Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  In the background, through the phone, Mac could hear Jessica going through the kitchen cabinets while preparing breakfast after her daily five-mile run, something she did like clockwork. Mac’s daughter was a creature of habit and discipline. Before discovering his birthright, Mac had some-times wondered if she had inherited her strong sense of discipline from someone on his side of the family.

  A life-sized portrait of Robin Spencer hung in Mac’s study. It had been painted over forty years earlier. Dressed in the strapless gown her wealthy parents had designed for her coming out party, Robin was ravishing with her long dark hair swept up. Her skin was like porcelain against her dark features and sapphire eyes. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor in her early movies.

  When he had first laid his eyes on the portrait, Mac had been struck by the resemblance between his birth mother and his daughter Jessica.

  Robin’s portrait had answered his question about who his beautiful daughter took after.

  “You knew this was coming,” Mac told her. “This happens every time anyone plans anything in that family. Sabrina has to be in charge and it has to be the social event of the season or nothing else. When it doesn’t go exactly the way she wants it, she throws a tantrum. I don’t remember one event that involved your aunts that didn’t end in a family feud with someone getting slapped and vases getting broken. That’s why I always volunteered to work those nights.”

  With a meeting scheduled at the Spencer Inn later, Mac mentally prepared for the day with more coffee. At his feet, he could hear Gnarly chomping away on his breakfast. He wondered if it was possible to teach a dog to chew with his lips shut.

  Do dogs even have lips? If not, what does he flap so loudly when he eats?

  “I want this to be over,” Jessica sighed with a sob.

  Hearing the pain in her voice, Mac’s heart ached.

  Unknowingly, she added to his pain with “I wish you were here.”

  “David said that he expects the medical examiner to re-lease your mother’s body today. I’ll arrange to have it sent to the funeral home in Georgetown as soon as possible.” He asked, “How’s Tristan holding up? I called last night and he was working at the museum.”

  “I think he’s in denial.”

  A forensics psychology major, Jessica had diagnosed Tristan as being in denial about everything ever since she first heard the word used by a psychologist on television.

  Tristan took after his father with his auburn hair, high cheek bones, and slim muscular build. He had also inherited his father’s blue eyes. What he didn’t inherit was Mac’s love for murder mysteries. Tristan loved animals and nature, in particular, dinosaurs. A sophomore at George Washington University, he was a devoted college student and practically lived at the Natural History Museum.

  Mac was grateful that neither of his children had made great changes in their lifestyles since inheriting ten million dollars each in trusts from the grandmother they had never met. Neither of them took to wild parties and extravagant shopping sprees. Jessica did upgrade her wardrobe and bought a Corvette. He also suspected that she’d traded up her hair stylist.

  Unlike any other teenager who had inherited millions of dollars, Tristan resisted the urge to buy a hot car, like his father, who had purchased a Dodge Viper sports car within days of receiving his inheritance. Practical to a fault, Tristan pointed out that since he lived in the city, it took longer to drive to campus and find a place to park and walk to his classes than it did to take public transportation. Instead, he splurged on the latest and greatest computer equipment with state-of-the-art scientific research capabilities that only Archie could understand and appreciate.

  According to Jessica, Tristan barely missed a beat between his classes and job since his mother’s murder. She had talked to him. He had also received a lecture from his Aunt Sabrina about respecting his mother by emoting his grief in a more public manner.

  Mac could imagine the motive behind his son’s withdrawal into his schoolwork. He recalled receiving the same lecture when his adopted father passed away after a long illness. While Mac grieved the loss, he had also felt relief that his father’s suffering was over. Even though Tristan’s circum-stances were different, Mac suspected that he wasn’t in denial as much as he may have been in hiding. It’s bad enough losing a loved one without getting flack for handling it wrong.

  Tristan wasn’t the only one in the family receiving grief from Mac’s ex-in-laws.

  After discovering the crushed garbage cans, Jessica had called Mac to announce that she was ready to give in to her aunt’s demands. “I guess we can let Aunt Sabrina have the reception at her house afterwards. That might placate her.”

  “This isn’t about Aunt Sabrina. Don’t let her bully you into doing anything that you think is wrong or that you don’t think your mother would have wanted.”

  Mac felt a grin come to his lips when Archie, carrying a basket filled with croissants, came in from the deck. He could smell the freshly-baked goods as soon as she stepped through the door.

  “By the way,” Jessica added as he was about to hang up. “I think someone broke into Mom’s house.”

  “Was anything taken?” Mac wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t uncommon for homes to be broken into after news of the occupants’ deaths. Knowing no one was home, the houses were considered easy pickings for thieves.

  “Nothing of value,” she reported. “I can just tell that your study—I mean Stephen’s—had been gone through. The safe was open, but all of Mom’s papers are there. I don’t know about Stephen’s. I assumed he took what was his when he moved out. I didn’t even bother calling the police. Do you think I should?”

  Mac told her to report the break-in to the police, in case it might be connected in some way to the Stephen Maguire’s murder. He was about to hang up and dive into the croissant that Archie had placed in front of him with a helping of strawberry jam, when his daughter went on to the next subject.

