Chapter 2 - THE WRONG BODY
The wedding was suspended before evening, but the Mercer family’s lawyers moved faster than the guests leaving Saint Aurelia. By the time Caroline reached Marcus’s temporary office in downtown Chicago, Douglas’s representatives had filed an emergency petition questioning her identity and requesting a confidential medical evaluation. The petition described an unidentified woman with facial injuries making claims about a long-settled family tragedy. It never acknowledged that Douglas had spoken Caroline’s name in front of two hundred witnesses.
Caroline’s attorney, Naomi Price, asked her to sit down and begin with what they could prove. Anger would not establish identity. Neither would a familiar voice, burn scars or her father’s reaction. Caroline placed her hospital identification band on the table. It named her as Cora Lane, age thirty-four, a patient of Westhaven Neurological Rehabilitation Center. Her original birth certificate said Caroline Mercer. The problem was the twelve years between them.
The first independent proof came from fingerprints collected by the Illinois State Police. Caroline’s prints matched an old identification record created when she worked as a junior analyst for the Mercer Family Foundation before the fire. Dental records supported the match. An independently supervised DNA comparison with a stored sample belonging to Douglas established the biological relationship beyond reasonable doubt. Within forty-eight hours, nobody acting in good faith could still claim the woman at Saint Aurelia was an impersonator.
That did not automatically answer whose body had been buried as Caroline Mercer.
Marcus reopened the original fire report with Naomi. The lake house burned on October 18, 2014, when Caroline was twenty-two and Juliette twenty-five. Investigators found a severely burned adult woman beneath debris in the east service wing. The coroner’s preliminary report listed identity as undetermined, but the final certificate identified Caroline after family representatives provided a personal-jewelry description and Juliette signed the affidavit. No reliable DNA comparison had been performed because the family’s attorneys argued that further testing would delay burial and deepen their grief.
“They accepted a necklace?” Caroline asked.
“Not a necklace alone,” Marcus replied. “The body was found in the room you were last seen entering. Juliette identified clothing and jewelry. Douglas’s office provided dental information that turned out to be incomplete.”
Marcus did not defend the original conclusion. He had been assigned to the fire as a detective and remembered objecting to the speed of identification. His supervisor removed him from the case after the district attorney concluded the remaining inconsistencies did not justify prolonging the investigation.
The new evidence gave prosecutors grounds to request exhumation. A surviving femur and several teeth had been preserved well enough for modern DNA comparison, and investigators obtained a reference sample from Miriam Cross’s daughter. Miriam had worked as a caretaker at the Mercer lake house and disappeared the same night. Douglas’s official account said she resigned and left the area before the fire.
The results took several days.
They confirmed that the person buried beneath Caroline’s name was Miriam Cross.
Caroline sat through the meeting without crying. She remembered Miriam’s thick wool cardigan, the peppermint candies she kept in her pocket and the way she called everyone by their first names regardless of how much money they possessed. Miriam had been forty-one when she died. Her daughter, Kate, was thirteen.
“What happened to Kate?” Caroline asked.
Naomi glanced toward Marcus.
That was the one part of the original investigation Marcus had never forgotten. Kate reported her mother missing, but Douglas’s lawyers produced a resignation letter and claimed Miriam left without telling her daughter where she intended to go. Kate was placed with an aunt. Without a confirmed body and with the Mercer household insisting Miriam departed voluntarily, police eventually classified the disappearance as unresolved.
“Does she know?” Caroline asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then tell her before this becomes another headline.”
Marcus nodded.
The second proof came from the document authorizing Caroline’s inheritance transfer. The original was not a standard estate form. It was a conditional voting agreement designed to become effective upon Caroline’s death, and it had been drafted twenty-six days before the fire. Juliette signed as prospective successor. Douglas signed as trustee.
Someone had prepared to benefit from Caroline dying before she supposedly died.
Then Naomi found an attached memorandum.
Its author was the Mercer Foundation’s former chief financial officer.
The memorandum stated that Caroline had recently requested an independent audit of the foundation’s employee-relief accounts and warned that her request could delay the planned sale of Saint Aurelia’s adjoining properties.
The author’s name was Miriam Cross.
Caroline stared at the page.
May you like
Miriam had not merely died in the room where Caroline was supposed to be.
She had been helping Caroline investigate the money.
