The Best Man to Trust

CHAPTER Fifteen



“Greg?”

Meredith took off down the hallway, Tom right at her side, her heart lodged in her throat at the sight of the big, unmoving form lying on the floor.

A split second before they reached him, he shifted slightly, the sight sending fresh shock ripping through her. At the sight of him, she’d immediately thought he had to be dead. The fact that he wasn’t was almost as much of a shock as finding him there.

He rolled partway on his side, then flopped back onto his stomach, placing a hand on the floor to steady himself.

“Take it easy,” Tom said, dropping to his knee at Greg’s side. “You’re hurt.”

“Am I?” Greg asked, sounding bemused.

“What happened?” Meredith asked.

Greg pushed himself fully onto one side, peering up at Meredith, his eyes narrowed in pain. “Guess I should have listened to you and cut back on the drinks. I must have tripped.”

“You tripped and hit yourself in the back of the head?” Tom asked in disbelief.

Greg chuckled weakly. “It happens. Believe me.”

“That’s not what happened here,” Meredith said, looking beyond him. She stepped past him and picked up something from the floor a few feet away. It was a candlestick, one that normally sat on the hallway table a short distance from here. The base was smeared with blood. “Someone hit you,” she said, holding up the candlestick. “With this.”

Greg glared blearily at the offending object. “I guess I should be glad it wasn’t a knife.”

“What’s going on?”

The voice came from the end of the hall near the stairs. Meredith jerked her head up to find Scott standing there, a bottle of water in one hand, staring at them.

As though cued by his voice, the door to the bridal suite opened. Rachel tentatively stepped into the hallway. She came to an abrupt stop when she saw them. “What happened?”

“Someone hit Greg in the back of the head,” Meredith said.

“Who?” Rachel asked.

“We don’t know,” Tom said with strained patience. “Did you hear anything?”

“I went down to the kitchen to get Rachel some water,” Scott said, holding up the bottle he held.

Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Greg started to push up on his elbows to hoist himself from the floor. “This is all very interesting, but I think I’d like to go back to my room.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t move,” Tom suggested.

“I’m not going to lie here in the middle of the hall,” Greg grumbled. “That didn’t work out so well for Haley, now did it?”

There didn’t seem to be any arguing with him. Rather than let him fall over, Tom reached for Greg’s arm and steadied him as he rose to his feet.

“I’ll get a first-aid kit,” Meredith said.

“I’ll get him into his room,” Tom said over his shoulder.

Meredith hurried to the nearest bathroom, where there was a first-aid kit under the sink. Once she had it, she made her way back to Greg’s room. When she stepped back into the hallway, Scott and Rachel were nowhere in sight. She assumed they’d gone back to the bridal suite.

Greg was sitting on the edge of his bed, Tom hovering nearby. Meredith moved to the side of the bed and set down the first-aid kit, opening it to pull out some disinfectant. “Do you want some pain relievers?”

“More than anything in the world,” he groaned.

“I’ll get some water,” Tom offered.

“No need.” Greg motioned toward the bedside table. A half-empty bottle of water sat on the top. “There’s some right here.”

Opening a bottle of pain relievers, Meredith shook a couple of pills onto her hand and held them out to him. “I’m just glad you’re not asking for something stronger.”

“I already agreed you were probably right about me cutting back,” he muttered. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

As he popped the pills in his mouth and reached for the water, she gave a glance around the room, checking to see if he had any alcohol in here he might turn to when they were gone. Mixing alcohol, painkillers and a head injury seemed like a recipe for disaster.

She didn’t spot any bottles, empty or otherwise. Not that that necessarily meant anything. Still, it was all she could hope for. And of course, she still had the flask she’d taken from him yesterday.

“Scott said you told him you stopped drinking,” Tom said.

“I did. Mostly,” he amended a few seconds later. “I make exceptions for special occasions.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way,” Tom replied.

“If you can’t drink at a wedding, when can you?” Greg scoffed. “We were supposed to be celebrating this weekend. I know that seems like a long time ago, but that’s what we came here for.” His voice softened. “At least I thought that’s what we came here for,” he murmured.

