Parrish

by Shannen Crane Camp

  Logan finally came into the room. “Dad?” he called, making Anthony jump. “Are you going to get the door?”

  “You know you’re not supposed to be in my office,” Anthony said coldly to his son.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Sorry, I was just showing my friend around the house.” He sounded like a typical teenager talking to his father and not like a rich future lawyer talking to a possible descendant of a murderer.

  “Well, I think it’s time for your friend to go home,” Anthony answered, still standing too close to Brighton.

  She was managing to keep her face pretty neutral, considering her tenuous circumstances.

  Deacon knocked on the door again, this time much louder, causing the three people in the study to jump at the sound.

  “Deacon, come back to the Jeep. Brighton’s going to get out just fine now, and we don’t need you screwing this situation up any more,” I said.

  But it was too late. Logan was leading Brighton to the front door with Anthony following close behind them. Deacon was already raising his hand to knock again, when the front door opened. Logan and Deacon stared at each other for a moment in silence.

  “Say something,” I whispered frantically into my mic.

  “Brighton,” Deacon said, sounding very odd with his fake American accent, “Mom freaked out when she saw that you weren’t at your friend’s house like you were supposed to be, so she sent me to get you.”

  “What?” Logan asked in confusion.

  “GPS on the phone,” Deacon explained. “Our mom is a little on the crazy side.”

  “Why are you all sweaty?” Logan looked like he didn’t quite buy that Deacon and Brighton were siblings.

  Brighton, though silent, looked like she might kiss Deacon for rescuing her.

  “Sorry, I just came from a party. It was a little stuffy.” He turned his attention back to Brighton. “Hurry up. I’ve got my friends waiting in the car and I don’t need to be chauffeuring my little sister around all night in front of them.”

  When did the people in our little group become such amazing actors?

  “I can take her home,” Logan said.

  Anthony was standing behind the pair in the doorway and watching the whole scene unfold, which was lucky for us. If he’d been alone in the study, he would have definitely looked inside of his safe and found his documents missing. Then we’d really be in trouble.

  “It’s all right, I’ll just go with him,” Brighton finally managed to say. “My mom will freak out if I don’t get back home now. But thank you so much for a lovely night. We’ll have to do it again sometime.” She didn’t bother to point out that he didn’t have her number or any way to reach her.

  Brighton walked quickly through the front door, passing Deacon and making a beeline for the Jeep. She hardly managed to keep herself from running across the street as Deacon followed close behind her.

  “Everyone keep it together for five more seconds and I’ll get us out of here,” Jefferson said.

  As Brighton and Deacon hopped in the back seat, I looked back at the Craftsman house. Jefferson started up the car as Logan and his father argued about something, but as soon as Logan stormed upstairs, Anthony headed into his study.

  “Jefferson, he’s going to look in the safe,” I said. “You need to get us out of here now.”

  Luckily, Jefferson didn’t need to be told twice to speed away from his crime scene. Taking too much joy in his excuse to drive fast, he hightailed it from the home and back toward our hotel room.

  “As soon as we get to the hotel, run inside, grab all of our stuff and bring it back into the Jeep,” he said. “We can’t stay there tonight in case Anthony’s looking for us. We need to stay somewhere a ways out of town. I don’t want to risk getting murdered by that guy.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Thank you for saving me back there,” Brighton whispered to Deacon in the back seat. “I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was stand there and try not to pass out.”

  “That’s the story of my life, so I knew a kindred spirit,” Deacon joked, although I knew he was basking in Brighton’s adoration like a cat in a patch of sun. “And for the record . . . in case anyone is wondering. Books flying off shelves means I’ve seen the error of my ways. Ghosts are real.”

  I rolled my eyes at his revelation. “You think?”

  Chapter 30

  “Should we open the envelope to see if it really warranted breaking and entering?” I asked Jefferson. I was still clutching the muddy envelope to my ruined dress.

