Authors: Magda Alexander
CHAPTER 26
Trenton
I jar awake from the depths of sleep. Someone’s buzzing from the entrance to the condo. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Fuck. I grab my phone and tap the app that connects to the cameras fixed on the card reader. What I see there freezes the blood in my veins. Madrigal, clutching her stomach, bawling. In a panic, I buzz her in and take the elevator to the ground floor. She’s standing by the door, sobbing her heart out, with one of the security guards watching over her.
“Mr. Steele, I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay, Bob. I’ll take it from here.”
She falls into my arms, a lost waif in torn jeans, hair tossed every which way. The classy debutante look is no more. We ride the elevator up to my apartment with her clinging to me.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” I run my hands up and down her body, looking for the source of her injury.
She clutches at me. “I think m-my fa-father k-killed my mother.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That can’t be right. But her ravaged face tells me otherwise. I pick her up and carry her to the living room where I gently settle her on the couch. I tuck back her hair so that I can see her eyes. The look in them—Christ Almighty—brings me to my knees. “Why do you think that?”
“I f-found my m-mother’s diary. He beat her, raped her.” She buries her head in my neck, crying as if her heart is breaking.
God. What a mess. “I’m so sorry.” How could such a thing be true? By all accounts, they appeared to be a loving couple. But if there’s something I’ve learned in my life, appearances can be deceiving. “Where is the diary?”
“L-left it at home. D-didn’t want it n-near me. Filthy, vile thing.”
Damn. She should have brought it with her. We could have studied it for clues. But I can’t blame her for leaving it behind, not with the awful secrets it contains. We’ll retrieve it in the morning. Right now she’s my priority. She’s in shock. I don’t know how she managed to drive here in the state she’s in. I grab a fleece throw from the hall closet, wrap it around her. Pour two fingers of Dewar’s scotch into a glass and hand it to her. She gulps it down, coughs.
I take the glass from her hand and gather her body in my arms once more. She’s still shaking, but at least the wild-eyed look has vanished. “Tell me how you came to find the diary.”
In fits and starts, she pours out the story. Olivia telling her about the trunk. Madrigal finding her mother’s things, discovering a false bottom with the diaries hidden inside. Racing to her room to read the last journal in private. And then finding out the awful truth.
“I ne-never knew. How could I not know?”
“Parents hide things from their children all the time.” Like my mother did. She left one day and never came back, abandoning my brother and me to the tender mercies of our abusive father.
“I loved him. I thought he was the best father in the world.”
“There’s no satisfactory answer to this. Not now. We’ll have to dig for the truth.”
She curls around me, resting her head on my shoulder. I rub her back until her measured breathing tells me she’s fallen asleep. Carefully I tend to her, tucking the blanket around her before rising from the couch.
I pour two more fingers of the scotch and knock it back, all the while keeping my eye on her. She’s fast asleep. No wonder. Gut-wrenching emotions take a toll on your body. In the distance the sun’s peeking over the clouds. It will be light soon. While the first pink and golden rays skip over the Potomac, I try to make sense of things. Even if he knew there was something wrong with his daughter’s marriage, the old man won’t talk. He’s too proud to tarnish the legacy of his name. But there’s one person who should know something about the Berkeleys. Mitchell Brooks. Yesterday at the picnic, I discovered his relationship to her family is a lot closer than he let on. Holden wouldn’t have made him a trustee to his granddaughters’ trusts otherwise.
I always wondered why he never married. Now and then he dated, but he never seemed serious about any of them. I believed him to be a confirmed bachelor, but Joss hinted he’d fallen for a married woman. Could that woman have been Madrigal’s mother? He cares a great deal for Madrigal and Madison, which means he spent time with them and their parents. Obviously, he’s a trusted family friend. But could there be something more to it? About a dozen years ago he’d become distracted, as if he was grieving about something. I’d been so full of myself about a big win on a case that I hadn’t bothered to ask what was going on with him. Madrigal’s parents died twelve years ago, so it makes sense that he was grieving for friends. But is there more to it than that? Well, there’s only one way to find out.