Having dabbed some disinfectant on a cloth, Meredith stood behind Greg. “Can you turn for me a little?” He complied, shifting slightly on the edge of the bed so she could fully see the back of his head. “This might sting,” she warned.

“As long as it’s not as bad as a candlestick to the head, I think I’ll be fine.”

“Now are you going to take what’s happening here seriously?” Meredith couldn’t help asking.

“I always took it seriously,” he said, his voice unexpectedly somber.

“Really?” Tom asked, skepticism heavy in his voice. “You sure didn’t act like it.”

“What should I have done, Tom? Started yelling and screaming my head off like Jess? That didn’t work so well for her, did it?” He shrugged. “I’m not afraid of death, Meredith. It’s just something that happens.”

“What about your family? Your parents? Relatives? Wouldn’t they miss you?”

He grew quiet. “Yes. Losing a child. That’s not something any parent could get over.... But my parents are both dead, and I don’t have any family left. So no, nobody would miss me.”

“I didn’t know,” Tom said softly. “About your parents.”

“Yes, well, you’ve been gone for a long time, Tom,” Greg said wryly. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

As she started to wrap a bandage around Greg’s head, Meredith glanced over at Tom in time to see him wince, and she knew the comment had stung.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “You’re right. I wish I’d been here. I should have been a better friend.”

Greg shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing you could have done about it. And you have your own life. We all do.”

Despite his casual tone, Meredith finally heard what she should have guessed was beneath the partying attitude and copious drinking. Greg was deeply sad.

She cleared her throat, unsure how to respond to the realization, not knowing what to say. She finally pulled her hands back, shifting away from him to deposit the antiseptic and unused bandages back in the kit. “There we go. All done.”

“Great,” he said with a cheeriness she could now hear was forced.

“Can we get you anything else?”

“I just need to rest for a while,” he said. “And lock my door.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Tom said.

“Let me know if you want me to send up dinner,” Meredith offered.

“That won’t be necessary,” Greg replied with a brief grin. “It’ll take a little more than a candlestick to the head to keep me down.”

Unfortunately, as they all knew too well, there were far worse threats out there with the potential to keep him down permanently.

Leaving him to rest, Tom and Meredith stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

“What do you think?” Tom asked as she moved back toward the bathroom.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Why would someone hit him in the head and not kill him?”

“Whoever did it could have heard us coming, or gotten scared before they could do anything.”

“But neither Haley nor Jessica were hit in the back of the head.” As soon as she said it, she frowned, reconsidering. They’d never actually examined the back of either body. “Or were they?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “We didn’t look. They might have been. It could explain why no one heard either of them scream.”

Meredith stepped into the bathroom, putting the first-aid kit back under the sink as she considered the issue. Returning to the hall, she met his eyes. “We could always check,” she suggested quietly.

“We could,” he allowed, sounding as excited about the idea as she was.

“Scott and Rachel were each alone,” Meredith pointed out carefully, not sure how he would react to the suggestion.

He didn’t immediately jump to defend either of them. Instead he sighed, dragging a hand over his face wearily. “I know,” he conceded.

“Do you want to talk to them?”

“We probably should—”

The sound of a door opening cut him off. They looked up just in time to see Alex step into the hallway.

He didn’t notice them at first, stopping to pull the door shut behind him. Once he turned away from it, he looked up, immediately spotting them. He tensed, eyeing them warily. “Everything all right?”

“No,” Tom said flatly. “Someone attacked Greg. Hit him in the back of the head.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed, as if he wasn’t sure he believed him. “Is he okay?”

“He should be. Nothing too serious.” He nodded toward the room Alex had just exited. “Have you been in there for a while?”

“Since lunch.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“No. Why?”

Tom motioned toward the hallway. “It happened right here. We heard Greg yell out from the stairs at the other end. Seems strange you didn’t hear it when you were a lot closer.”

Alex shrugged. “I drifted off. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Probably not a surprise I didn’t hear anything.”

