My Last Wish novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Spreadsheet

On Monday afternoon, Chad was at the Haddon Hotel for the gala rehearsal.

I knew because his calendar was on the family tablet, which I still had.

It said 2:00 to 5:00, Ballroom, run through with Tierney.

"I'll keep Teddy," Dane said at his kitchen table. "You should not go in there alone."

"I'm going in there for twenty minutes."

"Callie."

"It's my house, Dane. My name is on the deed, and I'm going to see what he's hiding."

He looked at me for a long time.

"Call me when you're in," he said. "Call me when you're out."

The alarm code was Teddy's birthday.

Chad had never changed it.

The house was cold and perfectly neat, and it smelled of vanilla again.

I went straight to his office at the back of the first floor, the room I had never been allowed to clean.

The desk was bare.

The laptop was gone, and so was every piece of paper.

I opened the drawers one after another.

Pens.

A stack of MacTiernan Group Realty brochures.

A takeout menu.

In the bottom drawer, under a pile of old tax folders, I found a white three-ring binder.

On the spine, in Tierney's tidy label-maker letters, it said GALA.

I laid it on the desk and opened it.

The first tab was a seating chart.

The second was the program, with Chad's name in bold at the bottom, and mine just above it in a smaller font.

Remarks by Callie MacTiernan.

The third tab held a thick sheaf of printed pages with a header across the top.

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