Notorious by Allison Brennan Page B

“I’m so glad Regina is still here.”
    Regina had been her grandmother’s housekeeper for fifteen years. She worked nine-to-five and often prepared meals, especially when James Revere was still alive and Eleanor was more involved with charity work.
    Conflicting feelings of nostalgia, regret, and anger—anger Max thought she’d left behind—flitted to the surface. She’d never hated her family, but the expectations and fundamental disagreements had weighed on Max her entire life. Though her grandparents hadn’t made her feel inadequate for being born out of wedlock or abandoned by her mother (those subtle attacks were reserved for her uncle Brooks), Max sensed she was expected to be faultless, as if required to repent for her mother’s many transgressions.
    “Don’t avoid me,” William growled.
    “I hadn’t planned on it,” she said. She smiled at him, bemused. “Why do they think I was at Gerald’s house?”
    “Maybe this dinner was a bad idea.”
    Could William have left the message at the hotel? It wasn’t like him—not threats. He’d come to her personally, using his leverage as her closest friend in the family.
    Except she was about to destroy their relationship.
    “I have a question for you.”
    “Can it wait?”
    She glanced down the hall. “What are you so nervous about?”
    “I’m not.”
    William was most certainly nervous.
    “Why didn’t you tell me you were at Lindy’s house the night she was murdered?” Max hadn’t meant to ask the question that way. She’d planned to ask if he’d told the police he’d been there. She’d been questioned, just like all of them—the police asked about the last time she’d seen Lindy, who she’d been with, her state of mind, if she was having an argument with anyone, who did Max think might have killed her. Though she wasn’t in the room when William was questioned, he would have been asked similar questions.
    “I wasn’t,” he said without hesitation.
    “Your car was ticketed down the street from Lindy’s house three hours before she was killed. That never came up in the trial, and it never came up in any of our conversations.”
    “Shh! Dammit, Max!”
    “Why did you hide that information?”
    “I knew you didn’t come just for Kevin’s funeral.” He ran a hand over his gelled hair, a bit long, but not too long, like Max always imagined Jay Gatsby would look.
    “I did.” She caught his eye. “But I changed my mind.”
    He paled. “Max, please—”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “Why does it sound like you’re interrogating me?”
    “It’s a simple question.”
    Caitlin walked down the hall, her heels clicking purposefully on the tile. “I can hear both of you all the way in the library.” She locked arms with William t to the pool house where Lindy about fhen looked up at Max. Even in her heels, she was several inches shorter. A petite, blond, blue-eyed Kewpie doll with the fangs of a viper. “Hello, Maxine. We’re so glad you’re not in jail, and that you could make time for your family. Perhaps you and William could save your arguments for later.”
    If there was a picture next to the definition of “passive-aggressive” in the dictionary, Caitlin Talbot Revere would be it.
    One well-placed question at the dinner table and Max would know the truth, but she hadn’t seen William with such a deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression in her life, even when they were fourteen and Aunt Joanne caught them sneaking back into the house at dawn after they’d gone to a concert at the Frost Amphitheater, after expressly being told they couldn’t go.
    If he wasn’t hiding something, why hadn’t he shared the information with the police?
    Maybe he had and they’d dismissed it. But if they had, Kevin’s attorney should have brought it up in court because it would have cast doubt on Kevin’s guilt as well as highlighted the errors in the initial police investigation. Max had never looked at the case files as a