34
Everything about the last few days—the rehearsal dinner drama, the wedding cancelation and her aunt’s unhappiness, the tension she felt coming from Conor, and most shockingly, the murder—made Sam feel wildly off balance.
Those facts were always with her; they were part of who she was.
Not only did she love and miss her mother, but she also had to live with the fact that she had been furious at her mother when she died.
Worst of all, she hadn’t been there. Maybe she could have stopped her mother from being strangled by someone she had trusted, even loved.
Had that been the case with Belinda? Had someone she’d known well, cared about—someone she’d thought loved her—walked up behind her and slit her throat?
The wedding dress must have played a role; it was bizarre that Belinda had stolen it from right here in the Tower Suite, put it on, and had been wearing it when she was murdered.
Sam pictured the white fabric soaked with blood.
Had the killer been repulsed by that sight, or had it fed a sick fantasy?
It all seemed beyond the realm of reality, and Sam wondered if either or both victim and killer were insane. It seemed to her that they had to be.
She remembered that she had gone a little mad after her mother’s murder.
There was no possible way to exist in normal life, among regular people, while her entire mind was swimming with images of the lace imprints left in her mother’s neck from where the elastic of her underpants had dug in, of her mother dying, watching the person strangling her, feeling her heart break as the life drained out of her.
Had that happened with Belinda? Had she looked into the eyes of her killer, had it been someone she loved?
Sam knew that having crazy thoughts and dreams as the daughter of the victim was one thing: But what about a killer?
And what about a victim who dropped into a pool of blood wearing someone else’s wedding dress?
She thought of delusions, paranoia, dissociation, the inability to stop reliving a terrible moment.
And she thought of that envelope she had seen Conor take from that drawer in the library desk at home, when he thought he was alone.
Seeing what it contained—a tiny tooth and a lock of hair—had activated a ton of suspicion in Sam.
But that had passed—when she was home, just an hour ago, she had checked the drawer and found it empty.
On top of the desk was a receipt and a note from Trooper Dave Liggett saying he had taken the envelope to the crime lab.
Sam figured the envelope had come from Belinda, and that brought her back to 1740.
“Maynard-King is the center of it all,” she said out loud. “It has to be.”
“Why do you say that?” Lincoln asked, not looking up from what he was doing.
“I think some of them were in the hospital for treatment, and they met each other there,” she said.
“We can put it on the list of things to check out,” he said. “But what makes you think it?”
“Because I know what it’s like to lose touch with reality.”
“Sorry,” Lincoln said. “That must have been awful. When?”
“After my mother died.”
“So why do you think Maynard-King is the center of this?”
Sam didn’t answer right away. She thought of how she had spiraled after her mother’s death. Every night for months she had dreamed her mother was alive. They were wonderful dreams, full of love and comfort. She could hear her mother’s voice, feel her arms around her.
But after a while, her dreams changed. She began having nightmares about her mother’s last day on earth.
She had visions of her mother in their garden, tending the roses and hydrangeas.
Her mother had been pregnant, and Sam remembered how they would talk about what the baby’s name would be.
But the killer would be waiting there, hiding in the garden, waiting for Sam’s mother to go inside the house.
And then her mother would be murdered, and Sam would never see her again.
Those nightmares, and the grief Sam felt, had made her want to die herself. Kate saw Sam falling apart and arranged for her to be admitted to McLean, outside Boston. It was one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the world.
The reason Sam felt so strongly that Maynard-King was key was that she related to sad, lost girls, and she knew how easy it was to fall off the edge of life. It would be even easier if there was someone evil standing there, giving them a push. But she didn’t say all that to Lincoln.
“That note at Dr. Tyler’s grave,” she said, because she knew it was a more acceptable response that wouldn’t require her getting too personal. “‘1740, With Love, Always’”
“We don’t have the note, do we?” he asked. “Maeve grabbed it just before she got into that Range Rover.”
“But I saw it,” Sam said. “So I know what it said.” She paused. “Lincoln, the way you say Maeve ‘got into that Range Rover’ makes it sound as if you think she did it of her own free will—instead of being forced in.”
