Chapter 7 - The Trial in the Dark
Richard jumped as if an electric wire had touched his neck.
He spun around, the heavy steel crowbar raised in his right hand, his eyes wild and dilated in the dim light reflected from the woodstove. Mom let out a high, terrified squeak, dropping the canvas duffel onto the wet floorboards.
"Clara!" Mom gasped, backing into the broken doorframe. "You... you were supposed to be asleep!"
"In this house, we don't sleep when the coyotes are in the yard," I said.
I stepped out of the shadow into the faint orange glow. My right hand was buried deep in the pocket of Grandpa’s flannel shirt, the heavy, rounded muzzle of the Colt lifting the wool fabric into an unmistakable outline.
Richard saw the shape in my pocket. He stopped, the crowbar trembling in his grip, his chest heaving under his wet shirt. "You... you little bitch. You think you’re going to shoot your own father?"
"My father died twenty-four hours ago in Saint Jude's Hospice," I told him, my voice steady, flat, and hollow. "The man standing in my mudroom is a thief who broke my door frame with a pry bar after being served a legal trespass notice by the county sheriff."
"This is my family’s house!" Mom screamed, her control shattering completely into the frantic, ugly rage of a cornered animal. "My grandfather built these walls! My mother died in that bedroom upstairs! You have no right to keep us out! You were five years old! You didn't do anything! We gave you life!"
"And then you sold it," I said.
The silence that followed was louder than the storm outside.
Mom’s face froze. The hysteria died in her throat, leaving her mouth open, her eyes darting toward the study door at the end of the dark hall.
"What did you say?" she whispered.
"Eighty thousand dollars," I said, reciting the figures from memory, every digit carved into my brain like an epitaph. "A cashier's check drawn on Continental National Bank, dated October 19, 2007. Check number 44109. Endorsed by Richard Sterling and deposited into the escrow account of Sterling Leasing Partners to replace the funds you stole from the Miller pension trust."
Richard’s face drained of what little color remained. He lowered the crowbar two inches, his knuckles turning grey. "Thomas... he kept the deposit slips?"
"He kept everything, Richard," I said. "He kept the original notes. He kept the letters where you threatened to put me in an unlicensed group home in Gary if he didn't sign over the timber yields. He kept the receipts for the clothes he bought me because the two pairs of pants you left in my grocery bag had holes in both knees. He kept seventeen years of proof that you aren't parents. You're just extortionists who ran out of leverage."
"Clara, listen to me," Richard began, his voice dropping into that slick, desperate cadence he had probably used on his investors right before the roof fell in. He took half a step forward, his hands opening in a mock gesture of surrender. "You don't understand the business world. People make moves. They make arrangements to protect the greater good. If I hadn't covered those accounts, I would have gone to federal prison. Chloe would have grown up with a father behind bars. Evelyn would have been on welfare. We did what we had to do to save the family!"
"You sacrificed one child to save your own skin," I said. "That isn't a family, Richard. That’s a cartel."
"We gave you to a man who loved you!" Mom cried, stepping around Richard, her face wet with rain and smeared mascara, her fingers clawing at the air between us. "Look at this house! Look at this land! He gave you everything! You got a better life here than you ever would have had with us in those first five years! We did you a favor!"
The sheer, breathtaking obscenity of the lie hung in the damp air like poison.
"A favor?" I looked at her, and for the first time in seventeen years, the sorrow inside me burned away completely, leaving only cold, clean iron. "You left a five-year-old girl sitting on a wooden porch in the freezing rain, telling her you’d be back before dark, and you never called again. Not when I had pneumonia when I was eight. Not when I graduated high school with honors. Not when I sat by his bed for three weeks watching him choke on his own blood while his heart failed."
I took a step toward them.
Richard stepped back, his boot heel catching the edge of the broken threshold.
"You didn't do me a favor, Evelyn. You tried to destroy me. But Grandpa took the broken piece you threw away, and he built a woman who knows what she’s worth. And she isn't worth eighty thousand dollars."
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"Clara, please," Mom wept, dropping to her knees on the muddy floor of the mudroom, her hands clutching at the hem of her ruined designer trousers. "They're going to take the house in Highland Park. They're going to take the cars. Richard owes three hundred thousand dollars to men who will kill him! They were waiting outside our office yesterday! If we don't bring them the deed to the ridge timber by tomorrow morning, we won't have anywhere to go!"
"Then you should start packing those black garbage bags you brought for me," I said.
