Chapter 5 - The Morning Call
Dawn arrived over Greenville with the cold, sickly yellow light that follows a midsummer thunderstorm.
The rain had stopped, leaving the streets steaming in the eighty-degree morning heat. The smell of wet asphalt, diesel exhaust, and rotten boxwood hung heavy over the commercial district as the city woke up.
At six-fifteen, the telephone on the desk in Arthur’s private office began to ring.
It didn't chime with the polite, musical tone of modern executive phones; it was a heavy, black Western Electric model with an internal brass bell that rang with the mechanical violence of an alarm clock in an empty room.
Arthur picked up the receiver, listened for five seconds, and handed it across the desk to me.
"He’s at the front gate of the estate," Arthur said. "The sheriff’s road patrol wouldn't let him past the cattle guard."
I took the heavy black plastic receiver with my left hand, holding it to my ear.
"Speak, Daniel."
A long, ragged intake of breath whistled through the copper line. When Daniel spoke, the baritone polish was entirely gone. His voice sounded like dry gravel dragged through an iron chute.
"Clara... God, Clara, listen to me."
"I am listening."
"My mother is seventy-four years old," he rasped, his voice trembling with an exhaustion so profound he could barely shape his vowels. "We spent the night in the carriage house without lights. The water is off. She couldn't take her heart medication because she couldn't wash down the tablets. She’s sitting on an old wicker trunk in the dirt, Clara. Her dress is ruined. Her feet are swollen."
"The water isn't off at the county detention center, Daniel," I said, looking out at the brick mills across the street. "They have three functioning water fountains in the holding tank. And the medical staff dispenses digitalis twice daily under nurse supervision."
"Clara, please!"
The scream was sudden, shrill, and completely naked. For the first time in ten years, I was hearing Daniel Mercer without his father's money, without his mother's social pedigree, without his tailored seersucker armor. He was just a terrified, thirty-eight-year-old child standing in the wet mud at his own gate.
"I don't know what Arthur told you," he wept into the receiver. "The company... Jack called me an hour ago from a burner phone. He said the city inspectors are at Riverfront with red tags! They’re putting chains on the parking deck gates, Clara! The construction union is pulling three hundred men off the framing line right now! If the bond defaults, I am personally liable for thirty-four million dollars! They'll take everything! They'll take my father’s name!"
"Your father’s name was Charles Mercer," I said. "And his name was already sold to the bank when you were eight years old. You just didn't read the receipts."
"Clara, we can fix this!" he begged, the words tumbling out in an incoherent, slobbering rush. "We’ll go to marriage counseling. We’ll go to that clinic in Arizona—the one the senator went to! I’ll sign whatever you want! I’ll put the voting shares in your name—"
"The voting shares are already in my name, Daniel."
"—I’ll fire Vanessa! I’ll evict her from the Charlotte house today! I’ll have the sheriff put her things on the street! Clara, look at what we built! Ten years! We were the couple on the cover of the Piedmont Review! You were beside me when the governor cut the ribbon on the civic center!"
"I wasn't beside you, Daniel," I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying calm that had terrified him on the patio. "I was standing four feet behind you holding your umbrella so your linen wouldn't spot."
Silence fell over the line. Only the faint, electrical hiss of the copper wire and the distant sound of a crow calling from the pines along Country Club Road.
"What do you want?" he whispered.
"I want you to walk up the driveway," I said. "I want you to look at the blue stone patio. Look at the grease burned into the bluestone. Look at the hydrangeas where your imported grill is currently rusting in the mud."
"And then?"
"And then I want you to turn around, Daniel. Walk back down the hill to the gate. Deputy Davis is waiting for you with three warrants for felony domestic battery, corporate wire fraud, and municipal endangerment."
"Clara—"
"Don't run, Daniel," I added softly. "Frank Miller has your passport. It was in the secondary wall safe behind your golf trophies, along with forty-eight thousand dollars in banded federal reserve notes and the lease for the Charlotte apartment. You have sixteen dollars in your wallet, Daniel. Make it count."
I hung up the receiver.
The black plastic hit the cradle with a heavy, final thunk.
Arthur looked at me from behind his desk, his spectacles resting on the bridge of his nose, his eyes steady, ancient, and completely unblinking.
"The grand jury convenes at ten, Clara," he said. "Are you ready to show them the hand?"
May you like
I looked down at the four inches of white surgical gauze wrapped around my right knuckles. The pain was still there—a deep, thrumming, bone-deep ache that would stay with me through the winter, through the skin grafts, through the physical therapy that would follow.
"Arthur," I said, rising to my feet. "I’ve been ready for ten years."