Now he looked up from his keyboard, reached up with one hand to push his long hair out of his eyes. “Sometimes I do think that.”
“Then why hasn’t she called you? Or Kate?”
“She was freaked out by seeing all that blood run down the stairs from Belinda’s body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be?”
Sam nodded. She knew she would. Add that to the list of ways to lose your mind.
“And it messed her up, knowing that Belinda was killed wearing Kate’s wedding dress. She was obviously obsessed with Conor. Even though she was a widow and had a kid, I guess she never got over her fantasy of getting married to the boy next door.”
Fantasy, Sam thought. Just like in the old Yellow Pages ad.
1740 Events: Fantasies our specialty.
She looked at the photo she had taken of the ad. Even though Sam had called the number earlier, she wanted to try again. Maybe someone would answer this time. She dialed it on her phone.
“Who are you calling?” Lincoln asked. Sam put a finger to her lips because she had just reached voicemail again, and she wanted to listen more carefully. When it finished, she hung up and turned to Lincoln.
“It’s a florist,” she said.
“Well, I guess we can cross that off the list, then,” Lincoln said. “A florist is pretty far from an event company.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“What’s bothering you?”
“The message said, ‘Make someone’s dreams come true.’ Dreams aren’t that different from fantasies,” Sam said.
“What’s the name of the place?” Lincoln asked.
“Enchanted Petals,” she said.
“I know where that is,” he said after a moment. “It’s in Narragansett, and it’s not just a florist shop—it’s a nursery. They have greenhouses, big fields full of flowers. I’ve seen them—there’s a hiking trail along the edge of the property.”
Sam replayed the message in her mind. Dreams, enchanted petals. A shiver ran down her spine. She thought of that ad, placed in the Yellow Pages so long ago, and she suddenly had a growing feeling that 1740 was somehow alive and well at the garden center.
“I want to go there,” Sam said to Lincoln.
Tuesday, July 6; 11:00 a.m.
Conor found Fernando Harris’s house and thought it looked more like an 1800s sea captain’s home than a framing and art restoration studio.
It blended in with all the other historic houses on Gravel Street, along the Mystic River.
There wasn’t a sign out front; the neighborhood was residential, not commercial, and for a moment he wondered if he had the right place.
Cars were parked on one side of the waterfront street.
He didn’t see Kate’s, so he walked down the driveway that ran alongside the house.
Part of the backyard had been paved to create a parking area for a few cars.
Conor saw a van with Fernando Harris’s logo on the side; behind it, just out of immediate view, was Kate’s car.
He let out a big sigh of relief and began to walk toward the house.
There was a back entrance, so Conor headed up the stairs and knocked before he saw the small sign:
By appointment only, unless it’s your lucky day and I happen to be here.
Conor pushed the door open. He walked through a room lined with samples of picture frames, with a massive work surface in the center, and a small oak table and two armchairs off to the side. There were a few art magazines and exhibition catalogs stacked on the table.
He had clocked a security camera above the outside door, and there were two more set in upper corners of this room.
At the far end was a narrow hallway that led to a white steel security door.
To the right of the door was an intercom panel.
Conor pressed the button. He listened for a faint buzz on the other side of the door but didn’t hear one.
His phone was in his pocket; he took it out and checked to see if he had heard back from Kate.
He texted her: I am at Fernando’s now—I see your car, where are you?
Nothing.
He stepped back from the door, in case she was inside and hadn’t had time to respond yet, but he felt his blood pressure rise as he waited.
He stood by the table and fanned out the top three catalogs.
The top one was from the Woodward-Lathrop gallery, displaying the shadow boxes of gallery artist Claire Beaudry Chase.
The second was a brochure from the Mystic Museum of Art’s exhibition a few years earlier, “Magic Hour: Art between Waking and Dreams.” The third was from Botanicum/Animalium, a gallery Conor had never heard of.
The title of the show was “Judge not, Lest ye be Judged.”