Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the Silt
The winter of 1924 had left six inches of frozen mud in the cellar vaults beneath the Old Water Street pier, but the winter of our victory was clean, dry, and cold enough to turn the salt marsh into iron.
Four weeks after Margaret was born, I stood on the public footpath that ran along the ridge above what had once been the Highfield estate.
The granite house was gone.
It had not been taken down with dynamite; that would have been too merciful, too sudden, too theatrical. The state engineers had dismantled it stone by stone, using heavy diesel cranes and hydraulic splitters that ground the four-foot foundation blocks into eight-inch riprap for the river channel.
Where the great drawing room had been—where Eleanor had poured tea from her George III silver service while warning me that valley girls were prone to early obesity—there was now only a rectangular trench of raw yellow clay, scored with the deep, geometric cleats of excavator treads.
The conservatory had vanished completely.
The iron glass bays had been sold to a commercial nursery in Maine, the exotic ferns had died in the first November frost, and the white gardenias had been dug up and replanted in the public park behind the town library in Norwich.
Beside me, bundled in three layers of boiled wool inside an English pram that had belonged to my own mother, Margaret slept with her face turned away from the wind.
"Mrs. Whitmore."
I turned.
Vance was standing ten paces behind me on the path, wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and holding a thermos of hot coffee. He had resigned from the private security firm two weeks ago; he was now the harbor master for the new municipal logistics authority David’s trust had endowed with thirty million dollars of consortium stock.
"The morning mail arrived at the bank," Vance said, handing me a small, flat packet bound with a rubber band. "Arthur thought you’d want to see these before the afternoon docket."
I took the packet.
The first letter was from the clerk of the Superior Court in New London.
State of Connecticut v. Eleanor Vance Whitmore.
The notice was three lines long:
“...The defendant having entered a plea of guilty to Count One (Conspiracy to Commit Capital Murder) pursuant to an agreement approved by the State’s Attorney, the Court hereby sentences the defendant to a term of Life Imprisonment without the possibility of parole, to be served at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic. The Court further orders full restitution to the Whitmore Protective Trust in the amount of $14,200,000.00...”
Fourteen million.
Every penny Eleanor had hidden in the Delaware LLCs, every bearer bond she had tucked into the safe-deposit box in Wilmington, every dividend check she had collected from the copper mines since her husband’s funeral in 1994.
The second letter was from the state hospital in Whiting.
Chloe had not entered a plea.
The medical board had found her incompetent to stand trial due to an irreversible toxic psychosis exacerbated by the chronic use of pharmaceutical stimulants and what the report called "narcissistic decompensation resulting from the sudden total loss of socio-economic identity."
She would remain in the secure psychiatric facility for the rest of her life, allowed two hours of supervised yard time a day in an asphalt enclosure surrounded by twelve-foot chain-link fencing topped with razor ribbon.
Her personal property, according to the inventory attached to the court order, consisted of:
1. One pair of black velvet evening slippers (worn). 2. One silver-plated compact with a broken hinge. 3. Three photographs of the equestrian team from Miss Porter’s School (1998). 4. Cash on deposit: $14.22.
Fourteen dollars and twenty-two cents.
That was the net worth of Chloe Whitmore.
The woman who had ripped the wedding ring from my pregnant hand in front of two hundred people, who had screamed that my daughter was a bastard and that I was a parasite who deserved to be thrown into the rain, had ended up with fourteen dollars and twenty-two cents and a pair of worn slippers.
I folded the letters and handed them back to Vance.
"Did they start the dredging on the lower canal?" I asked.
"Six o'clock this morning," Vance said, a slow, genuine smile warming his leathery, wind-burned face. "Two hundred men from the valley took the morning shift. The union hall is using the old carriage house as their field office until the new administration building is finished in the spring."
"And the portrait?"
"Julian Whitmore?" Vance spat into the dead weeds beside the path. "The boys down at the pier used the canvas to cover the cement bags during the rain yesterday. The paint was peeling anyway. Old Julian didn't look so fierce once the lime got into his eyes."
A sharp, cold gust came off the river, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and the distant, rhythmic clack-clack-clack of a pile driver working on the new commercial slips.
It was an honest sound.
A working sound.
The sound that this river had made before the Whitmores built their granite walls and brought their foreign lawyers down from Boston to tell the valley people that their lives were worth fifty cents an hour and a pine box in the poor ground.
May you like
Margaret stirred in the pram, let out a small, contented sigh, and settled deeper into her wool blankets.
"Let's go down, Vance," I said, turning the wheels of the pram toward the road. "Arthur is waiting with the harbor deeds, and my daughter has an appointment with the town clerk."
