The family doesn’t want you …
Who’d called in the message? Detective Beck? Max didn’t think so, even though he’d said almost the same thing to her at the funeral. He’d had no problem getting in her face before, he would have left a belligerent voice mail, or used his name with the threat of tossing her in prison. That it had come in not more than an hour after she left Olivia Langstrom Ward’s house made Max wonder who Olivia called after she left. Was she still close to the Ames family? Or had Max been followed?
Or it could have been Andy. He’d been so … odd … last night when he crashed her dinner. He hadn’t taken well her threat to stir things up.
Someone was speaking for the Ames family. Generally, Max avoided the immediate family during an investigation unless they had invited her in—until she got to the point of needing to talk to them. This time, however, she would make an exception. Though Gerald and Kimberly Ames would never get over Lindy’s death—Max had rarely found a parent who found any true peace after their child was murdered—enough time had passed that Max didn’t feel like she’d be intruding.
She wanted to know if the family told someone to send her out of town. If they simply didn’t want to be reminded of the tragedy, Max could assuage their concern about what she was going to do—which, right now, was nothing but uncovering the truth. She had no intention of writing an article or a book on Lindy Ames’s murder. But if either Gerald or Kimberly Ames was hiding something—information or evidence that pointed to a motive or killer—then Max wanted to make sure they knew she would find out exactly what they didn’t want to get out. She might want to talk to them separately. She’d have better luck with Gerald than Kimberly—Kimberly had never particularly liked Max, but she truly hated her after Kevin’s arrest. In many ways, Max couldn’t blame her for that. If she was a mother, she might have felt the same way.
She left quickly, not wanting to be late to dinner, but needing to make a stop. Since she had decided to review Lindy’s case, and everyone thought that’s why she was here anyway, why be discreet? She’d find out who had left that message before the night was over.
Max did not take well to threats, subtle or otherwise.
She drove into the town of Atherton, nostalgia taking her by surprise.
Her childhood had not been all bad. And honestly, most people who didn’t know her would think she was a fool to even think she had it rough. Certainly, she’d never wanted for necessities, at least from the time she was left with her grandparents. A beautiful home, a high-quality education, never any fear that she wouldn’t be able to go to college for lack of money. She’d been given a car on her sixteenth birthday, and had traveled around the world before she was eighteen.
Sometimes, growing up, she’d felt guilty for wanting more. For wanting to know why her mother left her. Wanting to know who her father was—and why her mother had lied to her about him. Why the birthday cards stopped after she turned sixteen. Why her uncle Brooks hated her so much he could barely look at her. Before she’d exposed his adultery. Before she’d been given one-fifth of her great-grandmother’s estate. He’d hated her from the minute Martha Revere showed up on Thanksgiving and surprised the family with Max.
She drove past the elementary school she’d attended through eighth grade, a small private school that fed into Atherton Prep. ACP was one of the most expensive but rigorous schools on the West Coast. Two decades before Max started, it had been an all-boys school that included boarding, but that had all changed. It had grown in size to more than five hundred students, but still graduated overachievers who went on to study at Stanford, Harvard, USC, MIT, and more. Lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, inventors, investors, authors, professors.
There were subtle differences between East Coast old money and West Coast old money that Max had never appreciated until she moved to New York City. One key difference was household staff—in the west, particularly the old money of Atherton, families didn’t have full-time, live-in help. Max’s great-grandmother Genie was the only person she knew who had two live-in household staff, but her stately mansion—where her uncle Brooks now lived with his much-younger second wife and five-year-old daughter—needed full-time maintenance. Max hadn’t been there since the family, who controlled the Sterling family trust, voted to allow Brooks to live there. She’d been the sole dissenting vote—and Brooks thought it was because she didn’t respect him.
She supposed that was part of it.
Max wouldn’t have had to stay at a hotel if Brooks wasn’t given Genie’s home, even if temporarily. Genie had always wanted the grounds to be for the family—there were twenty-two rooms in the main house, a guesthouse with three bedrooms, an apartment over the garage, and the small two-bedroom caretaker’s house. Now Brooks treated it as if it were his property and Max dreaded seeing what he and his wife had done to it.
She was still trying to find a legal way to remove him from the house.
She couldn’t bear to pass the Sterling property, so she drove the long way around until she reached the Ames spread on the far east side of town. There were no sidewalks in Atherton, but horse trails paralleled many of the streets, the yards of the spacious lots kept trim and tidy.