“Max.”
“It seems we’re finally going to get a chance to spend some time together after all, Maddie.”
NICK was beyond frustrated. He’d found the passageway on the second floor without incident, but once inside he couldn’t find a way to go anywhere else but the area he’d already explored. It was like the passageway existed in a world all its own.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that Maddie was in trouble. Now that he’d landed on Max as a suspect, he knew he was on the right track. He still didn’t know why Max would take Cassidy, though. He didn’t even know if Cassidy was still alive. All he knew was that he had to find Maddie, and he had no idea where to look.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Olivia, but you have to help me,” Nick said, hanging his head. “My Maddie needs me. I shouldn’t have left her downstairs. I should have piled her in my truck this morning and taken her home. No, I should’ve never brought her here in the first place. I know this is all on me. I need you, though.”
He waited for her to respond, but there was no answering whisper at the corners of his mind.
“She’s in trouble, Olivia. I know it. She’s in this house somewhere. You have to help me find her.”
Nick was just about to give up when he … felt … something.
“This way,” Olivia whispered.
“Where?” Nick asked. He couldn’t see her, but her voice was strong and clear.
“Over here,” Olivia said, her voice a little farther away.
Nick followed, confused, until he was in front of an old wardrobe. “Here?”
“Open it.”
Nick did as instructed, and when he peered inside he almost wept with relief. Instead of old clothes, or even an empty box, he found a set of spiral stairs leading down into the guts of the house.
“Thank you,” Nick said. “I promise I’ll find her.”
“Hurry,” Olivia said. “She’s not alone.”
Nick didn’t need to be told twice.
“WHAT’S going on?” Maddie asked, leaving Cassidy on the floor and getting to her feet. She positioned herself between the vulnerable woman and Max as she considered what to do.
“Oh, don’t do that, Maddie,” Max said, his voice positively giddy. “You know very well what’s going on here.”
“No, I don’t,” Maddie said. “I just know I found Cassidy tied up in here. Did you do that?”
“Of course I did,” Max said. “How else would I know where to look if I wasn’t the one to bring her here?”
“I have no idea,” Maddie said. “I do know that you probably could’ve gotten away with it if you didn’t come down here now, though. Did you follow me?”
“I saw you leave the dining room,” Max said. “I just had to know where you were going. I mean, you promised Nick you would stay in the dining room and then you immediately turned around and snuck out. What’s that about?”
“I … I had to go to the bathroom.”
“In a secret passageway in the servants’ quarters? That’s an interesting lie.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?” Maddie asked, shuffling back and forth. Max looked relatively normal, and yet there was something deranged about the way he was carrying himself. She had no way of knowing what was going on, and yet something told her she was about to solve more than one mystery.
“I heard you, Maddie,” Max said, wagging his finger as if she was a naughty schoolgirl. “I was out in the hallway for quite some time before I came in. I heard you talking … and it wasn’t always to Cassidy. I’m dying to know who you were talking to.”
“I was talking to myself.”
“That’s a lie,” Max said. “Don’t do that. I don’t like it when people lie to me. I’ve had to live with it my whole life. I’m not going to put up with it now … not when we’re finally getting somewhere.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Maddie said, swallowing hard. “I was talking to myself. When I’m nervous, I do that.”
“There have been rumors about you for a long time, Maddie,” Max said, taking a step away from the door. “People say you can talk to ghosts. They say your mother could, too. Is that true?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I think you’re just covering,” Max said. “I’m not an idiot. You saw something in the mausoleum yesterday, didn’t you? That’s why Nick was so worked up. That’s why you passed out. That’s why you went back down there today.”
“We were searching for Cassidy,” Maddie said. “We were worried she locked herself in like I did.”
“You’re such a bad liar,” Max said. “I don’t understand why you’re treating me like an idiot. I’m not one of those mindless morons downstairs. They might believe your falsehoods, but I don’t. I know that you were talking to someone inside of the mausoleum. Nick was acting weird, and it was almost as if he was relieved when I finally left.
“I guess that means he knows that you talk to ghosts,” Max mused. “Is that why you left after high school? Were you running away from what you can do? That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maddie said, risking a glance at Cassidy. For her part, the confused woman was still sitting on the floor and taking everything in. “Why did you grab Cassidy?”
“We’re not done talking about you yet,” Max said. “I want you to admit you were talking to a ghost at the mausoleum.”
Maddie was caught. Max wasn’t going to let it go. She didn’t see where she had a lot of options. “Fine. I was talking to a ghost. Are you happy?”
“Who was it?”
“Rose Denton.”
Max stilled, surprised. “Is that why you were asking so many questions about Big Jim down at dinner?”
“Yes. Rose was murdered. She was smothered in her bed. I was trying to figure out who did it.”
“Isn’t the obvious answer that it was Big Jim?”
“Except it was a woman who killed her,” Maddie said, seeing no reason to lie. “Rose could smell her perfume while it was happening.”
“What woman?” Max asked, intrigued.
