Chapter Thirty-Two
Present
Detective Church got to the office early, which was not unusual for him lately. He’d been pulling a lot of long days, coming in before the sun rose and leaving long after it had set. He hadn’t seen daylight or felt the sun on his face in ages.
This morning, he poured himself a hot mug of coffee from the break room and meandered down the hall to the evidence room, which, this early, was dark and empty except for him. He pulled the box he was looking for from its place on the shelf and sat back down at a table to examine it.
It was the box that Florence had given him the last time he was at Cliffhaven.
He’d looked through it once before when he’d first brought it in and entered it into evidence but had seen nothing of significance.
It contained mostly a medley of party-planning debris, which the evidence and property technicians had catalogued and itemized, sorting everything into plastic baggies and envelopes with the requisite labels.
There were filled-out RSVP cards noting the guests’ meal preferences, seating charts, a list of special dietary restrictions.
Mostly, Church marveled at the fact that Florence had kept these things for forty years.
What was the point? He started to absently comb through it all again, starting with an envelope of photographs.
The photos were professionally taken, some candid, others posed.
There were shots of guests dancing in the ballroom, close-ups of the band playing, stills of the fireworks.
Church gave them all only a cursory glance, moving each photo to the back of the stack until he was at the beginning of the night again, when the photographer had evidently gone around and gotten pictures of each of the tables before dinner.
He was just about to put the photos down when one made him pause.
He held it up, leaned back in his chair as he examined it.
Four people were seated at a white-clothed dinner table, their arms around one another, leaning in, posed for the shot.
Four faces gleamed up at him, all smiles, but there was one face in particular that caught his attention.
“Holy fuck,” he whispered.
He sat up straight, his blood running cold. He scrambled through the box on the table with both hands now, turning over receipts for the centerpieces and the menu from the caterer, the set list for the band. Finally, he found it near the bottom: Florence’s seating chart. He checked it again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
“It can’t be,” he said. But he knew it was.
He knew what he needed to do. He grabbed his car keys.
There was one person he still had to talk to.