Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  Before he could ask for more details, Sabrina screeched from the kitchen. “If Big Daddy could see you right now, he’d slap you across the head, bitch!” Her curse was followed by a crash of what sounded like a pan against the wall.

  Archie jumped up off the sofa. “I hope she’s not throwing our good pans.”

  “Sounds like she is.” Bracing for a fight, he hurried into the kitchen.

  “I’ll wait here for backup.” Archie’s quip wasn’t a joke.

  Sabrina was shaking a paring knife in her sister’s face when Mac barged into the kitchen. Tears were streaming down Roxanne’s face.

  “Drop that knife, Sabrina!” he ordered.

  Sabrina scoffed. “I was only making a point.”

  “Make it without the knife,” he said. “I mean it. Put the knife down.”

  In a huff, she laid the knife on the counter and returned to the sauce she had on the stove.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked Roxanne.

  “Other than the fact that her sister was murdered and you haven’t caught her killer yet, fine,” Sabrina answered. “But we Burton girls are tough. We’ll muddle through somehow. We always do.”

  “Is that what Big Daddy used to say?” he asked. “To muddle through somehow or he’d slap you across the head?”

  “Something like that,” Sabrina replied.

  Sympathy for Roxanne was a new thing for him. When he asked her a second time if she was okay, the words didn’t sound natural coming from his mouth.

  “She’s fine,” Sabrina answered for her. It sounded more like an order than an answer. “We’ve been taking care of Christine for so long, that Roxanne is feeling lost right now. I felt the same way when Big Daddy passed.”

  She reminded him, as she had often to whoever would listen, that when their father’s health began to decline, he had come to live with her. She would never mention in those reminders that she had also hired two private nurses, who cared for him and drove him to his doctor’s appointments.

  “You don’t realize it when you’re caring for someone, even when they become a burden, the guilt that you feel when they pass. You end up feeling like they died because you didn’t do enough for them.” Sabrina glared at her sister. “That’s what Roxanne is feeling like right now. Guilt over Christine’s death when it wasn’t her fault.”

  “Is that all it is?” Mac asked Roxanne.

  Roxanne had a pleading look in her eyes.

  “Did Archie show you Robin Spencer’s study?” He gestured to the door on the other side of the kitchen. It led to the hallway and steps, at the bottom of which was the room where the author had penned eighty-seven books and five plays, one of which was in its twelfth year on Broadway.

  Sabrina was casting them the evil eye from the end of the hall when Mac shut the study door behind them.

  Robin Spencer’s famous mysteries had been written in the most cluttered room in the manor. Built-in bookshelves, containing thousands of books collected over many generations, took up space on every wall. Robin had left her son first editions of all her books. First editions of famous authors personally inscribed to her, and books for research in forensics, poisons, criminology, and the law also lined the shelves. With every inch of shelf space already in use, the author had taken to stacking books on her heavy oak desk, tables, and the floor.

  Portraits of Spencer ancestors filled wall space not taken up with books. Mac was still learning their names and places in not only the Spencer family history, but the histories of the state of Maryland, Garrett County, and the town of Spencer. Some paintings appeared to be from the eighteenth century. Others were dressed in fashions from the turn of the twentieth century. The most recent portrait was a life-sized painting of Robin Spencer, dressed in a white strapless gown.

  “Jessica,” Roxanne gasped when she saw the portrait.

  “That was my reaction, too,” Mac said.

  The portrait of the demure-looking author filled the wall between two gun cases behind the desk. One case contained rifles and shotguns, while the other had handguns. Some of the guns had been handed down through the Spencer family. Others Robin had purchased for research.

  Robin had acquired many weapons during her murder mystery writing career. The coat rack sported a hangman’s noose, and a Samurai sword hung on the wall.

  In a chair in the far corner of the room, Uncle Eugene watched all the comings and goings. A first aid training dummy, Uncle Eugene had been stabbed in the back, tossed off rooftops, and strangled on numerous occasions, all in the name of research. When he wasn’t being victimized, he sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner, dressed in a tuxedo with a top hat perched on his head. With one leg crossed over the other, Uncle Eugene, an empty sherry glass next to his elbow, looked like he was taking a break while waiting for the next attempt on his life.

  After they had finished the tour with Mac pointing out facts that he had uncovered since taking ownership about the room and its most famous occupant, Roxanne surprised him with a question he had never expected, “Do you ever think that Robin Spencer left you all of this out of guilt? To make up for what you missed out on being raised here?” She gestured at the view through the study window of Deep Creek Lake. “Robin Spencer’s son. Think about what she deprived you of, by putting you up for adoption. Private schools, traveling all over the world. You could have—”

  “I had a good childhood,” Mac said. “I had the best adoptive parents any kid could want. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “But how can you be so certain that she left you all of this because she did love you as the son that she gave up, and not as some sort of a payoff for in case you decided to come looking for her.”

