Monster In The Closet (The Baltimore Series Book 5)

  ‘The lawyer?’ Stevie interrupted. ‘Mr Dawson?’

  Sienna shook her head. ‘No. This was long before she met my dad. This would have been her ex-boyfriend in high school.’

  ‘The one she was using me to get back at,’ Clay said, ‘back when we were only eighteen. That’s what Donna’s aunt told me.’

  Sienna nodded gravely. ‘Yes. So my mother lied the first time to get a divorce, but the lie grew and grew. Sometimes I wonder if she believed it herself, she told it so many times.’

  ‘But she told you the truth on her deathbed,’ Stevie said, her flat expression that of an interrogating cop.

  Sienna’s chin lifted ever so slightly. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘That was over a year and a half ago.’ Stevie’s voice bordered on harsh. ‘Why did it take you so damn long to come here?’

  ‘Stevie,’ Clay murmured.

  ‘No, she’s right,’ Sienna said, locking gazes with Stevie even though she continued to speak to him. ‘I didn’t come right away because I didn’t believe her at first. She was on heavy pain medication and nearly out of her mind at the very end. She’d also said that I shouldn’t forget to feed Rufus, and he’d died years before. I took her confession as a hallucination.’

  Stevie nodded. ‘All right. I can accept that. But eventually you believed her?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sienna said flatly. ‘After the funeral, after things started to get back to normal, I couldn’t get what she’d said out of my mind.’ She glanced at Clay. ‘I Googled you. I hadn’t done that before.’

  Stevie’s brows shot up. ‘Not even once? You weren’t even curious about what he looked like?’

  A huff of laughter that held no mirth. ‘I knew what he looked like. My mother used to show me his photo and said if I ever saw him to run and scream.’

  Clay felt the words stab his heart just as surely as if she’d used a knife. But she wasn’t finished.

  She dropped her gaze to the tabletop, her hair sliding forward to hide her features from view. ‘I saw your face in my dreams,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘In my nightmares. I’m so sorry.’

  New sorrow welled up within him. Pain that she’d feared him, but greater pain that she carried the burden of guilt when she never should have had either emotion. Only love.

  ‘I would have loved you,’ he whispered back, his voice breaking. ‘I would have loved you so much.’

  She nodded, her face still hidden, new tears falling to the tabletop. ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Did you tell Mr Dawson what your mother had told you?’ Stevie asked, more kindly now.

  Sienna was shaking her head. ‘Not at first. I couldn’t. Not even when I started to wonder if it could have been true. Because if it was true, it meant she’d lied to him too. Even when I was a kid, I knew what he’d given up for me. I’d always felt guilty for that, although I know he did it because he loves me. But our entire family was uprooted. We went from living in a nice house on a quiet street to living in the middle of nowhere and being homeschooled.’

  She looked up, her hair parting to reveal the intense pain flickering across her face. ‘I have three stepsisters, Dad’s daughters with his first wife, who also died. My youngest sister, Julie, has always needed physical therapy that she could have gotten in a bigger city, but we lived so far out that Dad had to hire a live-in therapist. My oldest sister, Carrie, ran away a few years into her “sentence in the East Bumfuck Pen”, as she called it, because she felt like she was in prison. She hated the ranch and ran away to LA. Fell in with a bad crowd and OD’d. She never made it to twenty years old.’

  Ford rested his hand on the middle of her back, and she gave him a grateful glance. ‘And your middle stepsister?’ Ford asked quietly.

  ‘Daisy’s my age. We did everything together because we were the only kids we knew. She’s also been terrified to let me out of her sight. All the cloak-and-dagger shit had her so anxious that she began to drink. A lot. Dad finally broke down and sent her to rehab because she was going down the same path that Carrie did. Now Daisy’s a recovering alcoholic at twenty-three years old. I was afraid to leave her alone to come here, but I had to get away. I had to know.’ She swallowed hard, met Clay’s eyes again, her devastation breaking his heart. ‘I had to see you. I had to know if you were good. And now all I can say is that I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sienna, stop,’ he whispered. ‘No more sorry, okay?’

