Chapter 12 - The Cellblock Of Silk And Steel
FPC Alderson, nestled in the remote mountains of West Virginia, was known informally in tabloid headlines as "Camp Cupcake."
Wealthy white-collar executives, corrupt politicians, and society embezzlement suspects were sent here to serve their federal sentences behind low-security fences.
Yet for Vivian Vance Ellis, the facility was an absolute living hell on earth.
At sixty-one years old, Vivian had never cleaned a bathroom in her entire adult life.
She had never washed her own clothes, cooked a meal from raw ingredients, or been spoken to by another human being without deferential courtesy.
Now, she was Inmate 67402-VA.
She stood in the center of the institutional laundry room, her hands raw and chapped from five hours of scrubbing commercial laundry tubs with harsh industrial bleach.
The coarse khaki pants hung loose around her shrinking waistline; she had lost twenty pounds in three months, unable to stomach the mystery meat and cold canned beans served on plastic trays.
Her roots had grown out dark gray and uneven, framing a face lined with deep crevices of bitter rage and permanent humiliation.
"Ellis! Stop daydreaming and finish loading the commercial presser!" barked an inmate foreman named Donna, a hardened fifty-year-old bank fraud convict from South Carolina.
Vivian clenched her jaw, her nails digging into her raw palms.
"Do not use that tone with me," Vivian hissed under her breath, turning around with her chin tilted upward in a grotesque imitation of her old socialite posture.
"I am a Vance of Richmond. When my appellate brief reaches the Fourth Circuit, I will have the federal warden reassigned for gross mistreatment."
Donna let out a loud, mocking bark of laughter that drew the eyes of six other female inmates across the humid laundry floor.
"Honey, the only place your appellate brief is going is into the incinerator," Donna laughed, tossing a bundle of wet prison bedsheets directly into Vivian's chest.
The heavy, damp fabric knocked Vivian back against the metal folding table, splashing dirty bleach water across her graying hair.
"Pick those up and feed them into the roller, 'Lady Vance,'" Donna warned, stepping up until her face was inches away.
"Out here, your daddy's money don't buy you nothing but an extra packet of instant coffee from the commissary."
"You hit a decorated soldier with a steel chair on national television, lady."
"Half the women in this dorm have sons and brothers serving in the infantry."
"You're lucky nobody drowned you in the mop bucket during your first week."
Vivian stood trembling with rage, but as she looked around the room, she saw the cold, hostile eyes of every woman staring at her.
There was no Arthur to yell at.
There was no high-priced attorney taking her midnight calls to threaten legal action.
There was only the relentless, humming drone of the commercial washers and the bitter reality of her own insignificance.
Suddenly, a correction officer appeared at the laundry doorway, holding a metal clipboard.
"Inmate Ellis, step out. You have an attorney visit in the annex."
Vivian dropped the wet sheets instantly, a surge of triumphant vindication rushing through her veins.
"You see?" Vivian sneered at Donna, brushing the damp bleach water from her collar.
"My legal defense has arrived. I knew the Richmond board would intervene."
She followed the guard down the brick walkways, her heart pounding with frantic excitement.
She envisioned a partner from a prestigious Washington firm waiting with an emergency release bond, a sleek private sedan ready at the gate, and an immediate press release clearing her good name.
She pushed open the heavy wooden door of the legal consultation room and stopped dead in her tracks.
Sitting at the small laminate table was not a high-powered defense team.
It was Arthur.
Arthur was wearing a stained brown wool coat with frayed cuffs, holding a cheap paper coffee cup between his calloused hands.
He had lost a tremendous amount of weight; his neck looked too thin for his collar, and his hands shook with a persistent, nervous tremor.
Vivian’s face contorted from eager hope to absolute fury in a fraction of a second.
She slammed both hands down on the laminate table, heedless of the guard watching from the corner.
"Arthur! What are you doing here?" she screamed, her voice cracking with hysterical rage.
"Where is the legal team? Where is Robert Sterling? Why hasn't the bond hearing been scheduled?"
Arthur slowly set down his coffee cup, looking up at the woman who had dominated and dismantled his entire life for a decade.
In his eyes, there was no longer fear, submission, or desire to please.
There was only the dead, vacant stillness of a man who had lost everything.
"There is no legal team, Vivian," Arthur said, his voice quiet, flat, and hollow.
"Sterling withdrew three months ago. No firm in the state will take your appeal without a half-million-dollar cash retainer."
"And we have no cash."
"Then sell the summer house in the Outer Banks!" Vivian demanded, spraying saliva across the table.
"Take a second mortgage on the Richmond estate! Liquidate your civil engineering stock!"
Arthur shook his head slowly, a grim, humorless smile touching the corners of his chapped lips.
"The Richmond house was auctioned by the federal marshals forty days ago, Vivian."
"It sold for pennies on the dollar."
"The Outer Banks property was seized under federal civil forfeiture to cover Chase’s stolen valor fines."
"My engineering stock was sold to satisfy the civil judgment awarded to the Hale family."
Vivian collapsed into the plastic chair opposite him, clutching her throat as if the air had been sucked out of the room.
"What about Chase?" she gasped, her fingernails digging into the laminate.
"Where is my boy? Tell me Chase is fighting this!"
Arthur reached into his coat pocket and slid a yellow carbon receipt across the table.
"Chase was transferred to Fort Leavenworth's maximum-security wing yesterday."
"He received twenty-two years at hard labor."
"He will not be eligible for a parole review until the year 2048."
Vivian threw her head back and let out a wailing, animalistic scream of agony that echoed off the cinderblock walls.
"No! Not my baby! He was innocent! Mara did this! That little orphan soldier did this to destroy us!"
Arthur stood up, buttoning his old, frayed coat.
"Mara didn't destroy us, Vivian."
"You did."
"You raised a coward, you fed his lies, and you dragged me down into your filth until I abandoned my own flesh and blood."
Arthur pulled an envelope from his pocket and tossed it onto the table in front of her.
Inside were signed, uncontested divorce decrees granted by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
"Arthur, you can't leave me!" Vivian shrieked, scrambling to grab his sleeve across the table.
"I have nothing! I have no family! I have no money! Arthur, please!"
Arthur looked down at her clutching hands—hands that had once wielded a steel chair to crack his daughter's bones.
He gently peeled her fingers away from his coat, one by one.
"You have your name, Vivian," Arthur whispered coldly.
"The great Vance family name."
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"Enjoy it here in the mountains."
Arthur turned and walked through the heavy security exit, leaving Vivian Vance Ellis collapsing onto the concrete floor, sobbing into the bleach-stained sleeves of her prison jumper as the door locked shut behind him.
