Fatal Family Secrets Read online

  FATAL FAMILY SECRETS

  MAGGIE SHAYNE

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be sold, copied, distributed, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or digital, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of both the publisher, Oliver Heber Books and the author, Maggie Shayne, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © Maggie Shayne

  Published by Oliver-Heber Books

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  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Excerpt: Girl Blue

  Also by Maggie Shayne

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Johnny cursed My Cousin Vinny and slammed the steering wheel for the twelfth time. So far the steering wheel was winning.

  “Maybe I should drive,” Chris said. “Woman trouble?”

  Johnny looked sideways at Chris, who was helping him move his stuff from his grandfather’s village rental unit over the local dive bar, to Jack’s cabin. “I guess not.”

  “Oh, man. You and Maya?”

  Johnny glanced sideways, surprised. There was no him and Maya. He’d thought there might be. He’d felt as if they were maybe becoming more than friends. He was attracted to her and he was pretty sure it was mutual, and apparently the gang had picked up on that fun, flirty chemistry between them too. But things had suddenly seemed to kind of…stall. He didn’t reply except to shrug.

  “Dude, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “You uh…want to talk about it, or…?”

  Johnny shook his head. “No point.” The light changed and he drove on.

  “This truck is dope,” Chris said in a transparent effort to change the subject. “I can’t believe how quiet it is.”

  “It took some getting used to, it being electric.”

  “What did it cost, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Damned if I know. It was a gift.”

  Chris was waiting for further explanation. Yeah, Johnny had been pretty tight-lipped about his private life, and he knew everybody was curious. “From my wealthy, white mom and stepdad.”

  “Ohhhhhhh,” Chris said. “So then your grandfather…?”

  “My birthfather was full-blooded Iroquois, but he died when I was little. My mom remarried and I never got to know the Native side of the family. So I tracked down my grandfather last fall. Came here to get to know him, stayed with him for a month, and all of the sudden, he up and leaves without a word.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said, nodding. "It was weird for all of us, him just leaving like he did. He’s been around here forever. Longer than any of us have, I think.”

  “You guys were pretty close to him then?” Johnny asked.

  “He didn’t let too many people get close to him, especially young people. But he and Maya worked together over the years, here and there. Healing rites, house blessings, funerals, marriages. He worked with Jack sometimes too, if somebody he was reading for had a Native connection. That’s how I know him, through Jack, and then he worked with us on that first case.”

  “The victims of the serial killer buried under Kiley’s house,” Johnny said, nodding.

  Chris cocked a finger-gun, complete with sound effects.

  “But none of you know why he left, either?”

  “Nope. We figured you knew and it was none of our business.”

  “He said he was going to Florida to spend time with old friends and he’d be back soon.”

  “You have an address?”

  “Yeah, I have his number, too, but he hasn’t answered a call or text in a couple of days.” Johnny turned a corner and drove away from the village, over a narrow, winding road with no painted lines and little intact pavement. It was pretty country, hilly and wild. “I’m getting worried, to be honest.”

  “You were probably hoping he’d teach you about your heritage and stuff.”

  “I was.”

  There was an extended silence and then Chris said, “People probably take one look at you and assume you’re in contact with animal guides or some shit.”

  “That what you thought, Chris?”

  “It’s what I hoped,” Chris said. “Is that racist? I hope it’s not racist. I’m black and gay, I know better.” He shook his head like he regretted his words, but then smiled at him and added, “But you have to admit, it would’ve been cool.”

  Johnny attempted to give him a stern glare, but he couldn’t keep the laugh inside. Chris elbowed him in the ribs and started laughing, too, and then a person ran in front of the truck and THUD. He felt the impact, slammed the brakes, and saw the person lurch and tumble toward the ditch, all in the space of a second.

  They both dove out of the truck, which had skidded sideways in the road, and ran toward the shoulder. Johnny’s heart was in his throat. In the ditch, a skinny teenager pushed his long, dark bangs off his face. His eyes were brown. There was dirt smeared on his forehead.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Are you hurt?” they asked at the same time, and Johnny reached out to clasp the kid’s hand and help him up.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I think.” He brushed at his clothes and stepped out of the ditch onto the shoulder of the country road, looking around them as if he expected to see someone else.

  Johnny looked around, too. The paved part of the road had ended half a mile back. This part was dirt and gravel. Every spring the town road crews dumped fresh gravel on top, and every fall it was mostly all ground in or gathered along the shoulders as a blatant challenge to joggers and cyclists.

  The kid had come tearing out of the woods off to the left. The right side of the road was a wide patch of dead looking meadow that Chris said would be thick with grass and wildflowers once spring took hold. As of now they were stuck in the in-between. Snow melting. Temps warming. Mud everywhere.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Johnny said. “I didn’t see you.”