  “Not yet. I want to focus on getting out of Kingston before we bother going over the contents of the envelope,” he said. “Besides, Anthony seems like a pretty powerful man. I only want us to make one trip to and from the hotel room so we can get out of here as fast as possible. I don’t know how long it’ll take him to figure out who we are and where to find us.”

  “Would you give the whole ‘murderer’ thing a rest?” I said. “Just because you think his ancestor might have been a murderer doesn’t mean Anthony is a horrible guy.”

  “Says the girl who hid in his garden because she was afraid of what he might do to her if he found her,” Jefferson answered.

  I was about to make up an excuse about how Anthony was a lawyer and I was more worried about the legal ramifications of what I was doing, but Jefferson would see right through that lie.

  Pulling into the hotel parking lot, we all did a wordless scan of the surrounding area before hopping out of the Jeep, sprinting to our hotel room, and emptying the contents back into our Jeep. It was amazing how efficiently we worked when we were all scared for our lives.

  Brighton eyed my mud-stained dress but didn’t comment on how I’d ruined the one nice thing I owned. I think she was just grateful to not be stuck in Anthony’s library anymore. She continuously shot Deacon little smiles when they passed each other with armfuls of equipment.

  We were able to get our things out of the hotel room in record time, and after Jefferson dropped our room keys off at the front desk, we sped away from Kingston, hoping Anthony wasn’t as connected as he seemed to be. It was a good thirty minutes before Deacon finally broke the tense silence that had fallen over us.

  “You know, Brighton, in another life, you would have made an excellent gold digger.”

  Brighton let out a relieved little laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever need a career change,” she said.

  Jefferson shook his head in the driver’s seat but said nothing to the exchange happening in the back.

  “We’re going to need to stop and get gas soon,” I said. “Maybe we can look through the envelope too?”

  Jefferson stayed silent but let his eyes scan our current surroundings from what little we could see in the illumination of our headlights. We were in Palenville, about thirty minutes from Kingston, and while I didn’t think we were nearly far enough away from Anthony to really feel safe, I was dying to look inside of the envelope. In my hands, I held the one reason we had gone to four different locations around the United States on the word of a letter from who knew where. All I wanted was to see what all of the trouble was for.

  Jefferson pulled into a small parking lot of an old building with a sign identifying it as a library. There were no other cars in the lot, but Jefferson cut the lights and engine on the Jeep, casting us into darkness and hopefully taking us off the radar of any crazy, vengeful lawyers covering up a murder from the 1900s.

  Jefferson turned to me with a hungry look of excitement in his huge eyes, illuminating the inside of the Jeep with his phone. “Let’s open it. I want to know why we were given this mystery.”

  Grinning back at him and feeling slightly giddy at the prospect of actually solving a mystery using our paranormal investigating skills, I opened the envelope and pulled a large stack of papers out.

  “A bit anticlimactic,” Deacon said. “Why couldn’t you open the envelope and have a trillion-dollar
bill fall out?”

  “Not sure that’s a real thing,” Brighton said.

  “Still, who wants to go through all of this to solve a mystery and then find out they have to sort through a stack of paperwork as well?” Deacon went on. “Not very exciting is all I’m saying.”

  I looked down at the stack of papers in my hands with pursed lips. It definitely wasn’t an exciting prospect to have to sift through documents to see if we’d committed a crime for no reason at all. Holding the weighty stack, I almost wondered if we’d all been crazy to go on this ghost hunt in the first place. It could have very easily been an elaborate prank.

  If that were the case, though, we wouldn’t have found evidence of the paranormal at every location, linking this historic story between Eva and Thatcher. I was almost positive no one could have faked what we found at the Bray house, no matter how elaborate their prank was.

  “Let’s just split it up and go through it like we did with Eva’s letters.” I gave everyone in the car a small stack of papers. “The second you find something that proves we were justified in breaking into Anthony’s house, let me know. Otherwise, we might need a lawyer.”

