Chapter 8 - The Shadow of Patricia
The Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, was a cluster of low, brick buildings enclosed by double rows of chain-link fence topped with coils of concertina wire that gleamed gray against the dreary November sky.
Inside the sterile, fluorescent-lit visiting room, Patricia Whitaker sat at a small, bolted-down laminate table.
The transformation was absolute and horrifying.
The expensive blonde highlights had grown out into six inches of greasy, unwashed iron-gray roots. Her tailored designer skirts had been replaced by a stiff, boxy jumpsuit of olive-drab polyester that bore the stamped black letters FCI DANBURY across the shoulder blades. Her face, which had been maintained for three decades by four-thousand-dollar chemical peels and boutique moisturizers, had collapsed into a network of deep, bitter crevices around her mouth and eyes.
Across the table sat her former sister-in-law, Beatrice, who had driven four hours from Boston only out of an ancient, familial sense of morbid curiosity.
"Did you speak to Daniel's appellate lawyer?" Patricia hissed, her voice cracked, thin, and vibrating with an ugly, impotent fury as she leaned across the table. "He has to file the habeas petition! The military had no right to seize those bank accounts! That money belonged to my family! My father was a state senator!"
Beatrice looked at her through her designer sunglasses, her expression one of cold, detached pity. "There is no appellate lawyer, Patricia. Daniel’s public defender closed the file on Tuesday. The Supreme Court denied certiorari without comment."
"That little bitch!" Patricia’s hands curled into claws, her knuckles rapping against the laminate table until the corrections officer by the wall shifted his hand toward his radio. "That little country mouse! She planned this! She knew Daniel was giving her those supplements! She took them on purpose to stage that collapse in Hanley’s courtroom! She seduced that colonel to use the Army against us!"
"Beatrice," the older woman said softly, shaking her head, "stop it. Listen to yourself. You sound completely insane."
"I am not insane!" Patricia screamed, her voice drawing the sharp, warning gaze of three guards stationed along the perimeter. "I am a Whitaker! We built this county! We owned the banks! And now... now they make me clean the grease traps in the cafeteria! They give me thirty minutes of yard time in the freezing rain! Do you know what those women in my block call me? They call me the 'baby poisoner'!"
"Because you helped poison a seven-year-old child's mother, Patricia," Beatrice said, rising from her chair and pulling her fur collar tight around her throat. "You sat in that courtroom and watched a woman dying on the floor, and you told forty people she was an actress. You deserve every single second you spend in this room."
"Beatrice! Don't you leave me here!" Patricia shrieked, lunging forward, but the heavy iron cuffs linking her wrists to her waist chain snapped taut, jerking her violently back against the plastic chair. "Beatrice! Bring me my money! Call the governor! Call someone who knows who I am!"
Beatrice did not look back. She pushed through the heavy steel door into the security vestibule, her heels clicking away down the corridor, leaving Patricia Whitaker screaming into the empty, indifferent air of the federal prison.
The guard stepped forward, his hand resting on his baton.
"Sit down, inmate," the guard commanded, his voice bored and flat. "Or your recreation privileges are revoked for the next thirty days."
Patricia looked up at the guard, her eyes wild, her chest heaving beneath the rough olive polyester.
The silence that settled over her was cold, absolute, and eternal. She was no longer the matriarch of Oakridge Estates. She was no longer the woman whose name opened private bank vaults and guaranteed invitations to governor’s galas.
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She was Inmate 88419.
And she was never going home.
