Chapter 50 Maddy
MADDY
Nico let me cry for ages. He walked me over and sat me down in the recliner by the fireplace.
The tears simply wouldn’t stop. Every time I thought I was done, another sobbing fit crashed through me.
He just knelt there, holding my hand the whole time.
Every few seconds, I’d look around the living room and see the disaster again.
The room where I’d sat and unwrapped Christmas presents, the kitchen I’d helped Mom prepare Thanksgiving dinner, the table we sat around for Easter dinner.
It was the same, but now it felt violated.
I doubted I’d ever be able to look at it the same way.
Finally, I managed to get myself under control. I’d needed to vent the emotion out, but I couldn’t afford to fall apart completely. I stood and wiped my eyes. “Come on. Let’s clean this up before we look around.”
Nico’s eyes widened in surprise. “Are you sure? It’s okay if you need some more time, Maddy.”
I shook him off. “No. We need to get this done. Come on.” I sniffed.
We spent the next fifteen minutes fixing the room, cleaning up the glass, and putting things back where they belonged.
I’d thought it would keep my mind occupied, and it actually did help.
Once the evidence of the abduction was gone, the house felt like a home again.
It still seemed desecrated in some way, but at least it wasn’t overt.
Nico and I went out, grabbed our bags, and brought them back in.
Thankfully, none of the other neighbors were out and about.
I didn’t have the energy to fake another conversation.
We stowed everything in my old room. Mom and Dad had converted it into a guest room, but they’d left a lot of my things as decorations.
A shelf along one wall still held all my trophies—gymnastics from when I was little, basketball when I’d been in elementary school, and track from high school.
All of them were still lovingly dusted and arranged.
My heart hurt at the sight, but I needed to push through the sadness.
Push through and figure out a way to get them back.
We went to the kitchen next, and I sighed when I walked in.
It looked like they’d been taken while making dinner.
There was a sour smell of spoiled meat, and we found a whole chicken in the sink—raw, greenish with slime, and covered in flies.
There were potatoes sitting in a pot on the stove that Mom hadn’t even started cooking.
The top was covered in a fuzzy gray-black mold.
A large salad sat in a bowl on the counter.
The lettuce and vegetables were wilted and slowly turning into a black soup of putrefaction.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “We should have started in here.”
Nico rubbed my lower back. “It’s fine. We’ll get it cleaned up before it stinks up the rest of the house.”
Thank God Mom had some rubber gloves under the sink to deal with the chicken.
Nico took care of that because I didn’t think my stomach could take it.
He stripped the gloves off and started rinsing out the sink and washing his hands.
“I should have thought about this too,” he said.
“I could have had a team come and clean things up before we got here.”
After another fifteen minutes, the kitchen was back in better order, and the window over the sink had been opened to air out the stench. As bad as the kitchen had been, I had no desire to cook. I pulled my phone out and put in an online order for Chinese delivery.
“General Tso?” I asked Nico.
He wrinkled his nose at me. “Maybe we don’t do meat. I’m gonna have PTSD from that rotten food for a while.”
I glanced at the sink. “God. Right. How about vegetable fried rice?”
He gave me a relieved smile. “Much better idea.”
While we waited for the food to arrive, I took him up to my dad’s study.
It was one of the best places I could think of where something important might be hidden.
When I opened the door to reveal the room, Nico whistled appreciatively.
It had two floor-to-ceiling bookcases on each side of the room, the carpeting was thick and dark red, almost brown, and Dad’s desk was a massive mahogany antique he’d found at an estate sale when I was around seven or eight.
There was a big globe beside his desk, along with a cocktail station with crystal bottles of whiskey, bourbon, and gin.
“Uh… was your dad like… The Godfather or something?” Nico asked as he stepped into the room.
“Close. He was a real-estate lawyer.”
“Close?”
“A joke.”
Nico chuckled. “Right.” He gestured around the room. “This doesn’t really match the aesthetic of the rest of the house.”
I nodded and sat in the plush leather seat behind Dad’s desk.
