CHAPTER 8 — THE EMPTY CASKET
The funeral home director denied everything.
He insisted my mother’s body had been properly identified.
He showed us signatures.
Transfer records.
A hospital release form bearing Richard’s name.
But the photograph had been taken by a traffic camera.
The date and time were digitally embedded.
Forty-eight hours after Margaret was declared dead, her car had passed through an intersection near Tybee Island.
The driver’s face was hidden.
The passenger was unmistakably my mother.
Detective Hale ordered the grave opened.
By sunset, half the town had gathered outside the cemetery gates.
The mahogany casket was raised.
Mr. Whitaker stood beside me.
Vanessa waited several feet away, wrapped in a borrowed coat.
When the funeral director opened the lid, the pearl earrings were still there.
But they rested on a plastic mannequin.
The chapel service had been staged around an empty body.
Vanessa stumbled backward.
“I touched her hand.”
“You touched gloves filled with padding,” Hale said.
Richard had arranged the burial and refused to let anyone see Margaret before the service.
The funeral director was arrested.
Under questioning, he admitted Richard had paid him fifty thousand dollars to prepare a closed viewing.
He claimed he did not know why.
Richard, however, refused to speak.
Laura became frantic when she learned Margaret might be alive.
“She found me,” she said. “A few weeks before the funeral.”
“What?”
“She came to the center.”
Laura explained that Margaret had visited secretly after locating the hidden property.
She had promised to return with the police.
But Richard discovered her plan.
The next morning, Margaret vanished.
Vanessa grabbed Laura’s arm.
“Did Mom say where she would go?”
“She mentioned an old cottage near the water.”
I remembered it immediately.
Our family had owned a weathered fishing cottage on Tybee Island when I was a child.
Margaret sold it after marrying Richard.
At least, that was what she told us.
Property records showed the cottage had never been sold.
It belonged to a trust under my father’s name.
Detective Hale organized a search.
We reached the island after dark.
The cottage stood beyond the dunes, its windows black.
The front door was unlocked.
Inside, dust covered the furniture.
There were canned goods in the kitchen.
Fresh footprints crossed the floor.
On the dining table lay one of my mother’s pearl earrings.
The matching earring was supposed to be inside the casket.
A floorboard creaked upstairs.
Hale raised his weapon.
“Police!”
A figure ran across the landing.
We followed.
The back window stood open.
Outside, footprints led toward the beach.
Then vanished at the waterline.
On the bedroom wall, written in charcoal, was a message:
RICHARD IS NOT THE ONE WHO PLANNED THIS.
May you like
Beneath it was a second line.
ASK VANESSA WHAT SHE DID THE NIGHT MARGARET DISAPPEARED.
