209. 🥀 The Florist Who Found Her Buried Fiancé Alive at Another Woman’s Wedding

Chapter 05 - The Brother Nobody Mentioned

Nina studied Peter over the rim of her paper cup. "You've been absent from the family for years. Why should Meredith believe you?"

"She shouldn't," Peter said. "Not because I sound sincere. She should verify anything I bring her."

The answer irritated Meredith because she wanted someone to be wholly dependable. Her life had become a collection of people offering partial truths in calm voices, followed by new documents that disproved them. Even the trustworthy ones were asking her to wait. She had spent months waiting for the pain to ease, and now everyone advised patience while they untangled the event that had caused it.

Peter told them he was a civil engineer in Indiana now, mostly inspecting older municipal buildings. His marriage had ended five years earlier, quietly and without a scandal. "I was away too much," he said. "And when I came home, I brought work with me. My former wife wanted a husband, not a visitor who repaired the gutters." He said it plainly, without asking for sympathy. Meredith found the absence of self-justification unexpectedly reassuring.

When the conversation turned to practicalities, he offered Nina the phone number of his former employer and the name of an attorney who knew about the Mercer business dispute. "You can check both," he said. "I'll be here if you want another conversation, and I'll understand if you don't."

Peter Mercer looked so much like Adrian that Meredith could hardly bear to look at him directly. The same eyes, the same impatient crease between the eyebrows, but his mouth was a little harder and there were threads of gray at his temples. He'd been twenty when he left home after an argument about the family business, at least according to the version Adrian used to tell.

Meredith let him in only after he agreed to stand where both women could see him. He took off his wet coat and draped it over the back of a chair. "I didn't come to frighten you," he said. "I came because I saw the photograph from the wedding."

"Where?" Sloane asked.

"Someone sent it to me. Anonymous number. The one where Adrian is staring at Meredith as if he's seen a ghost." Peter's laugh was short and joyless. "There's some justice in that, I suppose."

Meredith showed him the paper from the watch but kept the number covered with her thumb. "You said a woman didn't come home."

Peter nodded. "Lucia Garza. She was an accountant for Bellamy Infrastructure. She found evidence that inspection payments were being rerouted through shell vendors. My brother tried to help her. Last October, she contacted me about a locker she'd rented to keep original documents. Two days later her apartment was empty. Police treated it as a voluntary departure."

"Are you telling me she's dead?"

"No. I'm telling you nobody knows. Those are different things."

He had arrived with documents in a worn messenger bag: photographs of invoices, correspondence between Adrian and Lucia, and a copy of a complaint filed with a federal transportation oversight office. Meredith was impressed less by the papers than by Peter's willingness to let them inspect every page. The difference between him and Colleen was almost physical.

"Why did Adrian never tell me you were back in his life?" she asked.

"Because he wasn't." Peter rubbed his hands together. "We spoke twice a year. Then he called me about Lucia. He thought he'd found the thing that finally explained why our father left the company so abruptly."

Martin Mercer had died of a heart attack after resigning from the board of the company he'd helped start. Colleen always spoke of retirement, though Meredith remembered Adrian calling it a humiliation. Peter told them Martin had opposed a series of low-bid contracts and received threats of litigation if he took the matter public.

Sloane listened without interrupting. "My father serves on the Bellwether House board," she said. "He also paid for the wedding. If he knew Adrian was investigating him, why arrange a marriage?"

Peter looked at her with unexpected sympathy. "To make him family again. It makes people harder to prosecute, socially speaking. It also makes them easier to monitor."

Meredith wondered whether Sloane would defend her father. Instead she removed a small silver key from her handbag. "I took this from his study when he ordered me to return the watch. I thought it might fit something. I don't know what."

Peter examined the key. "A filing cabinet, maybe. Not the locker."

"And how do you know that?" Meredith asked.

"Because I rented the locker under Lucia's instructions. She didn't want Bellamy staff to know it existed. My name is on the lease, not hers."

There it was: a detail he'd withheld until it suited him. Meredith folded her arms. "So you can open it."

"I can. But someone already knows about it, and I think they expect you to go there."

Sloane checked her phone. Her father's assistant had sent fourteen messages in an hour. The last said: RETURN THE PROPERTY TONIGHT OR THE FOUNDATION WILL CONSIDER YOUR EMPLOYMENT TERMINATED. Sloane set the phone facedown. "I don't work for the foundation anymore," she said, with a trace of surprise at her own certainty.

Nina arrived halfway through the conversation and listened to Peter's story. As a lawyer, she had little patience for dramatic claims without corroboration. She asked to see the lease. Peter produced it. She checked the address against the paper and then photographed both.

"We're not opening anything tonight," she said. "We call the federal office tomorrow and find out whether Adrian's complaint was received. We get legal advice separate from everyone involved."

Meredith agreed, though waiting felt like another form of helplessness. The four of them ate takeout noodles amid buckets of hydrangeas, an unlikely company held together by betrayal. Peter told one story about Adrian at seventeen: how he'd spent an entire summer fixing a neighbor's broken boat motor rather than admit he'd taken it apart in the first place. Meredith laughed despite herself. For one moment Adrian was simply the person she'd loved, not a conspiracy wearing his face.

When everyone had gone, she opened a small box of his old belongings. At the bottom lay a receipt from the suit shop, dated the spring before his disappearance. She ran her finger across the numbers, then noticed a handwritten note on the back. Adrian had written: IF ANYTHING HAPPENS, ASK PETER ABOUT THE SECOND SET.

She took a photograph and called Peter. He answered at once.

"The second set of what?" she asked.