“It was a former maid here,” Maddie said. “Her name was Rosario Torres.”
While his face was relaxed before, almost as if he was toying with her, Max’s features took on an ugly quality after Maddie’s admission. “That’s a lie.”
Maddie had no idea why he was so upset. “No, it’s not,” Maddie said. “Rosario Torres seduced Jim Denton because she wanted to be the lady of the house. When Rose refused to divorce him without a payout, Jim decided he wasn’t going to divorce her. Rosario had no choice but to kill Rose.”
“Stop saying that!”
“Why? It’s the truth. It’s not like it affects you.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Max said. “It affects me very much. You see, I’m not just Aaron Denton’s best friend. I’m his cousin. You’re not maligning some random maid. You’re making up stories about my grandmother. I’m not going to stand for that.”
Maddie shifted her eyes to Rose, things finally slipping into place.
“He has her eyes,” Rose said. “I should’ve seen it a long time ago.”
Maddie knew she was in serious trouble now, and she had no idea how to get out of it.
Twenty-Five
“Rosario Torres is your grandmother?”
“She was,” Max said. “She died when I was six.”
Maddie rolled the idea through her mind, finally deciding that it actually made sense. Well, it would, as soon as she clarified a few details. “That means your mother was Big Jim’s daughter, doesn’t it?”
“Very good,” Max said, taking another step into the room and closing the distance between them. “How much of this have you figured out?”
“I know that Rosario came to this house with the express intention to seduce Big Jim,” Maddie said. “She wanted to get pregnant. She thought if she could make sure he was infatuated with her that she would be able to control
him.”
“Big Jim seduced my grandmother,” Max countered. “She was innocent until he put his filthy hands on her.”
“That’s a lie,” Rose said. “Rosario was never innocent.”
Maddie ignored her. “When your grandmother found out she was pregnant, she pressured Big Jim about marrying her. He wouldn’t divorce Rose, though. She wanted money to leave and he didn’t want to give her any.”
“My grandmother always said that woman was a bitter shrew,” Max said. “She just didn’t want Big Jim and my grandmother to be happy. That was her way of punishing them.”
“I don’t understand why Big Jim and your grandmother didn’t get married after Rose died,” Maddie said. “Granny told me that everyone in town expected Jim to put on a big show and mourn Rose for a few months before marrying Rosario.”
“That was the plan,” Max said. “Big Jim promised my grandmother the world. He told her she wouldn’t have to wait forever. It was just supposed to be a few months. She was going to get everything she ever wanted.”
“What happened?”
“Because of her fragile condition, my grandmother wasn’t capable of keeping a house this size up,” Max said. “She was put on bed rest in her sixth month. Big Jim hired a new maid to take over her duties.”
“I’m guessing those duties were the same ones your grandmother had been performing for him,” Maddie said. “He cheated on her, didn’t he?”
“He wasn’t even sorry he did it,” Max said, his face twisting. “He told my grandmother that he was going to give her the world and then he yanked the rug right out from under her. She confronted him about all of it. She told him that cheating wasn’t going to be allowed when they got married. Do you know what he told her?”
Maddie had a feeling she did. “He told her he had no intention of marrying her,” Maddie said, glancing at Rose for support. The ghost merely nodded, encouraging her to continue. “I think Big Jim realized that he was finally free of his wife, and despite how attracted he was to your grandmother, he decided he wanted to plow a few other fields instead of settling down.”
“That’s a pretty good guess,” Max said. “Can you believe he did that? He just threw my grandmother away like she was garbage. He even told her she couldn’t have her job back after she gave birth to the baby.”
“Did he ever pay child support?”
“Of course not,” Max said. “You have to remember, this was the 1960s. It wasn’t so easy to demand a paternity test. They existed back then, but they were very costly. Big Jim essentially tossed my grandmother out of this house and never looked back. He didn’t even care about the baby. That was his daughter, and he didn’t care.”
“What happened to your grandmother?”
“She moved to Traverse City and found a job as a secretary after she gave birth,” Max said. “She raised my mother all on her own, and eventually she got married and had another child. She never got over what Big Jim did to her, though. It marked her.”
“Did your mother know who her father was?”
“She found some paperwork in my grandmother’s things when she was cleaning one day,” Max said. “She couldn’t believe what she found. I was only three at the time, and she didn’t tell me any of it until I was much older.”
“She knew who Big Jim was when she took the job as a maid, though, didn’t she?”
“Of course she did,” Max said. “She went to college to be a paralegal, and yet she ended up working as a maid. Do you know why that is?”
“She wanted to get to know her father,” Maddie supplied. “She thought that was the best way.”
“You’re a smart little cookie,” Max said, winking. “It’s the rare woman who has beauty and brains. I’m looking forward to exploring your beauty when we’re done here.”
He was going to be waiting a long time for that. Maddie was just stalling now. She knew Nick would be looking for her. She had faith he would find her. Just like in the mausoleum, Nick would find a way to get to her – even if he had to rely on a little help from a ghostly friend.
“Did your mother tell Big Jim who she was?” Maddie asked.
