An Empty Place at the Table
Chapter 06 - An Empty Place at the Table
The morning after Rosa's call, Meredith stood at the cemetery in front of the stone that bore Adrian's name. She had chosen its lettering herself. Eleven months ago she had stood here unable to imagine any future; now she looked at the stone and thought of Rosa, whose brother was missing from a different graveyard altogether.
The groundskeeper was cutting back rose bushes near the path. Meredith asked whether he remembered the burial. He shrugged apologetically. "I see so many," he said, then added, "But I remember you brought your own flowers. No florist van. You carried them in two big buckets."
She had. She'd been so afraid the arrangements would wilt that she'd kept them in water until the last minute. She remembered kneeling to place one lily on the casket and thinking: this is my final chance to do something for him. There was no way to reclaim that gesture. It belonged to a dead stranger who had deserved his own mourners.
Meredith stayed until the groundskeeper went farther down the path. She touched the edge of the stone and said, "I'm going to find out who you are." She wasn't speaking to Adrian. For the first time, she was speaking to Eli.
"An empty casket?" Meredith asked.
"Not empty," Peter said. "But the remains weren't my brother's."
She sat on the floor among discarded ribbon spools, unable to trust the chair behind her. Peter explained in a voice she could barely recognize that the burned vehicle had contained the body of a man identified as Elijah Torres, who had been assisting Adrian with an exchange of records. He did not know whether Elijah had been in the car willingly or had been placed there after he died. That question, he insisted, was exactly why they needed investigators outside the circle of people who'd certified Adrian's death.
"Did you know before the funeral?"
"I suspected. I was told not to come. Colleen said she would take care of it. I was stupid enough to believe her for two weeks."
"And then?"
"I tried to get the records. The office said they didn't exist. By then Adrian had contacted me to say he was alive, and that going public would put other people at risk. I thought he was working toward something. I never imagined he'd marry Bellamy's daughter."
Meredith hung up. It was past two in the morning. Across the alley a kitchen worker smoked beside a dumpster, the red tip of his cigarette coming and going in the dark. She thought of Eli at the nursing home, patiently repairing Ruth's bedside lamp so that she could read magazines she no longer understood. She thought of his grandmother, whom she'd never met. Someone had taken a real man and buried him under another's name.
The next day Nina found an attorney who handled whistleblower retaliation and wrongful-death cases. Her name was Helena Cho. She had practiced for thirty years, wore walking shoes with her suits, and listened to Meredith's account without once looking at her watch. She advised that evidence be preserved and delivered through proper channels, and that no one confront potential suspects alone.
"We have reason to ask for a new investigation," she said. "That is not the same as having all the answers. Don't let anyone pressure you to give a public interview."
For the first time since the wedding Meredith felt someone was speaking to her as a capable adult. She could choose what to do next. Helena also warned that an exhumation, if authorized, would be hard on any relatives. "Eli had family," Meredith said. "They should be asked what they want. Not just told after decisions are made."
With help from Helena's office, they located Elijah's older sister, Rosa Torres, who worked as a school bus driver in Toledo. Rosa answered the phone warily, having spent almost a year being told that her brother had left town after debts he did not owe. Meredith introduced herself and explained, as carefully as she could, that she had reason to believe he might have died in the collision for which another man had been declared dead.
Rosa was silent so long that Meredith worried she'd hung up. Then she said, "My brother would not leave without calling our grandmother. She raised us. She waited by the window until she died last January."
Meredith closed her eyes. "I'm so sorry."
"Did you know him?"
"A little. He was kind to my mother."
"Then he was doing what he always did." Rosa's voice grew stronger. "Tell your lawyer I want his name back. I want to know where he is."
Adrian called that evening from a number she didn't recognize. Meredith almost ignored it, but Helena had told her to keep notes of every contact. "I'm listening," she said.
He asked whether she was safe. She told him he no longer had the right to make the question sound affectionate. His breath caught, and for a moment she could hear the man who used to call her at the flower market before sunrise, asking what coffee to bring.
"I thought the threats would stop if I got close to Victor," he said. "He needed the Bellamy marriage to protect the contracts. He believed I could be managed."
"So you let him manage you."
"I thought I could get into his files."
"You could have spoken to investigators. You could have trusted me."
"I didn't know which investigators were clean."
"Then you find one. You don't let the woman who loves you bury an innocent man."
Silence came between them. She heard a car horn at his end of the line, then the small click of a door closing. "I didn't know it was Eli at first," he said. "When I found out, Colleen begged me not to upset the arrangement. She said we could set it right when it was safe."
"Safe for whom?"
Adrian did not answer. Meredith told him Rosa wanted the truth and hung up before he could apologize.
May you like
That night, she went to Nina's room with the yellow note Eli had left. They turned it under the bedside lamp, trying to decide whether the handwriting belonged to him. On the edge was a faint imprint made by a pen pressing through several sheets of paper. Nina shaded it carefully with pencil on a separate tracing sheet. Four words appeared, imperfect but legible.
COLLEEN ORDERED THE SWITCH.
