Chapter 2 - The Scarf Nobody Found
Grace stood slowly.
Her knees felt loose, but her voice held.
“Take your hand off me.”
Adrian smiled toward the guests.
“We need a little privacy.”
“No,” Ruth said.
Celia stepped closer, her champagne-colored dress brushing the floor.
“Adrian, maybe we should call someone.”
“We’re not turning a child’s nightmare into a spectacle.”
Grace looked at Owen.
The scarf had been Nora’s favorite.
Blue wool, with a crooked silver star Grace had stitched into one corner when they were teenagers.
Nora had been wearing it at dinner the night she died.
Adrian told the police she had left it upstairs.
Grace had searched every drawer in the house.
It was gone.
“Owen,” Adrian said, “come here.”
The boy pushed himself behind Ruth.
That small movement changed the room.
A man near the windows lowered his drink.
Someone stopped recording.
Someone else started.
Grace pulled her phone from her apron.
Adrian’s expression emptied.
“Think carefully.”
She dialed anyway.
“My nephew just told us his father threatened to kill me if he talked about his mother’s death,” she said when the dispatcher answered.
“We’re at the Vale estate on Briar Lake Road.”
Adrian reached for the phone.
Ruth raised her voice.
“Does anybody here want to explain to the police why they watched him take it?”
He stopped.
The waiting was worse than the shouting would have been.
Adrian stood perfectly still while his guests avoided his eyes.
Celia took Owen’s untouched water glass from the table and offered it to him.
His hands shook too badly to hold it.
Grace held the glass while he drank.
When two deputies arrived, Adrian greeted them by name.
“Thank God. My sister-in-law is upset.”
One deputy looked at Grace’s uniform.
Then at Owen.
“What happened?”
Adrian began answering.
The deputy lifted a hand.
“I asked her.”
Grace almost cried at that.
Instead, she told him exactly what she had heard.
No guesses.
No accusations she couldn’t support.
Ruth gave her account separately.
The deputies moved Owen into a sitting room with Ruth while they spoke to Adrian.
Grace waited outside the open door.
On the wall beside her hung a portrait of Nora.
Beautiful.
Smiling.
Already being turned into someone who had never existed.
Adrian passed Grace on his way into the study.
“You signed a statement,” he murmured.
She felt the floor tilt.
He kept walking.
Her statement was still in the police file.
At the time, it had seemed harmless.
One sentence about a sound she thought she heard.
One sentence that had helped put Adrian somewhere else when Nora entered the water.
Inside the sitting room, Owen began crying again.
May you like
This time, Grace knew part of what he was afraid of.
She was afraid of it, too.
