Chapter 12 - The Price of a Soul
Friday morning arrived cold, gray, and heavy with the promise of early winter snow.
The Eagle County Detention Center smelled of industrial pine disinfectant, cheap wax, and old despair. It was the kind of building designed to strip a human being of their name and replace it with a four-digit docket number within forty-five minutes.
I sat on a metal stool behind the scratched plexiglass partition in the high-security visitor room.
The steel door on the opposite side buzzed and groaned open.
Beatrice Vance shuffled in.
She was wearing a faded orange jumpsuit that was two sizes too large for her thin frame. Her wrists were shackled to a chain around her waist. Without her foundation, her hair extensions, and her lighting, she looked twenty years older than she had on Sunday morning. Her skin was gray, her lips cracked, her hands trembling as she reached for the plastic telephone receiver on the wall.
I picked up mine.
"You look terrible, Beatrice," I said quietly.
She glared at me through the plastic, her eyes burning with an ancient, toxic rage that even iron bars couldn't cool.
"Are you happy now?" she hissed, her voice vibrating through the receiver. "You put your own mother in a cage. You put your brother in a federal holding cell. Maya is hiding in an abandoned motel room because people are threatening to burn her alive online. Is this what you wanted, Clara? Is your vengeance complete?"
I looked at her, searching for even a fraction of a percent of genuine regret.
There was none.
She didn't regret pouring the boiling coffee on me. She only regretted that the coffee hadn't scalded me into submission.
"I didn't put you in this cage, Beatrice," I said. "You walked in here yourself, one lie at a time, for thirty years. I just stopped paying for the lock."
"I am your mother!" she snarled, slamming her shackled hands against the metal counter. The guard in the corner took half a step forward, his hand resting on his baton, but I held up two fingers to wave him off. "I gave up my youth for you! I stayed with your pathetic, weak father to give you a home! You owe me everything you have! That AI company... that money... that belongs to this family!"
"My father wasn't weak, Beatrice," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper that made her lean closer to the glass. "He was exhausted. Because every day of his life, you drained him of every dollar, every dream, and every shred of dignity he had until his heart simply stopped beating to get away from you."
Beatrice flinched as if I had slapped her across the mouth.
"And you tried to do the exact same thing to me," I continued. "You thought if you made me feel small enough, ugly enough, and broken enough, I would stay in that mountain house forever, quietly funding your lifestyle while you treated me like dirt."
I reached up with my left hand and slowly, deliberately peeled back the medical bandage on my neck.
The skin beneath was a violent mosaic of angry red and purple blisters, weeping serum along the edges where the hair follicles had been destroyed.
Beatrice’s eyes darted to the wound for half a second before she looked away, her jaw tight.
"You poured that liquid on me," I said, "because you thought it would prove you had power over me. But all it did was burn away the last remaining illusion that I had a mother."
I pulled a legal document from my coat pocket and pressed it against the glass.
It was a deed of transfer.
"What is that?" she whispered, her voice finally trembling.
"This is the deed to your French provincial estate in Cherry Hills," I said. "Aura Investments completed the foreclosure this morning at nine o'clock. The property is no longer yours."
"Where... where am I supposed to go when I get out?" she gasped, terror finally breaking through her armor of rage. "Clara... where am I supposed to live?!"
"I donated the entire property to the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence," I told her. "By next month, your marble foyer will be an intake shelter for women who were abused by people who claimed to love them."
Beatrice’s face drained of the last drops of color. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
"Goodbye, Beatrice," I said.
I hung up the plastic receiver.
May you like
I stood up, turned my back on her frantic, screaming banging against the glass, and walked out through the heavy steel security doors into the cold, clean morning air.
***