It’s close to six and Sunday to boot, but Mitch’s an early riser, and chances are I won’t be waking him. I walk into the study so that I won’t disturb Madrigal and give him a call. Sure enough, he picks up on the second ring. “Trenton. Awfully early to be calling.”
“I knew you’d be up.” Fuck if I apologize, not when I suspect he’s been keeping secrets.
He must have caught the tension in my voice, because his own turns wary. “Something’s wrong.”
I can’t tell him Madrigal’s tale. At least not yet. So I’ll need to get what I need from him another way. “Yesterday’s events got me thinking.”
“About?”
“Madrigal’s mother and you.”
“What do you mean?” His voice vibrates with emotion.
Just as I suspected, he’s hiding things from me. “You’ve been keeping a secret, a big secret.”
There’s a pregnant pause at his end. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Son of a bitch. He’s playing dumb. But I’m not about to let him off the hook this easily and tell him my suspicions.
“You were in love with Madrigal’s mother. Probably fell in love when you were teenagers since you attended the same school. When she went off to William & Mary, you kept in touch. You decided to wait until you graduated to make your move. But that was your big mistake. You waited too long. By that time she’d met Thomas Berkeley. Maybe she fell in love. Maybe it was just a college fling that would have burned itself out. Except she got trapped. When she got pregnant with Madrigal, she had no choice but to marry him. By the time you found out what was going on, it was too late.”
“When did you figure all this out?”
“Yesterday at the picnic. All the pieces came together. Madrigal called you ‘Uncle Mitch.’ You’re a co-trustee to Madrigal’s and Madison’s trusts. That points to someone who’s a hell of a lot closer to the family than you ever let on.”
“What business is it of yours, Trenton?”
“It matters to Madrigal. Therefore, it matters to me.”
“Why? What is she to you?”
“My client.” In reality she’s a hell of a lot more than that. But I’m not about to clue him in. “She asked me to help her investigate her parents’ murders. So you and Madrigal’s mother? It’s all true.”
“Yes.”
“How did you end up at her mother’s private school?”
“I didn’t have the kind of money her family had. A Good Samaritan visited my middle school and promised to pay all expenses for one worthy student. That student was me.”
“So you met her in high school?”
“Yes. We were only acquaintances at first. Her father made sure she was too busy with schoolwork to socialize. Later on I found out she was afraid of him. He intimidated her, imposed curfews on her, and punished her for the slightest transgressions.”
“What kinds of punishment?”
“Limiting her freedom to come and go, who she made friends with.”
“So how did you end up friends?”
“She didn’t hang out with the other girls in high school. She turned to me instead. In time, I became her best friend. She called me all the time just to talk. And then one night she called after midnight, asked if we could meet. I was surprised, to say the least. Somehow she sneaked out of the house. She was a bundle of nerves. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me she’d gotten her acceptance letter from William & Mary. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to be with me.
“Well, that floored me. She’d never once hinted she was attracted to me. She kissed me, told me she loved me. But she didn’t know what to do about college. I’d already been admitted to Harvard and couldn’t turn that down, so I told her she should go to William & Mary and we’d marry after graduation. She was scared to be separated from me, but she did it all the same. We called each other at every opportunity, got together when she came home for the holidays and the summer whenever she could sneak away from her father.
“But things changed after her third year. Something happened to her that fall. She never talked about it. Next thing I know she’s telling me she’s pregnant with Thomas Berkeley’s baby and we have to break things off. I tried my best to talk her out of it, told her that I would marry her, give her child my name. But she told me it was no use. She couldn’t fight them anymore.”
“Them?”
“Her father and Thomas. So I honored her wishes, stayed away. After law school, Holden offered me a position in his firm. Promised I’d make partner in five years. He kept his word. I wondered if he’d known about us and offered the partnership as a consolation prize. I’d see her occasionally. Mostly at the firm functions. She seemed . . . happy. And then sixteen years ago she called me out of the blue, wanting to talk. She wasn’t happy anymore. Thomas had been having affairs practically since the day they married. He’d never been interested in her, only her money. One thing led to another and—”
“You slept with her.”
“Yes.”
