Chapter 2 - The Grave Without a Body
By four in the morning, Maisie Lel had learned three things she wished she could forget.
First, Reed Ashford had once had a little sister named Maeve.
Second, no one had ever shown him Maeve's body.
Third, the only person who had officially confirmed the child's identity after the fire had been Silas Ashford, Reed's father's younger brother.
Maisie sat in the library of Reed's Beacon Hill townhouse wearing borrowed sweatpants and one of the restaurant's black kitchen shirts. She had refused the silk robe a housekeeper offered her because it looked more expensive than everything she owned combined.
Reed stood near the fireplace.
He had changed into a clean white shirt, but the torn skin across his knuckles remained visible.
Dr. Weller had taken two cheek swabs twenty minutes earlier.
Now all they could do was wait.
Maisie hated waiting.
It made the past louder.
"Tell me about her," she said.
Reed looked over.
"Maeve?"
"If there is even a chance, I need facts. Not people staring at me."
Pierce was sitting on the edge of a desk with a laptop open, tracing the missing forty million. He glanced up, then returned to the screen.
Reed walked toward a locked cabinet.
He entered a code and removed a narrow wooden box.
When he placed it on the table in front of Maisie, his hand remained on the lid for several seconds.
"I haven't opened this in fifteen years."
"Why?"
"Because remembering did not change anything."
He lifted the lid.
Inside were photographs, a small silver bracelet, a dried yellow ribbon, and a child's drawing of a tall black house beside blue water.
Maisie's chest tightened.
The first photograph showed a teenage Reed standing on a dock with a little girl sitting on his shoulders.
The child was laughing.
She had dark hair, gray-green eyes, and a gap between her front teeth.
Maisie reached for the photograph.
Her fingers trembled before they touched it.
"She looks like me."
Reed said nothing.
She picked up another photograph.
This one showed the little girl asleep on a sofa with a red music box beneath her hand.
Maisie's breath caught.
A sensation flashed behind her eyes.
Red lacquer.
A painted bird.
A woman's hands turning a brass key.
Then smoke.
Maisie dropped the photograph.
Reed moved instantly.
"What happened?"
"Nothing."
"That wasn't nothing."
"I saw something."
His face changed.
"What?"
"A red box. Someone turning a key."
Reed opened a drawer beneath the cabinet.
He removed a small object wrapped in cloth.
When he uncovered it, Maisie stopped breathing.
The red music box was burned along one side.
The painted sparrow on its lid had darkened with age.
"No," she whispered.
Reed set it down carefully.
"This was found in the east lawn after the fire."
Maisie backed away from the table.
"I need you to stop showing me things."
Reed immediately covered the box.
"All right."
She looked at him, surprised by the lack of argument.
"That's it?"
"You said stop."
Maisie gave a strained laugh.
"People usually don't listen that fast."
"Then you know the wrong people."
Pierce glanced over again.
"I would like the record to reflect that he does not listen that fast when I say stop."
Reed ignored him.
Maisie sat down again.
"What was she like?"
This time Reed did not reach for photographs.
He looked into the fireplace.
"Loud."
Maisie smiled despite herself.
"Loud?"
"She sang constantly. Badly. She followed me everywhere. She stole the cherries out of my drinks because she thought they were candy. She hid frogs in our father's shoes."
Pierce said, "I like her already."
Reed's mouth moved slightly.
"She called me Red because she couldn't say Reed when she was little."
Maisie's smile vanished.
A word moved through her mind.
Red.
Not a color.
A name.
She pressed her hands together.
"Did she have nightmares?"
Reed looked at her.
"Sometimes."
"About what?"
"Storms. She hated thunder."
Maisie's throat tightened.
Thunder had terrified her all her life.
She had once spent an entire night in a foster family's linen closet because a storm shook the windows.
She never knew why.
"What happened the night of the fire?" she asked.
Reed's face closed.
"The official story? Electrical fault in the west hall."
"And the unofficial story?"
"My father had enemies."
"Did you see the fire start?"
"No. I woke to Maeve screaming."
His voice flattened, becoming the voice of someone reciting a nightmare he had repeated too many times.
"Her curtains were burning. I broke the glass because the bedroom door had jammed. She cut her hand. Her arm caught on the curtain rod. I wrapped it. I got her into the hall. Then I heard my mother downstairs."
Maisie held very still.
"What happened next?"
"Someone hit me."
"Who?"
"I never saw."
"And Maeve?"
Reed's eyes darkened.
"Gone when I woke up."
"Where were you?"
"Outside. Silas said he found me near the east door. He said he tried to go back for them. He said the roof collapsed before he could."
Maisie looked at the silver sparrow seal exposed in one of the old photographs.
"The man in my dreams wears that ring."
"Silas still does."
The room went quiet.
Pierce closed his laptop.
"We have another problem."
Reed turned.
"Only one?"
"I traced the transfer route. The forty million went from Harbor Nine escrow into the family trust, then split across four domestic accounts. Three are shell companies. The fourth belongs to a private medical management corporation called Halcyon Living."
Maisie frowned.
"A nursing home?"