  ‘But I am,’ she whispered back. ‘How can I not be?’

  Stevie sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry too. I’m sorry to hear about your sisters and the sacrifices Mr Dawson made. But I’ve had to watch this tear Clay to pieces and I need to understand why you took so long to find him. You said you Googled him. When?’

  Clay squeezed Stevie’s hand. ‘She’s not on trial here, babe. I know you’re doing the thinking for me now, and I appreciate it, but can you think a little less hostilely?’

  Stevie’s lips twitched. ‘Okay. I don’t mean to be hostile, Sienna.’

  Sienna’s jaw tightened. ‘Please call me Taylor. That’s my name.’

  Stevie blinked, her gaze cutting over to meet Clay’s. Clay shrugged. She hadn’t asked him to call her Taylor, had allowed him to call her Sienna without reproach. But it seemed he was going to be the only one allowed to do that.

  ‘All right,’ Stevie said quietly. ‘Taylor, when did you finally Google your father?’

  A muscle twitched under Sienna’s left eye. Just like me when I’m really pissed, Clay thought. It made him happy and sad all at once.

  ‘March, a year ago. There was a news story about you, Detective Mazzetti. Clay had been injured saving your life.’

  The whole mess came back to Clay in a rush – searching for the man who’d had Stevie’s first husband and son murdered ten years before, because that same man had resurfaced, targeting Stevie and Cordelia. They’d been lucky that everything had turned out all right. Stevie was safe. Cordy was safe. They loved him. The only thing missing had been Sienna.

  ‘I’m no longer a detective,’ Stevie told her. ‘I’m a PI now. I work with your dad.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Sienna sounded stiff but sincere. ‘I’m glad he has you to watch his back. Anyway, the article said he’d be okay, that he acted heroically and helped bring a murderer to justice. That didn’t sound like the man who’d been the monster in my closet for as long as I could remember. I dug a little more, but there wasn’t much media coverage.’ She glanced at Clay. ‘You keep yourself under the radar.’

  ‘Old habits,’ he said with a shrug.

  She nodded. ‘I get that. I did find pictures of you at a fundraiser with Daphne taken the year before. I thought you were her boyfriend. I figured you’d gotten over trying to find me and my mother since she was gone. That you’d gone on and found someone else. I was . . . relieved.’

  ‘Because you were still afraid,’ Ford murmured behind her, and Sienna turned in her chair to look up at him.

  ‘Yes.’ She drew a breath and spoke to Ford, although Clay knew the words were meant for him. ‘I still am. It takes a while to get past the pictures in your mind. Even when you know they’re not true.’

  Ford nodded once. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Stevie said bluntly, and Sienna pivoted in her chair to glare at her. ‘You Googled your father a year and five months ago. Why did you wait so long to find him?’

  Sienna flashed Stevie a look of muted anger that Clay understood too well. He was madder than hell about all this, but he couldn’t lash out. Donna wasn’t around and everyone else was a victim too. But that didn’t mean the rage disappeared, for him or for his daughter. Frankly, he was proud of her for her restraint. At her age, he’d have been punching holes in the walls.

  Maggie cleared her throat, speaking for the first time. ‘Or perhaps we should be asking wha
t made you decide to find him now?’

  Eight

  Hunt Valley, Maryland,

  Saturday 22 August, 5.40 P.M.

  Taylor pressed her fingertips to her left temple, a headache beginning to make her queasy again. This wasn’t going well. She understood Clay’s wife’s anger, but dammit, this wasn’t easy for any of them. The woman didn’t have to be such a bitch.

  Suddenly she wished she’d waited until her dad could have been there with her. But Ford had stuck like glue and for that she was grateful. She only hoped she could make Clay understand what had taken her so long. She didn’t care if Stevie Mazzetti understood or not.

  She turned to Clay wearily. ‘Six months ago, my mother’s account at the UPS store became overdue.’

  ‘You’re going to need to be more specific,’ Stevie snapped, back in interrogation mode.

  Taylor’s fuse popped. ‘And you’re going to need to back off, lady,’ she snarled, then felt instantly guilty at her outburst. Stevie’s expression darkened further, but Clay closed his eyes, looking like a man who was being cleaved in half. Which was exactly what Taylor had wanted to avoid like the goddamn plague. ‘I’m . . . I apologize. God.’

