Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Harriet
I look up from the giant printout courtesy of the Creighton FedEx and find Alexandru watching me with that unsettling calm of his.
A familiar heat creeps up the back of my neck, and I start feeling nervous. Does he think this whole thing is stupid already?
“I know there’s a killer in here,” I say, trying to sound confident instead of pleading. “Someone’s been staging accidents at weddings. The last two resulted in deaths.”
“Your giant ledger tells you this.”
“Yes. At first, the accidents weren’t fatal. But over the past year, they’ve escalated. And three months ago, when the first fatality happened—that’s when the smaller stuff stopped.”
“So you see a pattern,” he says.
I explain the columns and show him the progression. I drag my finger across the printed cells, the colors forming a visual pulse.
Your most pathetic theory yet. Cry for help.
I try to put the forum criticisms out of my mind as Alexandru studies the chart. His gaze moves over the data.
What if he doesn’t see what I see?
He gestures at the top of the red column. “Cake toppling. This is the first suspicious accident?”
“That I know of. The woman who baked it is one of the most highly trained pastry chefs in the region, and an honest woman. She felt it was deliberately ruined by an outside force. People don’t believe her, but I do.”
“Hmmm.”
“I was personally at another wedding soon after that, where a confetti cannon went off at the worst possible time. The woman in charge of the cannon was mystified at how it could’ve happened.
There was a wedding after that where a cart full of dirty dishes careened down a hill and smashed into a group of wedding guests, including my grandmother.
She fell and fractured her arm and was all bruised up.
It was awful. The caterers insisted somebody pushed it. ”
“Humans do hate to take the blame for things.”
“I wasn’t sure who to believe myself, but the accidents keep piling up. There have been seven this year, including two deadly ones, and I believe there are more I simply don’t know about.” I point to the list at the top right.
Cake topple
Confetti cannon malfunction
Runaway dirty dishes cart
Champagne tower collapse
Creighton Arms dance floor cave-in
Deadly balcony fall
Grand staircase collapse
“And you believe it is the work of a saboteur.”
“Yes, because if you plot the accidents on a spreadsheet, the pattern is obvious—the way they are spaced, the way they escalate in severity. Why did the small ones stop once the medium ones started? Why did the medium ones stop once people began to die?”
Do I sound too hopeful? Too desperate for him to believe me? I remind myself for the umpteenth time that it’s enough that I believe.
Alexandru has this habit of going super still, and right now, I hate it.
“I feel like the little accidents are where the killer honed their craft.”
He points to the deadly balcony fall column. “What happened here?”
“A groom fell off a balcony. Supposedly, when a rusted-out railing gave way. But the venue’s handyman had recently inspected it, and there was no rust.”
“And you believe him.”
“I do, but with you here, we can interview these people and get extra information.”
He points to the last column. “Stairway collapse?”
“A lot of local bigwigs were lined up on a curving staircase for pictures during a fancy wedding. The stairway collapsed out of the blue, killing the deputy mayor and injuring the mayor. The police found a remote-control device in the debris—a small hydraulic jack. They concluded it was an assassination attempt on the mayor, but I believe the wedding killer was there and simply didn’t have time to retrieve the thing. ”
“You believe it was part of your pattern.”
“Yes. I’d been expecting a larger accident around that time.”
Alexandru studies the sheet some more.
I wait.
After the deputy mayor’s death, I brought my spreadsheet down to the police station to show Maverick, and he told me that it made me look insane. He threatened to throw me in jail if I interfered with his investigation.
Alexandru seems to be turning things over in his mind. “You think the stairway collapse was the last in a long line of staged accidents.”
“Yes!” I say.
The fire crackles softly behind us.
“You are all so accident-prone, you humans. Disorderly. Oblivious. Often drunk. Bumbling through your short years,” he says. “It’s a wonder to me sometimes how any of you reach advanced ages.”
My heart sinks.
“Yet you see a killer hiding in these papers of yours. Somebody causing these accidents.”
“Yes,” I whisper, throat dry.
He waves dismissively at the sheet. “If you see a killer there, then a killer is there.”
“Wait, what? You believe me?”
“Of course I do.”
He believes me!
I’m trying really hard not to smile like a weirdo, but my heart is doing a happy dance.
“I do not hunt on paper. But your kind does,” he continues. “You see across the passage of time and numbers. You see the surface and discern when something lurks. You are like little ferrets in this way—snuffling and organizing, rooting through shadows until you corner something.”
“Okay, um, thanks?”
He shrugs. “It’s in your nature.”
“So, you don’t see it yourself, but you totally believe that I see it?”
“Don’t be tedious. I have said I believe you. You are a Renfield, are you not? Lowly creatures that you all are, you do have certain abilities.”
“Maybe we could go back to the ferret analogy?”
“Whoever did this—whoever is still doing this—is escalating,” he says.
