Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 4

The Sister

Morning came grey and reluctant through the tall windows.

Mara had not slept. She had changed out of her wedding dress somewhere around two in the morning, folding it carefully over the chair in the dressing room with the kind of deliberate respect you give to something you never want to look at again. She had showered. She had dressed in dark trousers and a white blouse, pulled her hair back, sat in the chair by the window, and watched the gardens below emerge slowly from the darkness as dawn arrived.

She had spent hours thinking about the box.

The photograph. The document. The key and its two-word warning.

By the time the house began to stir around her, she had made three decisions. The first was that she would not tell Dorian what she had found. Not yet. Not until she understood what it meant. The second was that she needed to return to that hidden space and photograph the document properly. The third was that she needed to find out what that key opened before anyone else thought to look for it.

She was reviewing the third decision when there was a knock on the bedroom door.

"Come in," she said.

It was not Dorian.

Vivienne Voss was twenty-six years old and looked like something that had been designed rather than born.

Golden hair that fell in natural waves over her shoulders. Warm brown eyes that caught the morning light and turned it into something inviting. A smile that arrived on her face the way sunrise arrived gradually and then completely, until it was the only thing you could look at. She was dressed simply in a cream blouse and tailored cream trousers, and she carried a tray with two cups of tea and a small plate of things to eat, and she looked so thoroughly warm and so thoroughly harmless that Mara's every instinct went absolutely silent and still.

Which was, Mara had learned, what instincts did when they were paying very close attention.

"I hope this is alright," Vivienne said, stepping into the room with the ease of someone who had been walking into this room her entire life, which she had. "I thought you might not have slept, and I thought tea was better than nothing, and I thought..." She paused, and her smile softened into something that looked remarkably like genuine feeling. "I thought you probably needed one person in this house just to be kind to you this morning."

Mara looked at her for a moment.

"Thank you," she said. "That was thoughtful."

Vivienne set the tray on the small table near the window and sat in the opposite chair with the naturalness of someone who had never once questioned whether they were welcome anywhere. She tucked one leg beneath her and wrapped both hands around her teacup and looked at Mara with those warm brown eyes and said, "How are you actually doing?"

"I'm fine," Mara said.

"You're not," Vivienne said. Not unkindly. Simply accurately. "But that's alright. You don't have to be."

Mara picked up her tea. It was perfectly made, which she noted without knowing yet what to do with the information.

"I didn't know Phillip Hartwell well," Vivienne said, her voice dropping slightly. "But it was still horrible. To see that. At your wedding, of all places." She shook her head slowly. "I keep thinking about it."

"So do I," Mara said.

"The police will sort it out," Vivienne said. "That's what Dorian says."

"What do you say?"

Vivienne looked at her over the rim of her teacup, and something passed through those warm eyes so quickly that Mara almost missed it. Almost.

"I say," Vivienne replied carefully, "that the truth always comes out eventually. One way or another."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"I think I'm going to like you," Vivienne said then, and her smile returned full and warm and genuine-looking as sunrise. "I think you're much more interesting than you're letting on."

"Most people are," Mara said.

Vivienne laughed. It was a lovely laugh. Everything about her was lovely. Mara smiled back and thought that this was the most dangerous person she had met since arriving at this house, and that included the man she had married.

Eli Crane arrived at nine-fifteen.

Mara heard the commotion from the third-floor voices in the entrance hall below, the particular quality of silence that descends on a house when someone unwelcome walks into it. She set down her teacup, stood, smoothed her blouse, and was at the top of the staircase in time to see Dorian and Eli facing each other in the entrance hall below.

She stopped at the top of the stairs and watched.

They were nearly the same height, which seemed to surprise neither of them. Dorian stood with his hands in his pockets and his expression at its most composed, which meant it was at its most impenetrable. Eli stood with his notebook at his side and his grey eyes doing the thing they did, which was look at everything and give nothing back.

"Mr. Voss," Eli said.

"Detective," Dorian replied. "I'd say it was a pleasure."

"I need to speak with your wife."

"My wife," Dorian said, with a particular quiet emphasis on the word that Mara suspected was entirely intentional, "is not available without her lawyer present."

"Her lawyer is on his way," Eli said. "I can wait."

"You can wait outside."

"I can wait inside," Eli said pleasantly, "or I can come back with a warrant and considerably more colleagues. Your choice, Mr. Voss."

The silence between them had texture. Mara could feel it from the top of the stairs. Two men who understood each other perfectly and found that understanding entirely unpleasant.

"He can wait inside," Mara said.

Both men looked up.

She came down the stairs with her hand on the banister and her expression perfectly composed, and she looked at Dorian first and then at Eli, and she thought that standing between these two men was going to become a recurring feature of her life for the foreseeable future, and she had better get comfortable with the geography of it.

"The sitting room," she said to Eli. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

Eli nodded once. A household staff member appeared and led him away.

Dorian looked at her.

"Your lawyer," he said quietly, "will be here in twenty minutes. You say nothing until he arrives."

"I know how to speak to the police, Dorian."

"I know you do," he said. "That's what concerns me."

She held his gaze for a moment and then moved past him toward the sitting room.

Eli was standing when she entered. He stood at the window, looking out at the ground, the way he had stood in the interrogation room,, like a man who was never entirely off duty, who filed information continuously and automatically the way other people breathed.

He turned when she came in.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"Good morning to you, too, Detective."

"It's an observation, not a criticism." He sat when she sat, which she noticed as a deliberate choice of courtesy that somehow made her more guarded rather than less. "I have some follow-up questions from last night."

"My lawyer will be here shortly."

"I know." He opened the notebook. "While we wait, Phillip Hartwell. You said you met him three times."

"That's correct."

"Did he ever speak to you privately? Away from the group?"

She thought about this genuinely because it deserved genuine thought. "Once," she said. "At the dinner six weeks ago. He found me on the terrace. He said he wanted to congratulate me on the engagement."

"What else did he say?"

She looked at Eli carefully. "He said that marrying into the Voss family was, and I remember this specifically because the phrasing struck me as odd. He said it was a significant responsibility. Not an honor. A responsibility."

Eli wrote something.

"Did he say anything else?"

"He started to," she said. "And then Vincent Voss appeared, and Hartwell stopped speaking mid-sentence, and the conversation ended."

The room was quiet.

"He was trying to tell you something," Eli said. Not a question.

"I think so," she said. "I've thought about it since. I didn't understand it at the time."

"Do you understand it now?"

She thought about the photograph in the hidden box. The document. The key.

"Not yet," she said.

Eli looked at her steadily. She looked back at him with the same steadiness and gave him the same thing she had given him in the storage room last night, which was the careful appearance of complete honesty.

He was very good at his job.

She was better at hers.

"Your bouquet," he said. "I'd like to come back to that."

The sitting room door opened.

Her lawyer walked in.

Eli closed his notebook slowly and looked at Mara one last time with those winter-grey eyes, and she thought that he was not finished with the bouquet and that he was not going to let it go and that whatever he already knew about it was going to become a problem very soon.

She smiled at her lawyer.

She did not look at Eli again.

But she felt him watching her all the way out of the room.

TO BE CONTINUED...