  “Roxanne wants to know what you want to do about the lake house,” Jessica announced.

  Mac moaned.

  “I told her to talk to you. Did you know that Mom never changed her will?”

  Mac told her that his lawyer, Ed Willingham, had already given him that news the day before.

  “Aunt Roxanne is having a cow. Something about Mom never signing over the lake house to her. Thought I’d let you know.” She finished the phone call with a “have a nice day.”

  Hanging up the phone, Mac buried his face in his hands and groaned.

  “I finished editing the book. Sent it in at three-thirty this morning and made lots and lots of money.” Archie rubbed both of his shoulders. “How’s your day shaping up?”

  “Tell me you don’t have any sisters.” He realized as he said it that she never talked about her family or childhood. It was always his family that they discussed.

  “Only child.” She held up her hand in a scout’s honor salute.

  “Then I’ll marry you.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. From where he was sitting at the breakfast counter and she stood, it brought his head to rest on her shoulder.

  She returned the hug. “Funerals are always stressful. Death is stressful, especially when it’s someone you love.”

  “Yeah, but the dead person doesn’t have to deal with anything. They get to sit back and enjoy it.”

  She said, “Your mother once said to me, ‘Have you ever noticed that it’s after you’re dead that suddenly everyone is concerned about what you want?’”

  “Believe me, these chicks aren’t concerned about what Christine wants.” When his cell phone rang, he checked the caller ID. It read, “Roxanne Burton.” He decided not to answer it.

  “Why didn’t you answer that?”

  “It was Christine’s sister. One of Stephen Maguire’s colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He was the head of the criminal division. She’s his counterpart in the family court division. She introduced Christine to Maguire.” He shot Archie a sa
rcastic grin. “I never thanked her for that.”

  He dabbed the butter and jam onto one of her croissants. “Christine was the baby of three girls. Their daddy did a stint for like eight years as ambassador to Brazil. They lived in a big house with servants and body guards and went to swanky parties and dated men in uniforms.”

  “They became spoiled,” she said.

  “They were actually called Daddy’s Little Princesses,” he told her. “It was pointed out to Christine—and me—that she married beneath her station in life. Sabrina, the oldest, married the president of a big accounting firm. Roxanne modeled her way through school and has the ear of every influential legal eagle in D.C. Now she’s standing in line to beat my chops about Christine’s will.”

  “You told me yesterday that they found out that she’d never changed it after the divorce.”

  “Or the beneficiary on her life insurance,” he said. “Jessica remembers her mother saying at one point that she was going to make Roxanne the executor and leave everything to the kids, but she never did it.”

  “Teaches you to never put things off.”

  “It should be a no brainer,” Mac said. “I’ve already talked to Ed. Okay, I’m the executor. I’ll do what she wanted. Split everything between the two kids, fifty-fifty. The house is going to be sold because neither of them wants it. They decide between themselves who wants what.” He sighed. “Then Ed took a look at her accounts.”

  Archie asked, “What’s the problem?”

  “Christine was head over heels in debt.” When Archie cocked an eyebrow at him, he explained, “When I left Christine, she was more than fixed. Her father had died the year before she kicked me out. Each of the sisters had received over a hundred thousand dollars. You might say that inheritance was the beginning of the end for us. Money was always an issue. I never made enough for her. Her father spoiled her rotten. Then, when Big Daddy died—”

  She screwed up her face. “Did they really call him Big Daddy?”

  “And he was only five feet eight inches tall.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  Mac continued, “I wanted to put the money into a trust fund for our retirement and the kids’ college. She wanted to spend it on stuff in order to bring us up to par with her sisters. According to Ed’s findings, that’s exactly what she did after getting rid of me. It’s all gone and the bank is about to foreclose on her house. The only thing she had left was her share of the lake house. If Roxanne buys out her share, which when we were married she made no secret about wanting to do, then that might pay off some of her debts.”

  Mac tapped his finger on the breakfast bar. “This is her sisters’ fault. It wasn’t ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in our house. It was keep up with the sisters. Designer clothes. Spas. Parties all the time. I was a drag because I wanted to live within our means. Maguire seduced her into running around with the sisters. She threw me out so that she could do what she wanted with her money and it looks like she died with nothing but bills to her name.”

  “You mentioned a lake house?” Archie asked.

  “Right here in Spencer,” Mac said. “It’s on the mountain and has a lake view. I’d only been there a couple of times. Right about the time she kicked me out, it was appraised at half a million dollars. I’m surprised Christine’s name is still on the deed. I know she intended to sell her third to Roxanne.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I need to go. I’m meeting the chief of security at the Inn for breakfast to see if he can give me any details about where David is in his investigation.” He frowned. “David won’t tell me anything.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been cleared as a suspect,” Archie said. “I only just got cleared since Bogie was able to reach my alibi at Frostburg.” A naughty grin crept to her lips. “If you and I had been sleeping together then we could have alibied each other and had a good time doing it.”

