Chapter 7 - The Poison in the Liquor
Forty minutes later, the ballroom had cleared.
David Mercer had handled the departure of the guests with the calm, methodical efficiency of an elder statesman, instructing the hotel staff to distribute apologies, reimburse travel expenses, and ensure the press was provided with a factual, legally airtight summary of the arrests.
I sat at a circular banquet table near the front of the empty room, my bow tie undone, the white gardenia unpinned from my lapel and resting beside a half-empty glass of tap water.
Claire sat beside me. She had washed the dried blood from her face, and her hand rested over mine on the white linen tablecloth.
David walked back into the room accompanied by a state forensic investigator carrying a sealed evidence bag. Inside the clear plastic sat an unopened bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt scotch—the private vintage Vanessa had insisted on purchasing for our private toast after the ceremony.
"The preliminary field spectrometer came back positive, Richard," David said quietly, taking a seat across from us. "The seal had been punctured with a microscopic syringe. The bottle is laced with four hundred milligrams of liquid digitoxin. One glass would have stopped your heart within ninety minutes of consumption."
A cold shudder rattled through my ribcage.
"She wasn't even going to wait for Saint Lucia," Claire whispered, her voice trembling as she squeezed my fingers. "She wanted you dead tonight."
"She wanted the will signed tonight," David corrected, opening his leather briefcase and extracting a document stamped with today’s date. "Mason had a mobile notary waiting in the hospitality suite. Under the prenuptial agreement Vanessa’s lawyers drafted, an emergency codicil would have transferred sixty percent of Richard’s non-trust assets to the surviving spouse immediately upon death, bypassing standard probate review."
I closed my eyes. The image of Margaret—my late wife of thirty-eight years—flashed across the dark behind my eyelids.
Margaret had built our life with me from a drafty four-room house in North Charleston. She had packed my lunches when I was working sixty-hour shifts on the cargo docks. She had kept our family grounded when the money started rolling in, constantly reminding me that wealth was merely a tool to protect the people you loved, never a substitute for character.
When Margaret died of ovarian cancer four years ago, a piece of my soul had been buried with her. The silence in our grand historic home had become an unbearable, deafening roar.
And in my desperate, pathetic attempt to escape that silence, I had invited two vipers into the sanctuary Margaret had built.
"Dad," Claire said softly, leaning over to rest her forehead against my shoulder. "Look at me."
I opened my eyes and looked at my daughter.
May you like
"You didn't do this because you were foolish," Claire murmured, tears shining in her dark eyes. "You did it because you were lonely. And monsters know how to hunt lonely people."
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, pulling her tight against my side, and wept the bitter, cleansing tears that I should have cried four years ago.
