Chapter 7 - Patricia’s Desperate Gambit
Twenty minutes after the hearing concluded, the marble corridors of the courthouse had cleared of the press and the gallery. I walked down the grand colonnade toward the south exit, my heels echoing rhythmically against the stone.
“Claire!”
The voice came from behind the granite pillars near the clerk’s office.
Patricia emerged from the shadows. She had discarded her designer sunglasses, revealing eyes that were puffy and bloodshot from crying, but her mouth was drawn into the same cruel, downward curve I had seen across the kitchen table throughout my adolescence.
Behind her, Richard Vance hovered near the doors, carrying his briefcase like a shield, looking thoroughly disgusted with the world.
“You’ve had your fun,” Patricia said, walking directly up to me. She didn't look at my uniform. She didn't look at the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Medal pinned above my heart. To her, I was still the nineteen-year-old girl who had dared to speak during dinner without permission. “You got your revenge. You embarrassed your brother. You put him in a cage like an animal. Now call your friends at the Pentagon and tell them you’re dropping these ridiculous charges.”
I stopped. Master Chief Keating took a step forward, his hand drifting toward his side, but I raised one hand slightly to hold him back.
“I don't drop charges, Patricia,” I said quietly. “The federal government brings charges. The Navy brings charges. Derek did this to himself.”
“Don't you dare speak to me with that tone!” she hissed, stepping into my personal space until the perfume she wore—the same heavy French jasmine she had worn since 1985—cloyed the air between us. “You orchestrated this! You’ve been jealous of Derek since the day he was born! You were an awkward, unlovable girl, and your father knew it! He spent fifty thousand dollars trying to turn you into a lady, and you threw it away to scrub toilets on ships!”
“Is that what you tell your friends at the country club?” I asked, my voice completely smooth. “That I scrub toilets?”
“You are a hired hand!” she snarled. “You serve people! My son creates value! He runs an empire!”
“Your son,” Richard Vance’s voice cut in from six feet away, “is facing twenty-five years in federal prison at Petersburg, Patricia. Stop talking.”
Patricia whipped her head around. “You shut up, Richard! You work for me! Arthur paid your firm millions over the years, and you’re letting this... this runaway dictate terms to us?”
She turned back to me, her expression shifting instantly into an exaggerated, trembling performance of maternal grief. It was an old trick—one she had used on Arthur for thirty years whenever she had overdrawn the family accounts or insulted the neighbors.
“Claire... baby,” she whispered, reaching out to touch my arm with trembling, manicured fingers. “Please. Look at me. I'm your mother. I carried you. I know I was hard on you, but I had to be. You were so willful. You didn't understand the world. But we’re family. Blood is thicker than water. You can't let them take Derek away. He won't survive in a place like that. He’s sensitive!”
“He was sensitive enough to forge my signature on thirty-six customs declarations,” I said, looking down at her hand on my sleeve.
Her hand froze.
“He was sensitive enough to use my naval service as a shield to smuggle unauthorized freight through the harbor,” I continued, my voice dropping so low that only she could hear the ice behind it. “And you knew about it, didn't you?”
Patricia’s breath hitched. A tiny twitch developed at the corner of her right eye.
“I... I don't know what you're talking about,” she stammered.
“Arthur’s safety deposit box was opened this morning at First Dominion Bank in Richmond,” I said calmly.
Patricia went completely, rigidly still.
The color drained from her face, leaving her rouge standing out like two grotesque red circles on a wax mannequin.
“Richard had the key,” I said, glancing at the old lawyer, who simply gave a solemn nod. “And inside that box, Patricia, wasn't just Arthur’s original will leaving Oakridge to me. There were copies of the corporate audits from 2002. The audits showing that you and Derek drained Arthur’s medical trusts to pay off Derek’s gambling debts in Atlantic City while my father lay in a hospital bed in Charlottesville.”
“You... you’re lying,” she breathed, but her voice was a dry, rattling whisper. “Arthur loved Derek. Arthur would never...”
“Dad knew what you were,” I said. “He spent his last years gathering the rope you and Derek would eventually hang yourselves with. And last night, Derek tied the knot.”
Patricia stepped back, her heels catching on the hem of her long wool coat. She looked at Richard, then at Keating, and finally back at me. The maternal performance vanished entirely, replaced by the sheer, unadulterated terror of a cornered predator.
“You won't get Oakridge,” she whispered, her lips peeling back over her teeth. “I’ll burn it to the ground before I let you walk through those doors.”
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“You won't burn anything,” I said, stepping past her toward the daylight of the courthouse steps. “Because the marshals will be serving your eviction notice at noon.”
***
