Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 5

The Evidence

The lawyer's name was Marcus Webb, and he had been handling Delacroix family legal matters for fifteen years, which meant he had been handling her father's disasters for fifteen years, which meant Mara trusted him approximately as far as she could see him clearly.

He sat across from her in the sitting room after Eli had gone and opened his briefcase with the practiced efficiency of a man who charged by the hour and was comfortable with that.

"The good news," he said, "is that they have no grounds for arrest. Not yet. The forensic results from the cake won't be back for forty-eight hours minimum and until they have a confirmed cause of death and a confirmed method, they cannot move against you."

"And the bad news," Mara said.

Marcus Webb looked at her over his glasses. "They have a witness."

The room was very still.

"What kind of witness," she said.

"Someone who claims to have seen you near the cake table approximately ten minutes before the lights went out." He shuffled papers. "Alone. Without your husband or any member of the wedding party."

"I was checking that the cutting knife was in position," she said. "The wedding coordinator asked me to confirm it personally. I have the text message to prove it."

"Good," Marcus said. "Send it to me immediately. That kind of detail matters enormously at this stage."

She sent it while he was still speaking.

"There's something else," he said.

"Of course there is."

"The witness," he said carefully, "is a member of the catering staff. A young woman who was hired specifically for this event through an agency." He paused. "She was not on the original staffing list submitted to the venue three weeks ago."

Mara looked at him.

"She was added," Marcus said, "forty-eight hours before the wedding."

The sitting room was quiet enough that Mara could hear the clock on the mantelpiece marking seconds with small decisive clicks.

"Someone added her," Mara said.

"That is what the records suggest."

"Who?"

"That," Marcus said, closing his briefcase, "is what Detective Crane is presumably trying to determine."

After he left, she sat alone in the sitting room for three minutes and thought about a witness who had not been on the list and had been added two days before the wedding and had been positioned near enough to the cake table to see exactly what she needed to see.

Then she stood up and went to find the hidden room.

The house was quieter in the mid-morning than it had been when Eli was in it.

She moved through the third floor corridor without hurrying, which was important because hurrying in a house full of staff was the fastest way to attract the kind of attention she did not want. She walked the way she had learned to walk in the Delacroix household when she was young and needed to move through rooms without being noticed with the casual purposefulness of someone who knew exactly where they were going and found it entirely unremarkable.

The dressing room. The back wall. The latch on her third pass.

The panel opened silently.

She pulled the cord and the bare bulb came on and there was the box exactly as she had left it, the lid slightly raised.

She opened it. The photograph. The document. The key.

She took out her phone and photographed everything. The photograph first, on both sides. The document was page by page, making sure every word was captured clearly. The key and its tag and the two-word warning in the handwriting she did not recognize.

She put everything back exactly as it had been and closed the panel and walked back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and opened the photographs and read the document properly this time.

It took her twelve minutes.

By the end, she was completely still in the way she was completely still when something had genuinely shaken her, which happened rarely enough that she recognized it.

The document was an agreement. Eleven years old. Three parties. The language was dense and deliberately obscure in the way that documents are when the people writing them know that what they are describing cannot be described plainly. But the meaning underneath the language was clear enough if you knew how to read it, and Mara knew how to read it because her father had kept documents like this, and she had read enough of them in secret over the years to understand the grammar of agreements made between people who should not be making agreements.

Phillip Hartwell had known something.

Something that the Voss family had paid him very substantially, over eleven years to keep quiet.

The document did not specify what he knew.

But it specified what would happen if he stopped keeping quiet.

She looked at that clause for a long time.

Then she locked her phone and put it in her pocket and sat with the knowledge of what she had just read and thought about what it meant that Phillip Hartwell was dead and what it meant that this document existed and what it meant that someone had hidden it here, in her room, where she would find it.

Someone wanted her to know.

The question was why.

She found Vivienne in the garden after lunch.

Vivienne was sitting at a white iron table beneath a bare-branched tree, her golden hair catching the pale winter light, a book open in front of her that she was not reading. She looked up when Mara approached with a smile that arrived in its usual way, warm and complete.

"Come sit," Vivienne said. "The garden is the only place in this house where you can breathe properly."

Mara sat. She looked at the garden and thought that it was beautiful in a cold, controlled way. Everything precisely placed. Nothing was growing where it had not been intended to grow.

"Can I ask you something," Mara said.

"Always," Vivienne said.

"Phillip Hartwell," Mara said. "How well did you know him?"

Something happened in Vivienne's expression. It was very small, and it was very brief, and it was gone before it had fully arrived. Her smile did not waver. Her eyes did not shift. But something changed in the quality of her stillness, the way the air changes quality before rain, even when the sky still looks clear.

"Uncle Phillip," Vivienne said softly. "That's what Dorian and I called him when we were small. He was at every Christmas. Every birthday. He taught me to play chess." She paused. "I'm going to miss him."

"I'm sorry," Mara said.

"Don't be," Vivienne said, and her eyes met Mara's with their full warmth. "You didn't do anything wrong."

The words were perfectly kind.

Mara heard something underneath them that the words were designed to cover, the way a beautiful rug is sometimes placed over a floor that has something wrong with it.

"No," Mara agreed. "I didn't."

They sat in the cold garden together for a few more minutes talking about nothing important, and when Mara stood to go inside, Vivienne reached out and touched her hand briefly.

"Be careful with that detective," Vivienne said pleasantly. "Eli Crane has been trying to find something to use against this family for years. Don't let him use you."

Mara looked down at her.

"How do you know about Crane's history with your family?" she asked.

Vivienne smiled. "This is the Voss family, darling. We know everything about everyone who poses a threat to us." The smile stayed warm and perfect. "That's how we've survived this long."

Mara smiled back and went inside.

She stood in the corridor just inside the garden door and thought about Vivienne's hand on hers and the warning delivered in a warm voice, and the thing she had seen move through Vivienne's expression when Phillip Hartwell's name was mentioned.

Her phone buzzed.

An unknown number. She almost ignored it. Then she answered.

Silence for a moment. Then a voice she did not recognize. Low, careful, deliberate.

"Mrs. Voss," the voice said. "My name is not important. What is important is that Phillip Hartwell tried to tell you something on that terrace six weeks ago, and he didn't get to finish."

Mara's hand tightened on the phone.

"I know what he was going to say," the voice continued. "And I know what's in the box you found last night."

The corridor was empty. She checked both directions automatically.

"Who are you," she said quietly.

"Someone who has been watching this family for a very long time," the voice said. "The key is in that box. I need you to find what opens before Detective Crane does. Because what's inside changes everything."

"Changes everything," she said.

But the line was already dead.

TO BE CONTINUED...