Chapter 7 - The Cornered Fox
The heavy oak front door of Patrice’s house was locked, but the interior lights were blazing in every window, throwing bright, rectangular patches of gold across the flooded lawn.
My father didn't use the brass knocker. He used his fist, hammering against the center panel with a rhythmic, thunderous violence that made the leaded glass side-panels shudder in their frames.
"Patrice!" he roared over the sound of the rain. "Open this door!"
A curtain twitched in the front parlor window. A shadow darted back.
"Patrice Evelyn Weller, you open this door right now or I swear to Almighty God I will take the tire iron from the truck and take it off its hinges!"
Ten seconds passed. Then the heavy deadbolt turned with a wet, mechanical thud.
The door opened four inches, chained from the inside. Patrice’s face appeared in the gap. The magenta jacket was gone; she was wearing an ivory silk dressing gown, her blonde hair coming undone from its elaborate spray, trailing in thin, damp wisps around her neck. She had removed her makeup, and without the foundation, her skin looked grey, loose, and mottled with panic.
"Richard, go away," she hissed, her voice trembling. "You're trespassing. I will call the Williamson County sheriff! I will have you arrested!"
"Call him," my father said, his voice dropping into a deadly, quiet register that was infinitely more terrifying than his shout. "Call Sheriff Long. He went to high school with me. His brother works at my lumberyard. Call him right now, Patrice, and let’s show him what we’ve got in this folder."
Patrice’s eyes darted past my father’s shoulder, landing on Grant, then on me. When she saw the Manila folder clutched against my chest, her breath caught with a wet, rattling gasp.
"You have no right," she whispered.
"Unchain the door, Patrice," my father said.
Her fingers were shaking so badly that it took her three attempts to slide the brass chain out of its slot. The door swung open, and we walked into her marble foyer, tracking cold rainwater and autumn mud across her pristine Aubusson rug.
The house smelled of stale lavender, gin, and cold air. On the glass console table beside the staircase, a crystal tumbler sat half-full of amber liquid, sweating condensation onto a silver coaster.
"What do you want?" she asked, backing away from us down the long central hall, pulling the silk gown tightly around her throat. "Money? Is that what this is about? You want the fifteen thousand dollars? I don't have it! It went into the roof! It went into Mom’s supplemental care!"
"You're still lying," I said, stepping past my father. "Even now. Even with the ground giving way beneath your feet, you can't stop."
I opened the folder, pulled out the high-resolution color photocopy of the final check, and held it six inches from her face.
"Look at it, Patrice," I commanded. "Look at Grandma’s name. You traced it from her nineteen-ninety-four power of attorney form. You forgot that she changed her signature after her stroke in two thousand and two. She stopped crossing the t in Keating. But you crossed it, didn't you? Because you were in a hurry. Because the hospice doctor told you she had less than forty-eight hours to live, and you knew the accounts would be frozen the second her heart stopped beating."
Patrice looked at the paper. Her eyes widened, the pupils dilating until her irises looked almost black. She pressed her back against the floral wallpaper of the corridor, her chest heaving.
"She wanted me to have it," Patrice whimpered, her voice shrinking into a high, thin whine that sounded like a frightened animal. "I gave up my life for her! Richard was off playing businessman with his hardware store, and I was the one who had to change her linens! I was the one who had to sit there while she babbled about things that happened sixty years ago! She owed me that money!"
"And what did I owe you?" Grant spoke for the first time.
His voice was terrifying. It wasn't loud; it was deep, resonant, and vibrating with an ancient, primal male rage that made Patrice flinch as if he had drawn a weapon.
He stepped toward her, towering over her small, trembling frame in the hallway.
"What did my daughter owe you, Patrice?" he asked, his fists clenched at his sides so tightly that the tendons in his forearms stood out like cables. "A four-week-old baby. What did she do to you that made you spend twelve months trying to convince me to abandon her?"
Patrice looked up at him, her lips trembling, unable to form words.
"You wanted to destroy Nora," Grant said, his voice dropping to a harsh, jagged whisper. "Because as long as Nora was disgraced, as long as Richard thought she was a thief and I thought she was a whore, nobody would ever look at you. Nobody would ever check the books. You were willing to ruin three lives—four lives—just to keep fifteen thousand dollars of a dead woman's money."
"Grant... please," she sobbed, sliding down the wall until she was half-kneeling on the polished floorboards. "I'm your family. I'm Richard's sister."
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My father stepped forward. He looked down at the woman on the floor—the sister he had defended, protected, and accommodated for six decades. There was no anger left in his face. There was only an infinite, bottomless exhaustion.
"You aren't my sister," my father said quietly. "My sister died a long time ago. You're just a thief who lives in her house."
