Chapter 3
Evangeline answered on the second ring.
Warm voice.
“Godfrey.”
“Come to the gallery.”
A pause.
“When?”
“Now.”
Another.
Then:
“You found out.”
Not surprise.
Good.
She arrived twenty-five minutes later wearing black silk and pearls.
Lenora used to tease her for dressing like every dinner was a memorial.
I had laughed then.
I did not now.
Evangeline entered the gallery and saw the necklace on the console.
Her expression softened.
Not guilt.
Affection.
That irritated me more.
“You opened Lenora’s coffin.”
She looked at Serilda.
Then Avelise.
Then me.
“Yes.”
Straight.
“Why?”
“Because you were going to marry again.”
I stared.
“That sentence is not an explanation.”
“To me it is.”
She walked toward the portrait.
I moved between her and the necklace.
“No.”
She stopped.
Good.
Lenora had been dead nine years.
Evangeline had apparently decided that gave her more authority over my wife than marriage had given me.
“Who opened the crypt?”
“Our family still has access.”
Wrong.
“The Vale family has ceremonial access to the chapel.”
I kept my voice low.
“Not permission to open a Wrenmoor coffin.”
Evangeline’s face sharpened.
“You put my sister in the ground and then spent nine years keeping her everywhere else.”
That landed.
Because partly true.
Portrait.
Birthday dinners.
Her favorite flowers.
Scholarship in her name.
Some of it remembrance.
Some habit.
Some cowardice.
But Evangeline was not finished.
“Then you chose her.”
She pointed toward Serilda.
“A woman who complained within three months that Lenora’s portrait was too large.”
Serilda snapped:
“Because you told everyone I was threatened by it.”
Evangeline smiled faintly.
“You were.”
“I became threatened because every dinner you compared me to her.”
There.
Not one-sided.
I looked between them.
“How long?”
Serilda laughed bitterly.
“Since the day you introduced us.”
Evangeline corrected her posture.
Corrected her hosting.
Her flowers.
Her dress.
Which chair she chose beside me.
How she greeted older guests.
Whether she touched my sleeve too often.
All through Lenora.
Lenora would have known.
Lenora would never have worn that.
Lenora understood silence.
Lenora understood this house.
A dead woman had become a measuring stick.
And Evangeline had appointed herself the hand holding it.
I turned toward her.
“Why?”
Her eyes filled unexpectedly.
“Because if another woman became important here…”
She stopped.
That was the first real crack.
I waited.
May you like
Then she whispered:
“…there would be nowhere left for my sister.”