  “I wouldn’t last in jail,” Brighton said with a shudder. “They’d eat me alive. Plus I don’t know that they’d let me sanitize my cell before moving in.”

  “Jefferson can just call Alistair if we really need a lawyer. I’m sure he’d love to help,” Deacon said.

  “He wouldn’t love to help,” Jefferson assured us. “But I know enough of his dirty little secrets to get him kicked out of the Temple family, so he’d help us whether he wanted to or not.”

  “Your family sounds wonderful,” I said sarcastically.

  I was already flipping through my own stack of documents that seemed to consist of contracts and agreements regarding Thatcher’s share of the law firm between himself and Mr. Meyer.

  “They’re something,” he responded, also lost in his own stack of papers. “Just hope you never meet them.”

  We went quiet, the sound of ruffling papers the only thing breaking the silence.

  “I think I might have found something,” I said after a moment. “It looks like Jefferson was pretty much spot-on with his theory, from what I can tell.”

  “Did you ever doubt me?” he asked.

  I rolled my eyes. “The only way Mr. Meyer would take possession of the entire law firm was if Thatcher had no children to inherit his portion of the firm, or if Meyer bought him out. I found several accounts of failed financial offers to buy Thatcher out, but it looks like he wasn’t budging. He didn’t want to get pushed out of his firm.”

  “And he did have an heir,” Jefferson said.

  “That somehow Thatcher didn’t know about because Meyer covered the whole thing up, let Eva die, and had the baby put up for adoption,” I added. “So the only way for Meyer to take control of the whole law firm—which was doing quite well by that point—was to buy Thatcher out.”

  “But Thatcher didn’t want to be bought out,” Brighton said.

  “So the only way for Meyer to get the law firm was if it was willed to him.”

  “I’m guessing Thatcher wouldn’t will it to Meyer,” Jefferson said. “I mean, unless he really wanted Meyer to have a good motive to murder him for his share in the firm.”

  “Unless Meyer somehow changed his will and then killed Thatcher,” I said. “If he did that, it would look like he had inherited the law firm through completely legal means. Although, unless you guys are finding more direct evidence, these offers to buy Thatcher out still aren’t enough to go on. We’re kind of grasping at straws.”

  “There is the fact that my so-called obsession with Korean dramas might have paid off,” Brighton added from the back seat.

  “What?” I asked

  “You guys thought I was crazy when I said the necklace we found in Texas was relevant. But look what I found.” Brighton held a paper in front of her with a triumphant smile. “A letter from Eva Castillo to Edward Meyer refusing his marriage proposal. As in E.C. and E.M. from the necklace.”

  “No way,” I said, refusing to believe our mystery was that much like a soap opera.

  But as I read over the letter written from Eva, I couldn’t deny that this whole thing was starting to look more and more like a romance novel turned murder mystery.

  “E.C. and E.M.,” I said with a short laugh. “Meyer knew Eva. And proposed to her at some point either before or after Thatcher knew her.”

  “I’d say greed is already a pretty heavy motivator for murder,” Deacon said. “But greed, love, and revenge is even better.”

  I looked up at Jefferson for his take on the matter, but he was staring at his own stack of papers with a furrowed brow, looking overly concerned about something. His large eyes flicked up to mine in a searching way, and then back down to the papers.

  “What?” I asked.

  He looked up to meet my eyes once more. “Sade, what did you say your mom’s maiden name was?”

  “Vasquez,” I answered. “Why?”

  “Does the name Dante Vasquez sound familiar to you?”

  “Not at all,” I said, understanding where he was going with this. “Let me guess, Dante Vasquez is Eva’s child’s name?”

  “His adopted name, yes,” Jefferson said. “What about Diego Vasquez?”

  “Jefferson, stop it.” I knew he wanted a good mystery, but now he was really stretching to find an answer.

  “Do you know that name?”

  “That’s my grandpa’s name,” I said, albeit reluctantly. I didn’t need to give him any more fuel on the fire of crazy he was currently burning. “But it’s not that uncommon. It’s like John Smith for Americans.”