"Long-term care network," Pierce said. "Psychiatric, neurological, trauma facilities."
Reed's eyes narrowed.
"Why would someone move criminal partnership money into a medical company?"
"No idea. But Halcyon has been receiving annual payments from an Ashford shell for twenty-one years."
That number settled over them.
Twenty-one years.
Maisie whispered, "Since the fire."
Pierce nodded.
Reed walked toward the desk.
"Who owns Halcyon?"
"Layered trusts. I'm still pulling it apart."
Maisie picked up the small silver bracelet from the wooden box.
MAEVE was engraved on the inside in tiny block letters.
Her thumb moved across the name.
"I had a bracelet in one foster home," she said. "Not this one. Cheap plastic beads. A little girl named Rosie made it for me. I kept it until I was nineteen. Then the string broke on a bus and the beads rolled everywhere. I cried so hard the driver thought someone had died."
Reed sat across from her.
"Why?"
"Because nobody had ever made me anything before."
He looked at the silver bracelet.
"Mother had this made on your fifth birthday."
Maisie laughed quietly.
"So apparently someone had. I just didn't remember."
Reed's jaw tightened.
"You should have remembered."
"That sounds like blame."
"For me."
"You were seventeen."
"You were six."
She recognized her own words from earlier and sighed.
"We can keep throwing those ages at each other until we are eighty, but they will not change what happened."
Reed looked at her.
"What would change it?"
"Nothing."
He did not like that answer.
Maisie could tell.
"That is the part you need to accept," she said. "If I am Maeve, you do not get twenty-one years back by buying things, fixing things, or threatening people."
"I can threaten Silas."
"That may be therapeutic."
Pierce smiled at his laptop.
Maisie turned the bracelet over again.
"Did I like cooking?"
Reed thought.
"You liked stealing batter."
"Reasonable."
"You once poured an entire jar of pepper into Father's soup because he yelled at Mother."
Maisie's head snapped up.
"How old was I?"
"Five."
Pierce looked impressed.
"Definitely her."
Maisie laughed, then looked suddenly sad.
"I wish I could remember her."
"Mother?"
She nodded.
Reed reached into the box and removed a photograph he had not shown her before.
Evelyn sat at a kitchen table with flour on her cheek. Little Maeve stood on a chair beside her, both hands buried in dough. Teenage Reed leaned in the doorway behind them pretending not to be part of the picture.
Maisie stared for a long time.
"She looks happy."
"She was that day."
"Were there not many days like that?"
Reed looked at the photograph.
"There were enough that I know what we lost."
Maisie studied the younger version of him.
"You look like you want to smile."
"I did not smile in photographs."
"Why?"
"I was seventeen."
"Ah. A medical condition."
Pierce laughed outright.
Reed gave him a look.
Maisie returned the bracelet to the box, but not the photograph.
"Can I keep this?"
Reed answered before she finished.
"Yes."
She slid the photo into the pocket of her borrowed sweatpants.
"Even if the test is negative?"
Reed's voice went quieter.
"Yes."
That answer told Maisie something important.
Whatever the DNA said, Reed had already attached hope to her.
And hope, she knew, could be more dangerous than certainty.
The library door opened.
Walsh stepped inside.
"Boss. We found something at Pharaoh's."
Reed looked at him.
Walsh held a plastic evidence sleeve containing a photograph.
"It was under Maisie's mattress."
Maisie stood.
"You searched my apartment?"
Walsh looked almost apologetic.
"After tonight, yes."
"What is it?" Reed asked.
Walsh handed him the sleeve.
The photograph was old.
A grainy image of a little girl standing outside a hospital in a coat too large for her.
On the back, someone had written a date.
October 12, 2005.
Three days after the Ashford fire.
Below the date were four words.
M.A. survived. Keep hidden.
Reed's eyes became lethal.
Maisie whispered, "Who wrote that?"
Walsh swallowed.
"We had handwriting compared to old security logs."
"And?" Pierce asked.
Walsh's gaze moved to Reed.
"It matches Silas Ashford."
Maisie sat down hard.
Reed did not move.
For twenty-one years he had believed his sister died screaming inside Ashford House.
For twenty-one years Silas had stood beside him at funerals, wars, weddings, and graves.
For twenty-one years Silas had called him son.
Reed looked at the photograph again.
The little girl wore a bandage on her left arm.
Her face was turned partly away.
But one small hand was clenched around a yellow ribbon.
The same ribbon inside Reed's wooden box.
His phone rang.
Silas Ashford's name appeared on the screen.
Nobody in the room breathed.
Reed answered.
"Uncle."
Silas's voice was warm and calm.
"Reed. I heard there was trouble at Pharaoh's. Are you all right?"
Reed stared at Maisie.
"I'm beginning to think I haven't been all right for twenty-one years."
A pause.
Very small.
But Reed heard it.
Silas recovered quickly.
"What happened?"
Reed's gaze stayed on the photograph.
"I found something that belongs to me."
Another pause.
May you like
Then Silas said, "Be careful with old things, son. Sometimes they survived for a reason."
The line went dead.