“So you weren’t downstairs a half an hour ago, either?”

“No, I told you I was in my room for the past several hours.”

“So you did,” Tom said noncommittally.

Alex eyed the two of them. “Why? Did something else happen?”

“Someone knocked me down,” Meredith answered. “Tried to take my keys.”

“Did you see who it was?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Alex zeroed in on Tom. “And you thought it might be me?”

“I had to ask,” Tom said with a complete lack of apology. “You of all people should understand that.”

“Oh, I do.” To his credit, he didn’t appear the slightest bit offended. “Did you check where Rachel was during all of this?”

“In her room,” Tom said.

“With Scott?”

Meredith hesitated, remembering the sight of Rachel coming out of their room while Scott had appeared at the stairs. Tom didn’t answer immediately, either, a fact that Alex didn’t miss.

His eyebrows shot up. “I’m going to take that as a no.”

“It seems that Scott went downstairs to get Rachel some water while she waited in their room,” Meredith explained.

“So she was up here, alone, not far from where Greg was supposedly hit. Interesting.”

Meredith studied the man closely, taking in the shrewdness in his face. “You really don’t like her, do you?”

“Not particularly. I remember the way she dropped him like he was nothing to her, all because she said he was neglecting her, wasn’t spending enough time for her. The guy was working his ass off, and all she cared about was that he didn’t have time for her.” He shook his head. “How much of a spoiled brat do you have to be to do something like that? Do you really think somebody like that is going to change? And should Scott really trust somebody who would treat him like that?”

“If that’s how you feel, then why did you agree to perform their wedding?” Tom asked.

“Scott asked me,” Alex said in a tone that seemed to indicate that explained everything. “They needed someone to do it, and he knew I’d officiated my cousin’s wedding. Rachel wanted to get married here in the middle of nowhere. It was impossible to get a minister to travel all this way, and he didn’t want a local to do it, a stranger neither of them knew who didn’t know them, either. So I said yes.”

“You really think she could be involved in this?”

His brow went up again. “You don’t?” he asked with thinly concealed disbelief. “She’s the one who wanted to come here. She’s the one who forced us to drive all the way here in a blizzard when most of us wanted to check into a hotel for the night instead of trekking up a mountain. She did everything she could to bring us to this castle of death.” A beat later, he glanced at her. “No offense, Meredith.”

“None taken,” she murmured. She couldn’t exactly defend Sutton Hall given the circumstances, even if she were at all inclined to at the moment.

“It’s a big leap from someone being a spoiled brat to being a killer,” Tom pointed out.

“Possibly,” Alex said. “But someone could still be both.”

“It almost sounds like you’re out to get her,” Meredith said.

“If she’s the killer, then yes, I am,” Alex said, the coldness in his voice sending a chill down her spine. “There’s a reason I do what I do, Meredith. If there’s one thing I learned a long time ago, it’s that people who do something wrong deserve to be punished.” He reached down and placed his hand on his thigh. She recognized it as an unconscious gesture, the same way she sometimes found herself flexing her broken hand without realizing it. She remembered that was the leg he limped on slightly, the one that had been hurt when he’d been struck by the hit-and-run driver.

A brief wince flashed across his face before he cleared it. “Because when they’re not,” he continued, “When there’s no justice, it hurts. It really does.” He looked at her, the hardness in his expression sending a sudden tremor of unease quaking through her. “People deserve justice. And the only way for that to happen is for the truth to come out.”

* * *

TOM STOPPED IN front of the closed door of Scott and Rachel’s room, bracing himself before knocking.

“You okay?” Meredith asked beside him. “I can do this if it bothers you.”

“No,” he said. He needed to see Scott’s face when the questions were asked. If anyone would know if he was lying, it was Tom.

Drawing himself up, he knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from the other side. It was Scott.

“Tom and Meredith.”

A few seconds passed before the door was opened slightly, revealing Scott on the other side. He eyed them, clear caution in his gaze. “What’s going on?”

“Can we talk to you and Rachel?” Tom asked.

