Chapter 8

I stood behind the speaker stack on the terrace with the recorder in my hand and waited for the part where the officiant asks if anyone objects.

The ceremony was gold and fog and wet silk. Two hundred people who had bought and sold each other's land for a hundred years sat under those lights and watched Celia Harrow, formerly Vance, become Celia Harrow, finally, and I stood eight feet away behind the sound equipment in a borrowed dress.

"...speak now or forever hold your peace."

I pressed play, and turned the volume knob all the way up.

My sister's voice came out of those speakers like something crawling out of a river.

"I already paid the man. Cut it. And don't tell me what happens after."

The quartet died mid-note. Celia's head turned, and the whole terrace turned with her, and then Grant's voice came over the tape loud and flat: "You're sure."

The tape ran on - the full restored file, the part he had recorded in his own boathouse, the two of them making their plans out of each other's reach, six minutes and eleven seconds of a woman explaining, in her own silvery voice, that a wife who cannot remember her own name is cheaper than a body, that a pinch in the tea every night keeps the lawyers happy, and that Grant was never the villain of this story, only the widower.

When it stopped, the fog and the wet leaves were the loudest things on the property.

Celia turned to the guests and smiled with her teeth.

"That," she said, "is a broken woman with a stolen phone. Evelyn Harrow drowned two years ago. I buried my sister."

"No," Milo said.

He came up the center aisle like he had the first day, in a borrowed jacket and shoes that didn't fit, and he stood in front of two hundred people and said it out loud with his name on it.

"Celia Vance hired me eight days before the accident. She came to the orchard shed with an envelope and wrote the instructions on the back of a store receipt in her own handwriting - garden shed, four a.m., and one line under it that said don't stop the engine before she's past the point. Grant told me it was his idea. It was hers."

Grant hit him before anyone could move - one heavy, wild swing that caught Milo in the ribs, and then he was on top of him on the wet stone, shouting a name that wasn't even my name, while four men dragged him off and Celia stood in her ivory dress and screamed at her wedding guests that they were all liars.

I walked to the table with the sale contracts and picked up the gold pen, and I signed nothing at all.

Then the county sheriff's deputies came up the terrace steps, and the man in front held up a warrant and asked which one was Grant Harrow.