Even though Adam and Rob didn’t even know that I had chosen Michael yet, I think they could tell that something was up because everyone seemed on edge with each other. I honestly didn’t have the strength to deal with that whole dynamic yet.
I still wasn’t quite back to feeling a hundred percent, and I needed to focus on the matter at hand with Mark and Naomi. After we had dealt with the inheritance money and made a plan, then I would figure out how to talk to the guys about things and get us all in a less awkward and less uncomfortable mindset.
But for now, we just needed to make it to Maine.
3
When we got to my uncle’s house and knocked on the door, it may as well have been a stranger answering it because I didn’t recognize the man who opened it.
He looked like he knew who I was, but the look on his face wasn’t one of close familiarity, which made me think that he just recognized me from a picture that he had seen or something like that.
“Lisette?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
He looked around at the three guys standing with me, and then looked over their shoulders to see if anyone else was behind them. He looked nervous and I imagined that was probably the way his life had been most of the time since he was holding onto the inheritance that his crazy sister was after. I wondered why he had gone through so much trouble for all this time, and why he hadn’t just given it to her and went on with his life unfettered. It wasn’t like he and I were close.
I didn’t even know who this man was.
“I’ve come to talk to you about the inheritance,” I said as I tried to sound matter-of-fact, and not freaked out and exhausted.
“Come in,” Mark said as he stepped to the side.
He seemed uneasy, but I guess that was to be expected considering we were essentially a group of strangers showing up at his door and asking about an inheritance that his sister was willing to murder people over. I would have been uneasy, too; in fact, I was uneasy. We walked inside and Mark quickly closed and locked the door behind us. When we got all the way inside the house, he offered us something to drink and we all sat down around a round wooden table in the kitchen.
Then, he stared at me until it became more than a bit unnerving.
“Sorry,” Mark said when he realized that he had been staring for a moment longer than was comfortable. “It’s just that I haven’t actually seen you in person since the day you were born. I was there at the hospital with your mother. After Paula died, I figured that you would come looking for me one day.”
I wasn’t trying to be rude or overstep by hitting my uncle with accusatory questions within the first five minutes of meeting him. However, I simply wanted to cut to the chase.
“Why didn’t you come looking for me?” I asked. “If my mother had left behind an inheritance for me when she died, then why didn’t you come to find me? Why didn’t you reach out to tell me about it? Why have you held on to it for so long in silence and waited for me to figure it out and come find you?”
I guess that I already knew the answer to that question, and when Mark answered me with a single word, I knew that I had been right.
“Naomi.”
Michael furrowed his brow. “You knew your sister would go after Lisette’s inheritance?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” Mark answered, as if we were all supposed to know that. “Naomi is crazy, and dangerous. Paula was the eldest sister and, therefore, her share of the inheritance was the largest. Naomi wanted that money, and I knew that if it had immediately fallen to Lisette, Naomi would have killed her for it. I’ve kept it out of her reach all this time, until you were ready to claim it and deal with Naomi yourself.”
“Well, unfortunately, we’ve already had to deal with Naomi,” I said bitterly. “And it nearly cost a few of us our lives.”
Mark looked sincerely troubled by that as he shook his head and frowned.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “If there was anything that I could have done to prevent her from reaching you, I would have.”
“You could have at least reached out to tell me about her,” I said. “Then at least we might have been prepared.”
“Trust me when I say that there is no preparing for Naomi,” Mark replied with a shake of his head. “I did my best to keep her locked away for years, but she is as smart as she is insane. I avoided contact with you altogether, hoping that Naomi would stay targeted on me when she got out of the institution since there would be no reason to even go after you if you didn’t have, or even know about, your inheritance.”
“Yeah, well that plan failed,” I said flatly.
“What is the inheritance tied to?” Adam asked. “Does Lisette need to be headmistress in order to claim access to it?”
“No,” Mark said.
I was surprised by his answer. I thought that the whole point of why Naomi was trying to make me headmistress was to get at the inheritance money.
“The inheritance is tied to fulfilling Paula’s dying wish,” he said.
I blinked. “I thought that was my mother’s dying wish.”
Mark got up from the table and walked down the hall and then into another room. When he came back, he was holding something in his hands. He leaned over the table and handed it to me.
“What is this?” I asked as I took the worn, leather-bound book from him.
“This was your mother’s,” he said. “I think you might want to take a look at it.”
I turned the brown book over in my hand and opened it to somewhere in the middle where my fingers happened to fall, and the binding spread open. It was a journal, and as I flipped through the pages, I saw each and every sheet of paper filled with my mother’s sprawling handwriting.
“My mother’s journal?” I asked as I looked up at my uncle with more questions than I had time to ask.
This book might have all the answers to the questions that I’ve carried around with me since my mother had died.
“Paula’s journal contains her dying wish,” Mark said as he reached over and pressed his finger against the front of the worn journal. “She entrusted me with it a few months before she died. She knew that things were getting bad, and I think that she knew her days were numbered. She wanted this journal to find its way to you, Lisette. Her journal tells what your inheritance is meant for.”
“You read it?” I asked, feeling invaded although I wasn’t sure why.
