Chapter 16 - The Visitation Glass
The security doors of the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution closed behind me with a heavy, metallic clang that reverberated through the marrow of my bones.
I sat down on the cold plastic chair in the non-contact visitation room. Across the thick partition of scratch-marked bulletproof glass sat Victoria Vance.
She wore an orange jumpsuit that hung loosely on her frame. Without her designer gowns, her weekly blowout, and her diamond rings, she looked like an empty shell. Yet her eyes—the same emerald green as mine—gleamed with the venomous satisfaction of a scorpion that had finally found its target.
She picked up the black telephone receiver on her side of the partition.
I picked up mine.
"You look tired, darling," Victoria purred, a grotesque parody of maternal affection in her thin voice. "Did you find what you were looking for under Julian’s shining glass tower?"
"Two million dollars," I said, my voice flat, devoid of emotion. "That was the price of your mother’s life."
Victoria didn't flinch. She leaned back against the steel wall, a dry, bitter laugh rattling in her throat. "You think you know the world, Claire. You sit up there in your architectural studios, drawing pretty lines on paper, thinking talent and virtue win the day. You don't know what it was like in 1974."
"Tell me," I demanded. "Tell me why your own mother wrote that you sold her to Arthur Montgomery."
"Because Evelyn was a fool!" Victoria snapped, her face twisting with sudden, raw fury as she slammed her fist onto the ledge. "She was an idealist who wanted to bankrupt our family for principles! She had designed the master complex for the waterfront, and Arthur offered her a fifty-fifty partnership. But she found out his family was skimming union pension funds to finance the steel. She wanted to blow the whistle. She was going to drag our name through the mud and leave us penniless!"
"So you helped him eliminate her?" I leaned against the glass, my knuckles whitening against the plastic receiver. "You watched her car get run off the parkway into the river?"
"I didn't kill her!" Victoria hissed, her eyes darting nervously toward the guard standing by the door. "Arthur told me she would just be relocated... sent to a private sanitarium in Switzerland. He said if I signed over the power of attorney and accepted the trust fund, our family would retain social standing forever. I did what I had to do to survive!"
"You did what you had to do to buy fur coats and champagne," I said, disgust dripping from every syllable. "And then, when the money ran out thirty years later, you tried to steal my father's estate, and when that failed, you tried to rob me."
Victoria smiled, a terrifying, empty grin. "And what are you going to do now, Claire? Sue Arthur Montgomery? The statute of limitations on the financial theft expired thirty years ago. The evidence of murder is waterlogged paper in a basement. You try to expose them, and Julian’s family will bury you under twenty legal firms before your press release even hits the wire."
"You always underestimated Evelyn," I said quietly, looking directly into my mother’s dead eyes. "And you made the exact same mistake with me."
I reached into my bag, pulled out a document, and pressed it against the bulletproof glass.
It was a legal petition filed two hours ago with the Federal District Court.
"Arthur Montgomery didn't buy the land from you, Victoria," I whispered. "The land was held in a private generational trust that required Evelyn's biological granddaughter to reach the age of thirty to dissolve. Your power of attorney was fraudulent. The sovereign heir of the entire Montgomery Plaza parcel isn't Montgomery Holdings. It’s me."
Victoria’s smug grin vanished. Her skin turned the color of chalk.
"No," she stammered, dropping the receiver so it dangled by its cord. "That’s impossible... Arthur said..."
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"Goodbye, Victoria," I said into the receiver. "Enjoy your orange suit. You’re going to be wearing it for the rest of your life."
I hung up the phone and walked out into the winter light, leaving my mother banging frantically against the glass.