Notorious

by Allison Brennan

  “Does Mrs. Ames still have the antique store on Oak Grove?”

  “Yes, it’s been her sanctuary these years.” He walked Max to the door. “Kimberly has always been particularly troubled by Lindy’s death. They had a fight before Kimberly and I left for my business trip, and it still hurts Kimberly that their relationship ended with that cloud.”

  Max wasn’t certain that was completely true, not after her confrontation with Lindy’s mother, but she didn’t comment. If Lindy had still kept a diary, she wouldn’t have told her mother about it. Would she have told her father?

  She turned around and asked, “Do you remember when Lindy and I were freshmen in high school and she got in trouble for writing in a journal?” In trouble was an understatement. Lindy had put everyone’s secrets in a journal and someone at school found and shared it. Like the fictional Harriet the Spy, only much, much more scandalous. It got out, and she stopped writing.

  “I remember. She didn’t mean to hurt anyone—the journal was for her only.”

  Max didn’t know if it was just for Lindy—Lindy had shared some pages with Max and undoubtedly others when she wanted. When she thought she could benefit, heap rewards on those she liked, or inflict pain on those she didn’t. “Did she ever keep another diary?”

  “No. She was truly devastated by what happened. Kimberly was furious, but I never read it. I didn’t want to. They had a ceremony where they burned it and Kimberly said, ‘Some things should never be immortalized on paper.’”

  Just because her parents didn’t know if she kept one, didn’t mean she hadn’t. Olivia would, hopefully, know the truth.

  * * *

  Max was torn—who first, Kimberly Ames or Olivia Langstrom Ward? She wanted to talk to both of them, but Kimberly would be the most challenging. She chose Olivia because Palo Alto was on the way to Atherton. It was nine thirty in the morning, and Max had a meeting with Jasper at Atherton Prep at noon. Kimberly owned a small antique store in Menlo Park near the Atherton border. It was more a hobby than to make any substantive income, but the word was Kimberly could get anything for anyone.

  Similar to how her daughter Lindy knew everything about everyone.

  Max hopped on to the freeway toward Olivia’s house in Palo Alto and mentally catalogued her day. After Olivia, Kimberly. After Kimberly, Jasper. Last night she’d printed a list of the local storage units and ranked them in order closest to Kevin’s apartment. She hoped she had time after Jasper to hit at least two units before closing.

  A car she’d seen outside of Gerald Ames’s building followed her on the freeway. She hadn’t seen the vehicle follow her from Mr. Ames’s office, but now she couldn’t be sure. She’d been on the phone with Ben giving him the details of the drug bust and the possibility that Jason Hoffman was killed by Dru’s ex-boyfriend or Rebecca Cross, and then David had called to check in. She should have been paying more attention, especially since she’d been followed yesterday.

  Except, she’d thought that was related to Dru Parker, not Lindy. That car had been white, not black.

  This car was a dark, nondescript late-model sedan. Max didn’t do well with models, but this looked like an American make. Feds? Was the FBI following her? There were no government plates on the vehicle, but that didn’t mean anything.

  Any other time, she’d have called Marco and asked him to look into it. But after the way she’d left things with him in Miami, she wasn’t going to ask him for a favor. She had other friends in the FBI, but no one she was close enough with to ask if they could call the local office and find out if she was under surveillance.

  And why? Why would the feds be following her? Because she found the pot farm? That didn’t make sense. But truly, sometimes law enforcement did things that made no sense to her.

  Or had Gerald Ames sent someone to track her? Why? He’d been polite, although sad; why would he have her followed?

  The person who’d threatened her Saturday might not have wanted her to talk to Mr. Ames.

  Max wanted to confront whoever was following her, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t know who or why, or if they had a weapon. She didn’t know if the person tailing her was the same as two days ago. Different car, but how could she have fallen under the watch of two different people? Chances are, the two incidents were connected. It was clear she was going to have to rent another car.

