Notorious (30 page)

“You took her to the airport?”

“No—Carrie had a bad breakup. I thought, maybe, it had been one of her professors. Carrie wasn’t bad, but she made some really bad choices about men, and she came home crying one night, saying she was dropping out of school, she needed to get her life together. I told her to sleep on it, that she shouldn’t drop#. . f out of school, but maybe just take some time off. Mom and her got in a huge fight about it—asked her if she’d gotten herself pregnant. Carrie said no, but Mom wouldn’t let it go and they just—well, they were oil and water. She left the next day, said she was going to get her life together and she’d call when she had answers. Then six months later we got the postcard from England.”

“You saw her leave?”

“Well, no, but that isn’t important. She left a note on the table. You don’t know what it was like trying to mediate between Carrie and my mom.”

“I have an idea.”

“Tell me—right now—what you’re thinking. Because you’re scaring me.”

Max didn’t know how to sugarcoat it. And she might be wrong. But if she was wrong, she’d spend a small fortune tracking Carrie Voss down and hauling her ass back to her sister.

“Did Carrie have a charm bracelet like yours?”

Faith frowned and stared at her wrist. “Yes, why?”

She pulled out her phone and showed Faith the photo from the crime lab.

“What’s that?” Faith asked.

“Is this your sister’s?”

“I—I don’t know.” But her voice rose and Max knew she was lying.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Faith’s lower lip quivered. “It looks like it. She—I—I got her a butterfly like that when she graduated from high school. But there’s lots of butterfly charms. Where did you find it?”

Max said quietly, “The police found it.”

“No.” She shook her head. Max didn’t say anything for a long minute, and Faith put it together. “No—not at the campus. The bones they found? No. Not Carrie. It can’t be Carrie. Bascomb said the bones were more than a decade old. Carrie sent me a postcard six years ago!” She covered her mouth and ran down the hall.

Max didn’t have anything she could say that would make Faith feel any better, not right now, so she focused on the postcards.

Faith said she received the first postcard six months after Carrie left. It was postmarked in December. That meant Carrie had left the previous June.

The same month that Lindy was killed. One week before high school graduation.

Max made a list with all the postmarks—day and location. New York. France. England. Australia. England again. Germany. Nearly every European country. There were sixteen postcards total over a seven-year period, but several were clumped together—the last three were all sent a week apart. From France, Italy, and Ireland.

Max had a hunch that Carrie never sent these cards, but there was one easy way to prove she didn’t. Only, she wouldn’t be able to get the information. Only law enforcement could find out whether Carrie Voss had a passport and if she’d used it.

The chances were, she died the night she wrote the note to her mom and sister, and was buried on the Atherton Prep campus.

Max looked carefully at each postcard. The picture from Australia looked familiar. She turned it over and read the inscription.

I’m in shook his head. “TX fd p beautiful Australia! It’s summer here, totally the opposite of the U.S., ha, ha. I could live here forever. Maybe I will. Carrie

All the other messages were just as generic. Nothing personal. Nothing asking about Faith or giving an address where Faith could write back.

Someone else sent these cards so Faith wouldn’t report her sister missing. Max was certain of it.

She looked at the last card sent. Six years ago next month.

Six years ago. France. Italy. Ireland.

William had been on his honeymoon then. He’d been married in the middle of April, then went on a honeymoon for three weeks, to France, Italy, and Ireland.

Nausea washed over Max and she put her head down for a minute. She had to have remembered wrong. She did the math again; it was right. But William—if Carrie Voss was dead, if she’d never gone to Europe, someone had to have sent these cards. And William was in Europe when the last three were sent.

What about the others?

Max took pictures of each card, front and back, then went upstairs to where she heard Faith softly crying. She knocked on the door.

Faith opened it a moment later. “I—I think I always knew she was dead.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“Are you positive?”

“No. Not one hundred percent.”

“But you think that—the remains—that it’s Carrie.”

