Chương 5
She knew that even as she turned.
Marcus did not stand.
“I didn’t poison anyone.”
Rachel said nothing.
He looked at Emily.
“I understand what she thinks she saw.”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“Then look at me.”
He did.
For the first time that night, his confidence cracked.
Not dramatically.
His eyes simply looked exhausted.
“I carried a decanter,” he said. “That’s true.”
Rachel glanced toward the detective interviewing Javier across the room.
Marcus lowered his voice.
“Adrian asked me to replace it.”
“Then why hide the other one under a napkin?”
“I didn’t hide it.”
“Emily says you did.”
“She’s eight.”
Rachel took one step toward him.
“She’s also the reason Vincent didn’t drink what you handed the bartender.”
Marcus’s face went still.
“Nothing has been proven.”
“No.”
“You worked here long enough to know how many people touch bottles. How many are poured, moved, polished, refilled.”
“Bellamy doesn’t refill branded liquor decanters.”
His eyes shifted.
There.
So small Rachel almost missed it.
He had expected her not to know.
She had spent four years working ten feet from that bar.
“You should leave,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“The detective asked me to remain available.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Marcus’s mouth tightened.
Rachel turned away.
Behind her, he said, “Ask Vincent what his brother was really doing tonight.”
She stopped again.
Marcus continued.
“Ask why Adrian requested a private meeting before dinner. Ask why Vincent arrived forty minutes late.”
Brooks’s voice cut across the room.
“Mr. Reed.”
Marcus looked over.
“Stop speaking to witnesses.”
He leaned back.
Rachel walked out with Emily.
In the car, neither spoke for nearly five minutes.
Rain had started, not heavily, just enough to turn the windshield into a moving smear of traffic lights.
Emily sat in the back with her seat belt pulled too tightly across her chest.
Rachel noticed at the second red light.
“Loosen that a little.”
Emily did.
“Not all the way.”
“I know.”
Rachel drove another block.
“Mom?”
“Yes.”
“Did I do something bad?”
Rachel nearly braked too hard.
“No.”
“I mean because maybe he didn’t do it.”
Rachel pulled into a pharmacy parking lot.
She turned around.
Emily’s bows had come loose. One hung lower than the other. Her face looked younger than it had inside Bellamy House.
“Listen to me. You told them what you saw. That is all.”
“But I told Mr. Vincent the man poisoned his brother.”
“Yes.”
“What if I was wrong?”
Rachel took a moment.
She wanted to say you weren’t.
She wanted the certainty because certainty would make Emily feel safer.
It would also be a lie.
“You might be wrong about why he moved the bottles,” Rachel said. “You might be wrong about what was in them. Adults can be wrong too.”
Emily looked down.
“But you were not wrong to stop somebody from drinking something you thought could hurt him.”
“What if Marcus gets in trouble?”
“If he did nothing wrong, the police are supposed to figure that out.”
Emily’s eyes lifted.
“Do they always?”
Rachel looked at her.
Children sometimes asked the worst questions in the quietest voices.
“No.”
Emily waited.
Rachel sighed.
“No, they don’t always get things right. That’s why you tell exactly what you know and don’t add things because you think they help.”
Emily nodded.
“Okay.”
“You did that tonight.”
Another nod.
Rachel reached into the back seat and fixed the crooked bow.
Emily endured it for three seconds.
“Mom.”
“What?”
“I’m eight.”
“You’ll survive.”
At her sister Danielle’s house, Emily fell asleep on the couch before Rachel could convince her to change clothes.
Danielle covered her with a blanket and looked toward the kitchen.
“Tell me everything.”
Rachel shook her head.
“Not where she can hear.”
They went upstairs.
Rachel spoke quietly for twenty minutes.
Danielle interrupted almost immediately.
“So this Marcus person tried to kill them both?”
“We don’t know.”
“You just told me—”
“I told you what Emily saw.”
“You believe her.”
“I believe she saw what she says she saw.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Rachel rubbed both hands over her face.
“I don’t know what I believe.”
Danielle sat on the edge of the guest bed.
“You do.”
Rachel looked at her.
“You packed a bag instead of going home.”
That was true.
Rachel hated it.
At one in the morning, Vincent Hale sat beside his brother’s hospital bed while a ventilator breathed for him.
Adrian had always looked younger asleep.
When they were boys, their mother used to say Vincent had been born forty years old and Adrian had been born twelve and intended to remain there.
At forty-one, Adrian still possessed an irritating ability to grin during arguments.
There was no grin now.
A line ran into his arm. Another disappeared beneath the blanket. Monitors made quiet electronic sounds that Vincent could already distinguish without wanting to.
A physician had used cautious language.
Possible toxin.
Possible cardiac event.
Possible neurological event.
More testing.
Vincent hated the word possible.
It allowed the world to remain unresolved.
Detective Brooks stood near the window with a small notebook.
“Mr. Hale.”
Vincent did not look away from Adrian.
“You said you needed a statement.”
“I do.”
“Ask.”
Brooks studied him.
“What was your relationship with your brother?”
Vincent glanced over.
“He’s my brother.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the answer.”
“Were you close?”
“We spoke every day.”
“Did you get along?”
“No.”
Brooks’s pen stopped.
Vincent looked at Adrian.
“He’s unbearable.”
“About what?”
“Details.”
“What kind?”
“All kinds.”
Brooks waited.
Vincent sighed.
“He reads contracts. Not just the page people want him to sign. Every page. Footnotes. Attachments. Amendments. He once found an incorrect insurance clause in a seventy-eight-page hotel acquisition agreement at two in the morning and called me because he couldn’t stand knowing I was asleep while a mistake existed.”
Brooks wrote.
“That sounds useful.”
“It is useful.”
“You sounded annoyed.”
“I am.”
She looked at Adrian.
“Did you argue tonight?”
“Yes.”
May you like
“About?”
Vincent was quiet.