“She was going to,” Max said. “Then he tried to grope her in the hallway one day. She was … disgusted. Her own father was trying to touch her.”
“I don’t want to make excuses for Big Jim, but there was no way he could know who your mother was if she didn’t tell him,” Maddie said.
“He should’ve known the second he saw her,” Max seethed. “She was his blood. You’re supposed to recognize your blood.”
“You lived in this house for years,” Maddie said, her mind turning as she tried to put the final pieces of the puzzle together. “Your mother made a decision to keep her secret at some point. She decided to stay the course. When did you find out the truth?”
“I stumbled across it by accident really,” Max said. “I was fifteen years old. I found these photos.” He gestured toward the box in the corner. “It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but when I confronted my mother, she admitted the truth.
“Do you have any idea what that was like? I lived like a second-class citizen in this house for years,” he said. “I was nothing more than the maid’s son. Aaron tried to be nice to me, but I could always see that he was looking down on me. There was no one else for him to play with, so he decided I could be his pity friend.”
“Aaron loves you,” Maddie said. “He doesn’t look down on you. You may have convinced yourself of that, but it’s not true. That’s not who Aaron is.”
“You don’t even know him,” Max said. “He puts on a show for people … just like his mother. He’s a snob.”
“What did you do when you found out the truth?” Maddie asked. She already knew the answer. She’d finally figured it all out. She needed Max to confirm it.
“What do you think I did? I confronted Big Jim.”
“What did he do?”
“He laughed at me,” Max said. “There I was, a fifteen-year-old kid who thought he was about to be embraced by his grandfather, and he laughed at me. He told me my grandmother was a whore and there was no way I was ever going to see a dime from him because he didn’t believe I was his grandson.
“He told me that he didn’t care about my mother, and if he had the chance he would still have sex with her,” he continued, raw emotion pouring out of him now. “He called her filthy names, and he commented on her body. It was disgusting. He knew what he was doing. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.”
“He was an awful man,” Rose said. “Oh, he was so much worse than I realized.”
“You killed him, didn’t you?” Maddie asked, gazing at Max expectantly.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because only someone killed in a fit of rage could carry that much rage over to the other side,” Maddie said, realizing why Big Jim turned into a poltergeist rather than moving on. “Aaron said his grandfather died when he was fifteen. He didn’t say how he died. How did you get away with killing him?”
“He was walking away from me,” Max said. “His back was to me. I was blind with anger. I couldn’t help myself. He was halfway up the stairs when I caught up with him. I grabbed his shoulder. I wanted him to take it all back. He wouldn’t, though, so I just … threw him down the stairs.
“He kind of bounced his way down,” Max said. “I could tell his neck was broken by the way he landed. I was going to run down to him. I was going to try and help him, I swear I was, but then I heard someone coming from the main hallway and I did the only thing I could do.”
“You ran and never said a thing about it,” Maddie said.
“I made a choice that day,” Max said. “Jim Denton refused to acknowledge me, so I refused to acknowledge what I did.”
“Your mother quit her job not long after the death, didn’t she? I seem to remember you moving to town when you were about that age. Did you tell her what you did?”
“No,” Max said
. “I never told anyone … until now. She had her suspicions, though. That’s why she insisted on getting me out of this house. She never understood, though. This house should’ve been mine. I should’ve grown up here. I should’ve had my own room on the second floor. I shouldn’t have been hidden in the basement like some dirty little secret.”
“What happened to your family wasn’t right,” Maddie said. “Jim Denton was a particular kind of animal. That doesn’t mean what you’ve done is okay. You killed him. You kidnapped Cassidy. Why did you do that, by the way?”
“I couldn’t have her telling Nick that I was watching the two of you,” Max said. “You see, the thing is, I didn’t just come back to this house to see Aaron. I didn’t come back because of the memories. I came back because of you, too.”
Maddie’s heart lodged in her throat. “What do you mean?”
“When Aaron told me you were back in town I realized I had a shot at claiming more than my birthright,” Max said. “I knew I had a shot at making you mine, too. I always wanted you. I always knew we were supposed to be together. Nick was the one standing in our way. He ruined our chance back then, but he’s not going to ruin it now. We’re going to have a good life together, Maddie. We’re going to make this house our own.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Maddie said. “If you think for a second that I would ever touch you, you’re crazy.”
“I just told you that I’m entitled to half of this fortune,” Max snapped. “I’m going to be a rich man. Don’t you want to live this life with me?”
“I already have a life,” Maddie said. “It’s with Nick. It’s never going to be with you.”
“You say that now,” Max said. “Once I take care of the Nick problem, though, you’re going to change your mind. I can guarantee it.”
“How are you going to take care of Nick?”
“It’s easy,” Max said. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill Cassidy, too. Once they both disappear, people will think they took off together. It’s perfect. You’ll be left behind, and you’ll have to pretend you’re broken-hearted for a few weeks, but after that people will be thrilled that we found each other.”
Grave Misgivings Page 19
