Chapter 83 - The Sister’s Bloodline
At seven in the evening, they transferred me to the visitor’s wing of the metropolitan correction facility. Marcus had secured a temporary release order on personal recognizance, citing my complete lack of criminal record and my status as a cooperating witness. But before I could walk out through the turnstiles into the sleet-drenched Chicago night, a bailiff tapped me on the shoulder.
"Inmate Beatrice Vance requested to see you. Counsel approved three minutes."
"I don't have to see her," I said reflexively.
"She said to tell you the word 'Sugar,'" the guard replied.
The cold inside me tightened.
Ten minutes later, I sat in a narrow concrete booth separated by scratched Plexiglas. Beatrice sat on the other side.
Her designer coat was gone, replaced by a drab orange scrub top that hung loosely on her frame. The immaculate blowout she had maintained for years was tangled, greasy, falling over a face drained of makeup and vanity. Her mascara had left dark, dried rivers down her cheeks. She looked smaller, stripped of the manic arrogance that had defined her entire life.
She picked up the receiver with a hand that shook violently. I lifted mine slowly, pressing it to my ear.
"You look terrible," I said.
A dry, cracked sob escaped her lips. "They took my jewelry, Julian. They took my rings. They told me... they told me Eleanor isn't my mother."
"You saw the papers in the loft," I said coldly.
"Paper doesn't mean anything!" she cried, pressing her palms against the glass. Her voice in the earpiece was ragged, raw, stripped of all theatrical cadence. "Eleanor held me when I had the measles! Eleanor took me to Paris when I graduated! How could she... how could they let me believe—"
"Because you were worth forty-four million dollars to them as long as you didn't know who you were," I interrupted. "They used you, Beatrice. Just like they used me to pay for your life."
Beatrice squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears spilling over the rims. "Clara... she was always watching me. At your dinners. At the family brunches. Remember when I demanded the four-thousand-dollar handbag for my birthday, and she just sat there smiling, sipping her tea?"
"I remember."
"She wasn't smiling at my behavior," Beatrice whispered, her voice dropping into an eerie, horrified clarity. "She was looking at my chin. At my eyes. She was looking at her own mother’s face on a girl who was acting like a monster."
I didn't answer. The memory of Clara watching Beatrice across holiday dinner tables flashed through my mind—her quiet patience, which I had always interpreted as polite forbearance toward a difficult sister-in-law. It hadn't been patience at all. It had been an audit of stolen time.
"I ruined your cake because I hated you," Beatrice said suddenly, looking directly into my eyes through the scratched plastic.
"I know."
"No, Julian, you don't know," she said, her voice trembling. "Arthur told me two days before the wedding that if you married Clara, my trust would be closed. He told me you were trying to freeze me out of our father’s will to give everything to her. He fed me that poison. He pushed me into that dining room. He said, 'Show Julian that you're the true daughter of this family, or you won't have a roof over your head by Christmas.'"
A heavy silence descended between us.
"Arthur manipulated you," I said.
"Yes! But I wanted to believe him!" she screamed into the receiver, slamming her small fist against the glass. "Because I couldn't stand that you had built a life on your own without their money, while I was an addict waiting for Eleanor's checks! I wanted to destroy your wedding because you were free, Julian! And I was in a cage I didn't even understand!"
The guard behind her tapped his watch, signaling the end of the session.
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"Julian, please," Beatrice begged, pressing her forehead against the partition as the guard took her by the elbow. "Don't let them leave me in here. Clara isn't finished. She told Arthur in the police car that there is one more account. An account in Zurich under our father’s real name. If that account opens, Eleanor dies in prison. Please... talk to her."
"I don't know who she is anymore, Beatrice," I said quietly, and hung up the receiver.