  She decided to lose him, then go straight to Olivia’s. She didn’t want anyone following her there, or while she searched for Kevin’s storage locker. Though she originally thought her pursuer was related to Dru Parker, now she wondered if she’d been mistaken.

  Did this have something to do with the threat that ostensibly came from someone close to Gerald Ames? Had Gerald Ames manipulated and deceived her? She had pegged him for being honest in their conversation—he hadn’t promised her his cooperation or blessing, but he definitely hadn’t asked her to stop what she was doing.

  The car was keeping pace with her. Max sped up; the sedan sped up. She pulled out her phone and did a quick search for the closest police station. David would have slapped her hand—but this was an emergency.

  She exited on El Monte and headed toward the Los Altos Hills police station. The sedan followed, but when she drove into the parking lot, he passed by. She tried to catch a glimpse of the driver, but saw little. Her impression was of a male driver, but other than gender, she couldn’t give a description.

  She mapped out an alternate route to Olivia’s house before pulling back onto the road. She didn’t see the sedan and no other car appeared to be following her. She made a few loops just to make sure, and ended up at Olivia’s house thirty minutes later.

  Olivia’s husband, Professor Ward, should be at campus, based on his class schedule that Max downloaded off the Internet. She knocked on the door. No answer. She walked around the porch and peered in the windows. The house was immaculate. In the back, a sporty but practical gold BMW was housed in the detached garage.

  Max wasn’t in the mood to be ignored. She rang the bell and knocked—loudly—on the door. “Olivia, it’s Maxine.”

  The door opened. Olivia stood there dressed like a Stepford wife, but with glassy eyes and a distinct odor of alcohol. Champagne. Max glanced at her watch. Not even ten in the morning.

  Olivia tilted her chin up, looking both haughty and regal. “You know, you’re really a bitch, Maxine.”

  Max laughed. “Well, aren’t you a surprise. Your husband is at work, you crack open the champagne.”

  She didn’t wait for an invitation, but walked in. The house was elegant and far too picture-perfect for Max. While she liked tidy, this was beyond neat—it was obsessively clean.

  “Christopher left this morning to guest lecture in Boston.”

  “And you didn’t want to join him?”

  Olivia laughed, but there was no humor. In fact, she sounded almost crazy. “And come between him and his mistress?”

  Max had picked the wrong time to visit. Or … maybe not.

  Max closed the front door because Olivia didn’t seem to care whether it was open. She followed her “host” through the house to the back. As she watched, Olivia touched each perfectly aligned picture, moving it just a fraction so it was out of balance.

  Hilarious. Christopher Ward, older husband with a mistress three thousand miles away, was a neat freak, and Olivia rebelled by misaligning his artwork and drinking before noon. Max wondered what other rebellions Olivia had. Was that why she’d really met with Kevin at the lake the night Lindy was killed? Maybe growing up she hadn’t been as perfect as everyone thought.

  Olivia sat down in a chair on the sun porch, in the back of the house overlooking a pristine pool and rose garden. The champagne bottle, which was chilling in a silver bucket, was half-empty. She pulled it out, refilled her glass, and offered one to Max.

  Max was tempted—Olivia was drinking a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque, one of Max’s favorite champagnes. She couldn’t see the exact year, but it was 199-something.
Worth more than $1,000.

  But it was ten in the morning, and Max had a lot to do. She declined, and Olivia shrugged, a physical mannerism that seemed ill suited for the trim, perfect, wealthy housewife.

  “We had these at our wedding. Ordered a couple extra cases and every year on our anniversary, we open a bottle. It’s gotten better with time.” Olivia sipped. “Sit. Ask your questions.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “We all have,” Olivia said.

  “In three days.”

  She laughed. It sounded bitter. “That’s what good champagne will do for you.”

  “I don’t buy it. We don’t change that much. We do, however, wear masks. Is that what you were doing on Saturday? Putting on a mask for your husband?”