  “I’ll remember that the next time I plan a murder.” Standing up, he kissed her quickly on the lips. When they parted, he held her close, not wanting to let her go. “I promise that when this is over, we’re moving forward in what we talked about before all this happened…unless all this made you change your mind about me.”

  She whispered to him, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The dongs of the doorbell made them jump back from their embrace as if they had been caught with their hands in the sexual cookie jar.

  “More flowers?” Since Christine’s death, he had been receiving tons of flowers and sympathy gifts from many people he didn’t know who had been friends of his late mother.

  As if he were voicing their displeasure, Gnarly charged for the door.

  The two people waiting on his doorstep were yet another piece of Mac’s Georgetown past. As he often thought when he saw the two of them together, Natasha Holmstead and Judge Garrison Sutherland made an odd couple.

  After years of seeing the two of them out about town together, Mac was still unsure if they were indeed a “couple” in the romantic sense of the word. He never saw them kissing, holding hands, or other body language that betrayed two people as being romantically linked.

  They never appeared to be guilty about being seen together, which led Mac to suspect that they were simply very good friends. Considering that she was married to Stephen Maguire and, to Mac’s knowledge, had never divorced him, to be romantically linked with Judge Sutherland gave them much reason to be apprehensive...if they were indeed a couple.

  Mac was never sure, which bothered him. He hated not being able to pin someone down.

  Natasha Holmstead was the personification of brains over beauty. Not that she was ugly. She was as skinny as a stick. Bee stings were bigger than her breasts and she had no butt to speak of. If she would ever do something with her cinnamon-colored hair, which she wore in a chin-length bob style with the part in the middle and combed straight down the sides, she would be considered attractive.

  From all the beauties that Mac knew Stephen Maguire had bedded throughout the years, the only reason that he could conclude for him marrying Natasha was the millions of dollars per year she made defending the richest criminals in the world. He certainly didn’t marry her for her winning personality.

  Mac knew Garrison Sutherland from back when he had held Stephen Maguire’s position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. As mediocre a prosecutor as Maguire had been, Sutherland was sharp and fair. He carried his passion to the bench.

  While Natasha stood tall and thin, Judge Sutherland was short and stocky with black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She was aggressive, he was soft spoken. As abrasive as she was, he was compromising.

  “Hello, Mac,” the judge greeted him in a somber tone, while holding out his hand to him. “Natasha and I came to personally offer our condolences on your loss.”

  Stunned by the visit from the couple who lived over three hours away, Mac accepted their condolence, while holding Gnarly back by his collar. Gnarly liked to check out every visitor by giving them a nasal pat-down. Mac invited them in to the living room.

  Natasha and Garrison reacted with surprise at seeing that their host had company.

  “I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” the judge said, while easing Gnarly’s snout away from his pants’ pockets.

  After assuring them that they weren’t, Mac introduced them. “This is Archie Monday.” Not sure what to call her, he stumbled over the words, “She’s my friend.” He realized, even as he said it, that his tone sounded guilty.

  He didn’t like the knowing glances that Garrison and Natasha exchanged upon hearing the introduction.

  After he had finished checking out the judge, Gnarly moved on to examine Natasha, who gave his snout a quick swat. She might as well have called him out for a duel. The German shepherd backed up and sat with his eyes on her.

  He dared her to make her next shot.

  Judge Sutherland waited until after they had taken seats on the sofa across from Mac and Archie to explain the reason for their visit. “I don’t kn
ow if you’re aware, but Natasha has suffered a loss as well. You see, she and Stephen Maguire were still married.”

  Archie said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thank you for your kindness.” Natasha blinked away non-existent tears while wiping one away from her cheek.

  Having seen the defense attorney in action in the court-room, Mac was very familiar with her techniques. She was like any predator. She laid low and observed her prey before devouring it, with no regrets for doing so.

  Garrison went on in his methodical tone, as if he were explaining the intricate steps of a murder plan to a jury. “For a variety of reasons, which we won’t bore you with, Mac, Natasha and Stephen had made a decision to remain married while living separate lives. They were still each other’s beneficiaries. As a matter of fact, Stephen had left Natasha sole heir to his estate, which leads to the reason for our visit.”

  Natasha jumped in. “I’d like to know when I can pick up Stephen’s stuff.”

  Mac asked, “What stuff?”

  “The stuff he left at Christine’s house,” Natasha said. “He left it all there while he was looking for another place to live. Since he left everything to me, then it’s mine, and I want to make arrangements to pick it up. Also, I want any personal effects that he had left in his room at your hotel. The police have taken it into evidence, but surely they don’t need it. Everyone knows what happened. Christine flipped out and gave Stephen what he had coming for a long time. The police don’t need to keep his personal effects to prove that.”

  Garrison said, “We tried to talk to the police chief about it, but he’s been stonewalling us. We were told that you two are pretty good buddies. Maybe you can use your influence—”

  “You and Maguire haven’t been living together for years,” Mac replied. “According to my information, he’s lived with at least three other women since leaving you.”

  “But we did remain friends,” she said.

  “Friendly enough for him to leave you everything,” Mac said. “Sounds to me like a motive for wanting him dead.”