Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
After cleaning the garage floor, and myself, I text Miles to come over and then turn off the alarm to open the back door.
I expect a text from Valencia, but none comes as I water the hydrangeas on the side and front of the house—making sure to
walk in front of the doorbell camera so she gets a notification.
Miles hops over the fence as I’m coiling up the hose.
“Ready to snoop?” he asks, his eyes a little gleeful.
“You sound way too excited to be invading your neighbors’ privacy.”
“Yeah, I keep telling myself if we find out they’re murderers, it wipes my karmic slate clean. So let’s try and get something
good.”
He marches around the house and I follow him, closing and locking the door behind us. I also set the alarm, because I want
to know if someone tries to get in here again. If they really are watching, and they know I’m alone today, they might try.
But at least I have Miles with me. If Valencia asks why I opened the door later, when Miles goes home, I’ll tell her I was
fertilizing the hydrangeas.
Maybe she’ll be so grateful that I fertilized them, she’ll change her mind about the paint being a destructive outburst.
“Where should we start?” I ask Miles.
“I’d say start in Valencia and Marcus’s room.”
“Fine, but I’m not going through their drawers like a pervert.”
“Drawers are cliché,” Miles says, climbing the stairs. “All the freaky stuff is in the closets. I mean, we’d know, right?”
His joke is stupid, but he’s not wrong. I hid my go bag in the closet, after all.
We head into the large walk-in closet Marcus and Valencia share. All her stuff is on the right; all his on the left. Marcus’s
side also has a chest-height dresser with a watch box and small dish of cuff links, keys, change, and miscellaneous other
items he probably tosses in after coming home from work.
Valencia’s side has shoeboxes up on the top shelf. I take them down to look inside, but they’re all her expensive shoes she
probably only wears on special occasions.
“Oh-kay, Valencia,” Miles says, taking out a pair of black leather heels with red bottoms. “Louboutin. Fancy.” Then he scrunches
up his face and puts the bottom of the heels against the bottom of his own shoes. “Not my size. Shame.”
I snort at the image of Miles walking around in those shoes. “You would look ridiculous.”
He points at me with the shoe. “But you’re picturing it.”
I huff in annoyance but my cheeks still burn. While he puts the shoes back, I turn to Marcus’s side of the closet to hide
my blushing from him.
Marcus has a shoebox on his top shelf, too, but it’s a blue Cole Haan box. I reach up for it and it feels heavy, but the weight is sitting differently than a pair of shoes would. When I open it, my stomach drops.
“Holy shit.”
Inside is a black handgun.
My hands start to shake as my pulse quickens. Even though this gun has a lock on the trigger, I hold the box like it’s a bomb.
There’s too much potential energy there; it’s like the gun wants to go off, and it doesn’t care what it’s pointing at.
Miles appears behind me and whistles. “Do you think they bought it before or after Nate disappeared?”
I tilt the box toward him. “You thinking murder weapon?”
But Miles shakes his head. “Too loud. Someone would have reported a gunshot. Trust me, every Fourth of July the LISTSERV is
rife with ‘gunshots or fireworks’ emails. It’s like, you all live in the suburbs, not downtown Baltimore, cool your tits,
you know?”
Again I laugh. “But they do own a gun. That’s something in the potential-murder column, right?”
“No. My parents have a shotgun in their closet and they’re liberal hippies. If I had to guess, they bought it after Nate’s disappearance. Everyone around here was freaking out after that. Alarm signs went up in yards, the LISTSERV started.
Maybe that’s why so many of them are worried about gunshots on a national holiday.”
I place the lid on the box and put it back up where I found it, then we leave the room.
“What’s upstairs?” Miles points to the stairs at the end of the hall, which go to the third floor.
“Valencia says it’s a guest room, Marcus’s office, and some storage.”
“Office, eh?” Miles heads for the stairs and I follow.
The steps to the third floor are narrower than the open first-floor stairs, and they’re carpeted with dingy, high-pile beige
carpet.
The third floor has a small cedar closet, bathroom, and guest room—I have no problem checking the dresser drawers in the guest
room, and they’re empty anyway. We continue down the hall and there’s another door to my left and one straight ahead. I open
the one on the left first. It’s Marcus’s office.
Unlike the rest of the rooms on this floor, it looks like it’s been renovated. There’s a leather chair facing a desk and the
walls on both sides of the room have been changed to bookshelves. Each shelf is filled with expensive-looking law books with
dates on the spine; they go all the way back to 1994.
