Page 1 of The Sweetest Obsession

1

ONE LIFE (GRANT)

Well, damn.

That’s definitely a dead body.

I tilt my head back, looking up at the pair of heeled loafers twisting slowly over the grand ballroom of the Arrendell mansion.

We’re standing on the upper walkway looking down over the massive checkered floor. I’m so far away that the dead woman still looks tiny, dangling from the central chandelier.

Her own weight makes the whole thing sway gently with a morbid chiming of glimmering ornaments.

I cock my head to the left and right, frowning up at the body.

Next to me, Junior Sergeant Micah Ainsley huffs, cocking his head to the right, his pale-blue eyes pensive.

“Don’t know how else to call it, Captain Faircross,” he says. “It’s a textbook suicide. Pretty clear-cut.”

I grunt in numb agreement.

Not much way it can be anything else, of course, but I can’t help scrutinizing the scene anyway, considering where we are.

Call it a cop’s overdeveloped instincts for detail, but I need to be sure, dammit.

Because right now, looking at this woman dangling some fifty feet off the ground, hanging there by a trailing velvet red curtain drawn into a noose, I’m not fucking feeling it.

Oh, I am feeling lots of other things.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because it happened inthis house, but even if it hadn’t, I’d still get a damned funny feeling about this whole mess.

The woman looks like she was in her late forties or early fifties, her dark-brown hair just starting to grey. She’s short, a little thick. Her body hangs slack inside the severe plain blue-and-white pinstriped uniform dress that’s typical for the mansion staff.

The women gathered below, nearly breaking their necks as they stare up at the scene, are wearing the same thing.

Same apron. Same thick beige stockings. Same low-heeled leather loafers.

Even the same hairstyle with their hair pulled back into tight, no-nonsense buns.

The deceased has a round, square-set face with deep laugh lines despite the puffiness already starting to set in.

There’s a terrible purple bruise around her neck, just visible past the twist of garishly red velvet.

Despite the plainness of her outfit, her nails are painted a vivid scarlet.

I scan the room again.

The walls all around the grand ballroom are draped with floor-to-ceiling velvet tapestry that sheet past the walkway where I’m standing, evenly spaced at broad intervals. They pour down like runners of blood to the ballroom floor below.

There’s one conspicuously absent on a diagonal from where Micah and I stand, just around the corner of the square walkway.

It’s easy to see what happened.

She stood at the railing of the walkway and pulled the drape loose from its overhead fixtures, then dragged the full length of it up. Must’ve done it in the dead of night—considering it’s about six in the morning right now, and her appearance tells me she’s been dead for three to five hours.

She could’ve tied one end of the drape around the upper walkway railing, then knotted the other end to weight it.

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