  “Maybe if I hadn’t met her, my cop side would have thought that, but Robin Spencer came looking for me. I met her, even though it was only for one day. She also left me her journal. I got to know her.” He said firmly, “Robin didn’t pay people off. She wasn’t perfect. She admitted that in her journal. She had made some mistakes, but she was never wrong.”

  “You forgave her.”

  “Maybe if I hadn’t met her, and seen for myself what a warm loving woman—” He gestured to the living room out front. “Ask Archie. Ask David O’Callaghan. Ask anyone in this town. It was impossible for anyone to not love her. For me to hold any bad feelings for her.” He smiled broadly. “Especially when I saw this house, the Inn, and all the money she left me.”

  “Nobody will ever feel like that about me when I’m gone.” She was rubbing the binding of a hundred-year-old book on autopsy techniques.

  “What’s going on, Roxanne?”

  “It’s my fault,” she sobbed softly.

  “What is?”

  She raised her eyes to his. “I was the one that suggested to Christine that maybe there was some remote possibility that the two of you could get back together. It never occurred to me that you would check her into the Spencer Inn the same weekend that Stephen Maguire was staying there.”

  “Why did you plant that idea in her head?”

  Roxanne opened her mouth, but then, seeming to think better of what she was about to say, shut it again. There was fear in her eyes, something he had never seen there before.

  “I was trying to get her to go into rehab,” Roxanne blubbered. “I’d told her that if she went into rehab, dried out, and made a real effort to get herself together, that maybe, ideally, that you might forgive her and maybe get back together again.”

  Mac swallowed the anger he felt rising. “Did it ever occur to you that there’s no way in hell that reconciliation between us was ever going to happen? Why did you plant that thought in her head?”

  Wiping her nose on her sleeve, Roxanne stood up tall in her defense. “As an incentive for her to go into rehab. Did you know that I had to file a petition to have Christine declared incompetent? That’s how bad it’d gotten. After Stephen left, she was too lost to even handle her own checkbook. I had to go through her books and pay her bills. That’s whe
n I found out how he’d been ripping her off all along. Meanwhile, she was drinking away, running up bills with money she didn’t have, and wallowing in misery and anger and resentment. I thought that if I got her into rehab she could be saved.”

  She admitted, “Yes, Mac, I used you as bait. It never occurred to me that she’d come over here and throw herself at you and that you’d take her to the Inn where she’d end up on a direct path with Stephen Maguire.”

  He asked, “How did she get here to the lake house?”

  Roxanne shrugged. “She drove her car.”

  “The kids told me that she’d stopped driving months ago. She was afraid of getting a DUI.”

  “I guess miracles do happen,” she said. “Now you see why I feel so horrible. I planted that seed in her mind two days before she suddenly took off here to the lake house and came after you. If I’d never done that, then she’d have stayed home drinking away, while I’d continue cleaning up her messes, but at least she’d still be alive.”

  “And Stephen Maguire?” he asked.

  She said, “I don’t give a damn about Stephen Maguire.”

  “From what I hear, you certainly don’t.”

  Her tears now dry, she asked, “What do you hear?”

  “Your name’s right up there on the list of those Stephen Maguire screwed over.”

  The purse of her lips brought on by the clench of her jaw signaled the return of her usual resentment of him.

  “It’s a very long list,” she replied. “I already told you about how he ripped off the money the mortgage company had sent Christine to buy her out of the lake house. When I tried to tell her, she called me jealous and stopped speaking to me for months. It wasn’t until after he was gone and she had no one to turn to that finally…”

  Mac countered, “But you didn’t tell me about how in addition to that, during those months that your little sister wasn’t speaking to you because of what Stephen Maguire did, he had the nerve to frame you for bribing a witness, which now has you on the path to disbarment, as well as taking you out of the running for Hunter’s deputy.”

  He didn’t expect her to be surprised by his discovery. Roxanne had been around the courthouse and criminal cases for too long. She had to know it was coming. It was only a matter of when.

  “Did your sources also tell you that I am no longer out of the running?”

  He wondered, “Did Maguire’s murder open that door again?”

  “As more and more of Maguire’s dirty dealings are coming to light, Hunter is looking to select someone as unlike him as possible.”

  “Which means you benefitted from his murder,” he pointed out. “You know the term for that. Motive. You had motive for killing him.”

  “But not my own sister.”

  Mac ticked off on his fingers. “Motive. Means. Your family has been coming out here since you were a little girl. You’ve been regular visitors to the Spencer Inn. You knew how security there works.”

  “Opportunity,” Roxanne said. “I wasn’t here. I was in Washington until yesterday morning.”

  “Can you prove it?” Mac shot back.

  She uttered a squawking sound from deep in her throat. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not the police anymore, Mac.”

  “Then you can answer that question for David. He knows everything that we’re talking about and he’ll be asking you himself. So you might as well tell me.”

  She answered, “I was home, alone, in Washington. I was working on my computer throughout the day, sending out emails and working on case files until six-thirty, at which time Sabrina brought me her homemade chicken soup for dinner. If you don’t believe Sabrina when you ask her about my whereabouts, I’m sure your forensics investigators can check my laptop and the emails that I had sent and received to confirm that I’d been working from home the same day my little sister was killed.” She dared him. “Any other questions you want to ask me?”

