Guests at a Funeral
Chapter 02 - Guests at a Funeral
Sloane examined the empty place on her wrist. She had spent eighteen months organizing the wedding, approving menus she didn't care about and pretending her father wasn't using the guest list as a directory of people he owed favors. The dress had belonged to her grandmother. She'd imagined walking down the aisle as an act of independence, and saw now how thoroughly her life had been arranged by other hands.
"Did you ever want to marry me?" she asked Adrian, very quietly.
He looked at her for a long time. "I liked you. I thought we understood what we were doing."
"I understood that you were a widower in everything but the legal sense. That's what you let me think." Sloane folded the dress away from the table's sharp edge. "You didn't have to love me the way you loved her. You did have to tell me whether she was alive and grieving you."
Meredith had expected to hate Sloane, an easy figure to put in the place of the woman she'd been cheated out of becoming. Instead she was struck by the bride's practical dignity. Their humiliations were not identical, but both had been made to perform a role in a story that had never been explained to them.
For a moment all Meredith could hear was a faint rattle from the air-conditioning vent. She had been expecting a lie, an apology, perhaps a confession of cowardice. Instead Adrian stood in a groom's suit and spoke of a death certificate as if it were an item on a shopping list.
"His name?" she asked.
Colleen spoke over him. "There are two hundred guests waiting. We can discuss this tomorrow."
"His name," Meredith repeated.
"Daniel Rusk," Adrian said. "He was the deputy coroner. He isn't anymore."
Meredith remembered Rusk. A large man with silver-rimmed glasses who had shaken her hand beside the grave, though she didn't remember inviting him. He had said something about the difficulty of identification after a fire. She'd thanked him. She'd actually thanked him.
Sloane pulled a chair from the dressing table and sat down. "You told me she left you," she said to Adrian. "That your engagement was over before the accident."
"It wasn't an accident," he replied.
Colleen slapped the flat of her palm against the dresser. It was such an uncharacteristic gesture that everyone stared. "Stop talking. All of you."
Meredith had once admired Colleen's elegance. Even when she lost her husband, she could arrange condolence cards and choose a sensible black coat. Now she watched the older woman's hand shake against the varnished wood and wondered what exactly it cost to keep a family respectable.
"I want the room unlocked," Meredith said. "I want Sloane to be able to leave. And then I want the truth."
Colleen moved the latch. Sloane stood but stayed, folding her silk skirt beneath her hand. "I don't think either of us should go anywhere," she said.
Adrian sat on the edge of a low sofa and leaned forward. Eleven months showed in his face after all, in the narrow hollows beneath his cheekbones and a pale line along his jaw. "I was driving to meet a man in Erie. He had records about my father's company. Someone followed me. A truck forced my car off the road. I got out before it caught fire."
"And you let me believe you died?"
"I was in a clinic for weeks. When I tried to contact you, someone got there first. They knew the name of your apartment manager. They knew your mother's nursing home."
Meredith went still. Her mother, Ruth, had advanced dementia and sometimes mistook a rainy afternoon for the day of Meredith's high school graduation. She lived in a small facility outside Milwaukee. Meredith had never told Adrian's business associates where.
"Who threatened her?"
"I don't know."
"But you know how to arrange a wedding."
He had no answer. Sloane rubbed the place on her wrist where the watch had rested. "My father introduced us in February," she said. "Adrian was consulting for our family foundation. He said he'd been divorced years ago."
"We weren't married," Meredith said, surprised that she felt obliged to clarify anything. "We were engaged for three years."
Sloane looked at the watch on the table. "My father said marrying Adrian would steady things after the investigation. I thought he meant the foundation's tax problem."
"Your father is?" Meredith asked.
"Victor Bellamy."
The name landed with an unpleasant familiarity. Bellamy Infrastructure had been one of the contractors on a bridge project Adrian had examined before his supposed death. In the weeks after the burial, people had come to collect his laptop and files. Colleen said the company owned them. Meredith had handed them over because she could barely manage the laundry.
Adrian noticed the recognition. "You remember the bridge."
"You were worried about the welding. You said the invoices didn't add up."
"Not welding," he corrected softly. "Inspection reports. Someone signed off on work that was never completed."
The wedding planner knocked. "Mrs. Mercer? The minister is asking whether we should delay."
Colleen answered through the door, "Twenty minutes. A family matter."
Meredith turned to leave. She could not solve corporate fraud beside a dressing table, and she was beginning to understand that every extra minute she stayed would give them another opportunity to agree on a story. Sloane caught her arm, not firmly, just enough to ask her to wait.
"I'm not going to marry him," Sloane said. "Whatever this is, I won't be part of it."
Adrian looked more stricken by that calm declaration than by any accusation. Meredith did not feel sorry for him. She felt tired enough to be sick.
At the service elevator, Colleen hurried after her. For the first time, she called Meredith by the pet name she'd used when Adrian was alive. "Merry. Please listen."
"Don't call me that."
Colleen swallowed. "Ruth received a visitor the week after the funeral. He left a photograph."
"A photograph of what?"
"You. Coming out of the nursing home. It was taken that morning." Colleen glanced behind them. "I did what I thought would keep you safe."
"You didn't keep me safe. You kept me ignorant."
The elevator opened. Inside stood an older man with silver-rimmed glasses and a pale carnation pinned to his jacket. Meredith knew him at once.
May you like
Daniel Rusk smiled as though they were meeting at a pleasant neighborhood fundraiser.
"Mrs. Vale," he said. "I was hoping you'd come."
