Notorious

by Allison Brennan

Max was thrilled that she was home.

  “Maxine Revere?” Faith said in surprise when she opened the door. “I—well. Come in.”

  Although it was just seven in the evening, Faith was already in her pajamas and had a bowl of popcorn and a Diet Coke situated in front of the television. Books—mostly romances with a few thrillers and classics intermixed—bulged from the bookshelves to such a degree that they spread over to the end tables. Faith might have more books than Max—and that was saying something.

  She looked self-conscious, and Max wanted to put her at ease. “Hey, if I’d known it was a pajama party I would have brought mine.”

  “This is a surprise,” Faith said. “A good surprise,” she added quickly. “I just didn’t expect to see you here.” She glanced around the house and frowned.

  Max glanced down at her wrist when she heard the clink. She still wore the charm bracelet.

  “I love your charms,” she said.

  Faith smiled. “Thanks. My mom gave me the chain when I turned thirteen, and a new charm every year for my birthday. Some I bought myself.” Her voice trailed off.

  “It’s a nice tradition.”

  Max walked halfway across the living room and saw a James Bond movie on the coffee table. “I’ve seen every Bond movie at least twice,” Max said. “I love Daniel Craig as the new Bond, but Connery will always have my heart.”

  Faith smiled. “Craig is definitely at the top of my list. Do you want something to drink? Eat?”

  “No—I should have called first.”

  “It’s fine, really. It’s been a long week, I usually don’t—”

  Max said, “Faith, this is your home, don’t apologize. I came to talk to you about your sister.”

  Faith blinked. “Carrie?”

  “Yes.”

  Faith frowned and sat down. “Why?”

  Max sat in the chair across from her. She didn’t want to lie to Faith, but at the same time she couldn’t very well say she thought that Carrie might have been dead for the last thirteen years. Yet … if the body in the grave was Carrie, Faith most certainly would have had to have been involved. Otherwise, why would she create a farce that Carrie was in Europe? And why did no one call her on it?

  Their parents were gone, could they truly have not had any other friends and family who would notice that Carrie was missing all this time?

  “When was the last time you heard from Carrie?” Max asked.

  “Um, six years ago?” She nodded. “Yes. Six years. Carrie—I try not to think about her too much. She didn’t even come home for Mom’s funeral, just sent a postcard months later saying she didn’t have the money to fly home. I thought that was her way of telling me she needed money to come home.” She played with her hair. “Except, she never called or gave me an address.”

  Faith sounded more sad than bitter. “Why the questions about Carrie? You and her were never close friends.”

  This was going to get tricky. If Carrie was alive six years ago, maybe she had returned home and Faith was the only one who knew. That meant she might be a danger to Max—except she was so petite and frail-looking Max could knock her over with a feather.

  Of course, she could have a gun.

  “I started looking for her online. You’d be amazed at what is available on the Internet. It’s very hard to completely unplug. Yet, there’s nothing on your sister anywhere.”

  “She’s been living in Europe.”

  But her voice caught, and she didn’t look Max in the eye.

  “Faith, when was the last time you actually saw Carrie?”

  “Why are you asking all these questions?” Her voice rose and cracked. Max had spoken to enough survivors to know that Faith was in deep denial about something.

  “Faith—”

  “Look, after our mom died, I did everything I could to find Carrie. And then I get this postcard out of the blue, months later, from France, saying she didn’t have the money to come home for the funeral and she was sorry. I just—washed my hands of her. When she didn’t answer my e-mails, I said no more. So why do you care? You weren’t friends with her.”

  “Do you know for a fact that she went to Europe?”

  Faith stared at her like she was an idiot. “I told you—she sent me postcards. I’ll show you.”

  Faith left the room. If she was guilty, now was the time she’d get a gun and try to kill Max.

  INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER SHOT DEAD IN HOME OF CHILDHOOD FRIEND

  Or, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER CONFRONTS KILLER IN HOME; MURDERED

  Headlines weren’t her strength. She left titles and teasers to her producer, Ben. He had the gift.

  Still, she kept her eye on the hall. A few minutes later Faith returned with a shoe box and handed it to Max. “These are all the postcards Carrie sent me. From Europe.”

  Max opened the box. There were maybe a dozen inside. “May I?”