  “What other dirty dealings do you know Maguire was into?”

  For the first time since Christine’s death, a smile crossed Roxanne’s face. “Rumor around city hall is that the high society Maguires are shaking their heads and saying, ‘What? What one of our relatives got killed at the Spencer Inn? We never heard of any Stephen who worked for the United States Attorney’s Office. He’s no relative of ours.’ A lot of brown-noses who kept him on the fast track because of his last name are now very embarrassed. Serves them right.”

  Mac wanted to know, “If that’s true, how do you think he managed to get into the U.S. Attorney’s Office without his lies being discovered in the background check?”

  “How do you think?” She held up her hand and rubbed her fingertips together.

  “Someone in the Office of Personnel Management,” he said. “Which means that someone would have known all along that he wasn’t who he said he was. Can you imagine the frustration of seeing someone that you know is a fraud moving up the chain of command, bypassing you when you work hard, because of something that you know for a fact is a lie? Are the feds going to investigate to find out who was responsible for letting Maguire get away with all this?”

  “I’m sure some heads are going to roll,” she said. “I have no doubt that it was Hamilton Sanders. He worked for OPM. Maguire brought him over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to be his assistant. Sanders wasn’t qualified. Took him three tries to pass the bar. But Maguire got what he wanted, per usual. He seemed to owe Sanders for something.”

  “And now Sanders is in town lying, cheating, and stealing trying to retrieve what Stephen Maguire had brought up here.” Now that he had her alone, out of Sabrina’s presence, he asked her, “Do you have any idea what Stephen Maguire was doing in Spencer?”

  “I assumed he was seducing his latest young woman,” she said.

  “He had some case files with him and was interviewing witnesses.”

  Her expression shifted from cocky to worried. “What kind of witnesses? What kind of case files? Were any of them from family court cases?”

  “No,” he answered. “What can you tell me about Themis?”

  “What?”

  “Themis,” Mac repeated.

  “What’s that?” Her confusion appeared genuine.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “Could it be a name of a defendant or victim, or maybe an organization? It almost sounds like an acronym.”

  Sabrina called to them. Her voice holding a note of annoyance, Roxanne called back that she was coming. Before going out the door, she turned to him. “I hope you understand why I feel guilty about Christine. I loved her. Do you think she knew that?”

  “Of course,” he said, “She had no doubt.”

  With a weak smile, she left. At the end of the hallway, she turned left to go into the kitchen, while Mac continued to the living room where Archie was tapping away on her mini-laptop.

  “How are you doing?” he plopped down next to her and dropped his head onto her shoulder.

  Archie hit a button to bring up a news item on the screen. “I’d put Emma Wilkes’s name in a search engine and found a news item dated this morning. Her body was found in the trunk of her car parked at the airport. The last time she was seen alive was Saturday night.”

  “Emma Wilkes is dead?” Mac asked.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “The police report I hacked into said that time of death was Saturday night. COD is a shot to the head.”

  “Then they couldn’t have been killed by the same perp,” Mac said.

  “Unless Themis is a big conspiracy and there’s more than one assassin.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I still don’t know what Themis is. Did you do a search of it on the Internet?”

  “Themis was the Titan goddess of law and order.”

  Mac waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “Anything else?”

  “Do you know who the blindfolded lady holding the scales of justice is?”

&
nbsp; “Themis?”

  “The blindfold symbolizes that justice is blind.” She wondered, “What would a Titan goddess have to do with this?”

  “In each one of those cases that Maguire was going over,” Mac said, “the defendants got off even though we had conclusive evidence that they’d done it. Maguire wanted to make a bid for U.S. Attorney. Most likely he was gathering in-formation on these cases so that he could claim Hunter and the attorneys working under him have been incompetent because of all these known killers getting off.”

  “Makes one wonder if his boss is behind his murder.”

  “He was at the party where Maguire was poisoned,” he said.

  She said, “Well, I also found out why Bonnie Propst was so reluctant to talk to Maguire and us.”

  “Besides that someone wanted to kill her and succeeded, by the way?”

  She pointed at the computer monitor. “I’ve discovered an interesting timeline. Douglas and Bonnie Propst got married and moved to Morgantown around a year after his last trial, which ended in a hung jury. Less than a year after that, Bonnie was admitted to the WVU hospital emergency room with a broken arm and black eye. She said that she fell.”

  Mac was already nodding his head. “But you don’t think so.”

  “I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, except that in this case, less than two weeks after she got her arm broken, Douglas Propst was shot dead, execution style. The police report says that, according to Bonnie, her husband had come home that night and got a call from the police saying that they caught someone breaking into his office and asked him to go down to make a statement. The police found his body a few hours later. They said that call never came from them.”

  “It was a lure.” Mac looked at her.

  Her eyebrow was arched in a seductive way.

  He asked, “Do you think she realized she had married a monster and arranged to have him killed?”

  “Think about it,” she said. “He got away with murder before.”