Chapter 6 - The Glass Partition
The visitor’s room at the county detention center smelled of industrial floor stripper, cold metal, and human despair. The fluorescent tubes overhead hummed with an irritating, low-frequency buzz that vibrated against my skull.
Margaret sat behind the scratched acrylic glass. She was stripped of her tailored church cardigans, her silver hair clips, and her air of untouchable matriarchal authority. In the oversized orange jumpsuit, her frame looked smaller, but her eyes held the same sharp, predatory calculation that had dictated my childhood.
She picked up the telephone receiver with a wrist encircled by a blue plastic inmate band. I lifted mine slowly.
"Nathan," she said, her tone instantly sliding into a practiced, quavering sob. "Thank God you're here. You need to get Colonel Bradley on the phone. Tell him who I am. Those officers... they dragged me out of my own home in front of the neighbors like a common criminal. Clara has completely lost her mind, Nathan. She attacked me, threw herself down the cellar stairs, and cut her own hair just to frame me because she knew I found out she was stealing from your deployment account."
I didn't blink. I let the silence stretch until her breath hitched in the receiver.
"I found the attic documents, Margaret," I said softly.
The color did not drain from her face; instead, her features hardened, freezing into an icy, unyielding sneer that made the plastic partition feel thin.
"You went through my private papers?" she hissed. "After everything I sacrificed to keep this family respectable while you ran off playing soldier? Marcus was building a legacy. You were always too stubborn, too simple to understand how business works."
"You beat my wife with a brass fire iron," I said, my voice dropping so low the receiver picked up the rasp of my breathing. "You had two men hold her down while you tore her hair out with tailoring shears so she would look too broken for me to believe."
"She is an outsider!" Margaret snapped, pressing her palms against the glass, her nails tapping sharply. "She was poison! She was going to take you away from this town, away from your duty to your family! A mother protects what is hers, Nathan. You belong to this family. You owe me everything."
"I owe you nothing," I replied. "The Army gave me a discipline you never possessed. The district attorney received the certified audit twenty minutes ago. Marcus was arrested at his office in Savannah an hour ago on interstate wire fraud charges."
Margaret’s eyes widened, a flicker of genuine terror finally shattering her cold veneer. "Marcus? You arrested your own brother?"
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"I didn't arrest him. Federal marshals did," I said, standing up from the metal stool. "You will never set foot on that property again. You will never speak Clara’s name. You spent thirty years teaching me how to obey, Margaret. Now you're going to learn what happens when an entire chain of command turns against you."
I hung up the heavy black receiver, letting it clatter against the metal cradle, and walked out without looking back at the woman pounding her fists against the soundproof acrylic.
