Chapter 4
Elaine Reed did not answer immediately.
For a woman who had spent the entire evening correcting everyone else, her silence was startling.
Megan lay on the stretcher staring at her, one hand gripping the blanket beneath her chin.
“It was your perfume,” she repeated.
Abigail turned slowly toward her mother.
“Tell me she’s wrong.”
Elaine’s eyes moved from Megan to Detective Ortiz, then to Grant.
Grant looked away first.
Ryan saw it.
So did Abigail.
“Mom.”
Elaine exhaled.
“I was in Grant’s suite.”
Abigail stepped backward.
Ryan felt her fingers leave his hand.
Grant swore softly.
Detective Ortiz’s expression did not change. “When?”
“This afternoon.”
“What time?”
“Approximately two.”
Megan shook her head. “I was there after three.”
“I didn’t say I was there when you were.”
“Why were you there?” Abigail asked.
Elaine looked at her daughter.
It was the look of a mother calculating which truth would hurt less.
Apparently none of them qualified.
“Grant and I have been seeing each other.”
Abigail stared at her.
Ryan did too.
Caroline whispered, “What?”
Grant’s face hardened. “Elaine.”
She rounded on him.
“Don’t. You’ve spent the last hour letting everyone look at me like I’m part of whatever this is. I’m done protecting your reputation.”
“My reputation?”
“You heard me.”
Abigail laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“You’ve been dating Grant?”
Elaine winced at the word.
“For about a year.”
“A year.”
“Yes.”
“And you never thought to mention that you were secretly involved with the groom’s uncle?”
“It was complicated.”
“Apparently that’s the family slogan tonight.”
Ryan glanced at Grant.
“You let Abigail ask you to walk her down the aisle while you were secretly sleeping with her mother?”
Grant’s jaw flexed.
“That is irrelevant to what happened tonight.”
“Nothing feels irrelevant anymore.”
Detective Ortiz stepped between them before the conversation dissolved completely.
“Mrs. Reed, why were you in his room this afternoon?”
Elaine tightened her grip on her silver clutch.
“To end it.”
Grant laughed under his breath.
She looked at him with open contempt.
“Tell her I’m lying.”
He said nothing.
Ortiz continued. “Why today?”
“Because I found out he had used me.”
“For what?”
Elaine looked at Abigail, then Ryan.
“The wedding.”
Abigail’s face went still.
“What about my wedding?”
Elaine closed her eyes briefly.
“Grant became very interested in details a few months ago. Staffing. Security. Service entrances. Vendor lists.”
Ryan stared at his uncle.
“You told me you hated weddings.”
“I do.”
“Then why were you asking about service entrances?”
Grant shook his head. “Because I was helping Elaine. She was overwhelmed.”
“I never asked you to help with security,” Elaine snapped.
“You asked me to fix half the problems with this event.”
“I asked you to recommend a driver and cover one deposit.”
Abigail frowned. “Cover a deposit?”
Elaine looked trapped again.
“What deposit?” Abigail pressed.
“The venue deposit.”
“This is Ryan’s family home. There is no venue deposit.”
Elaine’s shoulders sagged.
Ryan realized before Abigail did.
“Your business.”
Elaine said nothing.
Ryan continued. “You borrowed money from him.”
Grant looked irritated, as if money were more embarrassing than murder.
Elaine finally nodded.
“My events company had a terrible year. Two large clients defaulted. I was behind on payroll and taxes. Grant helped me.”
“How much?” Ortiz asked.
“Six hundred thousand dollars.”
Abigail sat down hard.
“Mom.”
“I was going to repay it.”
“With what?”
“I had contracts coming in.”
“You spent eighteen months pretending you were paying for half this wedding.”
“I did pay for parts of it.”
“With his money?”
Elaine looked away.
Abigail’s eyes filled, but anger arrived before tears.
“All day you told me everything had to be perfect because our family name meant something. You screamed at florists over ribbon widths. You made me change the menu because you thought Ryan’s relatives would judge us.”
“I wanted you to have a beautiful day.”
“You wanted everyone to think you could afford one.”
Elaine flinched.
Ryan put a hand on Abigail’s shoulder, but she shook it off gently.
“I need a minute.”
She walked toward the windows.
Detective Ortiz remained focused on Elaine.
“You said Mr. Mercer used you.”
Elaine nodded.
“About a month ago he asked me to add a bartender to Victor’s staffing list.”
Victor stood up again. “Caleb?”
“Yes.”
Grant’s head snapped toward her.
“I did no such thing.”
“You gave me the name.”
“That is a lie.”
Elaine opened her clutch and pulled out her phone.
“I have the message.”
Ortiz took the phone.
Elaine unlocked it and found the conversation.
The detective read silently.
Ryan could see only part of the screen, but the sender name was clearly GRANT.
Ortiz read aloud.
“‘Need a favor. Add Caleb Moss to Victor’s bar team for the wedding. Reliable. Discreet. Tell Victor he comes recommended by me.’”
