Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Harriet
I trace the velvet piping of Whitney’s fancy office chair, quietly freaking out.
Kip was at a motorcycle rally during one of the most obvious examples of sabotage?
The more we learn, the less progress we seem to make.
And Whitney isn’t the one who messaged to have the photo taken down?
Alexandru seems convinced that she’s being honest about not sending the message, and I’m inclined to believe it.
But nothing is adding up!
Bo said Whitney was at the curtain fire wedding. Is Bo lying about that? Is he lying about getting hacked?
But maybe the whole hacking thing has nothing to do with the accidents.
Or maybe it’s Whitney who’s lying. How do I know what’s in her book?
And who sent the gunman to take my bag?
Nothing is adding up, and I feel like Alexandru is growing hungrier by the day. He’s not saying anything, but he hums with something primal. I can feel it deep down.
I swallow and turn to Whitney. “You were at a lot of these weddings where accidents occurred. Can you recall anybody who seemed to be skulking around where they shouldn’t have? Acting strangely…”
“Wait, so you’re actually investigating this?”
“The number of unexplained accidents is very concerning and worth investigating, don’t you think?” I say.
“Well, I mean, yes, of course.” Whitney’s words say one thing, but her tone is unconvinced.
Alexandru watches her closely. Is he picking anything up?
Whitney continues, “I honestly don’t think we have more accidents here in the Silverton Valley area than other places.
Weddings are large events, and large events are prone to accidents and mishaps, tragic though some of them have been.
Surely there must be ways to compare. Wedding accidents per capita or something like that. ”
“There are ways, and I’ve run that comparison,” I say. “And it’s extremely unusual. Nine times what you’d expect.”
She blinks. “Oh.” But then she launches into something about how past events aren’t predictive.
Alexandru touches his head. Is it possible that he has a hunger headache?
Two days left.
I pull my thoughts together. We need two things right now: To rule Whitney out once and for all, and to get hold of that photo from Sloane’s friend.
I have an idea for ruling out Whitney.
I give Alexandru a significant glance. Under my breath, softly as I can, I say, “Please try to distract her. Please try to get her out of the room.”
Alexandru furrows his brow. I think he’s going to refuse, but then he stands, and in his cut-glass English accent, he says, “I’d like to see the vision board art projects one more time.”
Whitney looks shocked and surprised. “You would?”
“We do not have such things in Karsovia. I want to know about them.”
“Good idea!” I say.
“Well… Of course.” Whitney leads us into the vision board room and begins to explain something about the process.
I pull out my phone. “I’m sorry, I need to take this real quick. Be back in a sec!”
Whitney gives me a gracious nod, already turning back to her wall of fabric samples and images. Alexandru pretends to be interested in some photos.
I step out of the room, ducking back down the short hallway to her office and around the desk, quick and quiet, heart beating like crazy.
Whitney’s planner is closed but not locked. One flick of the magnetic flap and I’m inside.
I scan the pages for the date of the curtain fire wedding. Bo said she was there. The firefighters said she wasn’t. I want to know the truth, and I want it straight from her book.
I find it. She was in Philadelphia that weekend. There are several Philadelphia addresses and even a hotel reservation number. I take pictures of everything, just in case I want to confirm things, but it seems pretty obvious to me.
She wasn’t at the fire wedding. Not even in the state.
Bo was wrong.
Or he lied.
I snap the planner shut and rush back around the corner, rejoining Alexandru and Whitney at the vision board station.
“The prince’s taste runs quite strongly to the gothic,” Whitney says.
“Well, he is all about castles and dungeons, I guess. And bats!” I add. “He does love bats!”
Alexandru is not amused.
Whitney furrows her brow. She is definitely not a fan of the gothic direction.
She encourages me to add my aesthetic, if and when we create an official wedding vision board.
I’m guessing she senses a lot of potential publicity from the wedding of European royalty, and she doesn’t want it to look like a Tim Burton movie set.
“This is all great food for thought,” I say, “and we really appreciate it, but I need to get to work.”
Alexandru puts on his day walking hat and gloves, and we get out of there.
I tell him that Whitney was out of town the entire weekend of the curtain fire wedding, effectively ruling her out. He seems very confident that it was somebody other than her who requested that the picture be taken down.
