Chapter 6: The Arrest That Wasn't Supposed to Happen Here
The two men in plain clothes were not police officers.
They were investigators from the California Department of Insurance Fraud — a distinction that became clear when the taller one produced credentials and addressed the room in a voice calibrated for exactly this kind of situation: loud enough to be heard, quiet enough to suggest he had done this many times before.
"We're not here to disrupt the event," he said, which was the most absurd sentence spoken in the Saint Aurelia Ballroom all morning, given that the event had been thoroughly disrupted for the past forty minutes.
"We're here to speak with Juliette Mercer in connection with an ongoing investigation into a fraudulent insurance claim filed in March three years ago."
Juliette didn't move.
Gerald stepped forward.
"My client will not be speaking with anyone without—"
"We're not asking her to speak," the investigator said.
"We're asking her to come with us."
"On what basis?"
"The basis is a warrant." He produced it.
"Signed this morning."
Gerald took the warrant.
He read it.
His face did something complicated.
"This was prepared before today," he said.
It was not quite an accusation.
It was the sound of a man realizing how long this had been coming.
"The investigation has been open for fourteen months," the investigator said.
"We were waiting on the final piece of documentary evidence." He glanced toward the table where Vance's file was spread open.
"We received it yesterday afternoon."
Juliette finally moved.
She turned to Caroline.
"You planned this," she said.
"The whole entrance.
The bandages.
The timing.
You wanted an audience."
"You gave me a forged death certificate and a house fire," Caroline said.
"I thought a wedding seemed fair."
"This isn't over."
"No," Caroline agreed.
"It isn't.
There's still the matter of the estate.
The property.
The three years of interest on the inheritance you collected and spent." She paused.
"And the question of who else knew."
Juliette's eyes moved — just briefly, involuntarily — to the side of the room where Miriam was standing.
Caroline caught it.
"We'll get to that," Caroline said quietly.
The taller investigator stepped toward Juliette.
"Ms.
Mercer."
She looked at him for a moment with an expression that had nothing left in it.
Then she reached up and unclasped the emerald necklace.
She held it out toward no one in particular, and then set it on the nearest table — on top of the white linen, beside an untouched bread plate.
She walked with the investigators toward the side exit.
At the door, she stopped.
She turned back, not to Caroline, not to Miriam, not to the two hundred guests who were watching her leave her own wedding.
She turned back to the wedding cake — the three-tiered white fondant tower that had been standing untouched through all of it.
She looked at it for one second.
Then she walked out.
The door closed behind her.
The room exhaled.
Someone started crying — a woman near the back, quietly, into a handkerchief.
Someone else began speaking in a low, urgent voice into a phone.
The groomsman who had told them Douglas left was sitting in a chair with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.
Caroline walked to the table and picked up the emerald necklace.
It was heavier than she expected.
She had not held it since she was twenty-three years old, the summer her mother died, when she had helped Juliette clasp it for the first time and thought nothing of it.
She had been generous then.
She had been generous about a great many things.
She held the necklace in her scarred hand and looked at it.
Miriam appeared beside her.
"What happens now?"
"Now we find Douglas," Caroline said.
"And we find out exactly what he told Juliette the night before the fire.
And whether he told her before or after he came to warn me."
Miriam was quiet for a moment.
"Do you think he warned you because he wanted to protect you?"
"I think he warned me because he was frightened," Caroline said.
"Whether that's the same thing, I don't know yet."
She closed her fingers around the necklace.
"I need to sit down," she said.
"My feet are—" She stopped.
She looked down at the bandaged, bare feet that had walked across the marble floor of the Saint Aurelia Ballroom and left gray ash smudges all the way to the altar.
"I need shoes," she said.
"And probably a doctor."
Miriam put a hand on her arm.
"I have a car outside.
And I know where Douglas went."
Caroline looked at her.
"He didn't go to the airport," Miriam said.
"He went to the house.
The Malibu house.
The one that was supposed to be yours." She paused.
"He goes there when he's frightened.
He has since he was a boy."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I'm his mother," Miriam said.
May you like
"And I know my son." Her voice carried something that was not quite sorrow and not quite resolve — something in between, the particular weight of a parent who has finally chosen correctly after choosing wrong for too long.
"And I know what he needs to tell you."