  “It was my fault. I ran out in front of you.” The kid turned to glance behind him.

  “Why do I get the feeling somebody was chasing you?” Chris asked, following the kid’s gaze and taking the same visual tour Johnny just had, but from the perspective of someone who knew the area better than he did.

  “You see anybody chasing me?”

  “Ah, the sarcasm of sixteen,” Chris said, from the ripe old age of twenty-three.

  “Seventeen,” the kid said.

  Chris shrugged. “So why were you running, then?”

  “You ever hear of cross-country?”

  Chris looked at Johnny. Johnny looked at the kid’s shoes - basketball shoes. He wore them with jeans and a winter coat. Not exactly running gear.

  “Isn’t the high school just the other side of that woodlot?” Chris asked. “That where you’re coming from?”

  “Yeah, and I have to get back.” He started to turn away, but Johnny felt an irresistible urge not to let him leave just yet. Something was wrong.

  “Don’t run off. Come on, school’s out by now anyway, isn’t it? My pal Chris just has a curious mind. I’m Johnny."

  “Ryan.” He pushed his hair again. He had one of those long side bangs that guys his age were constantly pushing out of their eyes.

  “Can we give you a ride somewhere, Ryan?” Johnny nodded at the truck, sitting cockeyed in the road.

  “Looks like you’re already on your way to somewhere.” Ryan said, eyeing the load of furniture and boxes in the pickup’s bed.

  “I’m moving into my new place,” Johnny said. It was odd how it felt like a lie to call it his place. It was Jack’s place, but Jack was currently co-habiting with Kiley over at Spook Central, so Johnny had agreed to rent his log cabin. “It’s only about a mile from here, actually.”

  Ryan nodded slowly, then said, “I’ll take a ride, yeah, but I’ll help you unload first. If you want.”

  “Shoot, are you sure you weren’t dropped in front of us by the Moving Fairy?” Chris asked, grinning ear to ear. “Hop in.”

  Ryan hopped in, taking the truck’s back seat. As he pulled into motion, Johnny saw the kid looking behind them. He glanced sideways and saw Chris noticing it, too. No way somebody wasn’t chasing him. Johnny felt heat rising up the back of his neck. He knew about bullies. He’d dealt with his share of them, having been the only native in his mostly white private school.

  Somebody was bullying Ryan. Johnny decided on the spot that he was going to find a way to help.

  He looked acros
s at Chris, who met his eyes and gave a single, firm nod, as if he knew what Johnny was thinking and was in full agreement.

  Kiley stood on the front porch of her gorgeous, hundred-and-thirty-year-old Victorian house, wielding a long-handled paint roller back and forth over the porch ceiling. She wished Jack was doing it, but he seemed to think the Magic Shop ought to be open every once in a while, so he was there.

  The entire house needed painting. All of it, from the witch’s hat turrets to the sunburst high peak panels to the turned posts and spindles. All of that was on the schedule for actual spring, not this crazy, windy, precursor known as March. But the porch, Maya had insisted, could not wait.

  Because ghosts.

  Maya was manning another long-handled roller a few feet away. She said, “Careful not to let it–” just as a glob of paint dropped right onto Kiley’s upturned face, splatting across her nose. “–drip on your head,” Maya finished.

  Kiley lowered her roller to the nearby tray, leaned the handle against the wall, and pulled a ratty old dish towel from her farmer jeans’ back pocket to wipe the pale blue-going-on-gray paint away.

  “I’d think you were pulling a Tom Sawyer trick on me, if it wasn’t my own house we were painting.”

  “Oh, it’s a trick, all right,” Maya said. “Just not on you.”

  “I get the silver coins and old iron nails hidden near every door and window, since you say ghosts allegedly hate silver and iron.”

  “That’s the lore.”

  “And I get the bottle tree…” Kiley trailed off, because the breeze came up almost as if in response to her thoughts, and the bottles of every shape, size and color dangling from the big elm tree began to clink and clatter. The sound was magical. “I kind of love the bottle tree.”

  “I love it, too. It’s supposed to trap and confuse malevolent spirits,” Maya said. “I figured we’d try everything.” She finished the final stroke and lowered her roller into an empty bucket.

  “Including this pale blue paint on the porch floor and ceiling,” Kiley said. “Which I still do not understand.”

  “Not just blue. Haint Blue.”

  “Haint Blue?” Kiley arched one eyebrow. “The hell it haint.” Then she slapped her thigh and laughed at her own joke.

  Maya laughed, but not enough. “The lore says ghosts can’t cross water. Haint Blue is supposed to look like water so they don’t come in.”

  Kiley looked up at the porch ceiling. Then she looked at Maya again. “I have never seen water that color.”

  “The circle I cast will be the part that counts,” Maya said, choosing to ignore her keen observation. “I’ll place wards at the four directions and ask our local elementals to keep watch.”

