Chapter 9 - The House of Lies
The iron gates of the Bellamy estate on the Wilmington River were chained wide open.
Three black federal pursuit SUVs and two Chatham County Sheriff’s cruisers—driven by deputies who had not been on Graham’s payroll—sat parked across the circular carriage driveway, their red and blue strobe lights splashing silent, violent patterns across the weeping Spanish moss and the grey limestone facade of the mansion.
I sat in the passenger seat of Maya Cross’s beat-up Subaru, wearing a pair of clean jeans and a soft wool sweater that Maya had pulled from her own trunk. My wrists were still bandaged with white gauze where the cuffs had cut the skin, but my head was up.
"Are you ready?" Maya asked quietly, turning off the engine.
"I’ve been waiting twenty years for this," I answered.
We walked across the crushed oyster-shell path. The afternoon sun was high, baking the limestone terrace where twenty-four hours earlier, my daughter had fallen. The blood on the rim of the dry fountain had not been cleaned; it had dried into a dark, rusty crust beneath the Georgia heat, surrounded by white crime scene markers and yellow evidence tape.
Inside the grand double doors, the great hall was silent except for the low, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the rustle of legal papers.
Celeste Bellamy sat in her high-backed velvet armchair beneath the oil portrait of her late husband. She was still wearing an immaculate pearl-grey silk dress, her diamond rings catching the light, her back as straight as a steel rod. But her face had collapsed into an ancient, withered mask of pure, bitter venom.
Two federal marshals stood at the entrance to the parlor, watching her every breath.
Piper Bellamy sat on the velvet sofa, her Cartier sunglasses discarded on the rug, her mascara smeared in long, black streaks down her blotchy cheeks. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back, her shoulders shaking with pathetic, ragged sobs as an agent inventoried the contents of her Birkin bag on the mahogany coffee table.
When I stepped through the arched doorway, Piper looked up.
"Laurel," she gasped, her voice cracked, her throat raw from crying. "Laurel, tell them! Tell them it was an accident! I didn't know about the drugs! Graham told me it was just tax restructuring! He told me—"
"Shut up, Piper," I said, my voice quiet, completely flat, devoid of any feeling whatsoever.
I didn't even look at her. I walked past the sofa, my heels silent on the Persian rug, and stopped five feet in front of Celeste Bellamy’s chair.
The old woman lifted her chin. Even with federal agents seizing her family’s records in the library behind her, even with her daughter in chains and her son in a federal holding cell, she looked at me with that same cold, aristocratic contempt that had poisoned every day of my marriage.
"You think you've won something, Laurel?" Celeste whispered, her voice like dry leaves scraping over concrete. "You are a mechanic's daughter from Macon. You were never one of us. You never possessed the blood, the breeding, or the spine to bear the Bellamy name."
"You're right, Celeste," I said, looking down at her withered, hollow face, feeling nothing but a profound, cleansing pity. "I never had the breeding to push an eighteen-year-old child off a balcony to protect a bank account. I never had the spine to poison my own granddaughter with sedatives so she couldn't expose my thievery."
I leaned down until my face was level with hers, so close I could see the cold terror flickering behind her faded grey irises.
"The federal judge signed the asset forfeiture order thirty minutes ago," I told her, the words measured, deliberate, striking like hammer blows. "Every square foot of this estate, every shipping terminal from here to Jacksonville, every trust account, every bond, and every silver spoon in that dining room is being seized under the federal RICO statute. The Bellamy empire doesn't belong to you anymore, Celeste. It belongs to the United States Marshals Service."
Celeste’s hand tightened on the arm of her velvet chair, her fingernails digging through the fabric until the antique seam ripped. "My father built this house. Arthur preserved it. You cannot steal my home."
"Your home is an asset forfeiture warehouse now," I said. "A federal van will be here in twenty minutes to transport you to the women’s federal detention center in Tallahassee. You’ll be sharing an open dormitory with forty other women. You won't have your pearls, Celeste. You won't have your Krug. And there are no servants to carry your tray."
May you like
I turned my back on her, walking toward the grand front doors where the salt wind from the river was blowing clean and fresh through the hall.
Behind me, for the first time in her seventy-two years of life, Celeste Bellamy let out a thin, broken wail of absolute, helpless despair.