Max nodded. Faith stifled another cry, but controlled herself. “I know how you can find out,” Max said.

“How? They only found a couple bones.”

“I’ll call Detective Santini and tell him what we’ve figured out and they can compare your DNA with hers.”

“I should have called the police,” Faith said quietly.

“Why? Did you doubt Carrie wrote these? Was it her handwriting?”

“Because—I don’t know. I thought it was her writing. I didn’t think anything of her leaving. She did it all the time. She wasn’t even living here full time—she’d just come back from college, and was already looking to live with a friend because she and Mom fought so much. And we weren’t all that close, but—I should have realized she wouldn’t have just gone off to Europe without saying good-bye. In person.”

“You had a reason to think it.”

“She always wanted to go.

Chapter Twenty-five

Max left Faith’s house and went straight to Eleanor’s. She was ready to steamroll over any of her grandmother’s objections to what she was going to do, but the house was empty, even though it was nine at night. Not unusual, since Eleanor was involved in many charitable groups and had many friends she dined with. Since Max’s grandfather died, Eleanor spent more time out with friends, as if being alone in this big house without James saddened her.

For all of Eleanor’s faults, her grandmother had loved her husband dearly. It was their unity, their mutual admiration and respect, and the love Max had seen in their eyes that told Max that for some people, marriage worked.

People who didn’t lie or commit adultery.

Max went straight to Eleanor’s office and turned on the lights. She’d always been a bit in awe and intimidated by the stately, Queen Anne–style room, with real antiques and delicate touches. It was also immaculate, and Eleanor would be certain to know that Max had been in here.

Eleanor had kept old-fashioned date books most of her life. One page per day, with plenty of room for appointments, notes, and a daily diary. They went back to the year she was engaged. Fifty-nine years. She had the next two years already purchased. The current year was on her desk.

For a moment, Max was in awe of her grandmother’s diligence. Unlike Lindy’s secretive, gossipy diary, Eleanor had marked days of importance. On days of historical significance, like 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, royal weddings, peace treaties, she wrote what her initial thoughts were, and often referenced the major event through the months and years ahead, from a different perspective. But she also noted smaller things.

Like the day William and Max graduated from high school. Like the day her mother left Max to live in this house to be raised by a family she didn’t know.

Max had never gone through Eleanor’s date books before, other than with express permission, and it made her uncomfortable, like she was peeking in her underwear drawer or worse. And while she didn’t want to believe that Eleanor would destroy fifty-nine years of history, she knew that for her family, she would.

Max wanted to pull out the archives and read what Eleanor really thought when Martha left Max behind. But right now she needed to prove she was wrong. Prove that William hadn’t been to all those places abroad at the same time Carrie Voss allegedly sent Faith the postcards.

She pulled out the book from thirteen years ago. It opened in the middle, on Max and William’s high school graduation.

After Lindy’s murder, but before Kevin had been arrested.

Eleanor had written:

Pride fills my soul at my grandchildren today. James said, shook his head. “Wh3, includ“Ellie, we are lucky.” I don’t believe in luck, but today, I feel greatly blessed.

William—he is intelligent, considerate, and has a heart with far more compassion than his father. Today, he looks more a man than I’ve ever seen him.

Maxine—More my daughter than my granddaughter. I never understood Martha, but Maxine—she says what I wish I could say. I admire her passion for life. Her love of friends and family, her firm commitment to her values, the depth of her self-awareness. I will miss her greatly.

Max had to reread the comment because she’d never heard her grandmother say anything like this to her.

I will miss her greatly.

Max had walked away from home, gone to college, rarely come home because she never thought she would be missed. The friction her presence caused the family had always upset her grandmother. Yet, she admired her?

Max had to put it aside because she wasn’t here to read about June. And that what she was about to do would tear apart the family from its very foundation made her want to leave for New York on the next flight and forget everything she’d seen or heard.

