The Wrong Body
Chapter 03 - The Wrong Body
In the cab, Meredith called the flower studio and asked Bea to cover the Saturday orders. "Family emergency," she said. She heard her assistant's brief alarm, then the tactful silence of someone who knows not to ask questions. Meredith wanted to explain and could not find a sentence that would make the words sound sane. Her dead fiancé was getting married; her future mother-in-law was lying; a man she'd last seen at a funeral was waiting in an elevator. She put the phone away.
At a red light the taxi stopped beside a couple under a single umbrella. The woman laughed when the umbrella turned inside out, and the man tried to fix it, getting both of them wet. Once, Meredith and Adrian had walked home through a storm like that, sharing a paper bag of takeout fries. She remembered him stealing the crisp ones and giving her the soggy ends. Such small ungenerous things had made their days together feel particular and true. Had she invented their happiness? The question frightened her more than the possibility that he had invented his death.
She paid the driver and thanked him too politely. On the stairs to her apartment, she wondered how many people had already known. The clerk who signed the funeral paperwork? The minister who spoke of Adrian's kindness? The friends who'd lowered their eyes when she walked into a room? Grief had made her vulnerable; now suspicion threatened to make her unrecognizable to herself.
Rusk held the elevator door with one hand. He had put on weight since the funeral and grown a small, apologetic mustache. Meredith remembered the sound of his shoes on the gravel path between the grave markers, that deliberate crunch while she was being led away by friends.
"Don't get in," Colleen whispered.
"I wasn't going to," Meredith said.
Rusk pressed a button to hold the car. "There seems to be some confusion. I'd like to help."
"You signed a death certificate for a living man."
His expression barely changed. "That is a serious accusation."
"Then call a lawyer." Meredith backed toward the open corridor. "Or call the police yourself."
Rusk let the doors close. She watched the display descend, numbers blinking at a maddeningly ordinary pace. When he was gone, Colleen touched her wrist and Meredith pulled away. "Never follow me again unless you're prepared to tell me everything."
Downstairs, a young assistant planner tried to intercept Meredith near the loading dock, worried about the missing boutonnieres. Meredith gave her the box and said the arrangements had been delivered. For no reason she could explain, that small completed task steadied her more than anything else. She could do one thing correctly. Then another.
Outside, rain freckled the limestone steps. Chicago traffic moved past the hotel's white awning, buses wheezing at the light. Meredith called her older sister, Nina, a public defender in Milwaukee who had warned her once, gently, that the Mercers moved through life believing trouble was something other people cleaned up.
"Tell me you're sitting down," Meredith said.
"I'm not. I can be."
"Adrian is alive."
Nina did not speak for several seconds. Then she asked, "Where are you?"
Meredith gave the address. She described the room, the bride, the watch, the name Daniel Rusk. Nina asked only practical questions: Had he touched her? Was she alone? Could she get a cab? "Go home. Lock your door. I'm coming tonight. And do not hand anyone your phone."
Meredith rode in the back of a taxi with her wet apron folded across her lap. She stared at the city without seeing it. She had a precise memory of Adrian trying on the navy suit: the tailor kneeling to pin the hem, his hand reaching back for hers, the young assistant saying he'd never seen a groom look quite so pleased with himself. She remembered being irritated by how expensive the trousers were. Now she would have paid anything not to remember.
Her apartment was over a family-owned pharmacy in Lincoln Square. After Adrian's death she'd moved his things into the spare room, one box at a time. She had kept his old radio, his winter boots and a chipped mixing bowl he insisted made better pancake batter than the new one. She walked past that room and sat at her kitchen table until her phone rang.
The caller was Sloane Bellamy.
"I got your number from the florist contract," Sloane said. "I'm sorry. That sounds intrusive. I wasn't sure what else to do."
"Did you call off the wedding?"
"Yes. My father is furious. He says you're trying to embarrass us."
Meredith looked at her empty hand. "I didn't know I was invited."
"Can I tell you something without asking you to trust me?" Sloane hesitated. "Adrian once woke up screaming in my guest room. He kept saying a name. Eli. I asked who Eli was. He said a driver who hadn't survived the crash."
Meredith gripped the table edge. "The authorities told me nobody else was in the car."
"I know. I looked up the newspaper report this afternoon. It lists a single fatality, Adrian Mercer."
There was a bell downstairs in the pharmacy, the comfortable two-note sound of someone coming in for cough medicine. Meredith waited for Sloane to continue.
"My father told me to forget that name," she said. "Today he sent me a message. He wants the watch back, but he doesn't want Adrian to have it."
"Why?"
"He says something is hidden inside."
Meredith imagined the old watch lying beside the pearl earring. Adrian's father, Martin Mercer, had been a compulsive tinkerer who opened watches at the dining table and scattered tiny screws across the placemats. He had died five years before the crash. His watch was not expensive, only cherished. She'd asked for it to be buried because Adrian had worn it every day.
"Don't give it to anyone," she told Sloane.
"I have it with me. I'm leaving the hotel now."
That night Nina arrived with a grocery bag containing soup, bananas and a cheap spiral notebook. "We're going to write down what everyone said," she announced, setting food in the refrigerator. "Not what you think it meant. The actual words."
They worked until after midnight, filling pages with dates and names. When Meredith mentioned Eli, Nina stopped writing. "At Ruth's nursing home, there was an aide named Elijah Torres."
"He was kind to Mom. He left last winter."
"I remember him because he called you before the funeral. You were too upset to take it. He said he had something of Adrian's."
Meredith had forgotten the call completely. Nina had scribbled the number on a yellow note and tucked it into Meredith's old address book. They found the book in a drawer beneath a stack of takeout menus. The note was still there.
May you like
Meredith dialed. A recorded message said the number was no longer in service. She was about to hang up when Nina pointed to a few words written on the back in unfamiliar block capitals.
IF THEY SAY ELI DIED IN THE CAR, ASK WHO CAME TO MY MOTHER'S ROOM.
