Chapter 7 - The Auction Of Illusions
Three months later, the cold bite of winter had wrapped Boston in a blanket of pristine white snow.
Grandma Evelyn invited me to accompany her to a private estate auction held at the Mercer family’s ancestral brownstone on Beacon Hill.
The house had been seized by creditors to pay off Victoria’s mounting legal bills, tax liens, and civil penalties.
Evelyn walked beside me, leaning lightly on her cane, dressed in an elegant black cashmere coat and a silk scarf.
The opulent rooms were filled with antique dealers, art collectors, and curious socialites browsing the tagged furniture, oil paintings, and crystal chandeliers.
Victoria sat in the front row of the temporary auction gallery, flanked by two armed corrections officers.
She wore an orange county jail jumpsuit under a heavy prison jacket, her wrists handcuffed to a leather belly chain.
Her famous blond coif was gone, replaced by stringy, graying roots, and her cheeks were sunken and sallow.
When she saw Evelyn and me walk in, her eyes flashed with pure, impotent malice.
"Look at you two," Victoria croaked, her voice raspy from months in a holding cell. "Coming to gloat over the carcass."
Grandma Evelyn stopped directly in front of her daughter-in-law, looking down with a face carved from stone.
"I didn't come to gloat, Victoria," Evelyn said softly. "I came to buy back my mother's silver tea service. The one you stole from my attic twenty years ago and claimed was an antique gift from your side of the family."
Victoria bared her teeth in a sneer.
"You always hated me. You were always jealous because my husband listened to me instead of you!"
"My son listened to you, Victoria, and he died of a heart attack at forty-eight trying to pay for your country club lifestyle," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a register of quiet sorrow.
"And you raised his son to be just as hollow, just as selfish, and just as cowardly as you are."
Victoria looked at me, spitting venom.
"And you! You little nobody! You think you won? Julian is working at an auto-repair shop in Worcester! He lives in a rat-infested basement! You destroyed his future!"
"No, Victoria," I said, holding her hateful gaze without blinking.
"Julian’s future was destroyed the day you taught him that money was more important than honor. He's finally learning how to earn his own bread."
The auctioneer cleared his throat, tapping his wooden gavel against the podium to begin the bidding.
Evelyn took my arm, and we walked toward the back of the gallery.
She bid on only three items: her mother's silver tea set, an antique mahogany cradle that had belonged to the Mercer family for five generations, and a small landscape painting of the Maine coastline.
When the cradle was hammered down to Evelyn for eight hundred dollars, she turned to me with a warm, secretive smile.
May you like
"What are you going to do with that cradle, Grandma?" I asked curiously.
"I am giving it to Elena Vance," Evelyn answered with a twinkle in her eye. "For little Leo. An honest heir deserves to sleep in an honest bed."
