Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
If Kate had considered Cassidy finding the necklace to be a harbinger of chaos, her own accidental declaration was the eye of the storm. The whole room dropped into a dead silence, severely undercut by the howling of the wind outside the broken window and the dull, wet flapping of the makeshift curtains against the wooden frame. All eyes turned on her, bright and accusing. “What did you say?” Kennedy asked in confusion, the first to break the spell.
“Did you say Auntie R is dead?” Cassidy asked.
“Did you kill her?” Richie asked, looking almost impressed with her.
“I just said I didn’t! I only found her body!”
“Wait, she really is dead?” Kennedy said, before bursting into tears. The sound of her sobbing broke the spell in the room, and suddenly the accusations were flying. Someone called Kate a murderer, someone else accused her of stealing their diamond tennis bracelet at the rehearsal dinner, and a deep voice in the back called for a pitchfork, of all things. This was rapidly getting out of hand.
“Did you poison her, too?” Juliette demanded.
“I didn’t do anything!” Kate cried, sounding way too frantic to be innocent. “She was already dead when I found her. I only put her back in the plant for safekeeping.”
“You stuffed her in a plant ?” Cassidy cried.
“This isn’t going great,” Jake said, surveying the room.
“I know this isn’t going great,” Kate hissed. “Help me get it back on track!”
“Hang on, everybody, it’s not what it sounds like,” Jake said, holding up his hands and trying to calm the crowd with his trademark smile. “We were very careful with her—”
“You were there, too?” asked Abraham, looking shocked and disappointed. “You are her accomplice? Such physique, such a waste.”
“No, no, no accomplices!” Kate looked to Jake helplessly. “It wasn’t like that!”
“Oh my god!” Cassidy gasped, as a brutal gust of wind blew out another window, dousing the back half of the room in rain.
“We need to get out!” someone screamed. “Before we all drown!”
“But the ceremony isn’t done!” a bridesmaid cried.
“Oh, believe me, honey, it’s done,” said Serena loudly, holding up a protest sign and waving it as if she were directing air traffic. “Let’s go!”
“Wait, what about Aunt Rebecca?” Kennedy cried, shoving against the rising tide of fleeing guests to reach Kate. “Where is she? Did you mean it, what you said? Is she…”
Kennedy gulped, the sound lost in the crush of departing guests, but Kate could see her throat bobbing hard. Richie and Steven came to stand behind her, as well as Cassidy and Spencer and his parents, all of them forming a wall around Kate. Trapping her.
“It’s not what you think,” Kate said.
“Is she dead or not?” Mrs. Lieman demanded.
Kate swallowed hard. “Yes, Rebecca is dead. But I didn’t kill her!”
Kennedy burst into tears once again. Cassidy could only stare, presumably in shock, while Richie looked far more discerning in light of this disastrous family news.
“I don’t even know your name, but I know enough to know you’ve been the center of every controversy this weekend,” Richie said, crossing his arms. “You put on that little show during the rehearsal dinner. And then you conveniently find Kennedy down in the wine cave, but oh it was just some bad oysters, right? So, what did you do to Auntie R, drop a toaster in her bathwater? Tranquilizer dart to the neck? Stab her with a decorative letter opener?”
“Those are so specific ,” Kate said. “But I didn’t do anything to her. I never even met her before this weekend!”
“Maybe she caught you with the poison,” Juliette said, taking a defensive stance beside Kennedy. “And you needed to keep her quiet.”
“I didn’t poison Kennedy!” Kate said, throwing up her hands in exasperation.
“If Ms. Hempstead truly is… deceased,” Steven said in his most lawyerly tone, “I’ll need to confirm it.”
Yeah, Kate bet he would need to confirm it. She looked hard at him, then at Richie, then back at him, waiting for one of them to twitch or sneeze or cough, some kind of tell that they were guilty. But they looked stern and bored, respectively, no sign of guilt that she could tell. She’d have to press them harder, as soon as she wasn’t everyone else’s prime suspect.
“Where is she?” Cassidy asked. “Take us to her.”
