Chapter 35 - The Visitation Room
Two days later, the rain in Richmond fell in long, gray sheets that turned the granite facades of the state capital into dark monuments of wet slate.
I sat across an aluminum table in the basement of the regional detention facility. The room smelled of industrial floor stripper, cold metal, and the stale chicory coffee Eleanor had always claimed was unfit for civilized consumption.
When the heavy steel door clicked open, Eleanor walked in, flanked by two corrections officers who treated her not like a grand dame of the Virginia timber dynasty, but like any other woman who had been denied bail on twenty-four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy.
Her tailored silk blouse was gone, replaced by a drab orange jumpsuit that hung off her sharp shoulders like a shroud. Her hair, usually sculpted into an impenetrable silver halo, was limp and tied back with a cheap rubber band. But her eyes—those cold, pale blue eyes that had watched me choke on my own blood in an emergency room eight months ago—were still sharp as surgical steel.
She sat down, smoothed the front of her jumpsuit with an instinctive, pathetic gesture of vanity, and stared at me.
"You look terrible, June," she said, her voice dry, raspy, but still carrying that aristocratic sneer that used to make the domestic staff flinch. "You always did have Arthur’s wretched posture."
"Claire took a plea this morning, Mother," I said, leaning back in my chair, keeping my hands resting calmly on the table.
Eleanor didn't blink. A muscle in her jaw twitched—just once—before she composed her face into a mask of regal indifference.
"Claire was weak," Eleanor dismissed coldly. "She had my beauty, but she had your father’s panic. I told her never to touch the brakes on the mountain road. If she had simply let you run off the shoulder into the ravine, none of this paperwork would have survived to reach a grand jury."
Hearing her say it out loud—without hesitation, without remorse, as if she were discussing a horse that should have been put down behind the barn—did something strange to me. The last remaining knot of grief in my chest, the stupid, childish ache that had hoped, somewhere deep down, that she was just misguided, just desperate, dissolved entirely into ash.
"You really thought Arthur didn't know," I said softly.
Eleanor smiled—a thin, vicious crescent. "Your father was a drunk who spent his life hiding in sawmills. He died in his own bed while I signed the checks that kept the roof over his head."
I reached into my briefcase, pulled out a certified copy of the Richmond Federal Reserve inventory, and slid it across the table until it touched her handcuffed wrists.
"The roof was never yours, Eleanor," I said. "Arthur transferred the deed to Black Oak, the timber tracts, and every water right from here to the Carolina line into a non-revocable environmental trust the day I turned eighteen. He named me the sole trustee."
Eleanor glanced at the paper. Her eyes skimmed the first two lines, and then her skin went from the gray pallor of the jailhouse to the stark, lifeless white of limestone.
May you like
"This is forged," she hissed, her voice rising, losing its melodic cadence. "Vance holds the timber rights! Vance’s firm has been logging that ridge for fifteen years!"
"Vance has been logging state property without a permit," I corrected her. "Arthur let him do it. He documented every tree Vance felled, every board foot of white pine he shipped through Norfolk, and every dollar he kicked back to your personal accounts. Arthur wasn't hiding from you, Eleanor. He was letting you build your own gallows, one timber at a time."
