Forgotten Obsessions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 1)

by Talia Maxwell

  Holly’s house was on the hill in Mt. Scott and boasted twenty-foot marble columns and a three-car garage, which looked more like an adult care facility than a house for one single woman and her child. Derek wondered, without ill-will, if somehow the house was left over from a messy divorce. He wasn’t wrong.

  Maeve didn’t talk much about the social lives of the girls in the social club, but he’d gleaned a few pieces of information in his time in the group. Holly was a character. She was all type-A with gregarious extroversion and a take-charge attitude. When she opened the door to greet him, Derek felt immediately welcomed. She hugged him into her ample chest, enhanced by a tight shirt. Holly was a pin-up. All boobs and ass, and cascading red hair.

  Her house was immaculate and huge. His voice echoed in the foyer.

  She led him to the living room where a smaller contingency of the group gathered. Maeve was already there, sitting at the center of a solemn circle, a folded piece of paper in her hands, her face serious—absent of the joy he’d expected to see when she saw him.

  “Come with me,” Maeve said and she stood instantly, abandoning the group. Everyone watched her and he felt on display, as if the world was studying his actions, waiting for him to unravel. But he was still buzzing from the lead he’d received from Julie, and despite Maeve’s seriousness, he knew she’d be invigorated by the chase. He was excited to tell her, thrilled.

  If they could find the name of that driver, she’d have a suspect for his fire. And that driver would be on Maeve’s phone app.

  And certainly if the DIE note was from the same person who attacked Julie, then they’d have their killer.

  But Maeve took his hand and led him back to the front door and then to the left, up a large winding staircase to the second floor, and then to the end of a hallway and up another staircase to a finished attic. She closed the door at the bottom of the stairs and they trudged upward until they reached the room above. Maeve flipped on the lights and the room went from darkened daylight to a romantic hue of rose and white twinkle lights strung from one end to the other.

  “It’s a guest room,” Maeve said. At one end there was a queen bed and a trunk at the foot. At the other end there was a rocking chair and a bookshelf. “It’s the most private place in the house. I liked the ambiance better than the wine cellar.”

  “Thank you?” Derek said and mustered a sweet smile.

  “I need to admit something to you.”

  “Me first,” he said and plowed forward. He could tell her news was going to be solemn and he wanted to interrupt with news he thought would be welcome. “Julie stalked us. Both. She is responsible for…drum-roll…stealing your mail and occasionally letting Roger out. So…”

  “Wait, was she in my apartment?”

  “Nope,” he shook his head. “But if she unlocked that door and let that dog out…”

  “Wow. She’s intense.”

  He nodded. “I like to think of her as a super villain,” he said. He smiled a half-smile. “She’s evil, but she has a compelling backstory that makes you feel sorry for how she turned out. You know?”

  “She stole my mail,” Maeve picked up on and she immediately nodded, understanding the implications. “Oh…she stole my mail! And?”

  “Accepted,” he announced with an emotional twinge. “To all the schools.”

  “I was?” she asked and she put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t—”

  “Save it,” he said and continued. “Look, Maeve, if you’re going to go be some hot shot criminologist or investigator, you need to focus. I need you. Someone was prowling around my property the night Julie set the fire.”

  “Wait, wait.” Maeve shook her head. “I was really accepted?”

  “You were really accepted. And you’re not listening to me. Julie saw someone else there that night… his bumper sticker read Calculus is Fun.”

  “Holy shit.” Maeve nodded. “Calculus is fun. Oh shit. Oh shit!” She jumped up and down. “Yup. Yup. That’s the guy who took me out to Gillian’s and then waited and came right back for me. The..” she stopped.

  “What?” Derek stopped her and Maeve went white.

  She paused and dipped her head, immediately chagrined. “Oh man.”

  “What?” he asked again, softer this time, lower and concerned.

