Reyes’s Raina Read online

  And, with those words, raw ugly sobs ripped from her throat. She couldn’t believe it. She shouldn’t have had any more crying left to do. There shouldn’t have been any more sobs or tears left to shed. But apparently this raw ugly truth was just a little more than she could handle.

  Once again he wrapped her up in his arms and held her.

  When the crying jag was finally over, and she lay curled up on his lap, sharing a chair at the kitchen table, she whispered, “You’re good at that.”

  He leaned over and kissed her temple. “I haven’t had much experience with it,” he said. “After hearing you for the last twenty-four hours … To see someone in so much pain and to know there’s nothing you can do to help …”

  “What you’re doing is helping.” She got up, reached for the Kleenex on the counter and blew her nose. Then she wiped her eyes and sat down on the chair in front of her coffee. “I’ll focus on the fact my mother has what she wanted,” she said resolutely.

  She knew more grief would come, more sadness for what could have been, more loss down the road when the little things would hit her, but she also understood in her heart of hearts that this was what her mother had truly wished for.

  She stared at him and said, “I don’t have any right to ask this of you …”

  He grabbed her hand and said, “Ask anyway.”

  She gave him a small smile. “Any chance you can delay going home for a couple days until I can get them both buried?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  “It’s not so much about being alone,” she whispered, “I’m being selfish. I want somebody to help me, somebody to stand there beside me at their graves. I’m not sure what to do at this point.” She stared blindly around the apartment. “My mother wanted Reana buried, so Mom would have a place to visit, but I know my sister wanted to be cremated.”

  “What did your mother want for herself?” he asked.

  She stared at him in surprise. “Cremated. It was always to be cremations. She wanted her ashes planted in a garden or thrown out in the ocean.”

  “Then we’ll do that,” he said firmly. “We’ll find a place, take both of them, and we’ll put them back into Mother Nature where they came from.”

  She smiled. “She’d like that. She loved plants. In a way, she was jealous of the work I did because she didn’t have a green thumb but had always wanted to be involved in the business.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said in surprise. “Did she ever talk to Annemarie about her desire? Maybe that would have been a place for her.”

  “I have no clue.” Raina lifted her cup of coffee and stared at the black liquid. Then it hit her. “I’m an orphan now. I have no family, no aunts, no uncles, no siblings.” She stared at him in surprise. “To a certain extent, I always felt that way because the two of them were so close, and I was the third wheel who didn’t fit, but they were always there, always a part of my life. They were still family.”

  “And this too shall pass,” he said gently. “They will take their place in your memory as you move forward. What you can’t do is let them stop you from living a full life.”

  Her smile turned sad. “No, I won’t do that. But it feels very strange right now.”

  “Lonely?” he asked.

  “Well, it would be,” she said, “but you’re here. And I don’t want to impose or expect more from a friendship than I should.”

  “Stop,” he interrupted. “We’ve been friends for a long time. We’re something more now. I’m just not sure what.”

  She smiled, liking the thought. Then she realized he was right. “We have always been on that edge, haven’t we?”

  He nodded. “Even when I took that wrong turn, we were still on that edge. Did I tell you how much relief was in my heart after I found out about Reana’s affair? I’d gone there to break up with her because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everything felt wrong. I didn’t want to see her anymore. I didn’t want to be with her. I didn’t want to make plans with her. I just wanted her out of my life. And every time I thought about moving forward, it was always with you,” he said. “I didn’t know how to make the switch from one to the other without it seeming like I was replacing her with you.”

  Stunned, she stared at him. “I must have thought that myself.”

  He nodded. “When I left, I planned on coming back long before now. I planned on getting in contact to see what you were up to, whether something was still between us.”

  “Two years is a long time to leave it,” she said drily.

  He nodded. “Guilty as charged. I got buried in the work I was in, and I did that deliberately so I could heal. It was not peaceful being in a relationship with Reana. I felt torn, twisted up sometimes, shocked about some of the things she said and did. It wasn’t an easy relationship by any means.”

  Raina nodded. “I do understand. I loved her dearly, but she was in a self-destructive mode, and, if she wasn’t self-destructing, she was destroying others.”

  He smiled. “Let’s get breakfast, follow up with the things we planned to do yesterday, then we have some funeral arrangements to make.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “Agreed.” She glanced at the bacon and eggs, still on the countertop. “So who’ll cook? You or me?”

  He chuckled. “How about me?”

  *

  Reyes got up after finishing his plate of food. He’d been watching her carefully to see if she would eat. She seemed to pick up a new wind of energy. He knew the grief was just being put aside to deal with later. That was the way it should be. There was only so much one could handle at once. First her sister and then her mother. Although Raina appeared to be more at peace about her mother, it was still a lot of changes for her.

  They had to see if they could do anything to clear up the mystery about her sister’s murder. Then they had two funerals to arrange. He thought about the pain involved in something like that and shook his head.

