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CHAPTER TEN

F orbes leaned back in the creaky leather chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

His father's old files had revealed nothing. He'd left a lot of handwritten notes, but Forbes couldn't make heads or tails of them.

Three weeks of reading until his eyes crossed had garnered exactly zero helpful information.

The police had perused all of Dad’s paperwork after the murders, then shoved the files back into the cabinet haphazardly. Forbes had spent his first hours in this office putting them in chronological order.

Not that he hadn’t reveled in reading his father’s notes, seeing the real estate empire through Dad's eyes. After he’d finished college, he’d had nothing but a lot of education and a huge dream.

Grandmother had told Forbes that his grandfather didn’t believe in passing on wealth to the next generation or even giving them a hand up until they proved themselves. So when Charles went to his dad and asked for a loan to use as a downpayment on his first property, Grandfather had refused.

“‘If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way.’” Grandmother had affected a man’s voice, repeating her husband’s words from a generation before.

“I never told your father, but Henry and I did not agree on this. We had the money. What would it hurt to give some to our only child?” Then Grandmother had smiled.

Forbes remembered it so clearly because she was a woman who’d rarely smiled in those days.

“Henry was probably right, though. That place he wanted to buy was a rundown, rat-infested converted brownstone in a lousy area of Roxbury. By the time Charles raised the downpayment, it was, mercifully, off the market. Condemned, I think.” Her lip had curled, though a hint of that rare smile remained.

Dad had found a way. His first property was an apartment building in Watertown, just outside Boston.

He’d bought it, fixed it up, then converted it to condos and sold each separately.

According to the file Forbes had studied, he’d made six figures on the deal, though he’d made pages of notes about what he would do differently next time.

Dad had invested his profit in two apartment buildings. Some he turned to condos. Others he kept as rentals, which gave him needed cash flow.

By the time Mom and Dad married, he was a millionaire. Within a few years, he’d turned the first million into twenty-five.

When Grandfather died a few years later, Dad had made more money than his dad had ever dreamed. He moved his family back to this property. Rosie was three at the time. Forbes came along a few years later.

This was the only home Forbes had ever known.

He glared at the stack of folders. Details about every deal Dad had ever made, but nothing that pointed to what had happened that terrible day.

Nothing obvious, anyway. There were a bunch of scribbles that required a key to figure out, but there was no key.

No way to decipher what Dad had meant by them.

There had to be something, somewhere. Because Forbes’s family’s murders hadn’t been random.

His father had been involved in…in whatever the killers were doing. It had been a smuggling operation. At least, that was Forbes’s theory. The smugglers had used the dock in the inlet, just like the smugglers had the day before.

Though Forbes hadn’t understood everything he’d overheard that day, he’d known that Dad had not only been acquainted with the people who’d barged into their house, but he’d understood why they were there.

Forbes tried not to think about that part, but every once in a while, when he let his guard down, the memories intruded, and he’d be faced again with the knowledge that, in some way, Dad had been responsible for their deaths.

But how? And how had a man who took such meticulous notes about every deal he’d ever made not left anything about what those killers had been doing?

Forbes hoisted the files and carried them to the two-drawer file cabinet that held the old, useless fax machine and a printer they’d stopped producing ink for early in this century.

He should toss the things out with the trash. He would, too, along with all of these old files. Eventually.

Forbes struggled to part with any of his family’s things. This house and the memories it contained—even the useless and outdated ones—were all he had left of them.

Before returning the files to the cabinet, he felt around the bottom of the drawer to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

As he was slotting the files into the organizers, the question Brooklynn had asked the previous day came back to him.

How did you find all the hiding places?

He’d said the former owners had told him, which was true. His family had shown them to him.

That was just the kind of slip-up Forbes couldn’t make around Brooklynn or anyone else. Which was why that moment on the spiral staircase kept coming back to him.

But now, when he heard the question in his memory again, he realized what his brain had been trying to tell him.

Yes, Forbes knew about the hiding places because he’d lived in the house. His parents had shown him and Rosie some. He and his sister had found a few on their own.

But were there more?