  Maeve turned away from him. “There’s nothing more I want to do with you than this…” she started. She bit back tears and sniffed and turned to him. Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “Your dad’s fourth wife is named Gillian. And you have to meet her and get the safety deposit key which will lead you to the gun that killed Layla, your sister. You told me,” her face broke and she put her hands up, “you’d choose for me and you chose the case and I kept going…”

  She said it so fast and in a rush that Derek’s disbelief ran behind his actual understanding of the message.

  He shook his head. His body ran with uncontrollable electricity. Had he heard all that right? What was she implying? She’d gone to the fourth wife. She’d been to the fourth wife.

  “Wait…what? Stop. What?”

  “Gillian needs to talk to you. In your dad’s suicide note, he explains. He’s left you a key.”

  “You went to see my dad’s wife?” he asked, doubting.

  “Gillian,” she said again, her voice smaller, “asked me to come in person to get a copy of his suicide note.” She brought out a piece of paper and Derek took it from her tentatively. Without anger, but with confusion and caution, he scanned the two paragraphs, cringing at the direct acknowledgment of their father-son estrangement. It hit him like a sucker punch, but he kept going, kept pushing past it and when he got to the end: Aubrey.

  And looked up, he knew she knew.

  If he wanted to be angry at her for the intrusion, he couldn’t. If he wanted to keep being angry at her for hiding her applications to the East Coast from him, he couldn’t. He’d kept the biggest secret from her. The one that haunted him and strangled him in all his nightmares—the one he’d never be able to regain. His confidence had been destroyed, but not his will.

  The color drained from his face and he held his breath. They both stood there stone-faced and short-breathed, stuck in a nightmare of their own creation.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Derek said. “I thought it was. Forever. But when the ruling was issued…it took a long time not to keep blaming…”

  Maeve was confused. “Of course it wasn’t your fault,” she said, but then she added, “Your dad even admits it was selfish—”

  “That was a recent admission,” Derek said with a tug on his ear. “Man, Aubrey,” he whispered, barely able to work out the name. “He told me once never to say her name again. That I didn’t deserve to.”

  “Aubrey,” Maeve repeated and she closed her eyes. So, yes, she knew. She knew that he had administered an IV bag filled with a drug that killed his father’s most precious possession—a girl so revered and glorified that her death ripped a hole into his relationship that could not be redeemed.

  He was exonerated, later, after administrative leave and an investigation. The not-guilty didn’t hit with nearly the same amount of force as the original suspicions. The news never learned his identity, though, and for that he was grateful to be labeled an ‘employee of the hospital’ and not mentioned by name. It was the hospital’s decision, however, not his—they understood the potential for a media circus and a PR nightmare if the relationship of the staff and his name was released to the public.

  Gillian.

  A name to the woman who came next. His father’s collection of cash-strapped admirers.

  “The gun that killed my sister?” he reeled and back-peddled. What was happening? “You went and met…Gillian?” Derek put his head in his hands and tried to understand all of the pieces. What had exhilarated him moments before now seemed overwhelming and convoluted. He wanted to push the hard work of unraveling it away and retreat. Give him medical issues to solve, but don’t ask him to dissect his life.
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  At one time, his story was complete. It made sense. He was who he was and he knew where he came from.

  And now he was getting used to losing that story piece by piece.

  “Your father believed you deserved to know the truth,” she said, and she placed a hand on his knee. Derek removed his hands from his face and returned the gesture, placing one hand on her knee and the other over her hand on his. Maeve continued, “I think he thought he had to die to do that.”

  “I think he did have to die to do that,” Derek answered. “And I’ll go. But I need you with me. Will you do this with me?” His chin trembled and a single tear rolled down his cheek. Maeve cried with him—the names of the women he’d loved and lost on his lips as he looked to Maeve to help him. “I was wrong. I was wrong to ask you to chose and I was wrong to let you drive away in that car. It’s this…it’s all of this…that I love. Watching your eyes light up when you’ve figured something out, knowing that you’re pure, that you’re good, that you’re everything.”

