Chapter 4: Her Own Funeral

Iris watched her own funeral from the back seat of a rented sedan, through a black veil, with the window down two inches.

Two white coffins on the cathedral steps, one full-sized and one so small she had to look at the flowers instead. The same four hundred people from the ballroom filled the square, and half of them were holding up their phones.

"Eleanor ordered every lily in the city," Vance murmured from the driver's seat. "Forty thousand dollars' worth."

"She always liked an audience."

"You can still change your mind. Say the word and I'll walk you down those steps myself."

"No."

At the front of the crowd Damian stood alone, in the black suit he had worn for his father's funeral, and it already hung off him. At his wrists, small and blue, were the cufflinks she had bought him in March. Of course he was wearing them. He had put them on this morning to bury her. Eleanor reached up to straighten his tie and he caught her wrist without looking at her.

"People are watching, Damian." She dropped her voice. "Grieve quickly, then. The board needs an heir, and Vivienne has been very patient."

He turned and stared at his mother as if she had said it in another language. "My son is in that box."

"Your son was a sickly child, and a company can't be inherited by a cough."

He walked away from her. He climbed the steps to the small coffin, the pastor's voice faltering, and laid a crumpled, water-stained paper crown on the white lid, and put his palm flat on top of it. The wind carried what he said straight through the gap in Iris's window.

"He didn't like chocolate. Did you know that?" He was speaking to no one. "I bought him chocolate cake every year. He liked lemon. Iris told me three times, and I never listened, and he never once said."

Iris's hand had closed on the new inhaler in her lap so hard that her knuckles ached.

"He's breaking," Vance whispered.

"Good." Her voice was steady, and that frightened her. "I want him broken all the way. I want nothing left in there Eleanor can hold on to."

A young courier in a grey uniform pushed through the crowd and stopped at the foot of the steps with a small box. "Mr. Hale? From a Dr. Aldous. He said it couldn't wait."

Damian opened it. Inside, on tissue, lay Theo's blue inhaler in an evidence bag, with a folded note. He read the note once and went completely still.

In the car Vance glanced at her. "You did that."

"I want him looking inside his own house." She didn't blink. "It says, ask who had the keys to his room."

On the steps Damian lifted his head, and his eyes went through the crowd like a searchlight. They found Eleanor first, very straight and very still, and then Vivienne a few paces behind, in a black dress that fitted a little too well.

"Mother." It was so quiet Iris barely caught it. "Who filled Theo's prescriptions?"

"The household nurse, as always." Eleanor's face didn't move. "Why?"

"Who hired her?"

"Vivienne found her. She had excellent references." Eleanor looked at the box. "What is that?"

"The reason my son stopped breathing." He turned the bag over in his fist. "It's empty. Somebody drained it and glued the cap on."

The crowd made a sound, half gasp and half whisper. Vivienne stepped forward with a hand on her chest. "Damian, darling, this is grief. Not here."

"Where, then?" He was looking at her for the first time, really looking, and Iris saw it on his face, the thing she had waited six years for and stopped believing in: doubt. "My wife called me five times. My son died with an inhaler that didn't work. Tell me where I'm allowed to ask."

Vivienne's smile didn't slip, but it went tight at the corners.

"The service is over," Damian said. "Everyone go home."

"Damian," Eleanor hissed, "you're making a spectacle."

"I buried my family today, Mother. I think I've earned one."

He walked down through the crowd with the inhaler in his fist, and nobody dared touch him.

In the car Iris found her face was wet. She wasn't sure when it had started. She was thinking of the Tiger book, how he used to do a different voice for every animal, and how he hadn't done it since Theo was three, and she had forgotten until now that he ever had.

"He didn't do it," she said.

"No." Vance's phone buzzed on the dashboard, and he looked at it, and she watched the colour leave his face. "Harlan Pryce. Damian's lawyer. He's been digging since the hospital."

"And?"

"He says the nurse's contract was signed by Vivienne Ashgrove, personally. And there's something about Vivienne herself." His voice had gone thin. "Ashgrove isn't her legal name. She changed it eight years ago, a month before she walked into Damian's office. She was born Marsh."

The name meant nothing to Iris, and she opened her mouth to say so.

Then she saw Vance's hands. They were on the wheel and the leather was creaking under them, and he was staring straight ahead through the windshield at a funeral that wasn't hers, like a man who had just watched a ghost walk out of the crowd.

"Mr. Vance," she said slowly. "Who are the Marsh family?"

He didn't answer.