Scott glanced between the two of them, as though expecting to somehow read on their faces what it was they wanted, before finally pulling the door open all the way. “Sure.”

Tom stepped aside to let Meredith enter first, then followed her in. He heard Scott shut the door behind them.

As soon as Tom saw the inside of the room, he understood why Meredith had put them in it. It was twice as big as his or any of the others he’d seen, comprising a full suite. The bedroom portion opened into a sitting area in front of a large fireplace. Rachel sat in one of the chairs there. She looked at them expectantly, clearly having heard their brief conversation with Scott at the door.

“What is it?” she asked.

Scott moved to stand behind Rachel’s chair, allowing Tom to face the both of them.

“I hate to have to ask this,” Tom said. “We were wondering where each of you was in the past hour or so.”

“I’ve been in here the whole time,” Rachel said.

“I told you I went down to get Rachel a bottle of water,” Scott said.

“How long were you out of the room?”

“I don’t know. Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

Tom couldn’t help frowning at that, his brow furrowing. That didn’t seem right. Sutton Hall was big, but it didn’t take that long to get to the kitchen from here.

“It took you that long to make it to the kitchen and back?” Meredith asked, her voice heavy with doubt.

“I took my time,” Scott said, a hint of tightness—or defensiveness?—creeping into his voice. “There didn’t seem to be any reason to hurry.”

Tom did his best to hide his skepticism. With a killer on the loose, it didn’t seem likely anyone would want to take their time wandering the halls on their own. Especially since Scott should have been worried about leaving Rachel alone in the room....

Then Tom slowly registered what he hadn’t before. The way Scott and Rachel were both holding themselves a little stiffly. The way neither of them acknowledged each other.

Things were tense between them, the feeling heavy in the air. That was why Scott had taken his time.

If he can be believed, Tom forced himself to concede.

Tom studied the face of one of his oldest friends in the world, one of the closest—if not the closest—friends he’d ever had. Could he really believe Scott was capable of hitting Meredith? Of bashing Greg in the back of the head? Or so much worse?

His automatic response was no. He forced himself to ignore it, to really consider the possibility as he took in Scott’s familiar face.

Every instinct still said no, even if a whisper of doubt lurked at the edges of his mind.

“Is this about what happened to Greg?” Rachel asked. “Do you actually think one of us hit him?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said honestly. “But I have to ask.”

“Maybe you should ask Alex,” Rachel said with a touch of bitterness. “He’s the one who seems to have all the answers.”

“We did,” Tom admitted. He figured he was better off not discussing the details of their conversation with Alex. “He said he was in his room the whole time and didn’t hear anything.”

“Well, that sounds suspicious,” Rachel scoffed.

“Didn’t you say the same thing?” Meredith pointed out. Rachel slammed her mouth shut, an angry flush rising in her cheeks.

“It’s not just what happened to Greg,” Tom said. “Someone knocked Meredith down and tried to take her keys.”

Two pairs of startled eyes flew to Meredith’s face. “Did they get them?” Rachel asked.

“No,” Meredith confirmed.

“And you didn’t see who it was?” Scott asked.

“No. Whoever it was attacked me from behind.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Tom,” Scott said. “I didn’t hit Greg and I certainly didn’t try to take Meredith’s keys from her.”

“Neither did I,” Rachel said firmly, meeting his and Meredith’s eyes in turn.

Scott hadn’t defended her, Tom realized, a cold trickle sliding down his spine. He’d defended himself, but not Rachel. It was a far cry from his vigorous defense of her last night, when he said he hadn’t even had to consider the question of whether she was involved in the murders. Did it mean anything? Was he starting to doubt her? Or was he simply letting her confirm her own innocence since she’d been alone in the room and he couldn’t honestly say she hadn’t done it?

Tom simply didn’t know, and that disturbed him most of all.

He was probably overanalyzing the moment, but it didn’t matter. Because looking at Scott’s face, Tom had no idea what he was thinking, the face of his old friend suddenly seeming more mysterious than ever before.