Chapter 31
The evening was fast descending on them all.
Evie Gray was sitting in the kitchen alone waiting for her mother to return for her dinner duties, glad to be away from the intensity of the drawing room, where people were still anxiously anticipating their fates.
They were all on edge, waiting for the police to make their arrest. A task that was taking much longer than Evie thought it should’ve. It was as if the police were stalling.
The tense conversation from the garden still weighed on her. Evie had wanted to pry more, to ask more questions, gather more intel, but they’d all left pretty abruptly before she could.
She thought about the last thing Fola had said.
I guess it’s best to leave it up to the people who know best, then.
Fola was right. It was best to leave the solving of this case up to the people who knew best. And who better to figure out this mess than Evie?
Evie, who had grown up in the shadows of their world and knew the Manor inside and out, and by extension the Buttons.
She flipped through the notes she had been taking all day in her pocket-sized notebook—her questions and observations about the now-dead Mr. Button and his infamous heirs. She had pages and pages dedicated to the misdeeds of the Button family.
The family known for their money, their talents, their image of perfection. The family famed for their ruthless pursuit of genius; their willingness to do anything to achieve it. The family who had everything in the world. And yet, who had taken so much from her …
Too much.
The Buttons were a family who cleaned up their messes. Left no traces behind.
Or so they thought.
Even money couldn’t distract from the gaping holes in their covered-up offenses. For there were indeed holes. Holes all over the place, holes in everyone’s version of the truth.
Evie had lied in the garden when she’d said she couldn’t access much from the police logs.
In truth she had access to everything. Including everyone’s interviews and alibis—recorded, transcribed, and stored conveniently in digital files.
Though she would be the last in line to acknowledge the good work of the police, they had, in this case, done a fair job in their filing.
Before she had interrupted the Buttons’ circle time in the garden, she had read through every single interview, homing in on the five alibis she was most interested in.
She went over them again, hoping they would reveal more of the truth.
* Note: Mr. Button’s murder is estimated to have taken place at around 11:45 p.m., according to the police. The yacht docked at 11:05 p.m., and the drone show began at 11:15 p.m. Many guests stayed on the Titania to watch the display, before the ball ended at midnight.
* Note: The only official footage is the prodigy award announcement and the drone display toward the end of the event, meaning there was no CCTV of any kind on the yacht.
According to staff testimonials, Mr. Button was extremely paranoid about cameras in his personal space, worried that competitors would steal his company’s ideas, so he only used photographers/videographers when necessary (weird for a billionaire, but explains all of the physical security measures).
* Note: While there were no official cameras recording the entire event, police requested that any footage taken by attendees be surrendered to officers in order to corroborate alibis and timings.
* Note: Each guest on the yacht was made to “sign in and sign out” of the yacht through a basic QR code system.
Conveniently, said QR system experienced technical difficulties and logged every guest’s departure time as 00:00—midnight.
This means that the police were reliant on unreliable estimates from suspects.
The suspicious thing about the screwup is that this is a very popular web application with a high competence rate.
It is almost as if the application was tampered with.
Something the police don’t seem to be as suspicious about.
Either way, not being able to exactly vet the times everyone actually exited the yacht makes the alibis of the Buttons all the more interesting.
* Speaking of interesting, since I have gone through all of the interviews for the remaining suspects, it is clear to me that the police are grasping at straws here.
It is obvious that the only interviews that are truly suspicious are the five that matter most. It’s as if the police are keeping some of these guests behind for no good reason. But why?
Those poor guests, unaware that they are set pieces. Pawns in a game they didn’t even know was being played.
Now on to the alibis that matter most:
* Bilal Button claims to have left the yacht with Anwar Shah when it docked for the final time around 11:05 p.m. The two allegedly went back to the Manor together. Anwar confirmed this in his own statement.
* Octavius Button claims he left the ship at 11:15 p.m. He alleges that he had broken his violin bow and had to go to an emergency luthier (instrument doctor) in the city, missing the end of the firework display. Note to self: Make a list of all of the luthiers in the city and call them all up.
* Fola Button left around the same time as Octavius, but took a car into Manhattan and went to her laboratory (a high-tech office space she was gifted by the New York Institute of Mathematics and Sciences) in the Upper East Side to catch up on some late-night research—evidenced by online records of her signing into the institute’s building.
* Perdita Button was with Thorin Philips on the top deck of the ship watching the drone show at the time of the murder. Thorin Philips corroborated this in his own police statement.
* Romeo Button was “pretty certain” he was also probably watching the drone show on the top deck by himself at 11:45 p.m. No corroboration.
Evie had read over each statement, making notes, counting the holes as they popped up one after the other.
She had a fully functional bullshit-o-meter.
It was a skill she had honed after an entire childhood of watching the goings-on of the wicked and the wealthy from the bedroom she’d shared with her brother in the staff quarters.
She’d learned to see past the veneer of riches, the plastic smiles, all of the many faces and facades of Mr. Button.
And so, she could tell there was more to the story.
She’d known this morning, even before she’d seen any of the statements, that there was more. There always was with this family.
As bad as it sounded, she hadn’t gone into the gardens earlier to comfort the grieving heirs.
She had gone to look into each and every one of their shifty gazes.
That was how she knew for sure that her hunch had some weight to it.
It was always the eyes. You could see an entire universe in a person’s eyes.
They were the windows to the corrupted soul.
And if a person with keen focus looked into Evie’s eyes, they would see her truth in its entirety. If they were to look into the eyes of her mother and father, they’d see the same: how irrevocably changed—no, destroyed—the Gray family was. And it was all because of the Buttons.
It’s always the Buttons, she thought angrily as she watched the black ink from her fountain pen drip onto the page.
When she’d received Mr. Button’s invite to the ball, she’d known it was her chance to return for Adam, to confront Mr. Button, to get her brother the justice he so deserved. But now with Mr. Button dead … that justice had just gotten a lot more complicated.
Evie didn’t need the flimsy alibis to start making her guesses and theories.
After all, Evie already knew who had murdered Leontes Button.
And it wasn’t just the eyes that told all. As an avid watcher of true crime documentaries, Evie knew that one just had to look at the statistics for murder to know who the culprit was:
Less than 5 percent of murders where the victim was a man were committed by a partner or ex-partner. Around 20 percent were committed by a stranger. But the biggest percentage? The people closest to you. Family.
If someone were to kill you, it would most likely be your brother, or your mother, or even your great-grand-uncle Patrick who’d done it.
Therefore, the statistical likelihood that one of Mr. Button’s heirs had killed him was high.
Very high. One of them had killed him before Evie could wrench all of the answers she desperately needed out of him.
Someone had taken away her chance for justice for her brother—the only justice she could get in such an unjust world.
And so, alongside the sizable trust funds they’d inherited, the Buttons had also inherited Evie’s wrath.
She did not have the why, or the how, of the murder just yet. But Evie had her list of suspects:
The Maestro, the Brain, the Olympian,
the Artist, and the Failure.
She knew with absolute certainty that one of the Button siblings had killed their father. And she was well on her way to figuring out which one.