Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 3

The Mansion

They released her at half past midnight.

No arrest. No formal charges. Just a uniformed officer opening the door of the little storage room and telling her in a carefully neutral voice that she was free to go for the evening, but that Detective Crane would be in touch tomorrow morning.

She thanked him with the same careful neutrality and walked out.

Dorian was waiting in the corridor.

He was leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed, his jacket removed, and his tie loosened exactly one inch, which on any other man would have looked disheveled and, on Dorian Voss, looked like a deliberate choice. He straightened when he saw her and said nothing, which she was beginning to understand was simply how he communicated through the things he did not say as much as the things he did.

A car was waiting downstairs.

They rode to the Voss mansion in complete silence.

She had seen the mansion before. Twice during the engagement, formal dinners where she had been displayed like an acquisition and assessed by people who did not bother to hide that they were assessing her. She had memorized the layout during those visits, the way she memorized everything that mattered. Quietly and completely, and without anyone noticing, she was doing it.

But arriving at night, as its newest resident, as the woman whose name was now legally attached to everything inside its walls, was different.

The gates were iron and tall and opened without sound. The driveway curved through the ground so meticulously that it looked artificial. The house itself rose at the end of the drive like something that had decided it was done to be impressive and had moved on to simply being inevitable: four stories of grey stone and dark windows and history that Mara was fairly certain was not the kind anyone put in a book.

The car stopped.

Dorian opened her door before the driver could.

She stepped out into the night air and looked up at the house, and felt it look back at her.

"Your things were moved this afternoon," Dorian said beside her. "Before the wedding. Your room is on the third floor."

"My room," she repeated.

"Our room," he corrected, without particular emphasis. "If you prefer."

She looked at him. He looked back at her. The night air moved between them, carrying the faint scent of gardenia that had somehow followed her all the way from the ballroom, which felt like cruelty.

"We should talk," she said.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tonight you should sleep."

"I won't sleep."

"No," he agreed quietly. "Probably not. But you should try."

He walked toward the front door, and she followed because there was nowhere else to go, and that simple fact, nowhere else of it, settled over her shoulders like something with weight.

The inside of the mansion was exactly as she remembered and completely different at the same time.

During the dinner parties, it was lit and filled with people, music, and the performance of wealth. Now it was dim and silent and full of shadows that pooled in the corners of high-ceilinged rooms and made the space feel larger than it was. A housekeeper she had not met before appeared and disappeared at the same moment, ghost-quiet.

Dorian walked her to the third floor without speaking.

The bedroom was enormous. That was the first thing. The kind of enormous that stopped being impressive and started being lonely. A bed large enough to feel like a landscape. Tall windows overlooking the back gardens. Her suitcases were stacked neatly near the dressing room, already unpacked by hands she had not seen.

She walked to the window and looked out at the dark gardens below.

"Dorian," she said to the glass.

"Mara."

"Did you know Phillip Hartwell was going to die tonight?"

The silence that followed was four seconds long. She counted.

"No," he said.

She turned from the window and looked at him standing in the doorway, still in his wedding suit, still wearing his ring, still entirely unreadable.

"Do you know who killed him?" she asked.

Another silence. Three seconds this time.

"Not yet," he said.

She noticed the difference between the two answers. The first was simple denial. The second was something else entirely. Not yet implied that he was already looking. That he had people looking. That the machinery of the Voss family had already begun turning in the dark while she was sitting in a storage room being questioned by a grey-eyed detective.

"They're going to come for me," she said. "The police. Crane."

"I know."

"I was standing next to the body with a knife in my hand."

"I know that too."

"Dorian." She kept her voice steady. "I need you to understand that I did not do this."

He looked at her from the doorway for a long moment. Something moved through his expression that she could not name, and then it was gone.

"I know," he said for the third time. And then he pulled the door almost closed behind him, leaving just enough light from the corridor to keep the room from being completely dark, and she was alone.

She stood in the center of the enormous room and breathed.

Then she got to work.

She found it forty minutes later.

She had not been searching for anything specific. She had been doing what she always did in unfamiliar spaces, learning them. Opening drawers. Testing doors. Understanding the geography of a place, the way you understand the geography of a face, is by looking at it long enough and carefully enough that it cannot hide anything from you anymore.

The dressing room was large and lined with dark wood shelving. Her clothes had been hung with precision she found slightly unnerving. At the back of the room, behind a panel that was designed to look like part of the wall and would have fooled anyone who was not specifically looking for things designed to fool people, was a small door.

She found the latch on her third passage of the wall.

The door opened into a narrow space. Not quite a room. Not quite a corridor. Perhaps six feet deep and four feet wide with a single bare bulb overhead on a pull cord. The kind of space that old houses develop between their walls is like secrets they forgot they were keeping.

It was not empty.

On a low shelf sat a wooden box, unlocked, its lid slightly raised as though someone had opened it recently and not quite closed it again in their haste. Inside the box were three things.

The first was a photograph. Old, the edges worn soft with handling. Two men standing together outside a building she did not recognize, their arms around each other's shoulders, both of them younger than she had ever seen them. One of them was Vincent Voss. The other was Phillip Hartwell.

The second was a document. Three pages, dense with legal language, dated eleven years ago. She read it twice quickly and understood perhaps half of it. What she understood was enough to make her sit down on the floor of the narrow, hidden space with the paper in her hands and stare at the bare bulb overhead.

The third thing was a key. Small and old and attached to a tag on which someone had written two words in handwriting she did not recognize.

Do not.

She stared at the key for a long time.

Then she put everything back exactly as she had found it, closed the box, closed the panel door, and walked back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the enormous bed in her wedding dress and thought about what it meant that these things existed and what it meant that she had found them and what it meant that whoever had hidden them here had not hidden them carefully enough.

Or had hidden them exactly carefully enough.

For exactly the right person to find.

She reached up and began pulling pins from her hair, one by one, and thought about Phillip Hartwell's face in the younger photograph, laughing, his arm around Vincent Voss like a man with nothing to hide.

She thought about the document and the legal language she had half understood.

She thought about the key and its two-word warning.

And she thought about Detective Eli Crane and his notebook and his grey eyes and the way he had asked about her bouquet at the very end, as though he had been saving it, which meant he already knew something about it, which meant she was already behind.

She did not like being behind.

The last pin came free. Her hair fell around her shoulders. She set the pins in a neat row on the bedside table and looked at them and made herself a promise in the silence of the enormous, unfamiliar room.

She was going to find out what was in that document.

She was going to find out what the key opened.

And she was going to find out who had put those things in that hidden space and whether they had put them there for her to find.

Before Detective Eli Crane found them first.

TO BE CONTINUED...