“Of course,” Kate said, reaching for Jake’s hand for stability as she led their small group out of the sunroom. Juliette and Cassidy closed ranks behind Kate, prodding her forward. They closed off the door to the room and sealed the gaps around it as best they could with layers of sheets and heavy furniture to keep the door braced against the howling wind.
They followed Kate and Jake up the stairs to the second floor and the office where she had discovered Rebecca’s body what felt like a lifetime ago. Her steps slowed as they reached the landing, her toes practically dragging through the heavy carpet as Cassidy charged forward and swung the office door open. The interior was relatively serene, the raging of the storm outside muffled to a dull roar, but Kate would have preferred braving the hurricane-force winds to the storm Cassidy looked like she was about to unleash on them. Kate hung back by the door, which got her a sharp prod from Juliette.
“I was all state in track, don’t bother running,” Juliette muttered.
“Innocent people don’t run,” Kate said absently.
“Where is she?” Cassidy demanded. Gone was the sobbing girl from the rehearsal dinner, and in her place was a no-nonsense, vengeance-seeking woman. Briefly Kate wondered which version of Cassidy was the act and which one was the real deal, before Juliette nudged her again.
“Quit stalling,” Juliette murmured.
Kate sighed, moving toward a thick fringe of fern leaves and closing her eyes against the sight of poor dead Aunt Rebecca. “This is where we found her.”
There was a solitary gasp, then a long, surprising silence. Kate cracked an eye to catch the rest of the bridal party looking at her expectantly. Kate thought it was rather underwhelming, all things considered.
“There’s nothing there,” Cassidy said finally.
Kate frowned, realizing she hadn’t bothered to actually check for the body before revealing the body, and turned to the frond. Sure enough, there was nothing there, just a pot of soil and a few wilted leaves.
“Somebody moved her!” Kate said, and that got her a few gasps of shock, which was, frankly, more like it.
“Kate,” Jake said from across the room, drawing all eyes to him. He looked almost pained to say it, but continued, “she’s over here.”
“Oh,” Kate said, deflating. She’d picked the wrong fern.
Jake swept back the fronds of a tree closer to the false wall—which was obviously the right spot, now that she was actually paying attention to the room—and there was poor Aunt Rebecca. She looked a little grayer, a little stiffer, and a whole lot deader.
“Oh, Aunt Rebecca!” Kennedy cried, turning to Spencer and burying her face in his shoulder as sobs hiccupped out of her.
“This will require a great deal of paperwork,” Steven said with a sigh.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Cassidy demanded, looking just as upset. But Kate wondered if she was upset for a different reason. After all, she’d only recently been accused of potentially poisoning Kennedy. “You just left her there to rot in the fern. Who does that?”
“Some of us could have been planning new inheritance requests now that the witch is dead,” Richie said.
“Richard,” Cassidy said, so severely he immediately clammed up.
“You don’t have to call me Richard,” he muttered sullenly, turning away. “You sound just like her.”
“I wasn’t leaving her there to rot!” Kate protested. “I—we—left her there because…” Oh boy, here it came. The really big reveal. “Because someone murdered her.”
Kennedy buried her face deeper in Spencer’s shoulder as Richie sidled up and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, cuz, it’ll be okay,” he said, patting her awkwardly. “What you should really focus on right now is getting all the paperwork squared away so we can talk numbers and timelines for the November inheritance request meeting.”
“There’s a great deal of work to be done before then,” Steven said, giving Richie a reproachful look. “Like talking about allocation of assets, for one. Including Hempstead Manor and the surrounding lands.”
“Oh my god, not the resort business already,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. “She’s barely cold, Steve.”
“And these matters need attendance,” Steven said, his brows falling into a severe line.
“Both of you should be ashamed,” Cassidy said, crossing her arms and staring them down. “Poor Ken has just had her wedding ruined and lost our aunt, and all you can talk about is money.”
