Chapter 4 - The Outpost of the Matriarch
The house on Elm Ridge Road had belonged to the Hastings family since the late nineteenth century. It was a massive, three-story Victorian with white gingerbread trim and an old, wide veranda that looked out over the rolling hills of the northern valley. To the neighbors, it was the historic heart of the township; to me, it was a sterile warehouse where every room had a specific, monitored utility.
By Thursday afternoon, the grand driveway was empty of Rachel’s SUV. She was currently being held on twenty-five thousand dollars bail at the county correctional facility in Troy, charged with reckless endangerment in the first degree and tampering with physical evidence. But Evelyn Hastings was still at home. The state prosecutors hadn't filed the conspiracy indictment yet, waiting for the lab results on the wire cutters before they formalized the grand jury presentation.
I parked my rental car at the foot of the hill and walked up the gravel path alone. The autumn wind was cold, stripping the last of the orange leaves from the maples and scattering them across the dead grass. I didn't knock. I used my old key, the brass clicking smoothly into the lock of the heavy oak door.
The interior of the house was warm, smelling of nutmeg, lemon oil, and old linen. My mother was sitting in her usual wingback chair by the bay window, a silver tea tray balanced perfectly on her knees. She was wearing a new blouse, pale green this time, and her silver hair was pinned back with a diamond brooch that had belonged to my grandmother.
"You always did have a terrible stride, Claire," she said without turning her head. She took a slow sip of her Earl Grey, her eyes fixed on the gray line of the hills outside. "Like a farm girl. Heavy. Destructive. Your sister always moved like silk."
"Your silk sister is currently sitting in a concrete cell with three women who were picked up for selling methamphetamine in Lansingburgh," I said, walking into the room and stopping three feet from her chair. "She’s crying, Mom. She told the public defender that the whole thing was your idea. She said you told her the car would just coast into the bushes at the crossing, and that the deputy would be there to handle the paperwork before the ambulance arrived."
My mother set her teacup down with a small, sharp clink against the saucer. She turned her head slowly, her blue eyes clear, cold, and entirely devoid of the generic warmth she used to display for the neighbors.
"Rachel always was a weak creature," Evelyn said smoothly. "She has no stamina for the administrative details. She thinks because she has an accounting degree from a state school, she understands how money works. She doesn't realize that money is just an opinion, Claire. The only thing that's real is control."
"You took Thomas’s life insurance, Mom," I said, my knuckles going white against my sides. "Three hundred thousand dollars that was supposed to keep Lily safe if something happened to me. Why? You have the house. You have the estate from Dad. Why did you need his money?"
"Because Thomas Hastings didn't belong in this valley," she hissed, her voice dropping into that terrifyingly quiet frequency that had governed my childhood. "He was an outsider. He looked at me at the wedding and he didn't see the Hastings estate; he saw an old woman with an asset sheet. He told your father that we were over-leveraged on the commercial land in Brunswick. He was going to convince the board to split the trust, Claire. He was going to give you half of the capital configuration. I spent forty years keeping this family asset base monolithic. I didn't let your father break it, and I certainly wasn't going to let a software designer from Albany carry it off in a briefcase."
"So you had Wade change his medical logs," I said.
"Wade did what he was told because Wade understands what happens to a county deputy who loses his pension over a land-use dispute," she said, leaning back into the velvet cushions. "Go ahead and use your little videos, Claire. The grand jury in this county is composed of men who have been drinking my whiskey at the historical society since 1985. They aren't going to indict an seventy-two-year-old widow because her paranoiac daughter found some grease on a pair of pliers. You’re going to lose the child, Claire. The family services report will come back under my name by Friday noon."
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"The family services director was replaced at ten this morning, Mom," I said, reaching into my bag to pull out a printed copy of the state judicial order signed three hours ago in Albany. "Investigator Vance served a federal administrative subpoena on the county clerk's office at dawn. The entire Hastings trust has been frozen under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. You don't have an opinion anymore, Mom. You just have a very expensive house that you can't sell, and an seventy-two-year-old name that’s currently trending on the front page of the Times Union."
Evelyn’s hand moved toward her teacup again, but her fingers missed the handle by half an inch, her silver ring clicking against the porcelain with a sharp, erratic vibration that told me the ledger had finally run out of rows.
