Chapter 6 - A Daughter Sold on the Margin
The gallery doors did not slam; Briggs closed them with a heavy, pneumatic click that cut off the sound of the rain and the low, bubbling groans of Arthur Mercer as he was hauled down the limestone steps toward the waiting town car.
Inside the dining room, the silence was different now. It was no longer the silence of an ambush; it was the silence of an abandoned theater where the actors had fled before the final curtain, leaving only the wreckage of the props behind.
Victoria was sitting on the floor among the fallen silver cups, her knees drawn up against her ribs, her silk blouse torn at the shoulder where she had struck the sideboard. Her hair was down, hanging in wet, tangled strips across her eyes. She looked thirty years older than she had at seven o’clock, when she had been lecturing the head waiter on the proper temperature for the Chablis.
"You're a monster," Victoria whispered. Her voice was barely a rasp, directed at Elena’s shoes. "You spent two years... two years sitting at our Sunday dinners... eating our food... smiling at my children... while you were building this?"
Elena didn't answer immediately. She walked to the large bay window that looked out over the front lawn. Through the glass, distorted by the sheets of water running down the leaded panes, she could see the red taillights of the limousine idling near the gate lodge. Two men in raincoats were standing by the pillars, their flashlights throwing long, white cones through the dark trees as they waited for the county sheriff’s cruiser to arrive.
"Your food?" Elena said, turning back toward the room. Her face was half in shadow, the chandelier light catching only the clean edge of her jaw and the thin, dark line of the scratch on her cheek. "Victoria, the bread on this table was bought with the dividends from the nineteen-seventy-two timber trust. The meat was paid for by the depletion reserve. Even the dress you're wearing was charged to an account that had my name on the secondary card until I canceled it three weeks ago."
She walked over to where her sister sat on the floor, her heels clicking with a slow, deliberate cadence that sounded like a clock ticking down the last seconds of an execution.
"And as for your children," Elena said, her voice dropping an octave into that cold, terrifying quiet, "they aren't yours, Victoria. Not really. You haven't seen them on a Tuesday afternoon since they were four years old. They’re at Saint Mark’s in Massachusetts, and their tuition was paid by an educational voucher that Grandmother established specifically to keep them out of your hands."
"That's not true!" Victoria cried, though she didn't look up. "Julian paid the term fees! He showed me the receipts from the bank!"
"Julian paid the deposit on the polo pony," Elena said. "The tuition was cleared through my personal checking account in Boston. Because I didn't want my nephews to be turned out of their dormitories in the middle of November when Julian’s margin calls hit the wire."
Eleanor Mercer let out a dry, rattling cough from her corner by the wall. She had pulled herself up onto an antique footstool, her back hunched, her hands tucked into her sleeves as if she were freezing to death in the middle of her own dining room.
"Marianne," Eleanor whimpered, her eyes tracking the old woman who was still standing by the sideboard, her cane resting between her boots. "Marianne... you can't leave us with nothing. Arthur has no pension. The firm in the city was liquidated five years ago. He has no equity. Where are we supposed to go?"
Marianne Mercer looked down at her sister-in-law with an expression of mild, clinical interest, like an entomologist examining a beetle that had lost its legs.
"You have the cottage in Maine, Eleanor," Marianne said.
Eleanor’s mouth opened, then snapped shut like a turtle’s. "The cottage? In Machias? It hasn't had the heat on since nineteen-ninety-one! The roof was falling in when Arthur’s mother died!"
"Then I suggest you buy some cedar shingles and a hammer with your social security checks," Marianne replied. "Because after midnight tonight, the maintenance allowance for this family ceases to exist. Mr. Briggs has already notified the utility companies. The electricity here will be transferred to Highland Gate’s commercial account at eight tomorrow morning. The water will follow at noon."
She looked at Victoria, who had begun to rock herself slightly on the floor, her fingers tangled in the lace of her cuffs.
"You have two daughters, Victoria," Marianne said. "I suggest you learn how to iron their shirts yourself. Because the woman who has been doing it for the last six years—the one you called 'the girl from the agency' and paid eleven dollars an hour while you spent four hundred on your nails—was dismissed twenty minutes ago with three months' severance paid out of my personal pocket."
Victoria didn't answer. She let out a long, shuddering sob that ended in a dry heave, her forehead touching the marble floor between two broken pieces of the crystal wineglass.
Elena walked over to the blue folder, picked it up, and tucked it under her arm.
"The sheriff is at the bottom of the hill, Aunt Marianne," Elena said, looking toward the driveway where two blue lights had begun to pulse through the wet hemlocks.
"Let him come," Marianne said, turning her back on Eleanor and Victoria without another word. "He has the writ. He has the keys to the outer padlocks. He knows what Arthur is. His father was the gamekeeper Arthur fired thirty years ago for refusing to let him shoot the deer out of season."
She reached out and took Elena’s arm—not with the trembling weakness of an eighty-year-old woman, but with the dry, fierce grip of someone who had survived three wars and five recessions by never yielding an inch of ground to anyone.
"Come, child," Marianne said, her voice dropping into a tone that was almost soft, though it retained that hard, diamond core that ran through the Mercer women who hadn't married for money. "You have blood on your face. It's unseemly for an owner to walk through her house with blood on her face."
They walked together toward the wide mahogany archway, leaving the two women on the floor among the broken crystal, the cold quail, and the creeping red stain of the Margaux.
As they reached the hall, the front door swung open again.
This time it was not Julian, and it was not Briggs.
It was Deputy Sheriff Miller, his yellow slicker dripping water onto the limestone flags of the entryway, his campaign hat held in his hand, his leather holster creaking with the weight of his duty weapon.
He looked at Marianne Mercer, then at Elena, and finally through the archway into the dining room where Victoria was still sobbing on the floor and Eleanor sat hunched like an old crow on the footstool.
"Evening, Miss Mercer," Miller said, his voice flat, local, and utterly devoid of the deference Arthur had demanded for thirty years. "We got the call from Mr. Vance in the city. The judge signed the clearance at four."
"Good evening, Miller," Marianne said. "The keys are on the console. You'll find Mr. Mercer’s personal vehicles in the lower stable yard. The red Mercedes has a lien on it from the First National of Brewster; you may release it to their repo agent when he arrives at seven."
Miller nodded once, his eyes flicking toward Elena’s cheek. "You need an ambulance for that, Miss?"
May you like
"No, Miller," Elena said, her voice clear and completely steady as she looked back into the grand dining room for the last time. "It’s just a scratch. It washes off."
***