“Oh, like you wouldn’t take a piece of the pie if you could,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t act like you didn’t come here to beg Aunt Rebecca to let you back in the will so you could make your inheritance claim. We all know about your massive business loans. Honestly, a food truck that only serves hush puppies? What the hell were you thinking?”
“They were sweet and savory,” Cassidy said hotly. “They covered the full umami spectrum! And that’s not why I’m here this weekend. I came because I love Kennedy, and I wanted to be here for her.”
Except Kate knew that wasn’t true, because she’d seen Cassidy arguing with Rebecca. She’d seen Rebecca slap Cassidy, and now more than ever, Kate wondered what it was Cassidy had said to elicit such a reaction from her aunt. And how she might have retaliated.
“Awfully convenient for you now, isn’t it?” Richie muttered. “With the she-beast out of the way and the family fund still in the family. Kennedy will definitely let you back in the will.”
“I don’t need to be let back in the will,” Cassidy ground out.
Why didn’t she need to be let back in the will? Kate wondered. Unless her debts magically disappeared, which Kate knew from her own college experience was not possible. Most people she knew would be paying off student loans until they croaked. Kate had paid her loans down to a manageable lump, thanks to Loretta’s royalties, but she couldn’t imagine what kinds of debt Cassidy had, going to a private culinary academy. Even Marla sometimes complained about the cost of her master’s degree, and what it had really done for her in comparison.
Richie and Steven might have been her best suspects for Aunt Rebecca’s death, but Cassidy had just jumped up to the top of her list. She had means, motive, opportunity, and she seemed awfully confident about not needing to be let back in the will. What did she know about the Hempstead inheritance and her place in it, now that Rebecca was out of the picture?
“Oh please, we all know Uncle Alexi cut you off when your mom died,” Richie said, waving a hand. “You made a big enough show about it when you got here.”
“That’s not what I was doing,” Cassidy said, her voice getting thick. “And he didn’t cut me off. He told me…”
Richie couldn’t stop prodding. “Told you what? To pay your own debts for once?”
“You’re one to talk,” Cassidy said, pointing at him viciously with her freshly manicured nails. Kate wondered where she’d gotten the money to have them done, considering her financial troubles. Maybe Kennedy had paid to have them done, to match her mauve bridesmaid dress. Although Cassidy’s nails were more purple than anything—
Kate smothered a gasp of recognition. The hand in the photo holding the champagne glass had purple nails, the exact same shade as Cassidy’s manicure. It hadn’t been Juliette; it had been Cassidy, standing right beside her in the picture, smiling to the point of pain. Kennedy stepped up between her cousins, pushing them apart.
“Both of you, please, just stop!” Kennedy said. “Please, for me. For Aunt Rebecca. She wouldn’t want you fighting like this.”
“Are you kidding me?” Richie said. “She’d love it.”
“Yeah, she really would,” Cassidy said, looking down at Rebecca’s body mournfully.
“Can we please just… find a better resting place for her?” Kennedy sniffed. “I can’t bear to think of her in those potted plants again.”
While the family members made arrangements for how to respectfully handle Rebecca’s body, Kate slipped out the door leading into the hallway and hurried to the bridal suite.
It had been filled with an ocean of satin and organza since the last time Kate was there, making it hard to wade through the seaweed of discarded bras and the undertow of a pair of very stretchy leggings. These girls made her apartment look like Martha Stewart’s jail cell. Of course, they were probably used to someone cleaning up all their messes.
She didn’t have much time, and she wasn’t sure which suitcase might belong to Cassidy, so she started unzipping bags and rifling through each one with impunity. It wasn’t until the third suitcase that she spotted the woman’s ill-fitting rehearsal dress, price tag still attached. Her hand hit a hard yet delicate object, wrapped in an old T-shirt and stuffed in a plastic bag for some reason. Kate pulled it out, sucking in a breath at the sight of cut crystal.
“Gotcha,” Kate declared quietly, holding up the missing champagne glass. Find the glass, find the killer.
“What are you doing?”
Kate whirled around to face Cassidy glaring at her from the door to the bridal suite, blocking her only exit.