  “I love you,” Maeve said, interrupting him.

  She kissed him and pulled back to kiss away his tears. “I love you, Derek. Oh…I thought you’d…I thought we were done.”

  “We might have been,” he said. He cupped her chin and kissed her back, and he tried to make sure every single second of that kiss translated into his love and affection for her. No, she wasn’t angry and he wasn’t angry, and neither of them had to live with secrets or regret. She knew the worst of him and there she was, her admiring eyes never changing, her love undiminished. “But that’s not my ending. I love you, too,” Derek replied.

  “You’re not perfect,” she added quickly, as if to couch the romance with a dose of reality, but Derek didn’t want it. He kissed her again and she melted into him immediately. When she laid back on Holly’s queen guest bed, Derek went with her for a second. He ran his hand across her belly and kissed the nape of her neck.

  “You’re pretty perfect,” he said in response. “Let’s go solve the shit out of this thing, and then I’ll take you to bed.”

  “Oh, really?” Maeve propped herself up on her elbows. Her brown hair fell into her eyes and Derek leaned forward and brushed it away. “A romp with you is my prize for solving a murder?” A slow grin erupted and she slid out from under him before he could answer. “You know just what fuels me, Derek Shelton. You get me.” She winked, as she let forth a fair and tolerable amount of sarcasm.

  “I didn’t say anything about that being your prize.”

  She flipped her hair and laughed. “Oh, I see. I’m the prize.” Maeve stood at the top of the stairwell and as she glanced back, prepared to say something witty and oozing with sex, she stopped. Her face softened and he sat up to look at her. “Maybe we are each other’s prizes. Maybe we can get that lucky.”

  He stood and walked over to Maeve.

  “We already have each other,” he said. “And I already feel lucky.”

  He kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  Until she tugged him down the stairs and whispered in his ear, “Come on, my love. Let’s go get the bad guys.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “I’ll do it,” he said to the group downstairs. The other girls cast suspicious glances in Maeve’s direction, implying she’d exaggerated Derek’s dismissal of their efforts to solve the crime. After all, he’d agreed eagerly and without convincing. And while some of them, she was certain, assumed she’d used convincing of a different kind, none of them were complaining.

  “So, we have the driver,” Gloria said, taking charge. Holly wrote everything down. Calculus is Fun. Dude took Derek and Maeve home—he showed up again the night of the fire—a third time picking up Maeve from the hospital and depositing her at the Shelton house.”

  “Shelton mansion,” Maeve corrected.

  “And we have the gun,” Rosie said. She clapped her hands wildly and the group joined in.

  Maeve added, “Right. Derek and I will go back to Gillian and get the box key. We’ll handle that avenue.”

  “You got that driver’s name?” Kristy asked.

  Derek nodded and pulled up the history on his account. “Here’s his picture and his first name. Jim M. No full last name on the app, so we’ll start some digging.”

  “We’re on that,” Holly said with a quick smile. “Jim M. who loves calculus. I’m honestly sure that’s a limited amount of people in this area.”

  “Then go, and report back when you can,” Gloria said and clapped her hands. If she had a whistle, she’d have blown it and sent them all scattered.

  The team disbanded, and Maeve and Derek left Holly’s and climbed into Derek’s truck. Maeve didn’t have to tell him the way, he knew exactly which direction to go, how to find his way back to the house his father built and where he died.

  “This isn’t the way I pictured this happening…” Maeve said as she watched the suburbs roll on and on outside her window on their way to the Shelton’s.

  “I’ll be glad when this is behind us,” he replied and punched the gas. “Nothing ever happens the way you picture it happening.”

  Gillian greeted them and invited them inside. Derek’s knee visibly bounced up and down with nervous anticipation as she led them into a living room and sat them down. His eyes wandered over the pictures and the décor. He took everything in, the smell and the sight, and the way the light played against the furniture. He’d been in the house a lot before Aubrey died and never after. It was different—she’d been scrubbed clean.