Marcus’s desk looks expensive, too. The wood is dark and shiny, like it’s been treated with some kind of wax. There’s a computer
monitor that’s hooked up to a dock that Marcus can connect his laptop to. The chair is leather and tufted, and behind the
desk are two windows looking out to the backyard.
I go around the desk and start pulling open drawers. In the top right there’s only pens, pencils, Post-its, paper clips, highlighters,
and little sticky tabs in a variety of colors. Miles pulls on the drawers on the left side of the desk, but they’re locked.
“Hmm. If you were a key, where would you be?” he asks.
“Probably with all the other keys. Which means he’s got it with him at work.”
“You didn’t happen to learn how to pick locks in your time living on the streets, did you?”
I tsk. “You know what, I skipped Lockpicking for the Homeless 101. I took How Not to Starve to Death, like a dummy.”
But Miles’s eyes light up like he realized something. “Wait, I have an idea.” He runs out of the room, and I call after him,
asking where he’s going, but he doesn’t answer. His footsteps go down the stairs to the second floor, but then I lose them.
I turn my attention back to the file drawer on the right side of the desk, which is also unlocked. But it looks like it’s
all house stuff. There’s copies of the deed, some tax documents, and property insurance. There’s also a folder on the boathouse,
but when I flick through, it looks like invoices for the construction dating back a little over a year, but nothing interesting.
I put it back and see the final folder is labeled “NATE LI-P/O.”
I take it out and set it on the desktop. It’s a bunch of letters from a life insurance company. The top letter is from August
two years ago. It says that because of a judgment, they’re paying out the life insurance the Beaumonts had on Nate.
“Holy shit.”
It was a five-hundred-thousand-dollar policy. Besides the payout, there are invoices for the policy payment in full from fifteen
years ago, when Nate was a year old. There’s another document that looks like a petition Marcus filed with the court six years
after Nate’s disappearance to have him declared dead. And the approval from the judge.
Miles appears in the doorway, a small key in his hand. “This was in that tray of change on Marcus’s dresser. Think it fits
the desk?”
“Maybe, but I found something more important.”
He walks around the desk and looks over the documents.
His eyes go wide when I point out how much the payout was. “Half a million! Shit.”
“This is something, right?” I ask.
“It’s definitely motive.” Miles keeps looking over the papers as he talks. “Life insurance is one of the biggest reasons family
members murder each other.” He points to the court documents. “And they got paid out for it based on your disappearance. Look.
Marcus even had to file an order with a judge to have you declared dead.” He pauses. “He probably knows a judge who helped
him push it through.”
He sets down the papers and takes out his phone. I peer over his shoulder to see he’s searching how long a person needs to
be missing before life insurance pays out.
“Life insurance companies have to wait seven years before they pay out a missing person’s life insurance. Unless a judge declares
you legally dead beforehand, which, according to this, is hard to do.”
I go back to the drawer and look for the Beaumonts’ other policies. In the household folders I find more life insurance policies.
Marcus’s is for five million dollars. Valencia’s is, too. Easton has one in his name for five hundred thousand dollars that
dates to the same time as Nate’s. I turn Valencia’s around to show Miles. “Five million dollars. If Marcus killed Nate for
the insurance money, why not kill her instead?”
Miles shrugs as he reads it over. “Maybe he didn’t like Nate. It’s entirely possible for a parent to choose their spouse over
their kid.”
The idea fills me with rage. Will my own parents collect life insurance on me in seven years? If I’m still around then, I’m definitely going back to prove I’m still alive and fuck it up for them. Though I doubt my parents even bought a life insurance policy for me.
“Is that weird?” I ask. “For parents to have life insurance on their kids?”
Miles finally turns his attention back to me and he looks unsure. “I mean, maybe not? For funeral expenses—but five hundred
K is a pretty swanky funeral, if you ask me.” He goes back to reading the insurance documents.
Five hundred thousand dollars really is a lot of money. Valencia and Marcus are both wealthy people with high-paying jobs,
so would they really need half a million dollars so much that they’d kill their own son?
I pose the question to Miles.
“There’s always a reason. Maybe Marcus has gambling debts. Or maybe they’re leveraged out the ass and can’t keep up? These
old houses are expensive to maintain.”
Valencia did say they had to have the roof redone. Maybe that and a few other big items hit and they couldn’t keep up, so—