Page 63 of Deserving Maisy
“So your brother allegedly killed his wife after he got his money. Where does Stone come in?” Owl asked.
“Right,” Maisy said, forcing herself to continue. This was the hard part. “So he was happy for a while. Jason had lots of money and he didn’t have to work for it. But justlike he made his way through the life insurance payouts, eventually he spent all the money he got from his trust.”
“How much?” Brick interrupted.
“Four million.”
Brick whistled low. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah. And he didn’t like that he couldn’t spend willy-nilly anymore. He had my monthly stipend, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Wait—yourmonthly stipend?” Jack asked.
Maisy nodded. “Since I was a minor when our parents died, he arranged for it to be deposited into his account, which was legal at the time because he was my guardian. And when I turned eighteen, I was in no shape mentally to manage it myself. So it continued to go into his account. By the time I started to get better, not taking as many of the drugs and had the presence of mind to ask, years had passed, and he told me he’d been using the money to make sure I had everything I needed. Food, a roof over our heads, medicine, paying Paige’s salary…things like that. He insisted I still wasn’t ready to take care of that stuff on my own.”
“So all these years, he’s been stealing your money too,” Tiny said.
Maisy looked down at the table and shrugged. “It wasn’t as if I needed it. But after Martha disappeared, and he spent all his money…he stopped administering all of my drugs. Started encouraging me to find a boyfriend.” She sighed. “I guess he needed me clearheaded if he wanted to marry me off.
“I wasn’t interested in any of that. I’d barely left our house in years, I knewnothingabout dating. But he signed me up for some dating sites anyway, arranged for me tomeet some guys. He had the men come to the house, and it wasbeyondawkward. I didn’t like any of them, they only seemed interested in sex, not a relationship. Jason didn’t care, he kept pushing me to stop being such a prude. But I didn’t want any of those men.”
“So he went out and found you a husband,” Brick concluded.
Maisy couldn’t read the expression on his face, and she refused to look at Jack. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I don’t know how he did it. I mean, he has some really horrible friends, but I never thought he, or they, would do what they did.”
“Friends like Don Coffey?” Tiny asked.
“Yes.”
“Who?” Owl asked.
“Don Coffey. Ryleigh found texts and emails between him and Maisy’s brother. He wasn’t the guy he worked with to kidnap Stone. But they did other shit together. Sick stuff, like drugging women in bars and taking them to motels, leaving them there to wake up alone with no memory of the night before.”
“Assholes,” Spike muttered.
Maisy couldn’t agree more. She hadn’t known her brother and Don were doing stuff like that. It made her sick and even more ashamed of herself for not going to the police sooner. For letting her brother manipulate her so thoroughly.
“Why didn’t this Don guy marry her?” Spike asked. “If Jason wanted to get his hands on her money, why not just have one of his friends do it?”
“Because then someone else would know,” Maisy said. “I thought about that too. Don’s horrible. He was alwayssaying crude things to me, touching me when Jason wasn’t around. But if my brother had to pay Don to marry me, he’d have to tell him why, and then probably have to share some of my inheritance with him as well. And Jason’s greedy. He wouldn’t want to have to pay any more than necessary.”
“So, he arranged to have someone kidnapped. To what? Force him to marry you? That shit doesn’t happen today. Maybe back in the old days with shotgun weddings, but today? No way,” Owl said with a shake of his head.
“What was he going to do if I didn’t have amnesia?” Jack asked.
Maisy forced herself to look at him. He was the wronged party here, not her.Hewas the one who’d been kidnapped and lied to. She’d had plenty of time to separate herself from her brother, and she hadn’t. “Shotgun weddings might not be a thing today, but he wouldn’t have hesitated to hold a gun to your head, or mine, to make you go through with it.”
Her words were calm, but Maisy’s heart was beating a mile a minute, and she felt a little light-headed. But she forced herself to continue.
“All he needed was your signature on that marriage certificate. Once he had that, he would’ve locked you in the safe room in our basement for three months, until I signed the papers to accept my inheritance, and then he would’ve killed you.”
The room went electric.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Holy shit.”
“No fucking way!”
