Chapter 5 - The Threshold of the Estate
The Wright family estate outside Savannah was surrounded by a wall of gray stone that had been imported from north Georgia in the late nineteenth century. Live oaks, thick with Spanish moss that hung down like ragged gray laundry, lined the three-hundred-yard driveway.
Sarah stopped her car at the iron gate. The two federal marshals sitting in a white SUV parked near the brick pillars didn't move; they only nodded as she rolled down her window, her security clearance clearing the digital ledger before she even came to a halt.
She walked up the front steps of the house alone. The wide white columns looked yellow under the afternoon sun, the paint peeling near the bases where the damp air from the salt marshes had gotten under the primer.
The front door was unlocked. The house inside was silent, the air smelling of old lavender, lemon oil, and the dry, stale heat of a furnace that hadn't been cleaned in five years.
Elaine sat in the small morning room near the back of the house, a cashmere shawl wrapped around her shoulders despite the eighty-degree heat. She had a deck of playing cards laid out on the small green table before her—a game of solitaire that she wasn't playing, her hand hovering over a black queen as if she had forgotten where the card belonged.
“You look like your father,” Elaine said without looking up. Her voice was thin, the theatrical resonance she had used in the courtroom completely gone. “He used to walk into a room exactly like that. No noise. Just the weight of him.”
“The marshals tell me you’re refusing to sign the asset release forms,” Sarah said, staying near the door, her hands in her pockets.
Elaine finally dropped the card onto the table. It landed face up—the queen of spades. “Why should I sign them? To help you take the rest of it? You’ve taken my son, Sarah. You’ve taken my name. You’ve put men with guns at my gate.”
“You put the men with guns there when you signed the customs declarations for Kassar,” Sarah said. “Curtis didn't have the signature authority for the overseas transfers until after the probate cleared. You gave him the keys to the corporate accounts twelve months ago.”
Elaine turned her head, her eyes bright and wet with a sudden, vicious anger. “He was my son! He stayed here! He didn't spend twelve years in holes in the mud with people who don't exist! He was the one who went to the dinners, Sarah. He was the one who sat with me when your father was screaming from the pain in his bones while you were... God knows where, doing things you can't even tell a judge!”
“I was at a fire-support base four miles from the Pakistan border when Father’s cancer went into his lungs,” Sarah said, her voice dropping into that cool, rhythmic register that made the room feel twenty degrees colder. “I spent forty-eight hours in a ditch with a radio operator whose legs were gone, trying to get an evacuation bird through the cloud cover. Do you know what I was thinking about while I was waiting for that bird, Mother?”
Elaine didn't answer. She gripped the edge of the green table, her knuckles white.
“I was thinking about the letter you sent me three weeks before,” Sarah continued, taking a step into the room. “The one where you asked if I could get my father to sign the release for the Palm Beach property because the taxes were too high. You didn't ask if I was warm. You didn't ask if I had water. You asked for the deed to a house you hadn't visited since 2018.”
“You were always so hard,” Elaine whispered, looking back at her cards. “Just like him. A pair of iron filings.”
“The asset release forms need to be signed by five o'clock,” Sarah said, pulling a black pen from her pocket and placing it on the edge of the table. “If they aren't, the state's attorney will file the superseding indictments for the wire fraud. They won't let you stay here with your shawl, Elaine. They’ll put you in the county jail in Chatham, and the air conditioning there has been broken since June.”
She turned to leave, but her mother’s voice stopped her at the threshold.
“Sarah.”
Sarah didn't look back. “Yes?”
“Did you really win that medal?” Elaine asked, her voice sounding small, almost like a child's inquiry into a story she didn't quite believe. “The Silver Star. Did you really do those things?”
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Sarah looked out through the glass doors toward the salt marsh, where a lone heron was standing in the gray water, waiting for the tide to turn.
“The citation said I performed my duties in accordance with the standards of the service,” Sarah said. “The man who gave it to me said I was just too stubborn to die in the mud. You can choose whichever version you like for your memoirs.”