Victor pointed toward Grant. “That’s what I received too. A follow-up from Elaine’s office with his references.”
Grant stared at the phone.
“I never sent that.”
Elaine gave a bitter laugh.
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then someone has been borrowing your personality very convincingly.”
Ortiz examined the message details.
“This came from your number?”
“It appears to.”
Grant took out his own phone.
“Check mine.”
Ortiz did.
The message was not there.
Elaine scoffed. “Deleting it doesn’t make it disappear from my phone.”
“No,” Ortiz said, “but spoofing and account compromise are possibilities. We’ll preserve both devices.”
Grant handed over his phone reluctantly.
Ryan watched his uncle.
Grant looked angry.
He looked frightened.
But for the first time, Ryan also saw something else.
Confusion.
If Grant was acting, he was very good.
The paramedics finally wheeled Megan toward the hallway.
Evan walked beside her until Ortiz stopped him.
“You stay.”
He looked like he wanted to argue, but Megan touched his hand.
“I’ll be okay.”
Evan bent and kissed her forehead.
Ryan looked away.
Five hours earlier, he would have trusted that man with his life.
Now even tenderness looked suspicious.
After Megan left, Detective Ortiz collected phones from Grant, Elaine, Evan, Victor, and Abigail with consent forms and stern explanations. A forensic team began copying wedding-planning emails from Jenna’s laptop.
Oliver fell asleep on Caroline’s lap.
His red toy car sat inside an evidence bag on the table.
Ryan found himself staring at it.
A child’s toy had become the most honest witness in the room.
Around midnight, Ortiz received another call from the lab.
She stepped into the hallway.
When she returned, she carried a printed preliminary report.
“The residue in Ryan’s champagne and the residue inside the vial are consistent with the same compound,” she said.
Abigail crossed her arms around herself.
“So the vial was poison.”
“We’re treating it as a potentially lethal cardiac toxin pending confirmation.”
Victor’s face drained.
Ryan asked, “Would one glass have killed me?”
Ortiz paused.
“The toxicologist believes the amount detected could have caused a medical emergency. I’m not going beyond that until the full analysis is finished.”
That was enough.
Ryan looked at Oliver asleep across the room.
If the cake had not fallen, the toast would have happened less than five minutes later.
He would have lifted the marked glass.
He would have drunk it.
And everyone would have watched.
Abigail seemed to be thinking the same thing.
She crossed the room and gripped his hand.
Neither spoke.
Ortiz placed another document on the table.
“We also checked Mr. Grant Mercer’s suite.”
Grant raised his chin.
“And?”
“No additional vials.”
Elaine looked surprised.
Grant looked relieved for half a second.
Ortiz continued.
“But we did find a torn courier box in the trash.”
Victor nodded quickly. “That’s the package I saw.”
“It was addressed to Grant Mercer. The sender was Benton Specialty Compounding.”
Ryan stared at his uncle.
Grant shook his head.
“I never ordered anything from them.”
“They’ve been closed for more than a year,” Ortiz said. “Which makes the shipping label interesting.”
“What are you saying?”
“The box is old.”
“How old?” Ryan asked.
Ortiz looked directly at him.
“The postage mark is dated two years ago.”
Nora sat down.
Ryan felt Abigail’s grip tighten.
Two years ago.
The year Thomas Mercer died.
Grant’s face lost color.
Ortiz continued.
“And there’s one more thing. The package wasn’t originally addressed to Grant.”
Ryan’s throat tightened.
“What?”
“The top label was placed over another shipping label. The crime-scene technician managed to read part of the original name underneath.”
Grant whispered, “Whose?”
Detective Ortiz looked at Ryan.
“The original recipient was your father.”
For a long moment, Grant seemed unable to understand the sentence.
Then he sat down.
Ryan had never seen his uncle look old before. Grant had always been immaculate, controlled, too stubborn to let fatigue show. Now the lines around his mouth deepened as if years had arrived at once.
“My brother never told me about that package,” he said.
Ortiz watched him. “Did you keep it after his death?”
“I kept boxes of his things. Files, medicine, business records. Half of it went into storage.”
“Then how did this box end up in your suite today?”
Grant stared at the floor.
“I don’t know.”
Ryan almost shouted at him. Instead, he looked at the evidence bag containing Oliver’s toy car.
Someone had planned carefully enough to use an old package from a dead man, a forged message from Grant’s phone number, a new bartender with manufactured references, and a poison that could mimic a heart crisis.
That was not panic.
That was preparation.
And if Grant truly had not done it, then someone had spent a very long time making sure everyone in the ballroom would believe he had.
Ryan turned toward Detective Ortiz.
“Whoever did this knew my family.”
Ortiz nodded.
“Yes.”
“How well?”
May you like
Her eyes moved slowly across the remaining people in the ballroom.
“Well enough to know exactly which secrets would make you suspicious of each other.”
