Chapter 19 - Celeste’s Dying Secret
I had to see her. The only person still alive who had walked those halls when the conspiracy was born.
Celeste was being held at the Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Facility, serving thirty years for conspiracy to commit kidnapping, attempted murder, and financial fraud. Over the last decade, I had refused every single one of her letters, every petition for parole, every pathetic appeal.
Now, I was speeding down the interstate toward the gray concrete walls of the state penitentiary.
The visitor’s booth was narrow, partitioned by scratched, bulletproof polycarbonate. When Celeste was escorted through the heavy steel door, I barely recognized her.
Once a stunning, polished socialite with golden hair and venomous elegance, Celeste was now gaunt, her skin gray and papery, her blonde hair streaked with dull white. She wore a bright orange jumpsuit that hung loosely on her emaciated frame.
She picked up the plastic telephone receiver. Her fingers shook as she pressed it to her ear.
I grabbed mine. "Who is in my house?" I growled, pressing my face against the glass. "Who sent the key?"
Celeste didn't smile. There was no mockery in her sunken eyes. Only pure, paralyzing terror.
"You found the blueprint," she whispered through the static of the line.
"Who was under the cistern, Celeste? Why did my mother recruit you? You didn't just want my money. What did you bury down there?"
Celeste closed her eyes, tears leaking down her hollow cheeks. "I didn't want to hurt Elena, David. You have to believe me. Your mother... she cornered me before our wedding. She told me Elena had stumbled across the records. That Elena was going to call the federal authorities."
"Records of what?"
"Your family’s clinical trials," Celeste choked out. "Your grandfather didn't just build a mansion. He built an unlicensed private sanatorium beneath it in the 1970s. The Hartwell Foundation was treating unlisted patients. Experimental neurological surgeries. Memory alterations. Sedation protocols."
"My grandfather was an architect!"
"He was a monster, David!" Celeste slammed her hand against the metal shelf. "Your mother kept the facility running in secret with private investors. When Elena discovered the hidden entrance in the old wine vault, your mother gave me a choice: help lock Elena up until they could relocate the patient below, or be framed for embezzlement and spend the rest of my life behind bars."
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My breath caught in my throat. "The patient? What patient?"
Celeste looked at me with haunting pity. "Your twin sister, David. The one your parents told you died five minutes after delivery. She didn't die. She was born deformed, violently unstable. Your grandfather couldn't bear the public shame of an imperfect Hartwell heir, so he hidden her away. And your mother... your mother kept her alive in the dark for thirty-five years."
