Chapter 16 - THE AUCTION OF THE GOLDEN IDOL
By mid-April, the legal machinery did not simply grind—it pulverized.
When the state attorney’s office finished with the records from the Shenzhen rubber stamp company, they moved to Chloe’s personal tax filings. By the third week of the month, three separate investigators from the Department of Revenue were sitting in the living room of the Sterling manor on 4th Avenue, tagging nineteenth-century oil paintings with yellow inventory stickers.
I did not go to the estate sale.
Marcus went. He took his flatbed truck, three heavy canvas tarps, and five thousand dollars in cash that Sarah had released from my father’s legitimate, uncorrupted estate account.
He returned at dusk, the truck’s leaf springs groaning under the weight of an iron safe, four crates of hand-forged carpentry tools my father had collected in the 1970s, and a long, narrow mahogany box with brass corners.
Waverly ran out to meet him, her rubber boots splashing through the puddles of spring water.
"Did you get the horses?" she asked, peering over the tailgate.
"No horses, little bit," Marcus said, grunting as he lowered the iron gate. "Just old iron and dry timber. But I got this."
He reached into the cab and pulled out a small, framed watercolor of a salt marsh, painted by my grandmother when she was twenty years old. Evelyn had kept it in the downstairs powder room behind the door, where no one could see it, because the frame was plain pine instead of gilded gesso.
I took the frame in my hands. The paper was slightly foxed at the corners, smelling of lavender and forty years of dust.
"How was she?" I asked.
Marcus took off his hat, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and spat into the gravel.
"She sat on the stone bench by the rose garden," he said. "Had her pearls on. Had that little fur wrap around her neck even though it was sixty degrees out. People were carrying her dining chairs out the front door right past her feet, and she didn't look at a single one of them. She just kept telling the auctioneer that her daughter Chloe was in meetings with a gallery owner in London and would be wiring the funds to settle the lien by five o'clock."
"Did anyone believe her?"
"The auctioneer was selling the silver by the pound, Claire," Marcus said simply. "Nobody listens to a woman whose silver is on a butcher's scale."
"And Chloe?"
"Didn't see her," Marcus said. "Sarah told me at the courthouse that Chloe skipped her bail hearing on Tuesday. They found her car at the bus terminal in Scranton. She’s running."
A cold wire of tension pulled tight between my shoulder blades. "She’s running where, Marcus?"
"Nowhere good," he said, looking at the dark timberline behind the house. "A girl like that doesn't know how to run anywhere except toward the people who told her she was special. And Evelyn’s sitting on a stone bench with twelve dollars in her checking account."
I looked down at the watercolor in my hands. The green marsh grass, painted in quick, transparent strokes of viridian and raw umber, looked quiet. Unbothered by the tide that was coming in from the right edge of the paper.
"We keep the dogs inside tonight," I said.
May you like
"Already done," Marcus replied. "And I put three extra boxes of twelve-gauge shells on the mantle by your front door. If you hear a branch snap on the ridge, you don't ask who’s there, Claire. You just turn the floods on."
***