  ‘Let’s take a time-out, folks.’ Ford got up, fetched a bottle of pain reliever from the cupboard and shook out a few pills. ‘Take these,’ he said, handing them to Taylor, ‘and eat a cracker or two, or your stomach will make you pay.’

  ‘It’s already making me pay,’ she muttered but swallowed the pills, chasing them with a couple of saltines while everyone waited patiently – even the nine-year-old at the end of the table.

  Cordelia still had nightmares about her own brush with violence, Dillon had confided. A man with a gun. That hadn’t been in any of the articles Taylor had found when she’d researched Clay. She promised herself that she’d get the child help before she left.

  She polished off the crackers and some cheese Ford had insisted she eat. She whispered a thank you, calming further when he took her hand once again. He was a good guy, making this whole scene so much easier than it might otherwise have been, simply by being there.

  ‘Better?’ Ford asked. ‘Good,’ he said when she nodded. ‘Then maybe we can go back to “What made you decide to find him now?”’

  With a ‘back off, bitch’ glare at Stevie, Taylor turned to Clay to tell him the rest of the story. She owed him that much, at the very least.

  ‘As I was saying, six months ago, my mother’s account at the UPS mailbox store became overdue. This was over a year after her death. Since she’d had a box with them for so long, they gave her a three-month grace period. Finally, they called the house and I answered. This was in May. I told them she’d died two Decembers ago and they were stunned. They hadn’t even known she was sick.’

  Stevie frowned. ‘You can only pay mailboxes out twelve months ahead. It doesn’t matter if they’re UPS boxes or post office boxes – there’s a twelve-month limit. If she died in December, how did she pay her box ahead to the following February?’

  Of course the woman had hit the nail on the head. Taylor was annoyed, but underneath it she was grateful that Clay had someone so sharp in his corner.

  ‘She’d given the renewal checks to her aunt Laura in Oakland, who mailed them the month after my mother died. That’s when the yearly bill came due the first time. My mother had taken care of paying the bills and managing the ranch’s ledgers for years. She’d handed most of her responsibilities over to Aunt Laura a few months before she died so that my dad could continue to focus on running the ranch and taking care of us.’

  ‘Why did your aunt mail the check?’ Stevie pushed. ‘She could have simply canceled the box and anything addressed to your mother would have been returned to sender.’

  ‘I don’t know for certain,’ Taylor said, ‘but I can guess. My mother was very organized. She wrote checks for recurring expenses and put them in one of those accordion folders by the month they were due. I think Laura was still grieving a month after my mother died and maybe not thinking straight. Most of us weren’t thinking straight for a while.’

  ‘You just operated on autopilot,’ Ford said softly, giving her arm a quick stroke.

  ‘Exactly. Laura must have grabbed the letters in the January folder and mailed them. I didn’t know that she’d paid the bill. I didn’t know about the box period until the local store called me the following year. By then Aunt Laura had died too. She’d never canceled the box, and so, when nobody was left to pay the bill, the account came due. When I saw what was in the box, I knew that my mother really had lied and that she’d never intended to tell me the truth. For some reason, she changed her mind at the last minute.’ Taylor rubbed at her forehead. ‘That she did tell the truth at the end doesn’t clean her slate by any stretch, because you’re absolutely right. Her behavior was unforgivable. I’m not sure what more I can give you than that, Miss Mazzetti. Unless you want me to dig her up and spit on her corpse,’ she finished bitterly.

  Stevie flinched. ‘Sienna.’ She gave her head a shake. ‘Taylor. I’m sorry. I know she was your mother and I know you’re struggling with all this. I’m not being helpful, but I do need to understand how it happened. Clay deserves no less.’

  The change in the woman’s tone made Taylor’s eyes sting, but she didn’t want to cry anymore. Her head hurt enough already. ‘I know. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Sienna,’ Clay said quietly. ‘What was in the UPS box?’