  “Think whatever you want. I don’t care.”

  Max switched tactics. She wasn’t here to save Olivia from her husband or her own bad choices; she was here for answers.

  “You told me on Saturday that Kevin talked you out of running away. Why did you want to leave?”

  “Lindy always thought my father was molesting me.” Olivia reddened and didn’t look Max in the eye. No wonder Lindy thought that—Olivia acted like an abused woman. “He didn’t, but he was cruel in other ways.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She stared at Max, her eyes icy marbles. “It’s irrelevant.”

  “I don’t think it is.” Max leaned forward and said, “You could have cleared Kevin and stopped the farce of a trial. You remained silent and lifelong friendships were destroyed. An innocent man sat on trial. Lindy’s killer is still free. Kevin lost everything to protect you. Why?”

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “I kept waiting for the police to come and ask me if Kevin was with me that night, but they never did. Not until after the trial, and by that time it wasn’t important. I asked him not to tell anyone, but when things got serious—he said that he didn’t kill Lindy, so he wasn’t going to break my confidence. Maxine, I was scared and angry and worried.”

  Now the alcohol had Olivia making no sense. Max decided she might never know why Kevin and Olivia hadn’t come forward about his alibi. Before Olivia poured another glass of the thousand-dollars-a-bottle champagne, Max asked her the most important question:

  “Where is Lindy’s diary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bingo. Max figured that someone as diligent about keeping a diary for years wouldn’t have just stopped writing after her mother burned it. She’d just become better in hiding it.

  And she’d never told Max. Max tried not to let that truth sting, but it irritated her like sand in her shoe.

  “It wasn’t part of the evidence,” Max said. “Her father doesn’t think she had one. Lindy and I—” She couldn’t explain how they argued about secrets, how they’d fought over whether to expose Brooks and Kimberly’s affair to the world. It was a cloud over Max, that she and her best friend had so many fundamental disagreements … but Max had never turned her back on her. Or, she hadn’t thought she did. But in the last months before Lindy was killed, they’d been estranged. Distant.

  Max wished it could have been different.

  “I never saw it,” Max said.

  “She wrote in code. I never read it. She hid it. She told me some things—like how she was going to get back at the people who burned her.”

  “Who?”

  “I thought she meant Caitlin or her mother.”

  “Why? She and Caitlin were best friends.”

  “Lindy always believed that Caitlin was the one who left her diary in Mrs. Frauke’s classroom.”

  When they were freshmen, Lindy had brought the diary to school to show a picture she’d taken of Mr. Bonner, the freshman English teacher, and Mrs. Frauke, the advanced French teacher. Back then, cell phones with cameras were rare for most of the world, but not the affluent in Atherton. Lindy would take pictures, print them out on her computer, and delete them so her mother—who was prone to going through her phone to see who was calling her—would never see them.

  It was that scandal—with Mrs. Frauke finding the picture and going to the headmaster with the accusation that Lindy was blackmailing her—that had Lindy suspended for a week and Kimberly reading and burning her diary.

  Max didn’t know whether Lindy had blackmailed Mrs. Frauke, though she wouldn’t have put it past her. Lindy had a cold streak, especially when things didn’t go her way. But Max had never heard that Caitlin had anything to do with the diary’s discovery.

  “What was in this diary?”

  “I said I don’t know!”

  “But you have an idea.”

  “I think,” she said, “she wrote everything she knew. Lindy Ames was Jekyll and Hyde. When Mrs. Ames burned her diary, she realized that her mother was scared that Lindy knew something about her. Lindy made it her mission to find out all of her mother’s secrets.”

  Like her affair with Uncle Brooks.

  Olivia smiled. “Everyone has secrets. I’d think you more than anyone would know that.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Max changed her mind a half-dozen times about her next step after leaving Olivia’s house but decided to visit William at his law office. She sent Jasper a message that she would be thirty minutes late meeting him.