One of his ancestors had built this mansion—and all its secrets—so many generations before that nobody knew what, if anything, he’d been trying to hide.

Family lore had it that the original American Ballentine had designed a castle in Europe in the mid-eighteen hundreds and filled it with hidden nooks and secret passageways to protect the royal family from their enemies.

Nobody knew which country the builder had been from, nor which royal family he’d been trying to protect. Nor did anybody know why, years later, he’d included all the secrets in his own home on the peaceful shores of Maine.

Forbes wondered if maybe his great-great-plus-grandfather had just been eccentric, perhaps even a bit playful. Sort of like Forbes’s own father.

Or maybe, like Dad, his ancestor had had something to hide.

Were there hidden nooks he and Rosie had never found in places they’d never thought to look?

Forbes stood in the center of Dad’s office and turned in a slow circle.

When he was a kid, unless Dad was behind his big desk, this room had been locked.

It wasn’t until Forbes was an adult that he realized how strange that was. What was Dad trying to keep from them?

Or perhaps, shield them from?

Maybe this office hadn’t given up all its secrets. Little though Forbes wanted to prove his suspicions about Dad correct, he needed to know what happened that night.

Even if the truth hurt—and Forbes had no doubt it would crush him—he needed to know. He needed to bring their murderers to justice.

If this room contained a secret, Forbes needed to find it.

* * *

Forbes spent an hour searching the walls, then the desk, for secret compartments. He found nothing.

When his phone dinged with a text, he was glad for the reprieve and snatched his phone off the desk.

It was from Tim.

The delivery driver is there.

Giving the text a thumbs-up, Forbes headed for the foyer, where he accepted the box Tim had sent and then climbed the central staircase. He hadn’t seen Brooklynn since lunch and assumed she was watching television or reading.

The sound of music increased as he approached the family room. He stopped in the doorway to assess the situation.

Brooklynn wasn’t watching TV. The music came from a record turning on Mom’s old player, a big band tune that stirred a vivid memory.

Mom and Dad had been taking ballroom dancing lessons, and they’d put on the music to practice. What started as a stilted waltz ended in a cheek-to-cheek slow turn. Dad’s expression had been filled with love.

Mom’s reflected pure joy.

Forbes had stood in the entry, watching, unwilling to interrupt the moment. Even as a little boy, he’d understood the beauty of it.

The image was so fresh and unexpected that it took his breath away.

He forced his eyes open, worried Brooklynn had seen.

But the space was empty. A light shone through the door of the connected office, a room he hadn’t set foot in since he’d returned to the house.

He crossed to the open doorway, taking in each memory like a jab to his flesh.

Mom’s narrow antique writing desk. A wall of white bookshelves that held not the most beautiful books or the most expensive, but the ones she liked the best.

In front of the windows, there were two armchairs Mom had recovered in white fabric with black…drawings of some kind. She’d told him once the pattern had some fancy French name, but he couldn’t remember. A footstool—recovered in black-and-white check—was in front of the chairs.

The desk held nothing but a can of Pledge and a rag.

He inhaled, but his mother’s scent was gone. All he smelled was lemon and…Brooklynn.

She was seated on one of the chairs poring over an oversized book in her lap.

“What are you doing?” His voice was loud and echoed off the walls.

She startled, eyes wide when she looked up. “You scared me.”

“What’re you doing poking around where you don’t belong?”

“Cleaning.” She nodded to the things she’d left on the desk. “But I noticed the pictures and?—”

“What pictures?” He moved forward and realized the thing in her lap wasn’t a book at all, it was a photo album. He spied a pile of others on a side table.

He breathed through his rising anger.

Her ever-present smile faded. “I saw that”—she nodded to a photograph on the bookshelf—“and it made me curious. When I found these?—”

“Those are private family property.” He barely glanced at the photo she’d mentioned. “What are you even doing in here?”

“I was bored, and I thought?—”

“The TV, the five thousand books in this house weren’t enough of a distraction for you?”

“I’ve never been yelled at for cleaning.”

“This is not your house.”

“You said I should stay in the family room, so?—”