Chapter 7 - The Interrogation Room
The holding facility at the Alfred A. Arraj United States Courthouse smelled of industrial bleach, cold floor wax, and stale fear.
Douglas Mercer sat at a stainless-steel table, his right arm handcuffed to a welded iron ring in the center. The stroke he had suffered at the wedding had left the right side of his face slack, his speech slurred, but his mind was clear enough to understand the depth of his catastrophe.
The door clicked open. I stepped inside alone.
Agent Chen had granted me ten minutes of private conversation before the formal indictment was read in open court. Douglas did not look up immediately; he stared at his handcuffed wrist, his breath whistling through his nose.
"You look old, Douglas," I said, pulling out the steel chair opposite him and sitting down.
His good eye drifted up to meet mine. There was no defiance left in him. The arrogance that had commanded boardrooms and dictated state transport policies had evaporated into the gray, fluorescent chill of a federal cell.
"Caroline," he mumbled, his voice thick and wet. "You... you shouldn't have come."
"Why?" I asked, resting my scarred hands on the cold metal table. "Were you hoping to remember me as the girl who died in your fire?"
A spasm of pain crossed his features. "I didn't... I didn't want you to burn."
"You locked the doors, Douglas."
"No!" he choked out, his hand rattling against the steel ring. "That was Juliette! Juliette took the master key from the kitchen rack! I told her... I told her we only needed to burn the library! The files! The accounting ledgers! I thought you were still downstairs in the parlor!"
I listened to him, feeling a profound, clinical detachment. "You stood on the stone terrace below my balcony. I looked into your eyes through the burning glass. I screamed your name until my vocal cords ruptured. You turned around and walked to your car."
Tears began to spill from his unblinking eye, tracking down the sagging folds of his cheek. "You looked... you looked like your mother. Eleanor had that same look... when she found out about the offshore accounts. The disappointment. The contempt. I couldn't face it, Caroline. I couldn't let you put me in prison."
"So you put me in hell instead."
"They told me you were dead!" he cried out, his voice cracking into a high-pitched whine. "The men Arthur hired... they said the crash on Highway 72 killed everyone in the car! They said your body was unrecognizable! It wasn't until six months later that Arthur came to me... shaking... saying Finch had you at St. Jude’s!"
"And what did you do when you discovered your daughter was alive in a sub-basement cage?" I asked, leaning closer. "Did you call an ambulance? Did you come to take me home?"
Douglas bowed his head. His shoulders shook in silent, pathetic sobs.
"The probate had cleared," he whispered. "The funds had already been wired to Zurich. If you came back... it was federal wire fraud. Grand larceny. Conspiracy. Life imprisonment. Juliette... Juliette came to my office. She knelt beside my chair. She said, 'Dad, if Caroline wakes up, we both die. Let her sleep.'"
*Let her sleep.*
Four syllables that had cost me three years of daylight, thirty-four skin graft surgeries, and half my face.
"Juliette is twenty-four years old, Douglas," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper that cut deeper than a razor. "She will spend the best decades of her youth in a federal correctional facility in Dublin or Carswell. She will wear coarse khaki trousers, sleep on a thin foam mattress, and wake up to count times at five o'clock every morning."
Douglas squeezed his eyes shut. "Have mercy, Caroline... she was just a child... she was confused..."
"She was old enough to plan an execution," I replied, standing up from the chair. "And you, Douglas? You will never leave a correctional medical facility alive. Your assets are gone. Your name is being stripped from the business school building at the university. Even Grandmother’s grave is having your name chiseled off the family monument."
I walked toward the heavy steel door.
"Caroline!" he screamed behind me, the handcuffs clattering violently against the table. "Caroline, look at me! I’m your father! I gave you life!"
I stopped with my hand on the heavy brass door handle. I turned my head, showing him the jagged, fire-scarred side of my profile.
"No, Douglas," I said. "You gave me ashes. I had to build my own life out of what was left."
May you like
I knocked on the glass. The guard slid the deadbolt open, and I walked out into the corridor, leaving Douglas Mercer screaming into the empty, sterile air of his cage.
***
