34. Cass
CASS
St. James on Madison is one of those churches that’s so beautiful it makes you feel lesser than. Like you’re a smudge on the outside of a snow globe that someone ought to wipe away.
Soaring stone arches.
Stained glass pouring out puddles of reds and blues onto the marble floor.
Candles in tall brass stands flickering patiently.
I sit four rows from the back, gloves balled in my lap and my hat dripping melted snow onto my thigh.
Raymond’s seat next to me is empty. He told me he’d meet me here, but the longer that seat stays empty, the more I start to wonder if he ever intended to come at all, or if I’ll meet you there was Raymond-speak for I have a body to dispose of and I’ll get to you when I get to you.
The church is packed. The Snyder & Oglethorpe partners and associates are clumped in the front pews. I recognize the back of every head: Lowery, Zimmerman, Harrington, the Tate twins, Janelle from Estates, the redhead from M&A whose name I can never remember.
Matvei must be up there somewhere, but I haven’t spotted him yet. I’m trying very hard not to crane my neck looking for him. As Susan implied, you never know who’s watching.
The organ wheezes into a hymn. People stand, then stand, then sit again. I’m a marionette with someone else working the strings, going through the motions, mouthing along to a song whose words refuse to stick.
The smell, though…
The smell is what’s getting to me.
The lilies are to blame. Lord knows there are enough of them.
Banks and banks of the stuff, white and waxy, draped over the casket and spilling out of the urns on either side of the altar.
Stargazers, by the look of them. The fancy kind, with the freckled throats and the pollen that stains your fingertips orange if you so much as look at them sideways.
I haven’t smelled stargazer lilies since Giana’s funeral.
I press my gloves harder into my lap and breathe through my mouth. It’s fine. It’s just a measly little flower. Who’s bothered? Not me. I’m the opposite of bothered.
After the eulogy—delivered by a senior partner I’ve never liked, full of phrases like titan of the bar and force of nature , a man who suffered no fools —the procession files past the casket.
Raymond is still nowhere to be found.
I tag onto the end of my row and shuffle forward, head bowed, trying not to make eye contact with anyone who might want to make small talk.
As I get closer, though, someone draws my attention.
Standing at the head of the casket, in a black coat that’s just a little too big in the shoulders, is a woman in her mid-thirties.
She has Susan’s nose and Bill’s mouth and Susan’s wheat-blond hair pulled back in a low knot. Her eyes are red from crying.
I recognize her vaguely from a Christmas card we got two years ago . Bill and Susan’s eldest. Charlotte, I think. Or Caroline? One of those. Definitely a C-name.
I should slip past her with a murmur and keep moving. But then my feet stop, all on their own. The puppetmaster piloting my body wants me to talk to her, I guess.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I hear myself say robotically.
She looks up. Her gaze is empty at first, carefully glossed over. But then she recognizes me and it clears. “You’re Cassandra,” she says. “Snyder.”
“I am. I— I knew your father a little. I’m so sorry.”
“Caroline.” She offers her hand to shake. Her fingers are very cold. “Thank you for coming. I know my mother would— She will —” She breaks off and wipes the tissue under her nose. “Sorry. I keep doing that. The tenses.”
“How is she?” I ask.
Caroline’s face scrunches up. “She’s… alive.”
“Oh, thank God?—”
“She hasn’t woken up, though.”
“Oh.”
“They’re saying carbon monoxide does that.
The brain swelling, I mean. She made it to the hospital, and her vitals are stable, but she’s just…
she’s not awake. They have her on the ventilator.
” Caroline laughs a tiny, wet laugh and rubs her nose again.
“The doctors keep saying when she wakes up. When, not if. And I want to believe them, but I’m just really scared that being bitterly disappointed will hurt way more than expecting the worst until proven wrong. ”
“ When is good, Caroline,” I tell her firmly.
It’s not like I have much in the way of confidence to give, nor am I in any position to be weighing in on matters of life and death. But this woman looks like she needs something, so I’ll lend her what I can, even if I have to fake it.
“Yeah. You’re right. It is, it is.” She looks down at the casket, then back at me, and something hardens at the corners of her eyes. “She’ll be able to tell us what happened when she wakes up. The fire marshal is— well. They’re saying gas leak, but I just don’t buy it. At that hotel? No. No way.”
My mouth goes dry and chalky. “I’m sure the investigators will figure it out,” I manage to say.
