Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 12

Anna

Nobody moved for a moment.

The three of them sat around the desk with the phone between them and Anna Hartwell's voice settling into the room like something that had been traveling a long distance to arrive here and had finally made it.

Eli reached for the phone. Mara put her hand on his arm. He looked at her. She shook her head once. He sat back.

"Anna," Mara said. "Where are you?"

"Somewhere safe," Anna said. "For now."

"How did you get this number?"

"My father had it," she said. "In a notebook, he kept it separate from everything else. Your name was in it. He wrote it three weeks before the wedding with a note beside it."

"What did the note say," Mara said.

A pause. "It said — she didn't know what she was walking into. Tell her before it's too late."

The study was very still.

"He tried," Mara said quietly. "On the terrace. Six weeks ago."

"I know," Anna said. "He told me. He said someone interrupted before he could finish. He was going to try again at the reception." Her voice stayed steady but something underneath it tightened. "He didn't get the chance."

"I'm sorry," Mara said. "About your father."

A silence that had grief in it. Brief and controlled and real. "We need to meet," Anna said. "There are things I can only say in person. Things my father gave me that need to be seen not described."

"When," Mara said.

"Tonight," Anna said. "Late. There is a place my father used to go when he needed to think. A bar in the Meridian called Cassidy's. It closes at midnight. I will be there at eleven."

"I'll be there," Mara said.

"Alone," Anna said.

Mara looked at Eli. He was already shaking his head. She held his gaze and then looked back at the phone.

"Alone," she confirmed.

The line went quiet for a moment. "My father trusted you," Anna said. "He didn't trust easily. Neither do I. But I am choosing to believe he was right." Another pause. "Don't make me regret it."

The call ended.

The argument happened immediately.

"You are not going alone," Eli said. Not loudly. The quiet version of a firm thing that she was learning was more immovable than the loud version.

"She said alone," Mara said.

"She is either genuinely frightened or meeting you in a public place for her own safety," Eli said, "in which case I can be nearby without being at the table. Or she is something other than what she appears to be, in which case you absolutely are not going alone."

"She is Phillip Hartwell's daughter," Mara said. "Her father was murdered at my wedding. She has the information I need."

"All of which could be true, and she could still be dangerous," Eli said.

"I'll go," Dorian said.

They both looked at him.

"Not inside," he said. "I'll be in the car. If she sees Eli, she sees a detective and she runs. If she sees me, she sees the Voss family, and she runs faster." He looked at Mara. "But I will be outside. Non-negotiable."

Mara looked at Dorian and then at Eli and thought about two men who had arrived at the same position from completely different directions and whether that constituted agreement or simply parallel stubbornness.

"Fine," she said. "But you stay outside, and you stay out of sight."

"Agreed," Dorian said.

Eli said nothing, which was his version of the agreed.

Cassidy's was exactly the kind of bar that had existed in the same location for forty years without changing anything about itself and was better for it. Dark wood. Low light. The smell of old timber and good whiskey and the particular warmth of a room that has absorbed decades of conversation. A Tuesday night in winter meant it was half empty. The bartender was older and moved slowly and did not appear to find anything about his customers interesting enough to look at twice.

Mara arrived at ten fifty and took a corner table with her back to the wall and a clear line of sight to both the front door and the bar. She ordered coffee she did not intend to drink and sat with her coat on and waited.

Anna Hartwell walked in at eleven exactly.

She was not what Mara had pictured. She had expected something of her father in her — the heaviness, the age. Instead, Anna was slight and dark-haired and moved through the bar with the careful economy of someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible in rooms. She was perhaps twenty-nine but looked younger until you saw her eyes, which were older than the rest of her face by a decade at least.

She found Mara without hesitation and crossed to the table and sat down and looked at her with eyes that were dark brown and direct and conducting their own rapid assessment.

"You're smaller than I expected," Anna said.

"You're younger," Mara replied.

Something moved through Anna's face that might have been the beginning of a smile under different circumstances. She put a bag on the table between them. Old leather. Well-traveled.

"My father gave me this," she said. "Three weeks before the wedding. He said if anything happened to him," I was to find you and give it to you."

"He knew," Mara said. "He knew something was going to happen."

"He had known for months," Anna said. "He told me in August that he thought his arrangement with Vincent Voss was coming to an end. That Vincent had found a different solution to the problem my father represented."

"A permanent one," Mara said.

"Yes." Anna's hands were flat on the table. Steady. "He could have run. I told him to run. He said if he ran it would never end. That was the only way to finish it was to make sure that when he died the information he had been sitting on went somewhere that could actually be used."

"To me," Mara said.

"To you," Anna confirmed. "He said you were walking into the middle of it, whether you knew it or not. That you deserved to know what you were walking into."

"What's in the bag," Mara said.

Anna looked at her for a moment longer. Then she unzipped the bag and laid three things on the table between them.

The first was a hard drive. Small and black and ordinary looking.

The second was a handwritten letter sealed with wax. Mara's name on the front in the same old-fashioned handwriting she recognized from the key tag in the hidden box.

The third was a photograph. Different from the one in the cabinet. This one was newer. Taken perhaps five years ago. A woman Mara did not recognize standing outside a building she did not recognize in a city that did not look like Voss City. The woman was perhaps fifty. Dark hair going grey. A face that carried the particular expression of someone who had been looking over their shoulder for so long that it had become their default position.

"My mother," Anna said quietly. "Taken two years ago. The last photograph I have of her."

"Where is she now," Mara said.

"That is what I have been trying to find out for three years," Anna said. "My father told me she was alive. That she was safe. That the arrangement that kept her that way was connected to his arrangement with Vincent Voss." She paused. "When my father died, his arrangement died with him. Which means whatever was keeping my mother safe—"

"Died with him too," Mara said.

"Yes."

The bar moved around them. Someone laughed at the counter. The bartender changed a glass. The ordinary machinery of an ordinary night continued around a table where nothing ordinary was happening.

"The hard drive," Mara said.

"Everything my father collected over eleven years," Anna said. "Every document. Every recording. Every piece of evidence he kept as insurance." She looked at Mara steadily. "Including evidence of what Vincent Voss did eleven years ago that started all of this."

"What did he do," Mara said.

Anna was quiet for a moment. "He had someone killed," she said. "Not Hartwell. Not anyone connected to his business directly. Someone entirely outside all of it who happened to see something they should not have seen and made the mistake of saying so."

"Who," Mara said.

"A police officer," Anna said. "A young one. Twenty-six years old. Three years on the force." She looked at Mara with those old eyes. "His name was Daniel Crane."

The bar seemed to tilt slightly.

"Eli's brother," Mara said.

"Eli's younger brother," Anna said. "Who died in what was recorded as a traffic accident fourteen years ago. Six months before, Thomas Crane was framed and imprisoned." Her voice was very quiet. "It was not an accident."

Mara sat with that information and felt it rearrange everything again the way everything kept rearranging every time she thought she had the shape of it.

"Eli doesn't know," she said.

"No," Anna said. "He doesn't."

"He thinks his brother's death was an accident."

"Yes."

"And when he finds out," Mara said slowly, "that Vincent Voss killed his brother and framed his father and has been sitting in that mansion four miles from here for fourteen years—"

"He will stop being a detective," Anna said quietly. "And start being something much more dangerous."