And she also supplied an alibi for Kip—a motorcycle rally. Totally believable.
He slips into the passenger seat, and I get into the driver’s seat.
“I’m freaking out a little,” I say to Alexandru.
“We do seem to be losing suspects.”
I start up the car. “No chance of an extension?”
He gives me a dark look.
I pull out onto the sunny daytime streets, trying to drive fast to minimize Alexandru’s exposure to sunshine. He’s perfectly covered up, but I’m worried about the light, especially if he has a headache.
“All we really have is Harlan. But trying to stop an investigation isn’t that conclusive. Though Maverick Cooper seems to think there’s something there.”
I stop the car in front of Alexandru’s house. “I have to go to work, at least for part of the day, but I’m not giving up. We are going to find our culprit before tonight.”
“That would be most advisable,” Alexandru says.
Understatement of the year.
My phone pings. A text from Sloane. I open it up. “The forbidden sparkler wedding picture!”
Finally! I grab my tablet so that we can see it on a larger screen.
Everything is just like Roy described. The frantic people in action poses. Others crouching. The bride and groom, hands locked, jaws hanging open. The officiant ducking behind a lectern.
I zoom in on a man crouching behind a chair on the groom’s side of the wedding. You really can’t see much of him—just his hair and a tiny bit of his forehead. “Is that Harlan?”
“That is indeed Harlan.”
“You can tell?”
“I can.”
“He’s not doing anything suspicious,” I say. “Just hiding.”
I inspect the areas around the sparkler decorations to see if anybody seems to be retrieving something incriminating.
Nothing.
I spot Whitney with her dramatic streak of white hair over her mane of black, gripping the arm of an elderly woman whose hat is askew. I zoom in to see if Whitney’s maybe holding something weird, even though we ruled her out.
Nothing.
I zoom in on Manny, who’s on one knee, shooting from the front, feed cap low on his forehead, stringy hair hanging over his shoulders. One sleeve is flopping loose, and you can see a tattoo of a camera with a giant yellow lightning bolt through it.
“Like a heraldic emblem on his skin,” Alexandru observes.
“It’s a tattoo,” I tell him, zooming in on another part of the photo. “A tattoo shows what you love and who you are. So I guess it is sort of a heraldic emblem. They’re very popular.”
We inspect the photo quadrant by quadrant. There’s some reason somebody wanted this hidden!
“In my time, men have lost their heads for wearing the wrong emblem. Allegiance shifts with the wind—foolish to carve it into your flesh.”
“That is definitely a problem for people. They don’t lose their heads, but they feel stupid at the beach,” I say, trying to keep things light, though in truth, I’m starting to feel unnerved by Alexandru’s closeness, his heat, and his hunger.
“Do you have a heraldic emblem?” I can feel his gaze on me. Those liquid brown eyes that see too much.
“Me?” I ask.
“You,” Alexandru says.
“That’s for me to know and you to never find out.” I focus back on the partial image of Harlan. “If only he were scrabbling suspiciously around on the ground or holding something incriminating.”
Alexandru stays silent.
“Why would anybody go through such pains to hide this? What are we not seeing?”
“Send it to Gregor. He will present it to me, and I will study it more closely,” Alexandru says. “You will proceed to your job.”
I appreciate him intensely right then. Maybe he’ll see something in it with his raptor-like vision. “Thank you.”
The office is bustling with energy when I get there.
We just learned that InovaSpire’s up for a big award, and Serena’s whispering about buying a smaller firm out of Detroit.
She asks me to crunch the numbers and ramifications with Malik, who’s going to be an amazing replacement, though he’ll definitely need somebody to assist him in the operations area.
He’s not a Renfield, I catch myself thinking.
I’m also working on creating informational guides for people to consult when I’m gone, trying to prepare them for every possible situation.
I anticipate fielding a lot of calls... from my new home in Kingston Manor.
Whether or not we identify the culprit, Alexandru has played by the rules. He’s allowed me to direct the hunt, and he’s been more helpful than I ever dreamed.
Malik takes off, and I sit back and stare at the ceiling. What is in the exploding sparkler picture that we’re not seeing?