  He quickly washed up the few dishes.

  Behind him, she said, “You do realize we have a dishwasher, right?”

  He turned around to look at her and smiled. “Sure, but it’s just the two of us, and we don’t have much in the way of dishes.” He watched her grab a notepad and a pen. “What are you writing down?”

  “I’m getting rid of all the things in my head that need to be done,” she said. “There are a lot of notifications, not to mention all we were planning today.”

  “Now we have to look at your mom’s house in a different light,” he said. “So I suggest we start there.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  He hesitated as he grabbed a tea towel to dry his hands. “Well, to start with, we need wills.” He watched as her hand froze above the notepad; then slowly she wrote down a list of what they were looking for. “We also need to see if any of your sister’s belongings are at your mother’s, and we have to go to Reana’s office too.”

  Raina nodded and kept writing. He wanted to walk over and see what she’d put down, but it almost seemed intrusive. He took the tea towel and wiped off the table and refilled her coffee cup.

  “When you’re done with your coffee,” he said, “I suggest we leave. We’ll have to contact quite a few people. I don’t know if you have the phone numbers of those we need to call.”

  She shook her head. “No, not really. I’ll find them at Mom’s house. She had an address book.”

  “And we need to get into their computers,” he said.

  She winced. “That we do. I’ll check out my mom’s emails, let her old boyfriend know she won’t make their coffee date. And we have to post on her social media.”

  He winced at that. It wasn’t something he was good at. Social media was for other people. He tended to be much more private and didn’t spend his time posting things about his day for others to see. But he knew half the world completely disagreed with him on that.

  She snatched her pad of paper, walked to the closet, grabbed a purse
bigger than her normal one, stuffed the pad inside, went to her regular purse, pulled out her wallet and keys, added her cell phone, then disappeared into her bedroom.

  When she reappeared with a sweater draped over her arm, he nodded and said, “Ready?”

  She smiled. “As ready as I’ll ever be. Yesterday I thought one day could not get any worse …”

  “It doesn’t mean today is any worse,” he said quietly. “You know what she did yesterday. You know how much she wanted to be with your sister. If she pined away, and her heart gave out for that reason, it’s pretty hard to argue with.”

  She smiled. “It’s much easier to deal with a natural death than a murder.”

  On that note they walked out of the apartment and headed for his Jeep.

  Chapter 14

  “It’ll be a long day,” she said as they pulled up to her mother’s house.

  “Did your mom own the house?”

  She nodded. “Yes. And it was paid for. She had life insurance from my father’s death.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said in surprise.

  “It’s good, but she didn’t have enough to live on her own, even without that expense. That’s why she worked part-time, even though she shouldn’t have had to.”

  “Just because we want to be in a position where we don’t have to work,” he said, “doesn’t mean we are always so lucky.”

  “I know,” she said. “She’s lucky to have been as well off as she was.”

  They walked in the front door, and Raina stood in the hallway.

  “I hate to ask,” he said, “but do you know how her assets are to be divided?”

  She shot him a look. “Equally between the two of us. But, until I have a will in hand, I won’t really know.”

  “Do you think she has one?”

  “I believe so. My sister was always big on that.” At the frown on his face, she looked at him and shrugged. “Yes, it’s possible my sister did something so that everything went to her. I can’t say one way or the other. If it’s that way, I’ll deal with it. I’ve had enough of that behavior from Reana all my life. It would hardly be a shock.”

  He gave a hard look. “Still doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” she whispered. She headed toward the living room. “Let’s start in here.”

  They took a quick glance around, but, outside of a coffee table with a drawer, there wasn’t a lot to look through. Then they headed to the kitchen and dining room.

  “Your mom wasn’t much of a hoarder, was she?”

  “No, she wasn’t at all. She didn’t have money for knickknacks, and, after my father’s death, instead of hanging on to things, she got rid of everything. She said it was much easier to deal with than to see him in every bit and piece he had left in the house.”

  “That’s an unusual reaction.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but that was Mom. She did things her way. It didn’t matter if you agreed or not.”

  “Maybe it’ll make it easier for you to clean up the house before selling it or renting it or whatever.” He glanced around the living room, overstuffed with furniture and the large older dining room set. “I don’t think any of this is worth much money, but maybe it has sentimental value for you.”

  “That’s not really who I am either,” she said, fatigue in her voice. “But thankfully I don’t have to make decisions on that stuff yet.”

  After the living room and dining room, they went toward the kitchen. She stood in the front hall again, checking out the closet, just because it was there.

  “Nothing of Reana’s appears to be here. Maybe it’s all up in the guest bedroom, not the small bedroom we were in yesterday, but the bigger bedroom on the opposite end of the hallway from Mom’s bedroom.”

  They made their way upstairs to the three bedrooms.

