Chapter 3 - The Frozen Gate
The emergency department at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center was cold, bright, and smelled of betadine and floor stripper.
For two hours, a surgical resident with steady hands and no curiosity debrided the dead tissue from my right palm, picking away the charred skin with fine titanium forceps while an IV bag of cefazolin dripped into my left forearm.
"You're going to need a skin graft from the thigh," the surgeon said, adjusting his magnifying loupes as he inspected the exposed muscular bed of the thumb. "The deep dermal layers are gone along the thenar margin. If we don't graft within seventy-two hours, the scar tissue will pull your thumb into the palm. You'll lose thirty percent of your grip."
"Schedule it for Thursday," I said, staring at the perforated acoustic tiles on the ceiling.
"Thursday is five days out, Mrs. Mercer. The infection risk—"
"Thursday," I repeated. "I have depositions on Tuesday and Wednesday."
The surgeon looked at Arthur Pendelton, who was sitting in the vinyl consultation chair in the corner of the cubicle, his legal pad across his knees. Arthur simply nodded once.
"Thursday morning at seven," the surgeon sighed, reaching for the silver sulfadiazine cream. "Don't get it wet. Don't move the fingers. If you develop a fever above one-oh-one, you come back through those double doors in an ambulance, understand?"
"Understood."
By eight that evening, we were sitting in the rear of Arthur’s black Buick LeSabre, idling outside the heavy cast-iron gates of the Mercer estate on Country Club Road.
The storm had finally rolled down from the Blue Ridge. Rain was falling in long, vertical sheets, turning the red clay beneath the perimeter oaks into slick, thick grease. The tall, arched copper lanterns flanking the driveway were dark; the security lights along the cedar fence were dead.
Parked across the stone entrance, bumper to bumper, were three commercial flatbed trucks belonging to Carolina Heavy Rigging.
Standing beneath a massive golf umbrella at the gatehouse was a man named Miller—not the paramedic, but her older brother, Frank, who spent twenty-four years running maritime repossession along the Charleston waterfront before Arthur put him on the trust’s private payroll.
Arthur rolled down his window two inches. The smell of wet asphalt and summer rain rushed into the car.
"Status, Frank?" Arthur asked.
Frank leaned down, his yellow rain slicker gleaming under the Buick’s headlights. "The power was cut at nineteen-thirty per the commercial utility account cancellation. The municipal water line has been locked off at the road for non-payment of industrial rates. We have three teams inside the main house completing the physical inventory under the emergency injunction."
"Where is he?" I asked from the back seat, my bandaged right arm resting on an oversized down pillow.
"He’s in the carriage house," Frank said, a faint, humorless smile touching the corner of his mouth. "Him and the old lady. The power went off while she was trying to wash barbecue sauce out of her white silk in the upstairs master bath. They don't have flashlights, Clara. Just three scented candles they found in the powder room."
"And the cars?"
Frank pointed with his heavy magnesium flashlight toward the first flatbed truck.
Secured to the steel deck by heavy yellow transport chains were two vehicles: Daniel’s 2024 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan, and Evelyn’s pristine ivory Lexus convertible.
"Titles were held by Vance Capital Asset Management," Frank said. "The repossession notice was served on the vehicle registry thirty minutes after the 911 dispatch logged the battery call. If either of them touches the ignition on the secondary vehicles in the tractor barn, it’s grand larceny under state code forty-four."
Arthur looked back at me through the rearview mirror. "Do you want to see him, Clara?"
I looked through the rain-streaked window at the iron gates.
Ten years ago, I had arrived at those gates in an eight-year-old Honda Civic with two cardboard boxes of clothes and three crates of structural engineering textbooks from Clemson. Daniel had met me at the door wearing an Italian wool sweater, holding a glass of cabernet, laughing as he carried my boxes inside, telling me that I was done with the dust, done with the site trailers, done with the ninety-degree days on road crews.
“You’re a Mercer now, Clara,” he had whispered against my neck while his mother watched from the top of the spiral staircase with eyes like two cold silver dimes. “We don't get our hands dirty.”
May you like
He hadn't been rescuing me from the mud. He had been locking me in the pantry so I wouldn't notice that the house was built on my family's foundation.
"Let's go to the office, Arthur," I said. "He knows where to find us when the candles burn out."
