As though all she’d been waiting for was permission, her sobs escaped her mouth, quiet and tense at first but slowly growing until she lost herself in them. I had to wrap my arms tightly around her to keep her from collapsing. It was the cries of heartbreak, fear, and anger. I let her drain it all out. All I could do was be there for her as she released it all.
50
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’dthought 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 Godfatheror 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 hadthe 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.
