It died the way a wave pulls back from a beach, receding outward from the point where we appeared.

Women in designer dresses went quiet mid-sentence.

Men holding champagne flutes lowered them and turned to watch.

The music played on for a few more bars into a silence that had swallowed everything else, and then even that seemed to falter.

A hundred wealthy, comfortable people stood in a beautiful garden and watched a small, well-dressed older woman walk toward them flanked by lawyers and uniformed officers, and every one of them understood, without being told, that they were about to see something they would talk about for years.

Chapter 9 — The Vance-Callahan Estate