Free Children of Dynasty by Christine Carroll

awning. The laden pallbearers placed Charley’s casket on a dais above the vacant vault.
    The reverend, a beanpole of a man in a long black robe, began speaking sonorously of saying farewell to Charley at his eternal resting place. “And so we commit his body to the earth, and his spirit to Heaven. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
    The cold from the metal chair seeped into Mariah as the assembly joined in reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restoreth my soul.”
    Across the lawn, a life-sized angel in flowing marble robes knelt atop a headstone. The sculptor had eschewed the usual ethereal and unmoving portrayal. Rather, this angel had been dragged to earth. Her long white wings hung limply, brushing the ground. Her head bowed in what looked more like despair than prayer. Stone tears marked her pale cheeks.
    Mariah swallowed, a hard ache in her throat, for in a plot near the angel lay her mother. Carved onto a granite headstone alongside his wife’s was her father’s name.
    “Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death …”
    From somewhere behind her, she recognized Rory’s deep voice. “I will fear no evil.”
    But she was beginning to be afraid. Of Davis Campbell’s machinations, of the voracious appetite of reporters like Castillo for “On The Spot,” of the look in Tom Barrett’s eyes when he suggested she might have been targeted to die.
    When the service ended, Mariah joined the receiving line between her father and Tom, greeting men and women who were mostly strangers. All the while, she waited for Rory.
    When he got to Tom, she heard him say, “I hadn’t seen Charley in years, but I’ll miss knowing he’s there.”
    “Thanks for what you did last night, Campbell.” Tom sounded grudging. “Those ‘On The Spot’ people are scum.”
    Rory moved to stand before Mariah, compassion and sorrow in his dark eyes. She took an instinctive step forward into his arms. Though by now she’d hugged a dozen people she didn’t know, casual yet intimate connections forged by common grief, Rory’s embrace was different. Warmth, not of desire, but of comfort, seeped through her. The same sense of relief she’d not been ready to accept the night of the accident. Drawing a shuddering breath, she felt how tightly wired she was and tried to relax. One of his hands rubbed between her shoulder blades.
    “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered.
    Fresh tears for Charley welled. Rory’s arms tightened. With her cheek against his wool lapel, she caught her father’s gray gaze.
    Despite John’s obvious disapproval, when Rory set her away from him she wasn’t ready. Perhaps he wasn’t either, for he bore an expression of frustration like the one she was trying to hide. Drawing a business card from his jacket pocket, he pressed it into her hand. “My cell number’s there. If you decide to go sailing, call. I’ll be at my place until around noon.”
    Rory stepped away to face her father. Mariah watched the two men shake hands briefly and with less warmth than the evening before. “Sir,” Rory said before turning away.
    Her fingers clutching his card, she watched him leave without looking back at her. Only then did she glance down at the crisp white paper with black lettering:
Davis Campbell Interests.
    When the receiving line began to break up, it was too soon. For once the last car was out of sight, the gravediggers’ backhoe would cover Charley’s vault with earth.
    Her father took her arm and drew her away from the open hole. Without discussion, they both turned their steps in the direction of the Grant family plot. At the base of the headstone on her mother’s side rested a sheaf of white roses wrapped in florist’s paper. The offering was as familiar as the granite’s texture, for whenever the previous flowers began to wilt a fresh bouquet replaced them.
    John bent and touched a creamy petal, then straightened and bowed his