The Impossible Bride
Chapter 02 - The Impossible Bride
A double marriage could humiliate a room.
A marriage certificate dated to a year when one wife was a child could freeze it.
Catherine stared at Diane, no longer seeing a mistress or rival. She saw a woman standing in funeral black, holding the edge of a life that had just torn open.
“You were twelve?” Catherine asked.
Diane nodded once. “I met Richard in 2016.”
Mr. Bennett unfolded Diane’s certificate. “According to this record, Diane Mercer married Richard Langford on April 17, 1998, Hartwell County Courthouse, Judge Everett Crane presiding.”
Catherine took her own certificate.
April 17, 1998.
Same courthouse.
Same judge.
The date struck her with memory: rain on the courthouse steps, Richard laughing, a rushed ceremony in a side room because the main chamber was under renovation. Judge Crane had silver hair and liver spots on his hands. Richard had a bandage on his left palm. He said he had cut himself in the kitchen.
She had believed him because she loved him.
Diane clutched her handbag. “He told me our record had been corrected because of an old family property issue. I never saw this original.”
Catherine laughed once, bitterly. “He made lies sound like paperwork.”
Mr. Bennett opened another note from the envelope.
“Richard left instructions,” he said. “If both of you attended, I was to read this.”
He read:
Catherine, Diane,
Do not fight each other. That is what the system was designed to make women do.
The date is the key.
The rings are the proof.
The judge was not a mistake.
Find the courthouse ledger from April 17, 1998.
Forgive neither me nor the men who taught me how to lie.
Richard
No one moved.
Diane looked down at her ring as though it had become a shackle. “What system?”
Mr. Bennett placed a brass key on the coffin lid. “Richard left this too. It opens Drawer 17 in the courthouse basement.”
Margaret Langford stepped forward. “This is obscene. Bury my brother.”
Catherine turned on her. “Did you know?”
Margaret’s mouth opened, then closed.
Diane saw the hesitation. “You did.”
“I knew Richard had secrets,” Margaret said, tears forming. “Not this.”
Catherine picked up the key.
She expected Diane to object.
Instead, Diane said, “We go together.”
Something shifted then.
Not friendship. Not trust.
But recognition.
Both women had been placed on opposite sides of the coffin like enemies in a story written by a dead man. Richard had miscalculated. Humiliation might separate some women. But humiliation with paperwork creates investigators.
Mr. Bennett said, “I should come with you.”
Diane’s eyes sharpened. “Why? To explain what you ignored?”
He accepted the cut. “Yes.”
Catherine looked at him, then at Diane, then at the coffin.
The funeral was over.
The burial could wait.
May you like
A dead man had left them the first key to a life he had stolen twice.
And neither wife intended to let him take the rest of the truth into the ground.