  “Sadie, I think there might be a really good reason we were set on this trail,” Jefferson tried again.

  I wasn’t having it. “The name thing is a pretty amazing coincidence, I can admit that. But some typical Cuban name in our mystery doesn’t automatically link it to my family.”

  Brighton and Deacon were watching the exchange with concerned looks on their faces, and I could tell the insanity was spreading. Jefferson was slowly convincing our group that I was Eva’s long lost great (many-times-over) granddaughter. I needed to stop his crazy.

  “I’m sure the name is very common,” Jefferson agreed. He was trying to appease me at least a little, since I’m sure he could see the annoyance growing in my features. “But then why does Anthony have pictures of you and Michigan in his file?”

  I ignored the chill that traveled down my spine. “Give me that.”

  There was no way this mystery was linked to my family. It was too much of a coincidence.

  “Where did our letters come from?” Brighton asked.

  Jefferson handed me the picture. It was an older picture of Michigan and me that my mom had taken. I’d guess that Michigan had posted it online. It was either that, or Anthony was much creepier than he was already proving to be and had somehow gotten it from our personal files. In the picture, Michigan beamed her perfect smile as she stood with her arm around me. I had long hair and was wearing an awful camouflage shirt to go along with my forced thin-lipped smile. It may not have been recent, but it was definitely us.

  “Someone who knew Sadie was Eva’s heir had to have dropped the letters off at our apartments that night,” Deacon said.

  “But why would they remain anonymous?” Brighton asked. “Why not just tell us who they were and what they were trying to accomplish?”

  I interrupted her. “If my mom is the rightful heir to Thatcher’s fortune and half of his law firm, and Anthony knew about my family this whole time, then he also knew the truth and knew where his money from his family was supposed to go?”

  “And he said nothing,” Jefferson said.

  “When that letter we got said we’d be compensated financially, they meant my family would inherit the money they were supposed to get back in the 1900s after Thatcher died?�
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  “I’d guess so,” he answered with a nod. “I’m not sure if Anthony knows about the murder plot. But I’m sure he knew enough to know that his family fortune had been obtained through some shady dealings. Things that would look bad for him if they came to light. Which is why he hid the documents all these years.”

  “Ignorance is bliss I guess,” I mumbled. “And he had a lot of bliss to comfort him in the form of my family’s money.”

  “But don’t you have aunts and uncles as well?” Brighton asked. “Why, out of all of the descendants of Eva and Thatcher, would this random person pick you to give the letter to?” She paused, as if realizing she might have questioned my importance in this matter, and then quickly added, “No offense.”

  “Most of my aunts and uncles are on my dad’s side. I have a few on my mom’s side, but the Vasquez family has been pretty unlucky in the family arena. They just never had many kids . . . which I guess is kind of odd, given our culture. You’d think my mom would value family a bit more since she doesn’t have much of one. But that still doesn’t answer the question of where the letters came from. Who gave us this mystery in the first place?”

  “Thatcher’s ghost,” Deacon said, with an overly dramatic quality to his voice.

  “That’s as good a guess as I have,” I said. “I mean . . . obviously it wasn’t his ghost, but it might as well have been since the sender left us absolutely no way to locate them.”

  “Maybe it was a good Samaritan,” Jefferson suggested.

  “So, Sadie, you’re kind of rich now.” A grin broke out across Brighton’s face. “You don’t have to be a waitress anymore!”

  “Let’s not get crazy,” I said, stopping her in her tracks. “First off, I probably won’t see any of this money since it’ll go to my living aunts and uncles and my mom. Michigan and I will have to wait to inherit it. Second, we don’t even know how to get these documents into the right hands. Who would believe us if we told them this story? How would we even go about getting the fortune without getting arrested for breaking into Anthony’s house in the first place? We’d need a pretty good lawyer to keep us out of jail.”