Chapter 9 - THE FLOWER WALL
Celeste’s florist remembered seeing her behind the flower wall after the ambulance left.
“She was pulling at the fabric,” the florist said. “I thought she was hiding because she was crying.”
The wall had been dismantled and placed in hotel storage.
Police searched it under warrant.
Inside a hollow wooden base they found the empty shell of Audit Case Seven.
The encrypted component was missing.
Celeste admitted hiding the case there.
She claimed it was already empty when she removed it from Sophie’s jacket.
Nora said it had not been empty when she entered the hotel.
Preston said he had never touched it.
Eleanor refused further interviews.
Forensic examination found Celeste’s prints, Sophie’s partial prints, and a trace from Preston’s cuff-link polish.
The object had passed through several hands.
The hotel board moved to dismiss Nora permanently and authorize an emergency sale of two properties to cover debt.
Eleanor scheduled the vote for forty-eight hours later.
If the financial records inside the missing component concerned those properties, the sale could bury whatever Nora had found.
Lena sought an injunction.
The judge required more than suspicion.
Then the sound laboratory recovered one final sentence from Eleanor’s microphone.
“After Evelyn signs, destroy the key and blame Nora.”
The case was not simply evidence.
It was a key.
That night someone forced open Adrian’s apartment and took his backup tablet.
He was unharmed, but the copied wedding footage disappeared with it.
The official hotel servers still contained deletions.
The board vote remained scheduled.
And Preston filed a statement accusing Adrian and me of manufacturing evidence to seize control of the company.
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By the end of Chapter 9, the people who struck Sophie were no longer defending one wedding.
They were racing to finish something before the missing key was found.