“Was it only the one time?”
“Yes. Thomas found out about us. I don’t know how, but he did. He threatened divorce and to take Madrigal from her. It was only her at the time. Madison wasn’t born yet. So she broke things off with me.”
“But you’re managing Madrigal’s and Madison’s trusts.”
“When Madison was born, Holden created a trust for each of the girls, and he asked me to be a co-trustee along with him. At the time, I wondered why. It wasn’t like I was an estates and trusts lawyer. Turns out Marlena asked him to do so. She used that as an excuse to include me in family gatherings so the girls would get to know me.”
“I can’t imagine Thomas Berkeley approved.”
“He resented the hell out of it, but there was nothing much he could do about it. It wasn’t his money.”
“So you became Uncle Mitch.”
“Yes. I never missed a birthday or Christmas. They always got presents from me.”
“It must have been hell for you.”
“It was and it wasn’t. I lived for those times when I could have a few stolen moments with Marlena. I’d given up hope she’d ever leave him. And then one day she called again.”
“When was that?”
“March 2002.”
“A month before she was killed.”
“Yes. We met at a run-down hotel in DC on H Street. The kind where you rent rooms by the hour. She told me she had something on Thomas, something she could use against him, and he couldn’t stop her from leaving anymore. We made plans. He was supposed to be going away on a business trip. I made arrangements, but then it all went to hell in a handbasket. That was the night she was killed.”
“What happened?”
“He canceled his business trip and scheduled another of their ‘private nights.’ He used to do that once a month, the bastard. He’d send the staff and the girls away so he could have Marlena to himself. She hated every minute of it. I told her we could leave the day before, that everything was set. I’d found a place where we could hole up and lay low. But Thomas had gotten suspicious and kept a tight rein on the girls. He knew she wouldn’t leave without them. Normally during their private nights, the girls were sent to Holden’s.”
“But he was out of town, so other arrangements had to be made.”
“Yes. Madrigal would have been easy enough to get. She was spending the night at a friend’s house. But Madison—she was in the house, and Marlena couldn’t take her, not without arousing his suspicion. She told me it would only be a couple more days, that Thomas had rescheduled the business trip. We could make our move then.”
“But that day never came. Instead, she ended up dead.”
“Yes. If I’d only insisted, she wouldn’t have been there when those sons of bitches broke into the house.”
“Mitchell, Madrigal and I have been investigating her parents’ murders. We talked to Michael Haynes, one of the burglars.”
“What?”
“He swears they didn’t kill her. That they just robbed the house. After talking to the detective involved in the case, I believe he’s telling the truth.”
“Why?”
“They broke into people’s houses, but they never hurt anyone. They just snatched whatever they could and got out. Plus, the way he kept talking about Marlena and how she fed them while they worked in the house and served them sandwiches on fancy plates. I think he was half in love with her. I don’t think they killed her.”
“But if it wasn’t them, then who?”
“Last night Madrigal showed up at my doorstep. She was hysterical, beyond upset.”
“What happened? Is she okay? Let me talk to her.”
“She’s sleeping.”
“In your bed?” His accusing tone sets my teeth on edge.
Reminding myself he’s doing it out of love, I tamp down my anger. “She’s far safer here than anywhere else. I would never harm her. And you’re a fine one to cast stones.”
“Sorry. I can’t help it. I’m very protective when it comes to her and—Did something happen to her sister? Is that it?” He’s afraid. No, more than that. He’s petrified. Strange.
“Calm down, Mitchell. Madison’s fine as far as I know.”
“So what got Madrigal so upset?”
“Last night she found her mother’s journals. And discovered more than she bargained for.”
“What?!”
“She read the last one.” I clear my throat. “During those private date nights, Thomas Berkeley abused Marlena.”
The sound that comes through the telephone is that of a tortured animal. “God. No.”
“You never suspected anything?”
“No. I hadn’t seen her up close for months. And she chose that fleabag motel. The only illumination came from a lamp that barely shed any light. The secrecy. Her fear. I should have known something was wrong. I chalked it up to nerves. If I’d known the bastard beat her, I would have killed him with my bare hands.”