Chapter 7 - The Gathering at the Kitchen Table
At 11:30 AM, my phone rang again. This time it was Evelyn, my mother-in-law.
Her voice was trembling so violently she could barely articulate the words. "Claire... you need to come over here. Please. Walter came home, and he... he threw the Christmas tree out into the snow."
I told Sophie to stay with our neighbor, a sweet retired schoolteacher who lived two doors down, and drove back toward the Bennett house. The gray December sky was beginning to spit flurries of fine snow across the highway.
When I pulled into the gravel driveway, the scene looked like a disaster zone. The artificial pine tree, still tangled in tinsel and red glass ornaments, lay discarded in a snowbank near the garage.
Inside the house, the atmosphere was suffocating.
Evelyn was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room, weeping quietly into a dishtowel. Rebecca was standing by the fireplace, her arms crossed defensively, still wearing yesterday's jeans and a faded sweatshirt. Her face was flushed with anger, but her eyes held a frantic, cornered panic.
Daniel was sitting at the long kitchen table, his head buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking with silent, desperate sobs.
Walter stood at the head of the table. The manila folder lay open before him.
When I entered the room, the floorboards groaned under my boots. Rebecca looked at me, her lip curling with immediate venom.
"Are you happy now?" she hissed, stepping toward me. "You couldn't just keep your mouth shut about an accident with some wine? You had to come here and destroy this family on Christmas morning?"
"Rebecca," Walter said.
His voice was not loud, but it had the density of a lead pipe.
Rebecca froze mid-stride. "Dad, she's lying! She forged those papers! Daniel would never—"
"Shut your mouth," Walter commanded, turning his piercing gaze upon his daughter.
Rebecca’s jaw dropped. In thirty-eight years, Walter Bennett had never spoken to his daughter with that tone.
Walter picked up three sheets of paper from the table and tossed them across the wood toward her. They fluttered and landed near her boots.
"Those are the public records of your LLC," Walter said. "Thirty-five thousand dollars stolen from your brother's family home equity line. What did you spend it on, Rebecca?"
Rebecca looked down at the papers, her face turning from red to a sickly, mottled white. "It was an investment... we were going to split the returns..."
"You spent it on trips to Virginia Beach and payments on your leased Lexus," Walter said, reading from the bank statements he had spent the last two hours analyzing with his old investigator's eye. "You haven't held a valid real estate credential since the summer. You took money from a home where my granddaughter sleeps, and then you stood in my dining room and struck the woman who paid for every meal on this table."
Rebecca stepped back, her eyes darting toward Daniel for support.
Daniel didn't look up. He kept his face buried in his hands, weeping like a broken child.
"Get out of my house," Walter told her.
"Dad—"
May you like
"Take your purse, get into your car, and get off my property," Walter said, his voice dropping into a terrifying whisper. "If you are not gone in five minutes, I will call the Commonwealth’s Attorney myself and file charges for grand larceny."
Rebecca stared at her father, realized there was no mercy left in his eyes, and grabbed her coat from the peg. She slammed the front door behind her so hard the glass pane rattled in its frame.
