Women’s coat, size 6
Vanity case, assorted makeup
Earring, diamond
Was the earring supposed to be earrings? Or had one fallen off? Martha had a soft spot for jewelry, and not the cheap stuff.
Very little evidence had been logged. Frankly, the car had been practically empty, and the photos confirmed that. Why? She’d bought it in Florida three months before it was abandoned in Virginia. If she’d been living out of it—Max almost laughed out loud. Her mother living out of a car? Never. She’d find someone to manipulate or sleep with to get a roof over her head.
For years, Max had believed that Martha was dead. Now she believed she’d died here, somewhere on this peninsula.
Max had kept journals since she was old enough to write. Her earliest journals were mostly chicken scratch, half of which Max couldn’t decipher, even if she could read the words. By the time she was eight, however, she had kept a regular diary. They were stored at her apartment in New York, but she’d brought two with her—along with every postcard her mother had sent between the time she dumped her at her grandparents’ house until the last, a belated sixteenth birthday card.
She had written in her journal the day her mother first brought Jimmy Truman to their place.
Their place? Hardly. Her mother had rented a condo on the water in Palm Beach. But when her mother settled in a condo or house instead of a hotel, she tended to stay for a month or two, and that made Max happy.
She hated moving.
October 20
Martha and Jimmy went out. I’m here alone, but it’s okay. We’ve been here for two whole weeks and Mom isn’t getting that look that she gets when I know leaving is going to happen any day. It’s hot and sticky but there’s a pool and I love swimming and there’s a view of the ocean and I love watching the ocean and waves and the sand except when it gets stuck in my bathing suit and itches.
Mom brought Jimmy home last night and he slept in her bedroom. They made noise and I think it’s gross, but oh well, Mom said I’ll understand when I grow up. I know what they’re doing and it’s still gross and I don’t like Jimmy. I still miss Perry, though it’s been so long since we’ve seen him. He was my very favorite of all of Martha’s boyfriends. I asked him if he was my dad, but he laughed and thought that was silly. I asked if it was because he was black and mommy was white, and he said no, he doesn’t care about that, but they were just having fun. At least he was nice to me and we played games.
Jimmy is different than Perry. He’s different than a lot of Martha’s people and I don’t think he’s a nice person. He has a nice smile and everyone likes him but I don’t. I don’t know why. Mom says I’m judgmental. I don’t know what that means. She likes Jimmy and that should be good enough for me. How does she know I don’t like him? I didn’t say anything.
She’ll get rid of him like she does with all the others, only it makes me sad because I like this condo and if she gets rid of him we’ll be moving again. I thought maybe this time I could go to school, if we stayed long enough. She thinks I’m stupid for wanting to go to school. She said I should be happy I can live free, unlike her childhood.
November 5
Jimmy is an asshole. I called him an asshole to his face and Martha slapped me and I’m in my room. I hate them.
Max alternately called her mother “Martha” or “Mom.” She didn’t know why, other than she hadn’t really thought of her mother as one and Martha seemed to prefer being called by her name. She didn’t remember what specifically had happened that led to her calling Jimmy an asshole, but she’d certainly done it. Max had always been blunt and honest—sometimes to a fault, her grandmother used to tell her—and she’d always spoken her mind even as a child.
Though, there were times when she had kept her mouth shut around her mother. There had been a fear in the back of her mind when she was little that Martha would leave her in the middle of nowhere and Max wouldn’t know what to do.
In hindsight, Max realized Martha had done her a great favor leaving her in Atherton to be raised by her grandparents. It wasn’t a perfect life—Eleanor was strict, she believed in a firm etiquette and propriety and family above all else, even when the family screwed up. How many times had Eleanor covered for one of her children or grandchildren? For Uncle Archer’s wild grandson? For Uncle Brooks’s infidelity? She detested “dirty laundry” being aired publicly, and worked overtime to ensure that it was sanitized. So when Max announced at the dinner table that Uncle Brooks was cheating on Aunt Joanna, it didn’t go over so well.
Max hated lies, especially from people she was supposed to love and trust.
Yet … Max had an outstanding education. She had loved school. She loved her grandfather more than anyone, and her great-grandmother Genie. Eleanor? Max respected her … most of the time. But when she did things like ensure a killer went to a mental hospital instead of standing trial for murder, Max rebelled. Or when she didn’t stand up for Max when the family ganged up against her and contested Genie’s will, which had given Max her mother’s share of the Sterling estate. It wasn’t the money—it was the principle. And while Eleanor hadn’t argued against her, she hadn’t stood up for her. She wanted the family to settle and come to a compromise without the “spectacle” of a public argument. Max put her foot down—her great-grandmother had left her one-fifth of her estate and everything that went with it and dammit, she wasn’t going to capitulate and give up the seat on the Sterling Foundation board in order to “keep” money that was rightfully hers.
It didn’t matter that she was often the lone dissenting vote on the board, though she had more often than not been Aunt Josie’s proxy and on occasion had swayed Uncle Terry and Uncle Emmet—who almost always voted as a block—against Uncle Brooks. With Terry and Emmet she’d learned that if she made a clear, sound argument backed with financial evidence that the decision would be best for the foundation—and that there would be a positive portrayal in the community—they tended to side with her. They were all about image, so it was up to Max to spin it that way. Unfortunately, she didn’t always have time to come up with a sound argument for why she opposed Uncle Brooks.