  “I’m selling it,” Gillian said.

  “Fine,” Derek answered.

  “I didn’t think I’d have an objection from you.” She clicked her tongue, amused. “Before you go to the bank,” she said, continuing, “before I give you the key and you see what your dad wanted you to know, I wanted to tell you that he loved you and was proud of you.”

  “He could have told me in a letter. Not through you. Not like this.”

  “There is a letter for you. At the bank.”

  “But you may never be back to see me and I needed to know you knew, I needed to know someone had said it to you. None of this was your fault, your lack of memory, your father’s misuse of faulty ones, even your anger. He understood.”

  “He could have told me,” Derek said again. Maeve tried to stay still and calm, she knew there was nothing she could do for anyone where paternal grief was involved.

  Gillian, as a response, handed them the key and a postcard with directions to the bank.

  “Realtor and my lawyer and handling the sale of the home. I’m off to Cancun in the morning.”

  “Will it look like you’re running?”

  “I am,” Gillian said and she laughed. “From the press. I was only an accessory to giving you this key. I’m afraid I wasn’t privy to the details, only that they existed. So, I’m running from not having to answer any more questions. That’s not part of my life anymore.”

  “Right, right,” Derek said, still wavering between his emotions. Did he hate this woman? Did he let her in at all? “Your life as my dad’s emotional support who needed a healthy allowance. You benefited from his years of silence…”

  “Oh, Derek. I love you like my own. So, please let me interrupt to say to you…we could have benefited far more from the truth than the lie he kept hidden. And…I loved him,” Gillian answered as if she could read Derek’s mind. “I really did.”

  She paused after that and let her words sink in. Derek couldn’t say anything else and he dipped his head; Maeve put a comforting hand on his arm.

  “We’ll leave you to it, then,” Maeve said, and stood. “Thank you for, you know, everything.”

  “Destroy the people on the other side of this,” Gillian said in a half-whisper. “I won’t have Timothy die in vain.”

  “My father the hero again,” Derek said when they were in the car. “It’s hard to avoid the spin. He wasn’t the hero you thought he was. He was a different kind of hero who did the opposite thing
s we told you about. Does she think I’ll believe her?”

  “She loved him,” Maeve offered, tucking the buckle around her body and resting her back against Derek’s seats. “Say what you will, but she knew all his truths and is taking care of him in death. And when you love someone—”

  “You don’t idolize and vilify the ones you love. You know them for who they are.”

  “You do both. We all do both. And you may not even notice when you’re doing one over the other, but everyone does it. She loved your dad and she wants him to be known as the tortured man who gave up his life to uncover the burden of lying.”

  “I don’t like this,” Derek said. “I hate living like this. One secret dropping after another.”

  “It’s not going to get any better in the immediate future,” Maeve replied as she punched in the address to the bank on her phone. “Let’s go find ourselves a gun.”

  The little family-owned bank in a West Linn shopping center was not what they’d pictured when Gillian described the secrets buried there. A cat purred in a stream of sunlight cast through one of the floor to ceiling windows and Maeve had to side-step around it as she walked to the counter.

  Derek pulled out his father’s paperwork. The key. The death certificate. In a matter of minutes, without many questions and with Maeve by his side, Derek was led into the vault of deposit boxes, gleaning silver and suspicious. Maeve wondered what each of the boxes held. She imagined journals and pictures and stories and jewels and wills hidden from families. And in this room, a weapon, too. Maybe more.

  They accessed the box—his key, her key—and out slid the metal container. She opened it for him and then left for Derek to peruse the contents alone.

  Maeve gingerly touched a plastic bag and Derek confirmed: wrapped in a towel, there was a gun. There was also a letter. They slid closer together and Derek read the entire thing out loud in a jumble of whispering. Maeve pushed against him, her ear close so she wouldn’t miss a word as she followed along.