  “Go ahead.” Faith sat back down. Her hand was shaking. “Do you think something happened to her? Is that why you’re here? Because this is what you do, right? Investigate cold cases? Do you have friends in France? Did someone find a body and you think it’s Carrie?” Her voice cracked on the word body.

  “Faith, I’m here because I don’t know if Carrie ever went to Europe.”

  “Of course she did!” Faith pointed to the box.

  Max started going through the postcards. France. Italy. Australia. “I don’t see any pictures of Carrie.”

  “She didn’t send any.”

  “I have a hard time believing a girl who went to live in Europe didn’t take pictures of herself and send them. She didn’t have a cell phone?”

  “No, she said it was too expensive…”

  Max laid the postcards in chronological order on the table.

  Faith pointed to the first one. “See? That was dated six months after she left. From England.”

  “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 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 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. Always. She had posters in her bedroom, she wanted to study abroad—yeah, it was believable, but just like that?”

  “Faith, this isn’t your fault. We don’t know what happened.” Max asked the hard question. “You said she was having trouble with a boyfriend.”

  Faith slumped against the door. “She was seeing someone at college. She never told me his name or anything, Mom said she was probably sleeping with one of her professors.”

  “And your mom thought she was pregnant.”

  “My mom was paranoid about Carrie getting pregnant. Mom got pregnant in college. Got married, had Carrie and me, got divorced because they fought all the time. My mom was very bitter about it. She dropped out of college to raise us, she didn’t want the same thing to happen to us.”

  “Why did she think that? Did Carrie say something?”

  “Carrie denied it. But, deep down, I thought she might have left because she got an abortion, and she didn’t want us to know. The way Carrie thought—she might have thought our mom would hold it over her forever. It wasn’t a good year for any of us.”

  New tears rolled down Faith’s face. “I love my sister, but after she left, there was no more drama.”

  “Do you have any idea who Carrie had been seeing that spring?”

  “No. But I have a box of everything she left. It’s in the guest-room closet. I’ll get it.”

  Max knew she should tell her no, to give it to the police. But she didn’t. She wanted to see the box.

  They went back downstairs and Max called Nick while Faith hunted for the box. His cell phone went to voice mail, and she remembered he said he’d had plans.

  “Nick, it’s Max Revere. I’m pretty certain I know who was buried at Atherton Prep. I’m at her sister’s house now, and she’s willing to give her DNA to compare. Faith Voss. Her sister Carrie hasn’t been seen in thirteen years. There’s more, but we should talk in person. Call me.” She hung up.

  Faith put a shoe box on the table. “I got rid of most of Carrie’s things—clothes and junk. These are papers and stuff my mom boxed up after we got the first postcard.”

  Max went through everything quickly. There was nothing important here, at least at first glance. School papers, report cards, photos, lots of sticky notes.

  One sticky note stuck out at her because of the date: Greenwald, Thurs. 5/31 at 10.

  Two days before Lindy’s murder.

  She looked up Greenwald on her phone. Amelia Greenwald, OB/GYN, in practice in Redwood City for the past twenty-two years.

  Carrie had been pregnant.

  “What’s that?” Faith asked.

  “I don’t know,” Max said. She wasn’t going to share her theory with Faith, not yet.

  Max flipped quickly through the pictures. They were all from high school, which made sense even though Carrie had been a first-year college student. You leave your high school memories at home, make new ones in college.

  “Where did Carrie leave her stuff from college?”

  “I don’t know,” Faith said. “I thought she brought it all here. She might have taken it with her to—” She cut herself off.

  The sticky notes were Carrie’s calendar. Max spread them out by date if there was a date. She’d been home for two weeks. The sticky notes showed appointments, plans, her last days written in abbreviation.

  LUNCH WITH LINDY.

  No date. But sometime during the two weeks Carrie had been home from college, she’d had planned a lunch with Lindy Ames.

  And they both were dead.

  Max resisted the urge to box everything up and take it with her. But this was a police investigation. She said to Faith, “The police are going to want all of this.” She kept an old school paper to compare Carrie’s handwriting.

  “What happened?” Faith asked. It was hypothetical, but she still looked at Max for answers.

  Max didn’t respond. Instead she said, “If you think of anything else that happened the week Carrie was supposed to leave for Europe, call me.”

  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 sa
ddened 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, “Ellie, we are lucky.” I don’t believe in luck, but today, I feel greatly blessed.