Chapter 6 - The Shadows of Riverside Heights
While our new craftsman cottage on the other side of town echoed with the happy barks of our rescued golden retriever and the sound of Mia’s laughter, the old stone fortress on Riverside Heights was turning into a mausoleum.
Federal receivers had placed a massive, bright orange padlock on the wrought-iron gates of my parents’ estate. The marble fountains were turned off, their basins filling with stagnant rainwater and autumn leaves. Inside the cavernous halls, Patricia Winters sat alone in the dark, her silk blouses hanging in closets that smelled of mothballs and abandonment. The high-society friends who had once eaten cavier off her silver platters now pretended not to see her name when it popped up on their phones.
My mother’s lawyer called my office twice a week, pleading for a meeting.
“Rachel, your mother is seventy-two years old,” attorney Harold Vance—no relation to Marcus—had said over the phone with a tone of manufactured desperation. “She has no access to her liquid accounts. The government has seized her grocery allowances. She’s living off canned soup in a house with no operational heating because the gas utility was cut off last Tuesday.”
I had listened to him in silence, staring out the window of my kitchen at Mia playing catch with Dennis on the back lawn.
“She made her choices, Harold,” I replied quietly. “When she sat at that mahogany table and watched her husband serve dog food to a nine-year-old child, she made her bed. Tell her to buy a space heater.”
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I hung up. I didn’t feel guilty. For thirty years, guilt had been the invisible leash my parents used to drag me behind their chariot. Cutting that leash felt like breathing pure oxygen for the first time.
Yet, George Winters was not a man who went quietly into the dark. From the federal holding facility downtown, awaiting his final sentencing hearing for financial fraud and corporate racketeering, he was engineering one last, desperate play.
