Chapter 13 - The Broken Sister
The visiting booth at the York Women’s Correctional Facility was partitioned by two-inch-thick laminated ballistic glass.
The room smelled of floor wax, industrial bleach, and the flat, stale grease of institutional cafeteria food.
I sat on the bolted metal stool on the visitor's side.
I wore my clean denim jacket and a plain white shirt.
Across the glass sat Serena Bennett.
It had been forty days since the night she had stood on the emergency room asphalt wearing my coat and reeking of my father’s bourbon.
The transformation was shocking.
Her dyed honey-blond hair had grown out at the roots, revealing two inches of mousy brown.
Her manicured nails were cut short, plain, and uneven.
She wore a rough, unironed orange cotton jumpsuit with NDCS stenciled across the left breast pocket.
She had lost at least fifteen pounds; the sharp cheekbones she had once spent hundreds of dollars enhancing with cosmetic fillers now looked sunken, almost hollow.
She sat with her hands folded between her knees, her eyes fixed on the metal shelf between us.
She picked up the plastic telephone receiver with fingers that shook uncontrollably.
I lifted the receiver on my side.
“You came,” Serena whispered.
Her voice sounded thin, cracked from weeks of dry air and crying into an unyielding prison mattress.
“I came because Arthur Evans received your third letter, Serena,” I said.
“And because Aunt Martha asked me to hear what you had to say before your formal plea hearing on Friday.”
Serena looked up.
Her eyes were rimmed with red, bloodshot and exhausted.
“Tori... you have to help me,” she pleaded, pressing her knuckles against the cold glass.
“The public defender says the prosecutor is offering twelve to fifteen years.”
“Twelve years, Tori!”
“In this place!”
“They lock us in the cells for eighteen hours a day!”
“The women here... they know what the charges are.”
“They found out about Meadow.”
“They scream at me through the vents all night.”
“They threw hot water on my bunk yesterday morning.”
“I’m terrified, Tori. I’m going to die in here.”
I looked at the woman who shared half my DNA.
The sister I had held as an infant when our father was working third shift at the rail yards.
The sister I had sent care packages to from Bagram while she was failing her art classes.
“You didn't think about terrified when Meadow hit the bottom of the stairs, Serena,” I said.
The line was flat, entirely devoid of rage.
“I didn't push her!” Serena cried out, her voice cracking across the telephone wire.
“It was Dennis! Dennis lost his mind!”
“I was trying to stop him!”
“The security video shows you standing in the doorway of my bedroom with a glass of whiskey, laughing,” I said.
Serena flinched as if I had struck her across the mouth.
Her eyes darted frantically around the sterile visiting room.
“I was in shock, Tori! I didn't know what I was doing!”
“Dennis told me if I said anything, he would make sure I went to jail too!”
“He said his family owned the courts!”
“He controlled me!”
“Dennis didn't force you to sign that quitclaim deed, Serena,” I reminded her.
“Dennis didn't force you to stamp that false notary seal to steal my clinic land.”
“You wanted the design studio downtown.”
“You wanted the two-million-dollar truck stop payout.”
“You wanted to wear my coats, sleep in my bed, and raise my daughter with my husband while I was put away in a VA hospital.”
Serena’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
She slowly pulled her hand back from the glass, her shoulders collapsing inward like a puppet with cut strings.
“Dennis promised me we would be happy,” she whimpered, tears cutting clean lines through the gray dust on her face.
“He told me you didn't love him anymore.”
“He said you were cold.”
“He said all you cared about was the clinic and the horses and the military memories you wouldn't talk about.”
“He said he needed someone who actually admired him.”
“And you believed him because your vanity has always been bigger than your conscience,” I said.
I leaned closer to the glass.
“Serena, listen to me very carefully.”
“I am not here to grant you forgiveness.”
“I am not here to tell the prosecutor to lower the sentence.”
“You are going to plead guilty on Friday to felony conspiracy, evidence destruction, and fraud.”
“You are going to take the twelve years.”
“And you are going to serve every single day of that time without filing appeals or contacting Meadow.”
Serena began to sob violently, her forehead pressing against the cold pane.
“Tori... please... she's my niece... I love her...”
“You don't love her,” I said with devastating clarity.
“You loved the lifestyle Dennis promised to buy you with her future.”
“If you fight this plea, Arthur Evans will introduce your personal text messages with Dennis from the last eighteen months into the public trial record.”
Serena froze.
Her sobbing stopped instantly.
“The messages from July,” I added softly.
“Where you asked Dennis how much my veteran life insurance policy was worth if I died in a barn accident.”
The color drained from Serena’s face until she looked like a corpse sitting in an orange jumpsuit.
The sheer, murderous horror of what she had contemplated hung between us in the cold room.
She had not just wanted my life.
She had weighed the cash value of my grave.
“Take the twelve years, Serena,” I told her.
“Because if you force Arthur Evans to take this to a jury, he will make sure the sentence is life.”
I hung up the plastic receiver.
I stood up from the metal stool, turning my back on the weeping shell of my sister, and walked through the heavy security slider into the administrative lobby.
I didn't look back once.
The cancer was excised.
May you like
The perimeter was clean.
And the past was finally buried beneath twelve feet of steel and concrete.