Yes, sometimes she voted against him out of spite. She despised him.
The principle was the point, and that Eleanor hadn’t sided with her—clearly, unequivocally—hurt Max more than she’d thought it would.
But Max would rather have been raised by regal Eleanor than her wild, unpredictable mother. In the end, the stability Eleanor provided had given Max something she desperately needed, she just hadn’t known it at the time.
Ironic, Max thought as she closed her old journal, that she lived out of hotels and condos and cottages like this half the year. The life she despised as a child she’d reclaimed as an adult.
The difference, however, was that she had a home base. She’d bought the penthouse in Greenwich Village after she graduated from Columbia. She had a place for her stuff. She had her own bed and clothes and books and a kitchen she’d painstakingly remodeled after she took cooking classes. After every case, she could go home and be home. She didn’t have to live out of a lone backpack. She had a choice.
And that made all the difference.
At eight in the morning, Max called the Norfolk Police Department. “Detective Marcel Lipsky, please.”
* * *
Max drove her rental car across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. She’d never driven the road before, and it was a bit unnerving. The bridge was virtually flush with the ocean, and then dove down to an underwater tunnel. She never considered herself claustrophobic, but she was grateful there was little traffic in the middle of the morning. She didn’t want to be stuck waiting under the ocean.
The department Lipsky worked out of was on East Virginia Beach Boulevard, a large, single story, mostly brick structure. She entered and gave her name to the receptionist, and was pleasantly surprised when an officer escorted her immediately to Lipsky’s cubicle.
“I’m Maxine Revere. Thank you for a
greeing to meet with me,” she said and extended her hand.
Lipsky was in his early fifties with a receding hairline and intense dark eyes.
“Bill Bartlett called yesterday afternoon, said you’d been by to see him and that he’d referred you to me. Bill’s a good guy, though after talking to him I don’t think I’ll be able to help you.” Lipsky motioned to a metal chair next to his desk. “You’re here about the Jane Sterling case?”
“Yes. You investigated the car that was abandoned. The registration indicated D. Jane Sterling.”
“I took the liberty of reading the file again this morning, Bill was kind enough to send it to me. The car was abandoned, found by a local resident. Based on the location, we thought maybe it was a stolen car. It wasn’t stripped, and it was older—not the kind that usually gets dumped. There could have been valuables in the car, however, that were taken. Because the registration was in Florida, we reached out to the Miami police and they determined that Ms. Sterling had left Florida in early April. Neighbors indicated that she left one night and never returned, landlord said she hadn’t given notice, but had taken all personal items out of the apartment. We put an APB out on her with her driver’s license photo, nothing came of it.”
“Did you investigate where she might have stayed while she was here?”
He raised his eyebrow. “Bill said he gave you a copy of the report. So you know that no Sterling was registered in any hotel or bed-and-breakfast at the time on the Eastern Shore. We sent a BOLO out to neighboring law enforcement agencies, but there was no indication of foul play. I thought at first an insurance scam, but the vehicle was uninsured. We searched the area for a body—we found nothing. There’s a lot of marshes in the area, people have been known to wander and get stuck, especially at night. But we didn’t find anything suspicious and no tracks. There was no accident—the vehicle sustained no damage. After a couple of weeks of nothing, my guess was that she wanted to disappear.”
He paused, then said, “Bill said she was your mother? That would have made her very young when she had you?”
“She was twenty-one when I was born. The driver’s license was under a false identity—and a younger birth year.”
“Maybe Jane Sterling isn’t who you think she is.”
“I saw the photo. Martha Revere, my mother. My great-aunt Delia had her identity stolen eighteen years ago. I didn’t know it at the time, her financial advisors and lawyers took care of it. I now believe my mother took her identity. The only reason why she had come here, to Virginia, was because of a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend from Cape Haven.” Max went on to explain about how Martha stopped accessing her trust account the month the car was recovered. She was getting tired of having to explain the situation to everyone—they should take her word for it. But they didn’t know her, and they hadn’t known Martha.
Lipsky absorbed what she told him.
“Your mother’s real name is Martha Revere?”
“Correct.”
“Did you file a missing person’s report?”
“My grandmother did. Nothing came of it, and truthfully, I don’t think my grandmother looked all that hard. Seven years after she stopped withdrawing money from her trust fund, my grandmother had her declared legally dead.”
“That was what—ten years ago?”
“Sixteen years since she cut off all contact, and nine years since the court hearing.”
“And why are you just now following up?”
“I hired a private investigator who uncovered the information.”
“Sixteen years later?”
Why did Max feel like she was a criminal being interviewed? She was trying to be forthright with Detective Lipsky because she wanted information, but he wasn’t making it easy. Yet, he had agreed to meet with her the same day she’d called him
He didn’t comment further, just looked at her—a common cop tactic in an interview.
