AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes. No question,” Rose said firmly.
It didn’t take long for Jeremy to find the obituary for Natalie Quinne Grayson. It was just as Rose remembered it, with that same photograph from so long ago.
Rose thought,She was so beautiful. I didn’t realize it back then. I was twenty-one, and Natalie seemed so much older than me. At twenty-six! She was still a baby.
How foolish I was!
It was my foolishness that led Oren to me.
“But why isn’t the death certificate here?” Rose asked after a long pause.
Jeremy’s expression was difficult to read. He leaned back, his lips twisting. “She was married to Oren Grayson?”
Rose nodded. She searched his eyes for some sign that Jeremy knew she, too, had been married to Oren Grayson. But everyone knew that. Didn’t they?
“Oren Grayson has more money than God,” Jeremy said.
Rose’s heart stopped beating. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that anything can be printed on the paper,” Jeremy said. “You can fake an obituary easily. You just have to throw money in the right direction.”
Rose was speechless.It’s impossible.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I married Orenshortly thereafter. Natalie died in that fire. It completely affected our marriage. It affected my life.”
Jeremy raised his hands. “I don’t know. All I know is, there’s no death certificate.”
“But doesn’t that just mean it was lost? Or stolen?”
Jeremy looked doubtful.
“Give me a minute,” Rose said. “I have a phone call to make.”
Rose hurried upstairs to call Officer Sean Slagle. He sounded surprised when he answered the phone. Rose remembered when he’d urged her to call him all those years ago.Now’s the time.
Rose didn’t want to explain everything over the phone. Sean said he’d be at the records office in ten minutes but appeared in seven. His cheeks were pink. He was nervous.
Sean was just as flabbergasted about the lost death certificate as Jeremy and Rose. He asked numerous questions about how the certificates were stored and whether it was possible that it had been misplaced. But Jeremy said no.
That was when Jeremy had the idea to look through hospital records. He had a friend up at the Nantucket Hospital who was willing to dip into the files they had on-hand.
The three of them waited in the sun outside the records office as Jeremy’s friend went through hospital records from thirty-one years ago. It was clear to all of them that Natalie would have been brought to the hospital after her rescue from the fire. That was how things went.
But the friend called back within thehour to say, “No. We don’t have anything here for a Natalie Quinne or a Natalie Grayson.”
Sean’s face was deathly pale.
“But you must have seen those certificates when you were looking into her death?” Rose suggested. “Back in ’93? When you were going after Oren?”
Sean shook his head. “No. The Waldens and the Graysons kept everything from us. The entire investigation was like moving through a jungle at night.”
Jeremy, Sean, and Rose stood in the sun. Confusion marred their faces. Eventually, one of Jeremy’s employees came out to ask his advice about something—an email to a higher-up, and he said goodbye and, “Keep me in the loop.”
This left only Rose and Sean. They gaped at each other.
“Jeremy thinks Oren paid someone at the paper off,” Rose burst. “He thinks the obituary was a fake.”
“That’s insane.”