  Taylor swallowed hard. ‘Cards and letters addressed to me. From you. Nine of them. The oldest was from the October before my mother died. I guess she got too sick to check the box out.’ She rubbed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘One birthday card, two Christmas cards, plus two from Valentine’s Day, Easter and Halloween.’ Taylor assumed there would have been a tenth card for her birthday at the end of August.

  She was so glad she hadn’t waited any longer to find out.

  Clay’s throat worked as he tried to swallow. ‘Did you read them?’

  ‘Yes.’ She’d meant to say it firmly, but the word came out hoarse with the same emotion she’d felt the first time she’d read them. Because in every single one he’d told her how much he loved her and how much he would love to meet her. Just once. It had broken her. She met his eyes squarely. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I sent a lot more. Plus wrapped gifts every year on your birthday and Christmas. Your mother always returned them, unopened. Cards, letters, gifts. All of it.’

  ‘For how long?’ she managed to ask.

  ‘Since I found out you existed. Well, since I found out where your mother had run to, anyway,’ he amended. She wondered how he’d discovered her existence, but he was going on before she could ask. ‘I’ve kept everything your mother sent back. I kept hoping I’d get to give them to you in person.’

  Taylor had thought her heart couldn’t break any more, but she was wrong. God, thinking about him writing all those cards for all those years . . . Her heart physically ached.

  ‘I never knew. I’m sorry.’ She shuddered. ‘I know I didn’t do anything, but I’m still sorry. Not just apologetic. I’m sorrowful. For both of us. I wish I’d known. There are times I am tempted to dig her up and spit on her corpse. The thing is . . . she wasn’t a bad person when it came to everything else. She took care of me. Played with me. Taught me to sew and knit and bandaged me up when I skinned my knees. I don’t understand where all that . . . meanness came from. I never saw it coming.’

  Clay smiled sadly. ‘You were a tomboy?’ he asked, ignoring the rest.

  ‘Yeah. Still am. It helped growing up on a ranch. Did you say you have all the letters?’

  He nodded. ‘In my attic. Would you like to see them?’

  She managed a nod.

  ‘Then I’ll bring them to you. Tomorrow.’

  Taylor opened her mouth to
reply, but Stevie held up her hand.

  ‘Hold on,’ Stevie said. ‘You saw the letters in May. This is August.’

  Taylor really wanted to roll her eyes, but she fought the urge. ‘I’m cautious, okay?’ she snapped. ‘I still didn’t know anything about him and I especially didn’t know if he was a nice person. And I didn’t know how to approach him. It wasn’t like I could walk up to him with my hand out and say, “Hey, Pop, you’re my long-lost daddy. Let’s be friends.”’

  Stevie drew a breath, hissed it out through her teeth. ‘Yes, you could have! And you should have! Do you know what your being cautious has cost him? Every damn day you waited because you were too cautious has killed him. Don’t you understand that?’

  Taylor’s mouth fell open, unable to conjure a response to the woman’s unleashed fury. But it turned out that she didn’t have to respond, because Cordelia did it for her.

  ‘Leave her alone, Mama.’

  Everyone’s gaze swung to the end of the table where Cordelia sat, still in Maggie’s lap. Maggie looked as surprised as any of them.

  ‘Not everyone can make their nightmares go away like that.’ Cordelia snapped her small fingers, looking like a queen on a throne. But then she seemed to realize that she’d actually said the words aloud and curled into herself. ‘You don’t know how it is, Mama,’ she said softly. ‘You’re never afraid. You’re brave. But the rest of us . . . We’re afraid.’ She lifted her little chin, all the more heartbreaking because it quivered. ‘I think Taylor or Sienna or whatever her name is . . . I think she’s brave. She came all this way by herself even though she was scared. Clay’s not yelling and he was hurt the most, so don’t yell at her anymore.’ A beat of silence. ‘Please,’ she whispered, then looked at the faces around the table uneasily. ‘I’m done now.’

  Maggie huffed a surprised laugh. ‘Out of the mouths of babes, Stevie. You’ve raised this girl well. I think you should listen to her.’

  But Stevie was staring at Cordelia, her eyes filled with horror. ‘You still have nightmares?’