I was hoping to hear some sort of a “Eureka!” message from Alexandru, but I guess that would be too easy.
I print out a copy of it on InovaSpire’s nice high-DEF printer and study it with my microscope app.
Nothing.
I decide to examine the photos as a set, which can sometimes spur ideas.
I send some of the other key images to the printer room: the shot of Kip so mesmerized by the curtain going up in flames, an image of the collapsed cake that Berky baked.
I never got the champagne tower collapse image from Bo, but then I remember my friend sent me the duplicates that the insurance company had, so I download that file and go through it.
That’s when I see something interesting.
Or more like a whole lot of interesting somethings… namely, about seventy extra photos that show the collapse in the background unfolding in slow motion.
I zoom in on the corner where it’s all happening. The shots are magnificent, like catching an upside-down waterfall of light and glass and motion.
Why would Bo not want to show us these awesome photos?
I send the whole group of them to Gregor with an urgent message to show Alexandru.
Then I crop a dozen of the champagne tower collapse photos so just the tower part is showing and send them to the printer room.
A few minutes later, I have the photos arranged on my desk. The curtain fire shot taken by Manny. The cake collapse photo taken by a wedding guest. One of the champagne collapse photos taken by Bo. The sparkler mayhem photo taken by Roy.
Nothing makes sense.
KC the intern strolls by. I call him in. “What strikes you about these photos?”
He studies them for a while but can only comment on the superior quality of the professional photographs. A couple more people wander in. Nobody sees anything new.
And then Serena comes by. “Secret meeting?”
People mumble excuses and clear out.
“You’re a photographer,” I say to her. “What do you notice about these four photos?”
“I’ll play.” She comes in and leans over the desk. She can tell the three professional shots from the wedding guest shot. “But the three pro pictures… Two of these photos are not like the others.”
“Really?”
She slides the sparkler picture to the side, leaving the champagne tower collapse and the curtain fire at the center.
“These two were set up. The other two weren’t.”
I stiffen. “Set up? How can you tell?”
She picks up the curtain fire photo. “Look at the exposure. The color balance. The shadows falling just behind the flames. This wasn’t luck. This fire got big really fast, and people are only just reacting. The photographer would’ve had to know in advance that there’d be a fire.”
I peer over her shoulder. She’s right. A couple of people haven’t even noticed the fire.
“You’re sure about that? It would’ve had to be anticipated?”
“You don’t get a shot like this in automatic on accident. This was manual—high ISO, wide aperture, shutter just fast enough to catch the flame’s curl without freezing it. The depth, the focus—” She exhales, low and sharp. “This person was ready.”
“Wow.” The photographer was Bo’s anti-social nephew, Manny, of course.
“And this one—” Serena straightens the champagne collapse photo. “Are there a lot of these, do you know?”
I grab my tablet and show her the full photo series with the guys moving around in the foreground.
“Right. This was shot on burst mode. Look how tight the interval is—glass shattering, midair, splash. Whoever took this was holding the shutter down.”
“Burst mode.”
“Clever. He’s pretending to be documenting the groomsmen, but the falling glasses are his real subject. If you’re a photographer, I promise you, you’re not shooting these assholes on burst mode. You’re not wasting memory on that.”
“The photographer knew it was coming,” I say.
“That would be my admittedly hobbyist assessment.”
“It’s a great assessment,” I say.
The only problem is that they’re from two different photographers. The photographer for the curtain fire was Manny. Whereas Bo was the photographer for the champagne glasses falling.
God, could it be a duo? Is Bo the alpha and Manny the beta?
I need to talk to Alexandru. “Can I take a half day?” I ask her.
She studies my face like she’s searching for the answer there. “Is this part of it? Why you’re going to work for him?”
“Part of it,” I admit.
Her mouth curves—not quite a smile, but close. She likes this. It makes my move make more sense, I suppose. “Take the half day,” she says. “And be careful.”
I smile. “You know it.”
I pull up my spreadsheet. Bo or Manny were present for every one of the accident weddings.
It’s entirely plausible. Everything adds up.
Maybe jaded, judgmental Bo just needed a touch of violence and death to fall back in love with wedding photography.