“I have always believed my mother is dead,” she said, her anger starting to grow, “and while I wanted to know what happened, I didn’t begin to seek answers until recently. Hence, I hired a PI who is far better than most. He uncovered the connection between Martha and the Jane Sterling identity, and learned about the abandoned car.”
She’d then had to face the truth: that maybe she’d avoided this because she didn’t want to know what had happened to her mother. Ironic, perhaps, for a reporter who lived her entire adult life seeking the truth about crimes.
Now that she was ready to know the truth, she feared it was too late.
“I don’t have any more information about the case than is in the files.”
“You know the area and the people and now that you know she’s likely dead—dying on or about the time the car was abandoned—what do you think?”
Cops, especially longtime cops who moved up slowly but steadily like Lipsky, had the best instincts about crime and human nature. They always had a theory—and often, their theory was right or mostly right, because they had worked in the business so long. But proving a theory was often the hardest part. Especially in cold cases.
He leaned back, steepled his fingers, and looked at her. “I don’t remember much, to be honest, though some has come back to me after I reviewed the files. The car was off the road, but there was no sign of an accident. I initially thought maybe the driver pulled off because they were tired, get some shut-eye. But there was no purse or suitcase. I concluded that either the car had been stolen and the perp abandoned it for some unknown reason—there was nearly half a tank of gas, so it didn’t run out of gas and there was nothing wrong with the engine—or the owner abandoned it because they couldn’t afford it or the insurance. It’s happened. Don’t want to pay for a tow or to junk the car, dump it in a remote place.”
“And walk out of there?”
“Someone could have picked her up. There was nothing in or around the vehicle to indicate that the driver had any trouble. No blood, no signs of struggle.”
“And now? Assume that Martha’s dead. What would you think based on the evidence?”
“Anything I think is unprovable.”
“But you’re a cop, and you have a theory.”
“Not really, but I guess I can play the what-if game. No evidence of foul play, so that tells me the driver pulled over intentionally and attempted to hide the vehicle—it couldn’t be seen from the road, but it wasn’t crashed or disabled. We determined based on dirt and mud that the car had been parked two, maybe three weeks before it was found. The driver pulled off the road—a dirt road—and parked behind the bushes. The car was locked; we found the keys in the glove box. If the driver was upset about something, depressed maybe, I could see her committing suicide—but how I could only speculate. We didn’t find a note or a body. The other option is that she wanted to disappear and had another vehicle nearby.”
Max could see that as well, except for the fact that she knew that Martha was dead.
“If there was a crime,” Lipsky continued, “the killer could have left the car there, hoping it wouldn’t be discovered for a while. But again, we found no unidentified female victims, and no victims in that area. The last major unsolved crime in the county was two male victims, homicide, bullets to the head. That was … two and half, nearly three years before this incident. And since? Nothing that would fit this scenario.
“Who was her ex-boyfriend?” Lipsky asked.
“Jimmy Truman. And he might not have been an ex.”
“Truman.” Lipsky smiled humorlessly. “He was a piece of work.”
“You knew him?” It didn’t surprise Max, especially after Sheriff Bartlett’s reaction.
“I was a deputy in Northampton for nearly fifteen years. Truman was in and out of trouble, but he was slick. Always managed to talk himself out of any situation. Never did any jail time, never violent crimes. Ran a scam on tourists for a time—he was only sixteen. He got probation and his record was expunged when he was eighteen. You said your mother was wealthy?”
�
�Yes.”
“He could have been running a scam on her. Soak her dry. No offense,” he added quickly. “Honestly, though, Jimmy was the type of criminal who would run from violence. People can change, but my gut says if he killed anyone, it would have been spontaneous, and probably an accident. And yeah—I could see him covering up an accidental death.”
“No one ran a scam on Martha,” Max said, surprising herself. She hadn’t intended to share this much with the cop, but he made it easy with his what-if scenarios and his breezy conversation style. “Martha … she would have been part of it.”
“Really?” He sounded suspicious. Or maybe just curious.
“I lived with her for the first ten years of my life. She could con people out of anything. I didn’t think of it like that at the time, but in hindsight—of which I’ve had a lot over the years—I realized she enjoyed people giving her things. She had her own money, she certainly didn’t need anyone’s boat or house or car. But she had a way about her.…” Max had thought about it a lot over the years, because understanding her mother had been virtually impossible. In some ways Max didn’t care because most of the people Martha scammed could afford to part ways with their stuff. Insurance would pay for it, or they would dismiss it as temporary insanity on their part and walk away.
“She was a con artist,” Lipsky said matter-of-factly. “Someone who could convince Scrooge to part with his money.”
“Precisely. She had her own money, so people didn’t think she needed their vacation house, their boat, a ten-thousand-dollar sapphire ring. They just let her borrow whatever she wanted.” This was a truth Max hadn’t known at the time, but it had become clear through the lens of maturity and a decade of investigating crime and criminals and the people they left behind. “Once, when I was eight, we spent the entire spring in France in a villa because she blackmailed the owner. She’d slept with him and would have told his wife if he couldn’t find her a place to relax. That’s what she said. She just wanted some time to relax. And—even though he was so angry about what she’d done—he visited her nearly every weekend.”
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