“Exactly! They’re escalating.”
His eyes linger on the red column, darkening with a predator’s focus. “They’ve crossed into hunger.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
A dark lock of hair falls low over his right brow as he lifts his gaze to mine, and I see the calculating stillness of a predator there.
“Tell me who this killer is. Show them to me. I’ll gladly take their blood.
I’ll drain them so completely that death will be a mercy. And then you will come here to live.”
“Okay, well... yeah, that’s a good plan,” I say.
“But we’re not at that step yet. It’s not as if I know their name.
We have to investigate. I mean, I have a couple of suspects—a wedding planner and an event bartender.
They were at both deadly accidents. I need more information to confirm if they were at the others. ”
“You’ve narrowed it down to two. I could simply kill them both.”
“But one or both of them might be innocent!”
Alexandru sighs.
“You told me you can sense people’s emotions. And if they are being deceptive.”
“Are you suggesting that we go to these two suspects of yours and ask outright if they caused these accidents?”
“Oh. Interesting. Would that work?” I ask hopefully.
“No. I’ve known killers who, if I were to ask them directly about their crimes, the most I would feel from them is pleasure and excitement, even as they lie about the crime. The deception would be comparatively faint.”
“So if a person is like a perfume, you get the top notes.”
“Exactly. And I can’t tell why those notes are there. I may sense fear in a person, but is it fear of being exposed? Or do they fear that somebody suspects them wrongly? Maybe it’s guilt, but is it guilt for the crime or for not stopping the crime?”
“I see,” I say.
“That said, the ability to discern emotions and deception does have its advantages in interrogation.”
“I can imagine. Because little things show you the big things. It’s all data, and the more data, the better. Between you and me, we can nail this, Alexandru!”
He just watches me with those dark, fathomless eyes. He’s so hard to read sometimes.
I stroll toward the fireplace, feeling his gaze on me.
“Kip the bartender and Whitney the wedding planner are obvious. But this is a small town with a small pool of vendors, so it could be that everybody uses Kip’s mixology service, and everybody uses Whitney’s wedding planner services.
Their presence at these weddings over the months might be circumstantial. ”
“So it might not be them at all.”
“We don’t know. And we need to think about their motives. My motive column is completely blank.”
“Your motive column,” he says.
“Yes. But the first thing we need to do is to get all the guest lists for the accident weddings. Maybe there is some guest out there who attended all of them. And I know just who to ask for those guest lists.”
Alexandru homes in on me with interest. “And who might that be?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“This person has your adrenaline spiking. Your heart rate. You have intense feelings about them.”
“Are you reading me right now? You can’t do that.”
He shrugs.
“And it’s not like I have any kind of feelings about her. It’s Sloane—the woman who runs the stationery shop. She’s a difficult person, that’s all. But she made the invitations and place cards for all of the weddings with suspicious accidents. We need to get her to give us those lists.”
“The village stationer. I ordered calling cards there.”
“Yeah. I didn’t realize you were a prince. She’s very excited about that fact. Did you actually put Prince on your calling cards?”
“Of course not. They bear only my courtesy name—Alexandru Miramonte—and the word princeps.”
“Does that mean prince?”
“No, princeps means I am first among equals.”
“That seems like an oxymoron. If you’re first, how can you say everyone is equal?”
He adjusts his shirt cuffs. “I am not one of the equals. I am first, the rest are equals.”
Groan.
“I wonder why Sloane thinks you’re a prince, then. She loves history, and she’s a good researcher—she wouldn’t make a mistake like that. And she told everybody, so they all think you’re royalty.”
“Well. Prince is one of my legacy titles. I don’t use it, though. She would’ve had to dig deep.”
“So you are a prince? How did I not know this?”
“It’s an ancient title. No land or kingdom. Just the name.”
“Well, Sloane loved that you were a prince, so maybe you can turn on the charm.”
“I can certainly do that, but contrary to lore, I cannot mesmerize people.”
“Oh, I know. Or you would’ve done it to me by now, I’m sure.” I grab my phone. “Let’s go talk to her.”
Gregor, who has been standing in the corner all this time, mumbles something about dinner.
“I’m sorry, Gregor, there’s no time,” I say. “We have an hour before her shop closes.”
I lead Alexandru to my car, still reeling.
I can’t believe I promised to quit my job and move in with him.
But what choice did I have? He’s here because of me. That tourist’s death—that’s on me.
Offering up my servitude was the only card I had to play.
I’m already dreading telling Mom and Granabelle I’m moving out. Josie’s been pushing me to move out of my old bedroom for years, but not like this.
And Serena—she’ll be disappointed when I quit. She believed in me when no one else did, championing my obsession with collecting and organizing information instead of treating it like some troubled girl’s attempt to control the uncontrollable.
Alexandru settles himself into the passenger seat of my old Volvo like a king enduring a sub-standard throne.