“It’s in the rose garden,” Dr. Harlan Pierce whispered. “Under the white marble bench.”
Maxwell Anderson stared at him.
Behind the doctor, candles trembled on the old piano. Their light caught the silver tea tray, the little wooden music box, the dust hanging in the air. Beyond the doorway, wedding guests crowded the corridor in a silence so complete that Maxwell could hear the fabric of his bride’s gown dragging across the floor.
“What is?”
Pierce removed his round gold glasses. His hands shook too violently to clean them.
“The body.”
Maxwell closed his eyes.
For twelve years, he had sat on that bench on his mother’s birthday.
He had brought white roses because Eleanor loved them. Sometimes he spoke aloud. Sometimes he sat until sunset, hating himself for all the things he had not said before she died.
Except his mother had not died.
She was sitting beside him now, a gaunt woman wrapped in a worn lavender shawl, her fingers resting against his wrist as if she feared he might disappear.
“I sat on that bench every year on her birthday.”
Across the room, Cecilia Caldwell lunged.
“You lying coward!”
One of the security guards caught her before she reached Pierce. She struck his shoulder, emerald silk twisting around her legs.
“You’ll rot for this!”
Pierce flinched but did not retreat.
He reached into his jacket and withdrew a folded paper, softened and yellowed along its creases.
“I kept the real record,” he said. “I never destroyed it.”
Maxwell took it.
There were medical abbreviations, a date, a handwritten description of an injury.
And a name.
He had barely begun reading when Vanessa spun toward the guests.
“Stop filming!” she shrieked. “All of you! Delete it now!”
Nobody obeyed.
Maxwell looked up.
“Who paid you to sign the false one?”
His mother’s thin hand closed over his fist.
“Ask who was standing beside me when the doctor came.”
Pierce glanced at Vanessa.
Then Cecilia.
Then the shadowed doorway.
“It wasn’t only them,” he whispered. “There was a third person.”
Elena Marlowe turned toward the corridor, the amber violin pressed against her charcoal-grey uniform.
“He has been in this house all night.”
Maxwell looked down again.
At the bottom of the paper was a signature he had seen on birthday cards, business documents, letters of condolence.
Julian Anderson.
“Uncle Julian?”
At the far end of the corridor, a tall man in a charcoal suit stood motionless beneath a portrait of Maxwell’s father.
Three hours earlier, Maxwell had believed this would be the happiest evening of his life.
The ballroom at Blackthorn House glowed beneath crystal chandeliers. Nearly a hundred guests had gathered for a candlelit wedding overlooking the Newport coast. Vanessa wore an ivory gown made in Paris and a diamond necklace Cecilia had insisted was a family heirloom.
