trains started up … slowly at first … then faster … faster … little engines chugging … tiny whistles blowing … around and around … From some forgotten corner a baby doll cried in a tinny, mournful wail—‘Ma … ma … ma … ma …’ … The mechanical Santa Claus burst into insane laughter” (166). Ryan can’t get the door open and in her panic and desperation, shoves her arms through the plate glass. Ryan is traumatized, badly injured, and now, has to deal with everyone—including her mom—believing she tried to take her own life. When the truth of Marissa’s secret finally comes out, Ryan’s entire worldview and the web of relationships that have supported and sustained her are shattered. The film that Marissa had meant to get developed on that fateful afternoon contains evidence of a drug ring, though no one ever sees the pictures. Ryan gets a mysterious call while she’s home alone, from a man telling her that the police think they have found Marissa’s body near an old barn nearby but need someone to come identify her. Instead of calling her mom or asking why they want her to come to a barn instead of the morgue, Ryan goes running pell mell out into the snowy middle of nowhere. It is (of course) a trap and the people behind the drug ring plan to kill Ryan to keep her quiet (despite the fact that she doesn’t actually know what’s going on), orchestrating the murder so that Ryan’s death will look like suicide.  In the dark shadows of the barn, Ryan finally comes face to face with the secret Marissa was keeping—and there are a LOT of faces to face. First, there’s Charles, who taunts Ryan, telling her that she and Marissa will soon “be together again …” (196). But Charles wasn’t acting alone and he didn’t actually kill Marissa, saying “I have more class than to dirty my hands with something so unpleasant—especially when there are other people around who are so good at it!” (197). Those “other people,” it turns out, include Steve, Ryan’s mom’s boyfriend, who is the one who actually attacked Marissa. While Steve has played the part of a loving and supportive boyfriend and potential stepfather, this has all been a ruse, and he cruelly berates Ryan as well, telling her “you were so easy to scare … It takes time to drive someone right out of her mind … to make it believable. You felt so guilty about Marissa, it was almost too easy … The game’s not nearly as much fun when there’s no challenge” (199). While Charles seems to be the brains of the operation and Steve does the dirty work, there’s still the problem of how to transport the drugs without detection and it turns out their ingenious strategy has been to conceal them within Mr. Partini’s old-fashioned toys, which he then delivered to his customers. Of the three of them, Mr. Partini is the only one who seems to feel at all bad about what they have done to Ryan and about her impending murder, lamenting in his stilted English that “I never want to hurt you … I try to keep you out of it” (201), though that doesn’t stop him from seeing Ryan’s death as sad but unavoidable collateral damage. Last but not least, it is Ryan’s potential love interest and occasional rescuer Winchester who handles the local operations of the drug ring, though he does so under duress, with the others threatening to kill his younger siblings and burn down his dad’s service station if he doesn’t do what they tell him. Almost EVERYONE Ryan has turned to for love and support has been in on it all along.  Jinx shows up as Ryan’s would-be rescuer and the barn is getting pretty darn crowded, but while the others are distracted, Winchester helps Ryan and Jinx make their escape. The pursuit is intense and there’s a lot of gunfire. Winchester shoots Charles to save Ryan and Jinx, Jinx is grazed by a bullet, and Ryan is the victim of more flying glass, but they escape, the culprits are arrested, and Winchester agrees to testify against the others, with the truth revealed and the nightmare finally brought to a close.  Cusick keeps readers guessing about what might actually be happening in Fatal Secrets: are the terrifying things happening to Ryan somehow related to the secret Marissa never actually told her? Is this a ghost story, with Marissa exerting a supernatural influence from beyond the grave? Is Ryan a supremely unreliable narrator, with her guilt and post-traumatic stress manifesting in horrifying hallucinations, and if that is the case, can we trust any of her perceptions, including her assertion that she never meant to harm herself? Cusick offers readers a range of interpretations and even once the dark secret is revealed, definitive answers are few and far between. The stalker in the ski mask and Jinx’s slashed tires are pretty straightforward, part of the machinations designed to frighten Ryan into revealing what she knows. Steve gloats about how he and the others manipulated Ryan, telling her how they orchestrated “A few unfortunate accidents … a tape from Marissa’s answering machine at school … some great disguises” (199), though it’s hard to imagine any of these men believably disguising themselves as the corpse of a teenage girl or that Marissa’s answering machine would include anything like the mournful accusations Ryan hears on the snowy night when she gets stranded. It’s possible that Charles, Steve, and Mr. Partini set up the “hauntings” and the toys gone awry just to terrorize Ryan and drive her to irrational and self-destructive behavior, comfortable in the likelihood that no one would ever believe her. But there’s really no definitive confirmation either way—it seems likely that the truth lies in a combination of Ryan’s nightmares, both real and imagined, a volatile synthesis of external dangers and internal suffering.     In Fatal Secrets, Ryan faces down the ghosts of both past and present, as she works to come to terms with Marissa’s death, her own feelings of misplaced guilt, and the terrifying realization that a lot of the people she thought she could trust and rely on actually want her dead. As for the future, it’s pretty uncertain, in both good and bad ways: Ryan and her mother’s relationship seems to be on the mend, but finding out her boyfriend is a drug dealing murderer who killed one of her daughters and tried to kill the other is definitely going to leave a mark on Ryan’s mom. Phoebe’s friendship has been (and remains) steadfast, which hopefully won’t get complicated when she finds out that Ryan has noticed that annoying kid brother Jinx has turned into a pretty handsome and heroic young man, a guy with whom she wouldn’t mind dancing into the New Year. God bless us, everyone, and here’s hoping Ryan’s New Year is a lot less murder-y.[end-mark] The post The Gift That Keeps on Taking: <em>Fatal Secrets</em>  appeared first on Reactor.