Chapter 17 - The Empty Casket
The cemetery office kept records going back fifty years. Adrian arrived with Tessa and a court-authorized investigator the next morning.
The clerk found Lena's supposed burial file. Adrian remembered an itchy black sweater and refusing cake after the service.
The file showed a memorial, not a burial. Owen Hart Senior's consulting account had paid for it. There was no cemetery record of a body.
"So the grave was always empty," Adrian said.
Tessa nodded. "The marker was a private memorial. There was never a burial record."
The investigator took copies of the file.
Outside, Adrian remembered the boy he'd been, talking to a gravestone as if his mother could hear.
"What do I do with all those years?" he asked Tessa.
"You don't have to do anything with them today."
His phone rang. It was Lena.
"I wanted to tell you before you got home," she said. "I'm going to make a statement. Not through the company. Publicly, in my own name."
Adrian had expected her to ask permission. Instead she sounded certain.
"Are you ready?"
"I spent twenty-nine years being afraid of what Preston would say about me. He's going to say it anyway. I'd rather people hear my voice first."
At the local community center that afternoon, Lena stood beside Marisol and several Ash Street residents. She spoke about losing her child, about Tomas Rivera, and about the danger of putting a reputation above a human life.
"I signed something false because I believed it would bring my son back," she said. "I was wrong to sign. But the people who used that signature knew exactly why I did it."
She told the truth.
Then a reporter at the back raised his hand.
"Ms. Ward, your husband says Adrian knew about the demolition all along and approved the unsafe repairs. Do you deny it?"
May you like
Lena turned toward her son.
Across the room, Adrian saw a news alert announcing that Preston had formally accused him of corporate negligence.
