Jasmine Cresswell - Suspect

“The fact that Adam is not only a Fairfax, but Avery’s youngest brother.” Liam had no trouble finishing his sister’s sentence.

“You’ve got it. I know it’s hard for Mom to accept that Dad was the only villain in what happened, but he was. Avery and Adam were both his victims, just like she was.”

“Mom will accept that soon. She’s coming around.” Liam hoped he was speaking the truth. “Give it a bit more time, and I’m betting Mom won’t see Avery’s brother every time she looks at Adam. She’ll see Megan’s fiancé and a good guy.”

“God, I hope so. By the way, speaking of fiancés—” Megan’s voice turned a little breathless. “Adam and I are thinking of getting married at the beginning of next month. We thought we’d slip away for a few days over the Labor Day weekend.”

“Hey, congratulations! I’ll make sure to clear my calendar.” Despite his general disdain for the married state, Liam was surprisingly happy for his sister. He’d met Adam three times now and really liked the guy. “Will you have the ceremony in Wyoming? At the community church or at the ranch?”

There was a slight pause. “Neither place,” Megan said.

“In Georgia, then?” Liam was careful not to sound surprised by her choice. Megan loved Wyoming and the ranch; he’d simply assumed she would get married there.

“Adam and I can’t get married in Wyoming or in Georgia,” she said, and he could hear the regret in her voice. “And we can’t invite our families to the ceremony. Think about it. If we don’t invite the Fairfax clan, Adam will be sad and his family will be justifiably offended. If we do invite them, especially if we invite Avery, Mom is going to hate every minute of my wedding day.”

She had a valid point, Liam thought grimly. Jeez, what a mess. The elevator finally arrived and he stepped in, pushing the button for the seventh floor. In a perfect world, the Fairfaxes and the Ravens would be so happy for Megan and Adam that the past would have no importance. In the real world, Ron Raven’s bigamy cast a long and chilling shadow. It was unrealistic to expect the two widows to sit in church, smiling benevolently as Ellie’s daughter married Avery’s younger brother. And although Megan hadn’t mentioned anything about the media, unless they hired armed guards to surround the church and the ranch, the whole ceremony would probably end up being filmed for some sleazy tabloid TV show. Ron’s death had become one of those stories that the world of cable refused to let die.

“What are you going to do, then?” he asked. “Do you want to come to Colorado and get married in Denver? It would be easy for me to make all the arrangements and I might even be able to keep them secret, since I’m in the marriage business, so to speak…”

“Thanks. I appreciate the offer, Liam, but we’ve decided the best thing for us is to elope to Vegas.”

In normal circumstances, Vegas would have been just about the last place Megan would have chosen to get married and Liam felt a spurt of resentment on his baby sister’s behalf that the wedding of her dreams could never be. He was so taken aback at the thought of Megan in a wedding chapel on the Vegas strip that for a crucial moment he couldn’t come up with a damn thing to say.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said softly. “Don’t worry, Liam. I’m not regretting the white dress and the flower girls and the endless family conferences about who gets to sit at which table—”

“Why not?” he asked, sending a silent curse in the direction of his dead father, the most recent in a long and useless line of similar curses. “It’s a huge day in your life and it ought to be as special as you can make it.”

“It will be special.” Megan sounded completely sure of herself. “I’ll be marrying Adam, so it’s bound to be wonderful wherever we have the ceremony.”

The elevator clunked to a stop. Liam got out on his floor, amazed by his sister’s quiet exuberance. “You really love the guy, don’t you?”

“Yes, and fortunately he loves me, too.” She laughed. “That kind of puts the where-shall-we-have-the-ceremony issue into perspective. Before I met Adam, I used to fantasize about the perfect wedding. The only problem was that I had this huge hole where I was supposed to have a mental image of the groom. Now I realize the only thing that matters about a wedding is having the right person as your partner when you make your vows. The bridesmaids, the cake, the fancy dress and all the rest of it are basically irrelevant.”

“Speaking as a divorce lawyer, I can only say that I’m sure you’re right. I wish more people were as smart as my little sister.”

“No, you don’t, or you’d be unemployed!”

Liam laughed but there was a lump in his throat. Since he couldn’t deal with his emotions, today of all days, he spoke with deliberate briskness. “Adam seems like a good guy. Nowhere good enough for you, of course, but almost in the ballpark. Be happy, Meggie.”

“He’s a great guy, and I plan to be.” She broke off. “Oh my gosh, wait! We’re wading so deep into the sentimental stuff that I almost forgot the reason I called you in the first place. It’s about Dad.”

Liam winced, stopping outside the entrance to his offices. “Please don’t tell me Adam has uncovered more financial problems.”

“None that we didn’t know about already, thank goodness. Between the platinum mine in Belize and the disputed wills, I couldn’t take another financial disaster, or more documents to sign and send off to the probate court. No, this is something quite different. Do you remember Tricia Riley? She’s a distant cousin on Dad’s side of the family. Her grandmother and our grandmother were sisters.”

“I have a vague image from Grandma’s funeral.” Liam wrinkled his forehead. “She’s got curly hair a bit like yours, right? She was on the ditzy side, but smart in a geeky sort of way. As I recall, she used to work for a dotcom in Houston. She must be in her fifties by now.”

“Yes, that’s the one. She still does work in Houston, apparently for a company that manufactures household robots. She asked me to call her back when I had time to talk. She claimed she had something important she needed to discuss with me.”

“That sounds ominous. If she’s asking you to invest in her robots, I recommend you ask for a demonstration first.”

“That was precisely my thought, but we’re both offtrack. I called her back this morning and what Tricia had to say turned out to be a lot more worrying than robots designed to scrub the floors. Liam, she told me that she’d seen Dad in a shopping mall in Houston.”

“What? You’re kidding. She’s claiming to have seen Dad recently?”

“She says she saw him last week.”

“Good lord, she must be even more ditzy than she looks. So is she claiming to have seen him for real, in the flesh? Or are we talking visitations by a ghost?”

“Absolutely not ghosts. Tricia says she saw Dad going into Nieman Marcus in Houston. She called his name and hurried to catch up with him, but he ignored her. By the time she got into the store, he’d vanished.”

“Obviously she suffers from an overactive imagination,” Liam said, not sure whether to be irritated by his cousin or to pity her. He never understood why some people felt the need to turn commonplace events into major dramas, with themselves as the stars. “The guy didn’t turn around because he had no idea he was being called. He didn’t respond to somebody calling Ron Raven for the simple reason that wasn’t his name!”

“You’re singing my song. That’s exactly what I suggested to Tricia, but she wasn’t persuaded. She says she’s sure the man she saw was Ron Raven, or else his double. I pointed out that she didn’t know Dad all that well and that she hadn’t seen him in the twelve years since Grandma’s funeral, and she informed me that I was wrong. She’d had dinner with him in San Antonio a couple of months before he died. Apparently they discussed the possibility of Dad investing in her darn robots! She claims that she knows exactly what Dad looked like right before he was murdered and that this man—quote—had Dad’s way of walking.”