Page 62 of Deserving Maisy
“To answer that, I need to go back in time…” Maisy started.
“My parents were rich. They’d invested well and Dad had a good job in Silicon Valley. They moved to Seattle when I was little, bought a big house where my dad worked remotely. Hired a few people to help around the place, and were very generous with their money in the community. Jason is seven years older than me and he seemed happy, even though he had to leave all his friends behind when we moved.
“When I was around fourteen, Jason started to change. He was about to graduate from college and Mom and Dad were on his case about doing something with his life, but he was content to stay on his friends’ couches and stuff. Things seemed tense between him and our parents, but honestly, I was too into my own stuff to pay attention. Typical teen. I wasn’t part of the popular crowd or anything, but I had a few good friends I loved to hang out with.
“When I was fifteen, I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house when my parents were killed. Jason came to my friend’s and got me and brought me home. He told me that Mom and Dad had been out to dinner and when theywent back to their car, someone shot them and stole their vehicle. Dad died instantly, but Mom lived long enough to crawl over to his side and was found with her hand on his head. The police think she was trying to stop the bleeding.”
Maisy ignored the sympathetic noises coming from the men. They wouldn’t last, and she didn’t want to feel their concern and then have to give it up once they heard the entire story.
“The cops didn’t find their killer or killers. There was no physical evidence at the scene, no bullet casings, no blood other than from my parents, no fingerprints on either of them. There wasn’t even any surveillance video because the restaurant’s cameras were broken or something. So no one ever answered for their deaths.
“I didn’t take it well. I was hysterical at the thought of never seeing them again. Jason moved back into the house and became my legal guardian. He took care of me, making sure I saw doctors for my depression and anxiety. I couldn’t go to school…couldn’t make myself care aboutanything. I dropped out, but Jason helped me study for the GED test. I passed, barely, but I wasn’t interested in going to college anyway.
“The first twelve years after my parents’ deaths are a fuzzy blur because I was taking so many meds. They made it impossible to care about what was going on around me. I didn’t have to worry about anything because Jason was there. My parents had life insurance policies, and Jason got his money right away. I assumed he used my portion to pay for my expenses…drugs, medicals bills, that sort of stuff. But honestly, I was too drugged to ask.
“When I was around twenty-two, Jason met a girl. Hername was Martha. I liked her. She was shy and sweet. She helped me get a little stronger, and I was able to stop taking some of the daily meds I’d been on for so long. She and Jason got married down at the courthouse, and she didn’t seem to have a lot of friends, so she and I hung out a lot. But around four months after she and Jason got married…she disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?” Pipe asked.
“One day she was there, and the next she was gone. All her things were gone too. Her purse, a suitcase of clothes, the jewelry Jason had given her. The police investigated, but with all their other cases, and with no evidence of foul play, eventually I think they simply wrote her off as an adult deciding to leave her husband. She had no family to encourage the police to keep looking into things.”
“Yourbrotherdidn’t do that?” Brick asked.
“At the time, I thought he was too upset and humiliated that she’d left him. He’d hinted at the possibility of her cheating with someone else, and I thought he wasn’t willing to stoop to begging for her to come back.”
“And now?”
Maisy turned toward Owl. Jack was sitting next to him…on the other side of the table from her. When she’d sat down, and saw Jack pull up the chair next to his friend, as far away from her as he could get, it hurt. A lot. But she wasn’t surprised. She’d known this day would come from the first lie that passed her lips.
“As I said in the beginning, my parents had a lot of money. It was split between the two of us upon their deaths. But my parents were…quirky. They believed in soul mates, and they wanted their kids to experience the kind of true love that they had. So in order to try to help us find it, the money they left us had strings attached.” She didn’t wait for someone to ask what those strings were before continuing.
“In order to access the money in our trusts, we had to be married for at least three months. Only then would we be able to have it released. There’s a monthly stipend that we got, whether we were married or not, but the bulk of the money was only accessible after we were married.”
“Ah…” Tiny said with a knowing look in his eye.
Maisy felt her cheeks heat. She knew what these men were thinking. That she was a money-grubbing bitch who’d come up with a plan to access her fortune.
They were so far off it wasn’t even funny. But why would they believe her? All evidence was pointing toward the fact that she was exactly what they probably thought.
“So your brother got married and after gaining access to his money…his wife disappeared?” Jack asked.
Maisy nodded.
“Convenient,” Tonka mused.
“Not for Martha,” Maisy couldn’t help but say. Then she sighed. “He killed her.” The three words felt heavy in the room, but the weight that had settled on her shoulders from the moment she’d realized what her brother had probably done, suddenly lifted. She wasn’t sure anyone would believe her, but at least she was sharing her suspicions at last.
“I don’t know how the murder actually took place, but one day, very shortly after she went missing, Jason hired someone to put in that basketball court in our backyard. It was weird, my brother isn’t exactly the athletic type. But a company came, dug a big hole, then it rained for days and days, as it does in Washington. They came backabout a week later and filled it in and put the concrete pad over it, but I think Jason put Martha’s body in that hole.”
“Why?” Spike asked. “It seems risky to put a body in a hole someone else is going to fill in.”
“I know. I never said it was a smart plan. But I woke up one night after a nightmare and went downstairs to the kitchen. He was coming in from the back covered in mud. He yelled at me and told me to get back upstairs. I think he was preparing to move her body to that hole. And her stuff too. Martha wasn’t a big woman, only a little over five feet. I think he put her in there, maybe even digging a little deeper so the contractors wouldn’t notice, covered her up with some of the dirt the excavators had removed to create the hole, and then when the contractors came back, they helped him by filling in the hole with concrete and putting that stupid basketball court over it. I think he went out like three times after that to shoot hoops, and that was it.”
“But you have no proof,” Jack said.
Maisy forced herself to meet his eyes and shrugged. She had something thatmightbe proof, but wasn’t sure it was enough.
The room was silent, and it felt as if she and Jack were the only ones in the world. She wanted him to believe her. To trust that she wasn’t simply lying to cover her own ass. When he averted his gaze, her heart dropped.