  William practiced corporate law for one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. Probably the world. At thirty-one, he was a junior partner after only five years with the company, which he joined immediately after graduating from law school. He was the pillar of perfection in the eyes of most everyone: attractive, wealthy, intelligent, with an attractive, wealthy, and (marginally) intelligent wife. He had two perfect sons to carry the Revere name into posterity.

  To see him rattled that she showed up at his office right before the lunch hour had Max wanting to laugh.

  “Maxine.” He glanced around to see who else had seen her come in.

  “I checked in with the guard. The Revere name opens doors, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I—”

  “I’m here as your cousin, not a reporter.”

  He breathed easier. She felt bad about giving him that little white lie, but if anyone was eavesdropping, she didn’t want to start rumors.

  “I have a lunch meeting,” he said, “but I’ll delay.” He turned to his secretary. “Minnie, can you call Josh and Doug and tell them I’ll be a little late?”

  “Of course, Mr. Revere.”

  Max saw a brief exchange, a special look, between Minnie and William. She might not like Caitlin, but she sure as hell hoped that William wasn’t sleeping with his secretary. How … common. How … typical. William had many attributes; fidelity had never been one of them. Like father, like son, Max thought. She was surprised that she was more disappointed than angry.

  William’s office wasn’t as spacious or subtly rich as Gerald Ames’s, but it was grand nonetheless. Dark furniture, a complete set of law books in built-in bookshelves, immaculate desk. A conference table that could seat eight comfortably, along with a leather couch and two matching chairs

  “So, how long have you been sleeping with Minnie?” she said as soon as the door closed.

  William blushed ten shades of red and Max swore under her breath. “It was a guess, cuz, and you reminded me again why I always beat you at poker.”

  “What do you want?” he snapped. He crossed his arms and stared at her.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “This is my office. You haven’t been home in two years, and after what you pulled at Grandmother’s house?”

  “What did I pull? Confronting our grandmother and your father for obstruction of justice?”

  “They did nothing—”

  “I’m not here about that. I’m here about Lindy’s diary.”

  He rubbed his face and sat down. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “The truth.”

  “I told you exactly what happened. I didn’t know anyone kne
w about the ticket, or that Grandmother intervened. She told me everything after you left Saturday. She’s very upset, Maxine. She’s not young. She’ll be eighty this summer.”

  “She’s upset because I called them on it.” Max was deviating from her plan. She hadn’t wanted to fight with William about the parking ticket or family. “William, I need to find Lindy’s diary.”

  He stared at her as if he hadn’t heard her. When she stared back, he asked, “What diary?”

  “The secret diary that Olivia Langstrom just confirmed Lindy kept after her mother burned her first one.”

  “The one with the picture of Mrs. Frauke screwing Mr. Bonner.” He smirked.

  “William, this is serious.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at her shoulder.

  She snapped her fingers. “Dammit, I don’t have time to play twenty questions. You said you were bed bunnies with Lindy for a year, a totally secret relationship that no one knew about, not even me, and you didn’t ever see her write in a book? She was that discreet?”

  William sighed and his shoulders sagged. “She might have had something, but I have no idea where it is. She didn’t share it with me.”

  “But you’ve seen it.”

  “A couple of times I saw her writing in a black leather book. In her clubhouse. For all I know, it’s still there.”

  Or the killer took it. Or the police have it. Why wasn’t it part of the evidence?

  “I need to find it.”

  “After thirteen years?”

  “It has to be somewhere.”

  “Maybe her father has it.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  William blanched. “You talked to Mr. Ames?”

  “Yes. And he was far more cordial than anyone else.”

  William seemed stunned. “But you sided with Kevin.”

  “He, too, has his doubts.”

  “He’s old—”

  “Oh, jeez, William. He’s your father’s age. And for the record, Kevin lied about his alibi.”

  “We all know that. He couldn’t have been home if he killed Lindy.”