  “Elementals.”

  “Nature spirits.” She looked around the back yard and smiled as if some old friend was looking back at her. Then she returned her gaze to Kiley and apparently read her skeptical face. “Be doubtful all you want. When I finish, not one ghost is ever going to set foot in your house again.”

  Someone laughed from inside. A female someone. Kiley frowned and looked at the closed door. “Who was that? Is the TV on?”

  “Who was what?” Maya asked. She unscrewed the extra-long handle from the paint roller and picked up the bucket with the used rollers inside.

  Kiley grabbed the paint and the tray and the rest, and they carried the mess around to the side of the house where there was an outside spigot. The ground was still cold and hard, but would soften to sticky later in the day. Most of the snow had melted except for a patch here and there and the powdered sugar dusting from the night before.

  Maya picked up a roller and began rinsing the Haint Blue away under the faucet, over a bucket.

  “So, what’s up with you and Johnny?” Kiley asked. She’d been dying to ask, and now she was asking. For a while there, it had seemed like they were … not together, but maybe pre-together. But the past couple of days, things between them had seemed colder than the water coming out of that spigot.

  Maya didn’t look up from her task, her hands apparently immune to the chill. “Nothing’s up with me and Johnny.”

  “Why not? It seemed like something was kind of brewing there, you’ll pardon the witch pun.”

  Maya smiled at the pun, finished rinsing her roller and tray, and made way for Kiley, who began rinsing her own. She said, “So here’s the thing.”

  Inside her head, Kiley pulled up a chair and a bowl of popcorn.

  “He was talking about hunting. How torn he feels about it, because he knows it’s part of his heritage and the way his ancestors survived, and yet he doesn’t think he could do it himself.”

  “So, you’re breaking up with him because you don’t eat meat and he’s of two minds about hunting?” Kiley stopped herself from blurting how unlike Maya that seemed.

  “Not breaking up. There’s nothing to break up.”

  There was something, though. Kiley had seen it. Everyone had. The two seemed as drawn to each other as bees to flowers. “Maybe he just wanted your opinion as a vegan?”

  And since when, Kiley wondered, had she become such a Johnny-Maya fan? Didn’t matter, she was. They just felt right together, ages be damned.

  “No. It wasn’t that,” Maya said. “Actually, looking back, I think he wanted my opinion on all of it. But you know, it was the perfect opening, so I had to reply, “Imagine you’re a deer.” Only she pronounced it “dee-yuh” in perfect Marisa Tomei. “You’re prancin’ along, you get thirsty, you spot a little brook, and you put your little deer-lips down to the cool, clear water… BAM! A fuckin’ bullet rips off part of your head!”

  By the time she finished, Kiley was laughing so hard she’d splashed paint-tinted water on her bibs. “That was dead on.”

  “Yeah,” Maya said. “Only he didn’t get the reference.”

  Kiley turned off the spigot, her brain trying to catch up. “Well, not everybody’s seen My Cousin Vinny.”

  “He didn’t get the reference because he wasn’t born yet.”

  “Oh.” Kiley frowned. “Ouch. Okay. But gee… of all people, I wouldn’t have expected you to be worried about an age difference.”

  “An eighteen-year age difference.”

  “Nineteen.” Kiley bit her lip too late to keep the comment from spilling out, and fully deserved the fake death glare Maya sent her.

  “You’ve been doing the math in your head. Everyone probably has,” Maya said. “Doesn’t matter. It’s too wide a gap.”

  “So…you broke up with him?”

  “We were never even dating. I mean, I think that’s where he wanted to take things, and maybe I did too, but that felt like the Universe asking me what the hell I think I’m doing.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be fair to him.” She turned a little, so her face was averted. “And anyway, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m trying to make sense of it in my own head, you know?”

  “And it’s none of my business.” Kiley shrugged and shut off the spigot. “I don’t know why, but it feels like it is.”

  Maya faced her again, her friendly smile back in place, but it wasn’t hiding her sadness at all. “Well, unless you want me asking you what Jack likes in bed, knock it off.”

  “Reverse cowgirl.” Kiley picked up the pail full of freshly washed rollers, turned and pointed, “But not until near the end, because it tends to speed things up.” She made fireworks of her fingers and said, “Boom.”

  “OmyGod, please stop.” Maya held up both hands, but she laughed anyway.

  Kiley winked and felt warm and mushy about the friendship blooming between the two of them. It was fun, sassy, teasing, and sincere. She opened the hatchway to carry the tools down to the basement, but only went as far as the bottom of the stairs, set the bucket there, and leaned the long roller handles against the concrete wall. She gave a quick look deeper into the basement. The insurance had paid for the dungeon room underneath it to be filled in, and fresh new concrete poured on the basement floor. Everything was clean and new down there. But still…