“Dad told me once that when he’d been in law school, he’d always dreamed of having a big, over-the-top office like big-shot lawyers had on TV and in the movies.
He became a partner at his firm when I was…
I don’t know, ten or eleven? After that, he had the generic office here that was remodeled to look like this. It’s pretty cool, huh?”
“Cool is an understatement,” Nico said as he perused the books on the bookshelves. “Does he still practice?”
I shook my head. “He retired about four years ago.”
Nico moved over to an antique filing cabinet. “What’s in here?”
“That’s where he kept important documents and transcripts from some of his biggest cases. Lots of important things in there, probably the best place to start looking.”
Nico and I pulled every manila folder, accordion file, envelope, and notebook out of the cabinet and spread them across the floor in front of the leather couch beside Dad’s desk.
We only got through a couple of files before the doorbell rang.
Nico ran down to grab the food and some drinks from the fridge.
We ate while we worked. We poured over so much stuff that it felt like we’d been doing it for days.
My eyesight was getting blurry after reading so much legalese.
I had no idea how anyone could make head or tail of some of what was written in these documents.
By midnight, we’d gone through everything Dad had in his filing cabinet. There was still another filing cabinet he kept in the garage, plus all the boxes and stuff in the attic, then there were their computers and Mom and Dad’s personal stuff in their room. It was overwhelming.
Nico rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s give it a rest for tonight.”
It had been a long day. A really, really, long day. “Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be worth a damn if I have to look through one more file tonight.”
Nico and I made our way to my old room and got ready for bed. While I was brushing my teeth, he must have taken a closer look at my room. I came out, and he was holding a trophy, a look of bemused confusion on his face. I saw the one he was holding and rolled my eyes.
He held it up and grinned. “What the hell is Miss Teen Naples?”
I walked over and tried to yank it out of his hands. He took a step back, chuckling. He nodded toward the shelf. “And The Florida Teen Pageant?”
“Fuck off, Nico,” I growled.
He laughed and finally let me have the trophy.
I put it back on the shelf beside the other one.
I flopped on the bed and gestured toward the awards.
“So, my mom had always wanted a beauty queen. She did pageants when she was younger and loved them. Like loved them. I did a couple here and there, plus those two when I was in high school, but I hated it. Much to Mom’s disappointment. I preferred sports.”
Nico sat beside me and nudged me gently in the ribs. “I’m struggling to picture you as a pageant chick.”
I sighed and shook my head. “It wasn’t that bad, but I’d never want to do it again. Something gross about getting all made up and in a fancy dress, then having people decide if you were the prettiest and most bubbly and shit. It was all very fake. I don’t like being fake.”
“Fair enough. Looks like you were a pretty accomplished athlete in high school, though,” he said, looking at the other trophies.
“Most of those are from team stuff. I was above average, but nothing special. Let’s just say there were exactly zero athletic scholarships being sent my way. That’s actually how I met Abi. On the track team.”
“Seriously? You guys have been friends that long?” Nico asked.
“Yeah. We both did the hurdles. I did the one hundred meters, and she did the four hundred. I also did the long jump, but I was terrible at it. Abi and I tried out when we were freshmen and immediately bonded over our very average athleticism. Two peas in a pod from then on.”
“That’s pretty cool. Did you enjoy high school? I feel like there are two types of people, those who loved it and those who hated it. Which one were you?”
I shrugged. “I guess I’m an outlier. I was pretty apathetic to the whole thing.
It never seemed like this life-defining time that the movies and television make it out to be.
It was a place I went to learn. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t enjoy it enough to pine for the good old days all the time.
It was sort of the Abi and Maddy show. We did our thing and didn’t let anything get between us. ”
Nico grinned. “That sounds like you guys.” He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Any crazy stories?”
Of course, there were. We had been kids after all. I chewed on the inside of my cheek as I thought of a good one, then almost burst out laughing. “Okay, here’s one of the best. So, this guy, I think his name was Aaron, started rumors about Abi and me.”
“Rumors?”