Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 9

The Next Target

She did not sleep.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in her hand long after Thomas Crane's voice had gone, and the line had returned to silence, and the night had settled back around her like something that had been briefly disturbed and was now pretending it had not been.

You are going to be next.

She turned the words over the way you turn something sharp over in your hands. Carefully. Feeling for the edges.

Thomas Crane was in prison. Had been for eleven years. Which meant his information came from somewhere inside those walls or from someone outside them who was feeding him what they knew. Which meant he had a network. Which meant he had been building something from inside a cell for over a decade the way his son had been building something from outside one.

Father and son. Both are working toward the same thing from opposite sides of the same wall.

She thought about Eli sitting across from her in the sitting room that morning. The questions about Hartwell. The photograph in the evidence bag. The notebook and its careful record of everything she said and did not say. She thought about the recording and the younger version of his voice, saying My father is in prison because of you," with all that barely controlled fury underneath it.

She thought about a man who had been offered his father's freedom and had said no.

She did not know what to do with that yet. But she knew it mattered.

Her phone lit up again. Different number this time. She answered.

"It's Marcus," her lawyer said. He sounded alert at two in the morning, which meant he had not been sleeping either. "I have information. The catering staff member. The one added to the list forty-eight hours before the wedding."

"What about her," Mara said.

"Her name is Sera Doyle. Twenty-two years old. No prior connection to the Voss family or the Grand Veronique Hotel. She was referred to the agency three weeks ago by a personal contact." He paused. "The contact's name on the agency referral form is listed as V. Voss."

The bedroom was very quiet.

Say that again," Mara said.

"The referral came from someone identifying themselves as V. Voss," Marcus said. "It could be—"

"I know who it is," Mara said.

After she ended the call, she sat for a long time looking at the dark garden below the window. The hedges are cut into precise shapes. The gravel paths are perfectly raked. Everything in its place. Everything exactly as intended.

V. Voss.

Vivienne.

I think I'm going to like you. I think you're much more interesting than you're letting on.

She pressed her palms flat against her knees and breathed through the cold clarity of it. The chess pieces arranged themselves into a pattern that had always been there, waiting for enough of them to be visible.

Vivienne had placed the witness.

Vivienne had placed someone inside the wedding who would see exactly what she needed her to see and report exactly what she needed her to report.

Which meant Vivienne had known in advance what was going to happen at that wedding.

Which meant Vivienne had planned it.

Morning arrived cold and bright.

Mara was dressed and downstairs before anyone else in the house moved. She stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the photographs on her phone and went through everything she had documented from the hidden box with the systematic attention of someone building a structure that needed to hold weight.

The document. The photograph. The key and what it had opened. The recording. Thomas Crane's call. Marcus's information about Sera Doyle and the referral that bore Vivienne's initial.

She organized it in her notebook. Facts in one column. Inferences in another. Questions in a third. The question's column was the longest.

She was still writing when she heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up to find Vivienne in the kitchen doorway in a pale blue robe with her golden hair loose and her warm brown eyes soft with the particular gentleness of morning.

"You're up early," Vivienne said, moving to the coffee machine with complete ease.

"Couldn't sleep," Mara said. She closed the notebook.

"Me neither," Vivienne said. "I kept thinking about the detective. Whether he is getting any closer."

"To what?"

Vivienne looked at her over her shoulder with those warm eyes. "To whoever killed Phillip."

"I imagine he is," Mara said evenly. "He seems very thorough."

"He is," Vivienne agreed. She poured her coffee and turned and leaned against the counter with the cup in both hands. "He has been thorough about this family for years. Long before Phillip died."

"You mentioned that yesterday," Mara said. "In the garden."

"It bears repeating," Vivienne said pleasantly. "He is not your ally, Mara. Whatever he seems like in those rooms where he asks you questions and listens to your answers so carefully. He has an agenda."

"Everyone has an agenda," Mara said.

Vivienne smiled. "True."

"Including you," Mara said.

The kitchen was very still. Outside, a bird moved through the bare garden. The coffee machine finished its cycle with a soft click.

Vivienne looked at her for a moment with those warm brown eyes and Mara looked back and neither of them moved and the air between them had the quality of two people who had been playing a game and had just simultaneously acknowledged that they both knew it was a game.

Then Vivienne laughed. Soft and genuine-sounding. "I think I was right about you," she said. "You are interesting."

"Sera Doyle," Mara said.

The laugh stopped.

Not dramatically. Not with a sharp intake of breath or a sudden change of expression. It simply stopped the way music stops when someone lifts the needle from the record. And in the silence that followed Vivienne's face, she did something Mara had not seen her do before.

It went still.

Not the warm, composed stillness of a woman in control of a room. A different stillness. Older. Harder underneath.

"I don't know that name," Vivienne said.

"The catering staff member you referred to the agency three weeks ago," Mara said. "The one who was added to the wedding staff list forty-eight hours before the event. The one who had told the police she saw me standing alone at the cake table."

Vivienne said nothing.

"Your initial is on the referral form," Mara said. "V. Voss."

"There are two V. Vosses in this family," Vivienne said quietly.

"Vincent referred a twenty-two-year-old girl to a catering agency," Mara said. "Does that seem likely to you?"

The kitchen was completely silent.

Then Vivienne set her coffee cup down on the counter very carefully and looked at Mara with those still brown eyes and said nothing for a long moment. When she spoke her voice had changed. Not dramatically. But enough.

"What do you want," she said.

"The truth," Mara said.

"That is a very dangerous thing to want in this house."

"I know," Mara said. "I want it anyway."

Vivienne looked at her for a long time. Something moved through her face that Mara could not fully read, but that had the quality of a calculation being performed at speed. Then the kitchen door opened and a member of the household staff appeared, and the moment broke apart as something fragile dropped on a hard floor.

Vivienne picked up her coffee cup and smiled at the staff member and walked out of the kitchen without looking at Mara again.

Mara sat at the kitchen table and looked at the space where she had been standing and thought that she had pushed too soon. She had the information, but she had moved on it before she had enough to make Vivienne feel that denial was impossible. She had shown her hand before the hand was complete.

She would not do that again.

Eli arrived at ten.

He did not come alone this time. A second detective she had not seen before came with him, younger, quieter, who stood slightly behind Eli and observed everything with careful eyes.

Dorian was not in the house. He had left early for a meeting he had not explained, and she had not asked about.

She received Eli in the sitting room alone.

He sat across from her and opened his notebook and looked at her with those grey eyes and said, "Sera Doyle has retracted her statement."

Mara kept her face still. "When?"

"This morning. Seven am. She came to the precinct with a lawyer and formally withdrew everything she told us the night of the wedding."

"What reason did she give?"

"She said she was mistaken about what she saw." Eli watched her carefully. "She seemed frightened."

"Of course she did," Mara said.

"You don't seem surprised."

"I'm not," she said. "Someone got to her."

"Who?"

She looked at him across the sitting room in the winter morning light and thought about the recording in the cabinet. His father's voice. Your father is in prison because of you. His own voice. Younger, barely controlled. The date on the list. Four years ago.

She thought about Thomas Crane calling her in the night and telling her she was going to be next and knowing things that a man in prison should not know.

She thought about how much to give Eli and how much to keep and where the line was between an ally and a liability.

"I have a name," she said carefully. "But I need something from you first."

Eli looked at her. "What?"

"The truth," she said. "About your father. About Vincent Voss. About four years ago."

The room was very still.

Eli's expression did not change. But something behind it did. Something shifted and settled and when he spoke his voice was very quiet.

"How do you know about that," he said.

"Because," she said, "your father called me last night."

TO BE CONTINUED...