Chapter 7 - The Auction of the Peacocks
The bankruptcy of Arthur Monroe did not happen in secret. In the Lowcountry, when an old family falls, the community watches with the quiet, morbid fascination of villagers observing a shipwreck from the bluffs.
Three weeks after Clara’s arrest, on a crisp, blue-sky morning in mid-November, a public auction notice was tacked to the century-old wrought-iron gates of 42 South Battery.
The grand Georgian mansion—with its four-story piazza, its hand-carved mahogany mantels, its ballroom where three governors had danced—was seized by the United States Marshals Service to satisfy nine million dollars in defaulted mezzanine debt and state tax liens.
I sat in the passenger seat of Mallory’s truck, parked across the street beneath the shade of a massive live oak, watching the moving vans pull into the circular gravel drive.
Men in blue coveralls were carrying out the furniture: the Chippendale dining chairs where Beatrice had hosted her society teas; the French gilt mirrors Clara had used for her outfit-of-the-day reels; the portraits of ancestors who had signed treaties and owned rice plantations, now tagged with yellow inventory barcodes like surplus office equipment.
Arthur Monroe stood on the brick sidewalk, looking old, shrunken, wearing an ill-fitting gray overcoat that was missing a button. His silver hair was unkempt, blowing in the harbor breeze. He held a cardboard box containing his golf trophies and three framed photographs from his days at the university.
Daniel walked out of the house carrying two suitcases. He didn't look at Arthur. He walked down the brick steps, loaded the bags into the trunk of his station wagon, and drove away without saying goodbye. Daniel had taken a job as a logistics manager at the state port terminal in Savannah—an honest, middle-class job with union benefits and zero social pretensions. Harper was enrolled in a public high school where nobody knew her last name, and for the first time in six months, she had stopped having panic attacks.
"Do you want to go over there?" Mallory asked softly, her hands resting on the steering wheel.
I looked at Arthur across the street.
He was my father. He had taught me how to ride a bicycle on the battery path when I was six years old. But he was also the man who had stood over me while blood pooled in my hair and whispered: “Please don't embarrass the family.”
"No," I said. "There’s nothing over there for me."
My phone chimed in my lap. It was a formal notification from the Greenville County Probate Court, forwarded by Marcus Croft:
CASE CLOSED: IN RE THE MATTER OF THE CHARLES MONROE TESTAMENTARY TRUST.DECREE OF DISTRIBUTION ENTERED.FULL EQUITABLE TITLE VESTED IN RACHEL MONROE, SOLE BENEFICIARY.
Fourteen million dollars.
Four thousand acres of managed timber in the Blue Ridge foothills. Six commercial buildings on Main Street in Greenville. A portfolio of municipal bonds that generated three hundred thousand dollars a year in passive yield.
Uncle Charles had known what he was doing. He hadn't given me wealth to make me a socialite; he had given me wealth to make me a fortress.
"Where are we going?" Mallory asked, turning the ignition key.
I reached up, touching the faint, tender ridge across the top of my head. The staples had been removed five days ago. The hair was already beginning to grow back, fine and dark, covering the pink scar tissue that would remain for the rest of my life.
"Take me to the clinic," I said.
May you like
"Rachel, it's your thirty-ninth birthday," Mallory smiled, putting the truck in gear. "You're supposed to be celebrating."
"I am celebrating," I replied, looking out at the wide, sparkling blue expanse of Charleston Harbor. "We have three four-year-olds who need sensory integration therapy at two o'clock. And then we’re going to buy a new playground for the pediatric center."