  “It’s a small house,” he said, “but your mom didn’t need more than this, living alone.”

  They walked into the master bedroom, and Raina froze. Once again, he lay a hand on her shoulder. She tilted her head to rest on top of it and whispered, “This is hard.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. A large chair was off to the side. He brought it over and helped her to it. “Just sit. Her laptop is on the night table. I’ll grab it for you.” He picked it up and brought it to her.

  She turned it on while he went through the night table drawers. He looked around and said, “Did she have a safety deposit box?”

  “No, she kept everything in the bottom drawer of the dresser, as far as I know.”

  He headed to the dresser and went systematically from the top drawer down. When he hit the bottom drawer, he pulled out 9x13 envelopes of paperwork. “This looks to be legal stuff. She has a file from a lawyer’s office.”

  “That’s probably the one addressing her estate,” she said absentmindedly as she flicked through her mother’s emails. Nothing appeared startling. “What’s the lawyer’s name?”

  “Macaulay and Sons,” he said.

  She typed that into the search bar of the emails and brought a few up. “Mom redid her will a year ago,” she said and read quickly through the emails. She glanced up. “I wonder why she did that?”

  He just watched her.

  She frowned, feeling her stomach twist. “Yes, it’s possible,” she said, and then, more as a mantra for herself, she added, “Again I will deal with it, if that’s what it is.”

  He handed her the envelopes. “I suggest you start with calling the lawyer.”

  Surprised, but realizing the sense of his suggestion, she pulled out her phone and dialed the office. When the secretary answered, she asked to speak to Larry Macaulay.

  “What’s this regarding?”

  “My mother,” Raina said. “Melissa Woodcroft passed away this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the secretary said. “Hang on a moment. I’ll get him for you.” Then she stopped and asked, “Who is calling please?”

  “It’s one of her twin daughters, Raina.”

  “Thank you.”

  Within a few seconds a man’s voice came on the phone. “Raina?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m Melissa Woodcroft’s daughter.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And what’s this that I hear about your mother?”

  “The hospital called me this morning,” she said. “Apparently she had a heart attack and passed away. I’m on my way to the hospital soon. I just thought I should let you know.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “We have her will and will handle her estate here.”

  “Do you also handle my sister’s estate?” she asked, finding it difficult to get the question out.

  “Reana’s? Yes, of course,” he said. “I think you’re the only one who hasn’t been into the office.”

  “I’m the only one who doesn’t have any estate to handle,” she said half humorously. And then she remembered who she was talking to and why. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my sister was found murdered yesterday.”

  Dead silence followed on the end of the phone. “What?”

  “Yes,” she said. “In effect, I just became an orphan.” And her voice choked on that word.

  “Oh, my dear,” he whispered. “I am so sorry. Rest assured we’ll get everything handled on our end, but I need you to come in to the office.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Can you contact the hospital for the death certificates? Or is that something I need to do?”

  “Let me look into it. If we can do it, then, of course, we’ll do it without bothering you. Do the police have any idea what happened?” he asked, his voice diffident and hesitant.

  “No,” she said. “They’re still investigating.”

  “That makes it very difficult for you. To lose both your sister and your mother.”

  “Well, you might as well understand the whole story,” she said. “When my sister was murdered, my mother tried to commit suicide. It was just too much for her heart, and early this morning she had a heart
attack.”

  His gasping horror came through the speaker, and his voice warmed up several degrees. “I am so sorry, Raina. I know we’ve never met, and these certainly aren’t the circumstances under which I would choose to meet you, but, if there’s anything we can do to make it easier on you, please let us know.”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “I’m at Mom’s house right now. We found a bunch of legal paperwork in the bottom of her dresser. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do next.”

  “Whenever the bodies are released,” he said, “funeral arrangements will need to be made.”

  “Is that information you have as well?” she asked. “As far as I know, they both wanted to be cremated.”

  “That’s my understanding, but I will pull both files and take a closer look,” he said. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  “Okay,” she said, relief in her voice. “And I don’t really know how to handle their estates.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” he said with forced cheer. “Let me check on the files. I’ll call the hospital, then I’ll get back to you.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. She hung up and looked at Reyes. “Apparently they’ll be handling both my sister’s and my mother’s estates.”

  “Your sister had money?”

  “She had the brownstone,” Raina said. “I don’t even own my apartment. I just bank my money and pay rent.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I never felt like this was home. I never saw a place I wanted enough to lock myself into ownership, and I guess I always thought that maybe something would happen, and I would need to move.” She frowned, not even sure what she meant by that. “I don’t know. I guess it just didn’t feel right.”

  He nodded. “A bunch of other paperwork is here. Some photocopies of your birth certificates, things like that.”

  She glanced at him and sighed. “I probably need all that.” She stood, walked to her mother’s closet. Inside was a large empty beach bag. She held it out to him. “Can you pack up all the paperwork for me?”