Chapter 18 - The House of Cards
The suburban townhouse Eleanor had rented was small, cramped, and smelled of damp earth and neglect.
The lawn was overgrown with dead weeds, and yellowing junk mail spilled out of the rusty metal mailbox by the curb.
Marcus waited in the idling SUV as I walked up the cracked concrete path alone.
I didn't knock.
The front door was unlatched, swinging slightly in the bitter November wind.
I pushed it open and stepped into the dim, drafty living room.
Eleanor was sitting on an uncovered mattress in the center of the floor, wrapped in a threadbare faux-fur coat.
Empty wine bottles and crushed pill packets littered the bare floorboards around her.
Her silver hair, once styled every morning by expensive private hairdressers, was matted and greasy.
When she saw me standing in the doorway, her bloodshot eyes widened with a terrifying mixture of hatred and terror.
"You," she croaked, her voice dry and rasping like dead leaves.
"You came to gloat."
"You came to laugh at Walter’s wife while you live in his palace!"
"I came to look at you, Eleanor," I said, standing ten feet away, my hands deep in the pockets of my tailored coat.
"I wanted to see what was left of the woman who threw an eighteen-month-old child into the winter cold."
Eleanor let out a sharp, hysterical laugh that turned into a wet, choking cough.
"That child is nothing!" she spat, clawing at the filthy fabric of her coat.
"You are nothing!"
"You were a servant!"
"You washed his clothes!"
"You wiped his mouth when he couldn't hold a spoon!"
"Everything he had belonged to Charles!"
"It belonged to Richard!"
"It belonged to me!"
"Walter didn't leave you this empire because he was confused, Eleanor," I said, my voice cutting through her madness with surgical precision.
"He left it to me because he knew you would destroy it within five years."
"He watched you bleed Charles dry."
"He watched you turn Richard into a weak, spineless parasite who couldn't survive three days without a trust fund."
"He watched you treat every human being in your life like an expendable tool."
Eleanor stared at me, her chest heaving, the venom in her eyes beginning to drown in pure, unadulterated panic.
"What do you want from me?" she whimpered, pulling her knees up to her chest.
"The marshals are coming tomorrow."
"The police are coming."
"I have no money, Paige!"
"I have nothing left to take!"
I pulled a single legal document from my coat and tossed it onto the dirty floor in front of her.
"This is a total, irrevocable relinquishment of all parental claims and visitation rights for Richard regarding Gemma," I stated coldly.
"And this is your confession of forgery, detailing every diary entry you manufactured."
"Sign them both, Eleanor."
"And what do I get?" she whispered, staring at the papers as if they were venomous snakes.
"What do I get in return?!"
"You get Arthur not to hand the wire fraud evidence to the federal prosecutor," I said.
"You get to spend whatever miserable years you have left in a state rest home instead of a federal penitentiary."
"That is the only mercy you will ever receive from me."
Eleanor’s hand trembled violently as she reached out, picked up a discarded pen from the floor, and signed her name in jagged, broken letters.
I picked up the signed sheets, blew on the wet ink, and turned toward the door.
"Paige!" she screamed behind me, her voice breaking into a desperate shriek.
"He lied to you!"
I paused at the threshold, not turning around.
"Walter lied to you about everything!" Eleanor shrieked, laughing through her tears.
"You think you won?!"
"You think you’re the savior?!"
"Go look in the deepest drawer of his desk in the archive!"
May you like
"Go find the birth certificate he hid from the world thirty years ago!"
I stepped out into the biting wind, closing the door on her screams forever.