“I’m sure they will.” She tries on a smile that doesn’t seem to fit her right. “And until then, I’m just waiting. Any day now, she’ll wake up and tell me what she saw.”
I don’t know what I say next. It might not be English at all, more of a vaguely sympathetic mumble. I think I touch her sleeve and she thanks me again, but then a man behind me clears his throat because I’m holding up the line, so I move on.
I stubbornly refuse to look at the casket as I slink past. Nothing good can come from that.
Best case, I see Bill’s withered, frightened corpse.
Worst case, I’m remind of Giana’s coffin. No thanks. The choking, cloying scent of the lilies has already started to drown me as it is.
They’re everywhere. Even when I’m careful to breathe through my mouth, I can somehow taste them. The thought comes in fast and violent: I need to get out of this place.
The line snakes back up the aisle toward the side door. I follow it into the reception in the parish hall, where trays of lukewarm crustless sandwiches await, already half picked over. Black wool swirls everywhere I look. How can it still smell like lilies in here, a room away?
I need out. Oh, God, I need out.
When someone taps me on the shoulder, I nearly scream.
“Cassandra, dear. Are you alright? You look pale.”
It’s Hadley’s wife. Or maybe Zimmerman’s, I can’t remember.
The lilies are screaming in my nose now.
I can taste them. I can taste the cake the church basement ladies brought to Giana’s reception five years ago, the dry yellow sheet cake with the white frosting that I couldn’t choke down because every bite tasted like flowers.
“I just need some air,” I gasp at her. I’m walking away, almost running, before she’s even done nodding sympathetically.
I shove through the heavy oak door at the back of the parish hall and out into the small stone courtyard between the church and the rectory. It’s bitterly cold out.
It’s raining, too. When did that start? It was snowing this morning. Now, it’s that nasty in-between New York rain, more sleet than water. Fat, icy drops that go straight down the back of your collar and linger longer than they should.
I stand under the eave for a second, and then I step out from under it. I need the cold on my face, I need it on my eyes, I need to wash the lily smell off my upper lip.
It’s been five years since I buried my sister. I’ve spent those years re-carving myself out of stone. I wasn’t Cassandra Madden anymore, free-spirited, happy—I became Cassandra Snyder, a murder robot with one mission: kill the man who took Giana from me.
All it took was one whiff of stargazer lilies to undo all that work.
I’m a soggy mess now, both inside and out.
I’m crying for Giana. I’m crying for Bill, too, who died horribly and undeservedly, and for Susan, who is alive but not awake, and who might know something terrible if she ever opens her eyes again.
I’m crying for poor Caroline. I’m crying for myself, and for the baby in my belly, and for the man who’s about to spend the rest of his life pretending I never existed just as soon as the job is finished.
I’m crying so hard I don’t hear him approach.
I just feel the air shift, and then a coat—warm, dry on the inside, smelling like rain on pine—settles around my shoulders. Hands pull me onto a nearby bench and an arm tucks me into his side.
“I’m here . ”
“You shouldn’t be,” I gasp. “Mat, you can’t, there are people, they’ll see?—”
“As if I give a fuck.” He situates me even closer, and the slow seep of his heat into me starts to chew away the pain. “Besides, if anyone comes through that door, I’m just a colleague who found a colleague’s wife crying alone in the rain. That’s all.”
Nothing is ever that simple.
But I turn my face into his shoulder anyway. His suit is already going dark with rainwater. He doesn’t try to shush me. He simply holds me for as long as I’ll let him.
When I finally come up for air, my mascara is a black smear on his collar and my hair is plastered to my forehead.
“The lilies,” I croak. “It was the lilies.”
He looks at me, brows furrowed. “Lilies?”
“Stargazer lilies. They had them at my sister’s funeral.
All over. The funeral home upsold my parents on the deluxe package because they thought— I don’t know what they thought.
That a fancier coffin made up for a closed lid, maybe.
” I laugh, except it isn’t a laugh, not even a little bit, not even close.
“I haven’t smelled them in five years. But then I walked into that church and it was like she died again. Right there. In front of me.”
I’ve never told him about Giana. He seemed content to believe that I wanted Raymond dead because he was cruel to me.
That’s true, of course.
But it’s not the real story.
The rain splatters against the slate. We’re alone out here in this little side yard. If I’m ever going to say this out loud to him, it’s now.
“Raymond killed my sister,” I whisper.
Matvei goes deathly still.