Chapter 6 - The Visitor in the Holding Cell
The subterranean detention ward of the Los Angeles County Women’s Correctional Facility in Lynwood smelled of industrial floor wax, cold concrete, and bitter, rotting pride.
Natalie Vance sat on the edge of a stainless-steel cot bolted to the wall, wearing an oversized blue institutional jumpsuit. Her manicured acrylic nails had been chipped and broken; her styled blonde hair was unwashed, hanging in stringy tangles across her pale face. Her wrists and ankles were secured with heavy steel transport chains.
The heavy steel slider door buzzed open with a loud hydraulic clank.
Beatrice Alden walked into the cell.
I did not hurry. My leather heels clicked rhythmically against the concrete with a slow, deliberate cadence. I wore an elegant navy wool coat over my three-piece suit, my posture commanding, sovereign, and entirely unbothered.
Natalie flinched back against the concrete wall, her bloodshot eyes widening in a mixture of feral hatred and visceral terror.
"You came to gloat," Natalie spat, her voice cracking into a dry, hoarse rasp.
"I came to look at you, Natalie," I said softly, stopping three paces from the cot. "I wanted to see what twenty-three years of blind maternal indulgence looked like when the curtain was finally pulled back."
"You ruined my life!" Natalie hissed, leaping to her feet, her transport chains rattling violently against the steel belt around her waist. "I was going to be a partner at Apex! I was going to be the biggest publisher in New York! You kept me trapped in this dusty little Pasadena firm, making me edit regional poetry while my friends were running media conglomerates!"
"You weren't trapped, Natalie," I replied, my voice steady, calm, and absolute. "You were protected. You had an unencumbered salary, a multi-million-dollar inheritance, and a seat at a table that took forty years of blood and tears to build. But you didn't want to build. You wanted to steal."
I reached into my coat pocket, pulling out a copy of the morning's unsealed grand jury indictment.
I dropped the heavy document onto the steel cot.
"Graham signed a full plea-allocution at sunrise, Natalie," I said. "He detailed every offshore transaction, every forged proxy, and the six-hundred-thousand-dollar kickback scheme with Thomas Vance."
Natalie’s breath hitched in her throat. She looked down at the twenty-eight felony counts listed on the parchment, her hands shaking so violently that the paper fluttered against her knees.
"Graham... told them?" she whispered, her voice finally breaking into a pathetic, terrified whimper.
"Graham saved himself, Natalie," I answered quietly. "Just as you tried to save yourself at my dining table. The Sterling family has filed for an expedited annulment, and their lawyers have stripped your name from every joint account in their trust."
Natalie collapsed onto the cot, burying her face in her cuffed hands, weeping with the raw, ugly agony of a child who had realized that her vanity had left her completely alone in the dark.
"Grandma... please," she sobbed through her fingers. "I'm Clara’s daughter... you promised her you would never abandon me..."
I looked at the woman on the cot.
The grief that had torn through my heart on my seventy-first birthday was gone, replaced by the deep, eternal serenity of a mother who had finally set down a burden she was never meant to carry alone.
"I kept my promise to Clara, Natalie," I whispered softly. "I gave you every tool to become an honorable woman. But you chose to become a thief. And now you must answer to the law."
I turned my back on the broken girl.
May you like
"Guard," I called out.
The heavy steel door slid open, and I walked down the echoing corridor into the bright California sunshine, leaving Natalie Vance to weep in the concrete shadows where she would remain for a very long time.
