Julian had adjusted Maxwell’s boutonniere.
“Your father would have been proud.”
It was something he said often.
Maxwell usually found it comforting.
Then a maid entered carrying a violin.
Vanessa told her to leave.
The maid did not.
Instead, she played the opening of The Harbor Lullaby, a little tune Eleanor had composed when Maxwell was a child.
There was a wrong note in the third phrase.
A deliberate wrong note.
His mother always played it that way because nine-year-old Maxwell had once insisted the proper note sounded lonely.
When he demanded to know where the maid had learned the song, she showed him a brass key on a faded blue ribbon.
Half an hour later, he opened his mother’s music room and found a dead woman breathing.
Now the wedding flowers were wilting downstairs, his bride was screaming at strangers, and a doctor was telling him there was a body beneath the place where he mourned.
Nothing in the world felt solid except his mother’s fingers.
He looked at Pierce.
“Whose body?”
The doctor opened his mouth.
“Before you answer that,” Julian said from the corridor, “perhaps we should consider what you’ve already admitted.”
People moved aside as he approached.
He walked slowly, without visible alarm.
Maxwell knew that walk. He had followed it through hospital corridors after his father disappeared, through airports, through the early years of running a company he had been too young to inherit.
Julian had always seemed like the one person who could enter a crisis without bringing fear with him.
Now Eleanor began trembling.
“Stay there,” Maxwell said.
His uncle stopped at the threshold.
“Of course.”
Julian’s gaze moved over Eleanor.
There was no astonishment.
No whispered prayer.
No instinctive step toward a sister-in-law supposedly dead for twelve years.
Maxwell felt something inside him go cold.
“You knew.”
Julian sighed.
“There are things we need to discuss privately.”
“You knew my mother was alive.”
“Your mother was very ill.”
“She was locked away.”
“She required care.”
Eleanor’s breathing became shallow.
Elena knelt beside her, the violin balanced carefully against her own shoulder.
“Look at me,” she said softly. “Mrs. Anderson. Look at me.”
Maxwell had already called for an ambulance and the police. Their arrival seemed impossibly distant.
Julian glanced at the paper.
“Harlan has been under considerable strain.”
Pierce gave a small, broken laugh.
“Twelve years.”
“Exactly. He is not thinking clearly.”
“I remember very clearly.”
“Then remember your responsibilities.”
The doctor’s lips went white.
Maxwell recognized the threat, although the words contained none.
He looked down at the record again.
The name beside the description of the fatal injury was not Eleanor’s.
It was Julian’s.
