Chapter 3

Prescott found Nell by the caterer's tent, and he did not say hello.

"Why is the clipboard out of the office?"

"She was asking about the blessing line."

"She." Prescott's jaw moved. "The man at the gate."

"Yes."

"And you showed him the run-of-show."

"He read it over my arm." Nell held the clipboard tighter. "Mr. Prescott, that line is on Odette's version. I checked. It's on the version Ms. Calloway signed off on three weeks ago."

"Odette's version is a wish list. I build the actual show."

"It says founding family."

"It says a lot of things." He took the clipboard out of her hands, turned it face-down, and tucked it under his elbow. "The caterer's timeline shifted. We cut four minutes. Nobody's going to miss a blessing."

Nell looked at him for a second longer than was comfortable for either of them.

"You didn't ask his name," she said.

"What?"

"At the gate. You told him there's no Reyes on the property. You said that before he ever gave a surname." She said it quietly, the way you say a thing you don't want to be right about. "How did you know what his name was?"

Prescott's phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it - a habit, ninety seconds, always - and put it away.

"Go get the box off the gatehouse step," he said. "It's unclaimed property. Log it in the office and tell him he can collect it Monday."

"That's not-"

"That's the procedure."

Nell went. The box was heavier than it looked, and the twine was knotted in a way that took two hands and would have taken teeth. She carried it inside and set it on the office desk beside the guest book, and she stood there a moment with her hand flat on the lid, feeling the weight of it, before she went back out.

Up the aisle path, Marisol Vega was standing barefoot on the stone with her heels in a bridesmaid's hand, laughing at something about the dog. Ivory silk crepe, seed-pearl buttons down the back, her grandmother's small gold hoops, black hair half up in two silver combs. She was twenty-nine and so quietly, seriously beautiful that the string quartet had stopped tuning the first time she came down the path in the gown.

She heard the voices at the gate. Two of them. Raised.

"Is that the florist?" she said.

"Probably the florist," said a bridesmaid.

Marisol looked down the drive anyway, shading her eyes, and for a moment she saw a man's shape in the heat shimmer by the gatehouse and felt absolutely nothing about it.

On the service road, Tommy Reyes turned around and started walking back.

Rudy Tavares said, "Sir."

"I left something on the step," Tommy said.

Prescott watched him come up the drive, and something in his shoulders loosened - because a man who comes back is a man who can be cited.

He took the radio off his belt.