Except, of course she’d never do that. The truth had to come out. Gerald and Kimberly Ames deserved to know what happened to their daughter. The Hoffmans deserved to know what happened to Jason. Faith deserved to know what happened to her sister.

And why.

In December after graduation, during his winter break, Eleanor took William to England as his graduation present. They didn’t go over the summer because of Lindy’s murder.

December tenth through the twenty-second.

The postcard from Carrie was postmarked December eleventh.

She didn’t want to believe it. How could she? How could she not only believe that her cousin was a killer, but that he’d been so calculating? That he’d lied to her, and she’d believed him, because she had believed Kevin O’Neal and had been right about him?

William has a heart with far more compassion than his father.

Could kind, considerate, polite, compassionate William have brutally murdered three people? Lindy? Carrie? Jason?

William’s explanation of their fight didn’t make any sense. Lindy was mad about another girl he dated—why would she be? She’d been cheating on Kevin with William, William had been cheating on Caitlin with Lindy, it was one big cluster-fuck and Max had been totally in the dark.

Had she been? Had she truly been that clueless about her friends?

Maybe. She had Andy then, they’d been together all the time. She’d been planning for college, playing volleyball in the fall, skiing in the winter, swimming in the spring, she’d always kept busy, and her senior year was particularly hectic because of the added stress of college applications. Had she been so wrapped up in her own life that she’d forgotten to pay attention to the world around her?

Or maybe, subconsciously, she knew everyone had secrets, and she was willfully ignorant of them. Because she didn’t want to think about people she loved lying to her. Intentionally blind.

If William killed Lindy and Carrie, why? If he killed them, that meant he’d also killed Jason Hoffman a nine-thousand-square-foot t fd p because Jason had seen him removing Carrie Voss’s remains. Then William had taken her bones and … what? Reburied them? Burned them? Scattered them in the woods?

Max felt physically sick as she looked at the next date, the following winter—when it was summer in the land of Oz. Genie, her great-grandmother, had been ill. She had never been to Australia and said that before she died, she wanted to visit. It had been a difficult trip for the woman, but Max had never seen her happier. She’d died nine months later, but at peace.

While Genie and Eleanor had stayed for six weeks in a house they rented in Sydney, Max had joined them for a week. William was there. The Talbots had all visited at different times.

The dates William was in Sydney matched up with the postmark.

Max almost didn’t keep looking, but one thing being a reporter taught her was that she had to have all her facts. She had to make a solid case. If she was going to convince William to confess, she had to give him incontrovertible proof that he had no option. That there was enough evidence to put him in prison. She took pictures of each page in the date books, in case her grandmother destroyed them. She hoped not, because as she read notes in her grandmother’s impeccable, formal script, she saw a history unfold that she wanted to read more about. A history she wanted to write about.

She knew if she did this, if she used these date books to put William in prison for murder, her family would disown her. She’d still be part of the trust, she’d still have her money, but she would never be able to come home again. No matter what Eleanor had written about her in the books, some things would be unforgivable.

It was perhaps ironic that she never wanted to come home … until the idea that she couldn’t terrified her.

The money had never been important to Max, yet that would be all she had left of her family and her heritage.

But what choice did she have? She’d promised herself long ago that exposing the truth was the only way she could live in balance. That harboring secrets would only give her heartache and failure. Her mother’s lies and deception, Lindy’s secret diary, Karen’s disappearance and murder … the truth wasn’t pretty, but it was real, and Max had to hold on to that.

Eleanor kept a copy of everyone’s travel schedule because she wanted to know where they were in case she needed to reach them. She also said once, over dinner, that knowing where her family was gave her a continuity in her life, so she would remember to ask about their trips, to view their pictures, to remember what it was like to be young and active. Eleanor was the most active seventy-nine-year-old Max had ever known, taking after Eleanor’s mother, Genie. Strong, active, smart women. Even with all the secrets and the battle of duty and family over truth, Max greatly admired the women in her life.