Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 7

The Truth About Three Years Ago

The sitting room felt smaller after Eli left.

Or perhaps it was the words that made it smaller. Three words that had rearranged everything she thought she understood about the architecture of her situation.

It was about you.

Mara looked at Dorian standing by the window and kept her voice very steady.

"Explain that," she said.

He turned from the window and moved to the chair across from her, sitting in it the way he sat in everything, with the kind of controlled ease that looked like comfort but was actually something much more deliberate. He rested his elbows on his knees and looked at his hands for a moment and then looked at her.

"Three years ago," he said, "my father began negotiating the arrangement with your father. The marriage. The debt absorption. The alliance." He paused. "Phillip Hartwell found out."

"How?"

"Hartwell had been involved in my father's business for thirty years. He knew things. He heard things. He was present in rooms where conversations happened that were not meant to be heard." Dorian's jaw tightened slightly. "He came to me privately. He told me he knew about the arrangement. He told me he thought it was wrong."

Mara was very still.

"He said that using a woman as a financial instrument was something he could not remain silent about," Dorian continued. "That he would go to the authorities if the arrangement proceeded."

"But it proceeded," Mara said.

"Yes."

"So he didn't go to the authorities."

"No." Dorian looked at her directly. "Because my father made sure he had reasons not to."

The clock on the mantelpiece marked seconds. Outside the winter garden sat grey and still and perfectly arranged.

"The document," Mara said carefully. "The agreement. Eleven years old."

Something moved through Dorian's expression. "You know about the document."

It was not a question. She did not treat it as one.

"I know what it contains," she said. "Generally."

"Then you know that my father has been paying Hartwell for eleven years to maintain his silence about certain business practices." Dorian stood and moved back to the window. "What I didn't know until three years ago was that Hartwell had also been keeping his own records. His own copies of everything. Insurance, he called it."

"Smart," Mara said.

"Dangerous," Dorian replied. "Which is apparently what got him killed."

The room absorbed that.

"You think your father?" she began.

"I don't think anything yet," Dorian said. It came out sharp, and then he controlled it, and when he spoke again, his voice was level. "I have suspicions. I am not prepared to say them out loud."

"Eli is going to speak to your father tomorrow."

"I know."

"Your father would have had lawyers in that room before Eli's car turned into the driveway."

"I know that too."

She looked at him standing at the window with his back partially toward her and thought about the man in the photograph, Vincent Voss, younger, laughing, his arm around a man he would later pay to stay silent and who was now dead. She thought about the kind of father who produces the kind of son standing in front of her and what that cost and whether Dorian knew the full price of it yet.

"The disagreement between you and Hartwell," she said. "When he threatened to go to the authorities about the arrangement. What happened? How did your father stop him?"

Dorian was quiet for a long time.

"He found something," he said finally. "Something Hartwell had done. Years ago. Something that would have destroyed him as thoroughly as Hartwell could have destroyed us." He paused. "Mutually assured silence."

"And you," she said. "Where were you in all of this?"

He turned from the window and looked at her.

"I told my father to end the arrangement," he said. "Your arrangement." The marriage. I told him it was wrong and that I wanted no part of it."

She had not expected that.

She kept her face very still.

"He didn't listen," Dorian said. "He never listened. And by the time the contracts were signed, and your father had accepted the terms, there was no undoing it without consequences that would have fallen on people who didn't deserve them." He looked at her steadily. "Including you."

The room was very quiet.

"So you went through with it," she said.

"Yes."

"To protect me from the consequences of an arrangement I didn't know about."

"Partly," he said. "And partly because I had no more choice than you did."

She sat with them for a moment and thought about two people placed on a board by other people and moved around it for years and finally arriving at an altar neither of them had chosen. She thought about the morning she had found out the truth in her father's study and the cold fury that had moved through her like water finding its level.

She thought about the fact that Dorian had tried to stop it.

She was not sure yet what to do with that.

"The key," she said.

He went very still.

"What a key," he said.

She reached into her pocket and held it up between two fingers. The brass key with the worn finish and the tag and its two-word warning.

Dorian looked at it for a long time without speaking. Something happened in his face that she had not seen there before. Something that looked almost like the particular pain of recognizing something you had hoped was gone.

"Where did you find that," he said quietly.

"Behind a panel in the dressing room," she said. "Along with the photograph and the document."

"That room was searched," he said, more to himself than to her. "Before you arrived. I had it searched."

"Someone put those things there after your search," she said. "Someone with access to this house."

He crossed the room and sat down across from her and looked at the key in her hand with those deep unreadable eyes.

"What does it open," she asked.

"My father's studies," he said. "There is a cabinet. Old. Against the east wall. It has been locked for as long as I can remember. My father said the key was lost."

"He lied."

"He lies about a great many things."

She looked at the key and thought about what Eli had said. Documents were found in Hartwell's safe deposit box. Her father's name appears prominently. The investigation is moving toward Vincent Voss as the weather moves toward the coast.

"If Eli gets to that cabinet first," she said.

"He won't," Dorian said. He stood. "We need to go tonight."

They went at eleven.

The study was on the first floor at the east end of the house. Vincent Voss was not in residence. He had gone to his secondary property that morning, which Dorian had known and which Mara now understood was not a coincidence, but a decision Dorian had made about timing.

The study was dark and large and smelled of old paper and something else underneath it. Power, she thought, had a smell. It was the smell of a room where decisions had been made for decades that other people had to live with.

Dorian did not turn on the main light. A desk lamp. Enough.

The cabinet was exactly where he had said. Dark wood, tall, old enough that the brass fittings had the same worn quality as the key. She crossed it and looked at the lock and put the key in and felt it turn with the particular smoothness of a lock that has been used many times and is simply waiting to be used again.

The door swung open.

She had expected documents. More papers. More dense legal language covering more things that could not be said plainly.

She had not expected what was actually inside.

Three shelves. The top two folders were held, neatly labeled in the same old-fashioned handwriting as the key tag. But it was the bottom shelf that stopped her breathing for a moment.

A recorder. Small, digital, modern against the old wood of the cabinet. And besides it, a single sheet of paper with a list of dates going back seven years. Beside each date is a name. Some she did not recognize. Some she did.

The third name on the list was Gerald Delacroix.

Her father.

The seventh name was Phillip Hartwell.

The eleventh name, near the bottom of the list, written in the same precise hand as all the others, was one she had not expected to see.

Eli Crane.

She stood in the dark study with the cabinet open before her and looked at Eli Crane's name on the list and felt the ground shift beneath her in the particular way it shifts when you realize that nothing you thought you understood was actually the shape you thought it was.

She turned to look at Dorian.

He was reading over her shoulder. She watched his face as he found the name. Watched him go very still.

"He's not just investigating this family," Mara said quietly.

"No," Dorian said.

"He's connected to it."

"Yes."

She looked back at the list. At Eli Crane's name. On the date beside it.

Four years ago.

"What happened four years ago," she said.

Dorian reached past her and picked up the recorder from the bottom shelf and turned it over in his hands and looked at it with an expression that was the closest thing to dread she had ever seen on his face.

"I think," he said slowly, "we are about to find out."

TO BE CONTINUED…